Rights at the Margins

Abstract

This panel focuses on what it calls ‘rights at the margins’, concentrating in particular on the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. It addresses the specific questions that these groups pose to political theory, groups which are framed on the one hand by Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (‘Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’), and on the other hand by Hannah Arendt’s idea of the condition of “rightlessness” as entailed by statelessness. The panellists might discuss whether declarations of rights implicitly reinforce the concept of national sovereignty by conflating the ability to have rights with citizenship. According to Agamben, even while the Declaration may seem to place the rights of the individual above that of the state, in fact it leaves no room for pure human existence without a tie to a particular sovereign nation. What would then be the place and function of the refugee’s status in such an apparatus? They may also assess what institutional and non-institutional recognition mean outside the citizenship bond. Can legal recognition and rights be partially or completely decoupled? How can theories of recognition deal with the specific case of asylum seekers? Panellists may also consider Benhabib’s assertion that naturalization ought not to be a matter of sovereign discretion exercised by the naturalizing state. In this regard, can the idea a right to naturalization, a right to membership, be defended? Does the idea that ‘everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’ entail such a right, or should its scope be limited to the allocation of temporary rights? This panel might also analyze the rhetoric on refugees and asylum seekers to explain the parameters within which the policy environment is framed within a polity, especially in relation to integration/assimiliation policies, anti-terrorism, etc. Finally, papers focusing on specific rights, such as welfare rights, or specific threats to the rights assessed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the routine detention of asylum seekers in the EU and the US, will be welcome.

Title	Details
Anti-trafficking, Humanrights and Recognition	View Paper Details
No Land’s Man: Irregular Migrants’ Challenge to Immigration Control and Membership Policies	View Paper Details
Framing the Post War Debates on the Right to Asylum	View Paper Details
Human Rights, Bare Life and the Refugees Status	View Paper Details
Cynicism, Civil Disobedience and the Rule of Law: Critical Reflections on Languages of Justification in Asylum Policy	View Paper Details