What duties do liberal democratic states owe to refugees? Does international refugee law impose unfeasible demands on states? This highly original contribution explores what theories of international ethics have to say about refugee policy. It advances an innovative critique of prevalent liberal approaches, showing how their assumptions about moral agency create unfeasible expectations about international justice. It sets out an alternative theory, showing how this could be more adept at mobilizing commitment to refugee rights. The volume will be of interest not just to scholars and students of applied ethics, but also to those more generally interested in debates on refugee and migration policy. It presents a clear and thorough discussion of liberal political theory and its application to questions of international justice, and provides insights into the philosophical sources of debates on liberal versus restrictive approaches to refugee policy.
The Ethics and Politics of Immigration provides an overview of the central topics in the ethics of immigration with contributions from scholars who have shaped the terms of debate and who are moving the discussion forward in exciting directions. This book is unique in providing an overview of how the field has developed over the last twenty years in political philosophy and political theory. The essays in this book cover issues to do with open borders, admissions policies, refugee protection and the regulation of labor migration. The book also includes coverage of matters concerning integration, inclusion, and legalization. It goes on to explore human trafficking and smuggling and the immigrant detention. The book concludes with four topics that promise to move immigration ethics in new directions: philosophical objections to states giving preference to skilled laborers; the implications of gender and care ethics; the incorporation of the philosophy of race; and how the cognitive bias of methodological nationalism affects the discussion.
How to assess and deal with the claims of millions of displaced people to find refuge and asylum in safe and prosperous countries is one of the most pressing issues of modern political philosophy. In this timely volume, fresh insights are offered into the political and moral implications of refugee crises and the treatment of asylum seekers. The contributions illustrate the widening of the debate over what is owed to refugees, and why it is assumed that national state actors and the international community owe special consideration and protection. Among the specific issues discussed are refugees' rights and duties, refugee selection, whether repatriation can be encouraged or required, and the ethics of sanctuary policies.
Across the globe, migration has been met with intensifying modes of criminalization and securitization, and claims for political asylum are increasingly met with suspicion. Asylum seekers have become the focus of global debates surrounding humanitarian obligations, on the one hand, and concerns surrounding national security and border control, on the other. In Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum, contributors provide fine-tuned analyses of political asylum systems and the adjudication of asylum claims across a range of sociocultural and geopolitical contexts. The contributors to this timely volume, drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives, offer critical insights into the processes by which tensions between humanitarianism and security are negotiated at the local level, often with negative consequences for asylum seekers. By investigating how a politics of suspicion within asylum systems is enacted in everyday practices and interactions, the authors illustrate how asylum seekers are often produced as suspicious subjects by the very systems to which they appeal for protection. Contributors: Ilil Benjamin, Carol Bohmer, Nadia El-Shaarawi, Bridget M. Haas, John Beard Haviland, Marco Jacquemet, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Rachel Lewis, Sara McKinnon, Amy Shuman, Charles Watters
How do African states respond to the mass arrival and prolonged presence of refugees? This book answers this question by drawing on recent case studies and examining the politics behind refugee policy in Africa. The implications of this approach are important not only for the study of asylum in Africa, but also for the future of refugee protection.
Eminent political theorist Joseph Carens tests the limits of democratic theory in the realm of immigration, arguing that any acceptable immigration policy must be based on moral principles even if it conflicts with the will of the majority.
In this timely study, Inghilleri examines the interface between ethics, language, and politics during acts of interpreting, with reference to two particular sites of transnational conflict: the political and judicial context of asylum adjudication and the geo-political context of war. The book characterizes the social and moral spaces in which the translation of the spoken word occurs in ways that reflect the realities of the trans-nationally constituted, locally and globally informed environments in which interpreters work alongside others. One of the core arguments is that the rather restricted notion of neutrality that remains central to translator and interpreter practices does not adequately reflect the complex and paradoxical nature of these socially and politically inscribed encounters and others like them. This study offers an alternative theoretical perspective on language and ethics to those which have shaped and informed translation and interpreting theory and practice in recent years.
Mollie Gerver considers when bodies such as the UN, government agencies and NGOs ought to help refugees to return home. Drawing on original interviews with 172 refugees before and after repatriation, she resolves six moral puzzles arising from repatriation using the methods of analytical philosophy to provide a more ethical framework.
This book is a philosophical analysis of the ethical treatment of refugees and stateless people, a group of people who, though extremely important politically, have been greatly under theorized philosophically. The limited philosophical discussion of refugees by philosophers focuses narrowly on the question of whether or not we, as members of Western states, have moral obligations to admit refugees into our countries. This book reframes this debate and shows why it is important to think ethically about people who will never be resettled and who live for prolonged periods outside of all political communities. Parekh shows why philosophers ought to be concerned with ethical norms that will help stateless people mitigate the harms of statelessness even while they remain formally excluded from states. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315883854, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.