PANEL 7 / MIGRATION AND REFUGE IN AN IMPERFECT WORLD
CONVENOR: LEONARDO MENEZES
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected]
A number of theorists have held that, while we should sketch out our long-term aims by painting a broad picture of migration justice, we should be weary of the possibility of backlash when we adopt this picture as a more immediate guide for action. Open borders, Carens notes, is not a policy proposal (2013, 229). But how should we understand the idea of feasibility in times of deep political polarization? And what does a concern with feasibility suggest for the role of theorists in and outside of public discourse? Others understand realism not as a concern about the feasibility of our ideals, but about taking the ubiquity of disagreement and conflict in social life as starting points for devising normative criteria in the first place (Williams 2005, Sleat 2016). This is often reflected in a heightened emphasis on questions of legitimacy and the justification of state coercion. In migration ethics, a number of recent works (Bertram 2018, Brock 2020, Owen 2020) have put legitimacy at the centre of broader
theories of migration justice, arguing that a state’s internal legitimacy is conditional upon how it deals with migration. But there is still room for debate on why legitimacy should be a central value in a theory of migration in the first place – is its advantage that it does better at grounding duties in the real world than more ambitious accounts of justice?
Finally, some theorists have sought to embed migration ethics in a wider account of the global social processes connected to migration movements, and how these have shifted historically and as a result of political struggles. Here, theory is not concerned with the feasibility of an abstract ideal, but – on the contrary – with criticizing our theoretical categories for their lack of grasp of the dynamic and deeply politicized nature of real-world social processes. This perspective includes critiques of “methodological nationalism” (Sager 2016; Dumitru, 2023) in the political theory of migration, but also a recent debate about the role colonialism as a historical injustice should play in migration ethics (Finlayson 2020; Jaggar 2020; Mayblin and Turner 2020). Though conceptually distinct from non-ideal and realist accounts of migration ethics, these critical accounts also concern themselves with mediating theory and real-world processes – so that the question arises how they might relate.
We invite submissions from all related academic fields, including political and moral philosophy, political theory and political science, migration studies, sociology and legal theory.
Possible topics include:
- Political Philosophy of Refuge
- Forced Displacement and Membership
- Migration Ethics and Feasibility
- Methodological Nationalism and Its Critics
- De-colonial Perspective on Migration Ethics
- Migration Ethics and Political Legitimacy
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected]
A number of theorists have held that, while we should sketch out our long-term aims by painting a broad picture of migration justice, we should be weary of the possibility of backlash when we adopt this picture as a more immediate guide for action. Open borders, Carens notes, is not a policy proposal (2013, 229). But how should we understand the idea of feasibility in times of deep political polarization? And what does a concern with feasibility suggest for the role of theorists in and outside of public discourse? Others understand realism not as a concern about the feasibility of our ideals, but about taking the ubiquity of disagreement and conflict in social life as starting points for devising normative criteria in the first place (Williams 2005, Sleat 2016). This is often reflected in a heightened emphasis on questions of legitimacy and the justification of state coercion. In migration ethics, a number of recent works (Bertram 2018, Brock 2020, Owen 2020) have put legitimacy at the centre of broader
theories of migration justice, arguing that a state’s internal legitimacy is conditional upon how it deals with migration. But there is still room for debate on why legitimacy should be a central value in a theory of migration in the first place – is its advantage that it does better at grounding duties in the real world than more ambitious accounts of justice?
Finally, some theorists have sought to embed migration ethics in a wider account of the global social processes connected to migration movements, and how these have shifted historically and as a result of political struggles. Here, theory is not concerned with the feasibility of an abstract ideal, but – on the contrary – with criticizing our theoretical categories for their lack of grasp of the dynamic and deeply politicized nature of real-world social processes. This perspective includes critiques of “methodological nationalism” (Sager 2016; Dumitru, 2023) in the political theory of migration, but also a recent debate about the role colonialism as a historical injustice should play in migration ethics (Finlayson 2020; Jaggar 2020; Mayblin and Turner 2020). Though conceptually distinct from non-ideal and realist accounts of migration ethics, these critical accounts also concern themselves with mediating theory and real-world processes – so that the question arises how they might relate.
We invite submissions from all related academic fields, including political and moral philosophy, political theory and political science, migration studies, sociology and legal theory.
Possible topics include:
- Political Philosophy of Refuge
- Forced Displacement and Membership
- Migration Ethics and Feasibility
- Methodological Nationalism and Its Critics
- De-colonial Perspective on Migration Ethics
- Migration Ethics and Political Legitimacy