The Peculiar Normativity of Movement

The presentation addresses the issue of political normativity from a special perspective that considers human movement and migration as a norm of human life. The presentation challenges the ’moralistic’ approach of mainstream discussions about the ethics of migration, by demonstrating that it fails to capture a peculiar characteristic of political life, precisely, that exclusion from the political community – intertwined with the detrimental status of migrant figures – is not an incidental phenomenon, but a principle of the operation of political communities. Therefore, as the argument continues, to understand the peculiar nature of the political sphere, political theory must consider human movement and migration as essential as the perspective of host states of international migration usually considered by dominant normative approaches of migration. Hence, the presentation challenges the prominent division between contemporary liberal nationalist and cosmopolitan positions of the topic by demonstrating that these streams both fail to address the real nature of the political sphere by regarding movement as an anomaly whose importance emerges only in case of issues of admittance of migrant figures. Finally, the presentation offers an alternative approach that takes experience and vulnerability as its focus.