Why Care Matters: Analysing the German Response to the European Refugee Crisis from a Global Ethics of Care Perspective.

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to introduce a global reading of the feminist Ethics of Care and its theoretical conceptualisation as framework for the political response to the global migrant crisis. To pursue this end, the thesis starts by indicating the need for a joint political response to the global migrant crisis, the lack of compas- sion on political level for refugees fleeing from conflict and persecution, and the dominance of exclusion within political discourses. The second section discusses the feminist Ethics of Care in regard to its conceptual ability to serve as global ethics. Caring ethics should not be merely associated with the private sphere, but raised to the political level because of its concern for social inequalities, the moral responsibility for the individual and the respect towards the global interde- pendence of social relations it entails. The theoretical framework is subsequently employed by a discursive psychological analysis of German chancellor Angela Merkel and her response to the European refugee crisis. The findings suggest that the global interdependence at the heart of the relational ontology of a global Ethics of Care has the theoretical-conceptual power to overcome traditional polit- ical discourses. A global Ethics of Care challenges the hegemonic forms of mas- culinity within political discourses, while its practical applicability is limited by the same.