Refugee Protection and Solidarity looks to define the duties that EU member states have towards each other in the field of refugee protection, employing analytical tools of normative political theory to bring moral clarity to a highly divisive debate on both principles and political feasibility. There is a discrepancy between the commitment to solidarity enshrined in EU law and the reality of asylum provision in the EU. The events related to the EU 'migration crisis' of 2015/16 have exposed this discrepancy and questioned the nascent notion of EU solidarity at its core.

The book argues that the debate on distributive justice in the EU fails to consider refugee protection as a field in which distributive duties apply in ways similar to other domains such as social policy, as well as exploring what justifications states invoke to justify non-compliance with their duties. Eleonora Milazzo contends that, as currently framed, the debate on the ethics of refugee protection fails to account for the nature and effect of associational ties among states in relation to asylum provision, which is important for the assessment of responsibility shirking.