No Refuge

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serena Parekh
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Central Americans ◽  
Moral Framework ◽  
Adequate Response ◽  
The Us

This book confronts the ethical dimension of the global refugee crisis. When most people think of the global refugee crisis, they think of Syrians crossing the Mediterranean in flimsy boats into Europe or caravans of Central Americans arriving at the US border. Yet behind these images there is a second crisis: refuge itself has all but evaporated for millions of people fleeing persecution and violence. Refugees have only three real options—squalid refugee camps, urban slums, or dangerous journeys to seek asylum—and none of these provide access to the minimum conditions of human dignity. No Refuge makes visible to readers the crisis that refugees experience in the twenty-first century: for refugees, there is no refugee. The author argues we must adopt a moral framework that incorporates the harms refugees experience both as they flee their home countries and as they seek refuge elsewhere. It’s crucial, she thinks, that citizens understand the crisis for refugees as they seek refuge and the role our states have played in this crisis in order to develop more just responses in the future. Both drawing from and transcending other philosophers’ approaches to the morality of refugee policy, the book demonstrates that countries have a moral obligation to address the political structures that prevent refugees from accessing to the minimum conditions of human dignity. An adequate response to the crisis must include ensuring the rights and dignity of refugees wherever they are.

Sanctuary

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-123
Author(s):  
Milta Ortiz
Keyword(s):  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Border Patrol ◽  
Political Asylum ◽  
Central Americans ◽  
Opening Scene ◽  
Real People ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Immigration

Sanctuary is a play based on real events and real people. In this opening scene, we meet Carol and Mica as they set out to investigate what they believe to be a refugee crisis in 1981. They have uncovered harsh truths about Central Americans, mostly Salvadorans, fleeing war. They are being detained by border patrol under the US Immigration and Naturalization Service's orders and are being coerced against political asylum applications. Mica and Carol set out to help refugees apply for political asylum, but first they must convince the detainees one by one that they can be trusted.

scholarly journals The figure of the refugee in Hassan Blasim’s “The Reality and the Record”

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Atia
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
First Century ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Displaced Persons ◽  
Trauma Narrative ◽  
Narrative Agency ◽  
The Many ◽  
Developed World

This article considers Hassan Blasim’s short story, “The Reality and the Record”. It argues that Blasim’s asylum seeker should be read as a powerful challenge to extant responses to the ever-growing global refugee crisis: a vision of the many difficulties faced by twenty-first century displaced persons, no longer confined to the refugee camps of the mid-twentieth century most often associated with Palestinian literature in the Middle East, but seeking elusive shelter in Europe. I argue that Blasim’s short story highlights the impossibility of the demands placed upon those seeking shelter in the developed world, reminding us of the under-recognized role of trauma, narrative, agency, and especially evidence in seeking humanitarian asylum. By undermining any confidence we might have in an idealized “truth”, the text questions the morality of asylum-seeking processes in the developed world, demanding that its readers reevaluate their own stance in relation to displaced persons, and asserting that the burden of narrating oneself into a place of safety, of performing worthy victimhood, is neither just, nor feasible.

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

A Precarious Confluence: Neoliberalism, Race, and Water Insecurity

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mascarenhas
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
First Century ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Water Insecurity ◽  
The Core ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Racial Projects ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Cities

Three very different field sites—First Nations communities in Canada, water charities in the Global South, and the US cities of Flint and Detroit, Michigan—point to the increasing precariousness of water access for historically marginalized groups, including Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and people of color around the globe. This multi-sited ethnography underscores a common theme: power and racism lie deep in the core of today’s global water crisis. These cases reveal the concrete mechanisms, strategies, and interconnections that are galvanized by the economic, political, and racial projects of neoliberalism. In this sense neoliberalism is not only downsizing democracy but also creating both the material and ideological forces for a new form of discrimination in the provision of drinking water around the globe. These cases suggest that contemporary notions of environmental and social justice will largely hinge on how we come to think about water in the twenty-first century.

