Refugees and a right to place
Embargo Date
2032-02-29
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
This dissertation maps a series of significant recent shifts in the spatial management of refugees, and then subject them to ethical scrutiny. I focus, in particular, on the unique harms of protracted displacement, locating them not in the loss of national membership or specific rights, but in the prolonged deprivation of the environmental background conditions necessary for leading a decent human life. After critiquing dominant approaches to the ethics of forced displacement in Chapter 1, I develop a broadly phenomenological account of the normative significance of the places we inhabit — in particular the way our environment shapes various aspects of our agency and well-being — in Chapter 2. Over the next set of chapters, I mobilize those phenomenological insights to identify and articulate a set of under-recognized harms characteristic of protracted displacement today. In Chapter 3, I develop a functional account of the harm of long-term encampment. Today, I contend, that function consists principally in containing the displaced. Drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of the spatiality of different kinds of entities in Being and Time, I then argue that aiming to contain people involves an important kind of recognitive failure, reducing refugees to the status of objects to be, in effect, immobilized and stored away for an indeterminate amount of time. In Chapter 4, I critique the pervasive non-durability of refugee housing. Highlighting the important ways in which we outsource cognitive activity to our spatial environment, I argue that the long-term deprivation of durable living conditions can therefore undermine displaced persons’ cognitive function and attenuate various forms of agency while also failing to furnish a foundation upon which refugees can build toward meaningful futures for themselves. And in Chapter 5, I examine the distinctively liminal spaces that have opened up along the modern border, drawing a connection between the sense of limbo those spaces tend to induce in inhabitants and a widely-reported crisis of hopelessness amongst asylum seekers. Stressing the way hope is often conditioned by one’s sense of agency and one’s ability to imagine some way a desired future state might come about, I show how those capacities are in turn constrained by the liminality of refugee habitation in a manner that tends to undermine displaced people’s ability to sustain determinate hopes for their futures.
Weaving together these various strands in Chapter 6, I argue that the meaning of displacement today has changed: refugees no longer merely lose their homes, they are also deprived (often indefinitely) of access to genuinely habitable places. This failure, I argue, indicates a need to recognize a reciprocal “right to place” — a right, that is, to live in a place that can sustain the exercise of basic human capabilities and support a decent life, and so too a right not to be unduly restricted to places that cannot.
Description
2024
License
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International