When the Global South and North (Dis)Engages: Considering Reglobalization as a Guarantee of Human Rights for Syrian Refugees

Globalization is a phenomenon encompassing social, political, and economic issues, highlighting the asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South regarding human mobility. If liberalism, which inspired the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has failed to promote these rights, it is necessary to move in a different direction through a more humane, emancipatory, and reformist approach. The rise of reactionary and anti-globalization leaders and movements, such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, and BREXIT, highlights the urgency of developing new critical and humanist approaches to globalization. This chapter explores how the responses of the Global North and Global South to Syrian refugees illustrate a failure to uphold the “spirit of liberalism” promoted by globalization and examines the contradiction in the liberal discourse on human mobility. It advocates for a pivot towards reglobalization—a reforming and reframing of current global systems which advocates for a return of power to marginalized peoples across the Global South. Through a comparative approach, this chapter examines the case of Syrian refugee flows to show how the Global North and Global South have responded differently to the crisis. The questions addressed are: “How have the Global North and Global South responded to the migration of Syrian refugees?” and “How does this reinforce or undermine reglobalization as inherently emancipatory, humanist, and reformist?” The responses of the United States and Europe to the Syrian refugee crisis are compared with Brazil (Latin America) and Lebanon, Jordan, and Türkyie (MENA), those of the Global South.