Challenges of the parliamentary system in Iraq after 2003

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (10) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Emad Wakaa Ajil
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
The Political ◽  
Parliamentary System ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Us ◽  
Long Time

Iraq is one of the most Arab countries where the system of government has undergone major political transformations and violent events since the emergence of the modern Iraqi state in 1921 and up to the present. It began with the monarchy and the transformation of the regime into the republican system in 1958. In the republican system, Continued until 2003, and after the US occupation of Iraq in 2003, the regime changed from presidential to parliamentary system, and the parliamentary experience is a modern experience for Iraq, as he lived for a long time without parliamentary experience, what existed before 2003, can not be a parliamentary experience , The experience righteousness The study of the parliamentary system in particular and the political process in general has not been easy, because it is a complex and complex process that concerns the political system and its internal and external environment, both of which are influential in the political system and thus on the political process as a whole, After the US occupation of Iraq, the United States intervened to establish a permanent constitution for the country. Despite all the circumstances accompanying the drafting of the constitution, it is the first constitution to be drafted by an elected Constituent Assembly. The Iraqi Constitution adopted the parliamentary system of government and approved the principle of flexible separation of powers in order to achieve cooperation and balance between the authorities.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas I. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Political Conception ◽  
Legal Principle ◽  
Ethical Disposition

In academic debates and popular political discourse, tolerance almost invariably refers either to an individual moral or ethical disposition or to a constitutional legal principle. However, for the political actors and ordinary residents of early modern Northern European countries torn apart by religious civil war, tolerance was a political capacity, an ability to talk to one’s religious and political opponents in order to negotiate civil peace and other crucial public goods. This book tells the story of perhaps the greatest historical theorist-practitioner of this political conception of tolerance: Michel de Montaigne. This introductory chapter argues that a Montaignian insistence that political opponents enter into productive dialogue with each other is worth reviving and promoting in the increasingly polarized democratic polities of the twenty-first century.

Anxieties of Experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
The Us ◽  
New Interpretation

Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author’s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the “US literature of experience” and the “Latin American literature of the reader.” Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and “misencounters” between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the “common grounds” approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frédéric Grare
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Slow Pace ◽  
Centre Of Gravity ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Future ◽  
Economic Interaction ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
The Relationship

India’s relationship with the United States remains crucial to its own objectives, but is also ambiguous. The asymmetry of power between the two countries is such that the relationship, if potentially useful, is not necessary for the United States while potentially risky for India. Moreover, the shift of the political centre of gravity of Asia — resulting from the growing rivalry between China and the US — is eroding the foundations of India’s policy in Asia, while prospects for greater economic interaction is limited by India’s slow pace of reforms. The future of India-US relations lies in their capacity to evolve a new quid pro quo in which the US will formulate its expectations in more realistic terms while India would assume a larger share of the burden of Asia’ security.

The Rise and Return of the Indo-Pacific

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Doyle ◽  
Dennis Rumley
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
First Century ◽  
Regional Security ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Hegemony ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Under Construction ◽  
Political Realities

In the twenty-first century, the Indo-Pacific region has become the new centre of the world. The concept of the ‘Indo-Pacific’’, though still under construction, is a potentially pivotal site, where various institutions and intellectuals of statecraft are seeking common ground on which to anchor new regional coalitions, alliances, and allies to better serve their respective national agendas. This book explores the Indo-Pacific as an ambiguous and hotly contested regional security construction. It critically examines the major drivers behind the revival of classical geopolitical concepts and their deployment through different national lenses. The book also analyses the presence of India and the US in the Indo-Pacific, and the manner in which China has reacted to their positions in the Indo-Pacific to date. It suggests that national constructions of the Indo-Pacific region are more informed by domestic political realities, anti-Chinese bigotries, distinctive properties of twenty-first century US hegemony, and narrow nation-statist sentiments rather than genuine pan-regional aspirations. The book argues that the spouting of contested depictions of the Indo-Pacific region depend on the fixed geostrategic lenses of nation-states, but what is also important is the re-emergence of older ideas—a classical conceptual revival—based on early to mid-twentieth century geopolitical ideas in many of these countries. The book deliberately raises the issue of the sea and constructions of ‘nature’, as these symbols are indispensable parts of many of these Indo-Pacific regional narratives.

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