Ethical Considerations for Humanizing Refugee Research Trajectories

This paper argues that ethical responsibilities in refugee studies have focused on fieldwork, yet ethics ought to be applied to the research problematic—the aims, questions, and concepts—as potentially implicated in the production of harm. Using an example from Tanzania, I argue that policy has largely shaped the language, categories investigated, and interpretive frames of refugee research, and this article advocates greater attention to historical and contemporary processes underpinning humanitarian principles and practices, and how they might contribute to exclusion and ontological anxieties among refugees in the Global South. By expanding our conceptualization of ethical responsibilities, researchers can better explore the suitability, and the implications for the refugee communities, of the approach that they have adopted and whether they contribute or challenge the and dehumanization of people seeking refuge.

On Refugee Agency, Bio-Politics, and a New World

This short intervention starts by discussing Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical formulation of ‘bare life,’ popular in refugee studies. Thinking with the case study of Palestinian refugee camps, particularly in the West Bank, it argues that there are clear limitations to the discourse of and bare life. I argue that ‘bare life’ neither accounts for the multilayered relations of power, particularly colonialism, slavery, and indigenous genocide, that systemically make certain populations more susceptible to its power than others. Nor does it account for the modes of of those who are systemically relegated to its sphere. I conclude by working through some of the theoretical formulations around body politics from the field of Black studies, particularly Alexander Weheliye's 2014 concept of the flesh, in order to explore new directions they may point us towards in refugee studies.

Introducing International Refugee Law as a Scholarly Field

This introductory chapter provides an overview of international refugee law. Since the adoption of the Refugee Convention, international refugee law has emerged as a dynamic and ever-challenging area of international law, particularly as its relationship to other branches of international law continues to be explored and understood. The chapter reflects on the emergence of international refugee law as a scholarly sub-discipline in the twentieth century, and its role within the wider area of refugee studies. It focuses on the important interface between scholarship and praxis in the sub-discipline’s development, as well as the field’s methodological strengths and weaknesses. Finally, it presents some observations about the future of international refugee law, identifying potential challenges and opportunities.

Decolonizing Refugee Studies, Standing up for Indigenous Justice: Challenges and Possibilities of a Politics of Place

This paper interrogates the challenges and potentials for solidarity between refugees and Indigenous peoples by bringing decolonial, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist critiques in different parts of the world, including in white settler colonies and in the Third World, into conversation with each other and with Refugee Studies. The first section of the paper offers two analytical steps towards decolonizing mainstream Refugee Studies. The first step involves identifying, analyzing and problematizing what we may call “an elephant in the room,” a parallax gap between Refugee Studies and studies of International Politics. The second analytical step is problematizing and challenging the popular discourses of charity and gratitude that dominate refugee discourses and narratives in the Global North. The second section of the paper engages in a more direct and detailed discussion about challenges to and possibilities for solidarity between refugees and Indigenous peoples. Articulating historical and contemporary parallels between refugee displacement from land and Indigenous dispossession of land, this section demonstrates that there are nevertheless no guarantees for political solidarity. It argues that potentials for solidarity are contingent on a politics of place, as articulated by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars; and also possibly on a reconceptualization and reorientation of refugee identity different from the ways it has been constituted in colonial discourses.

Refugeehood and Rights: A Theoretical Debate

To which rights refugees are entitled? In this paper, I analyze the many challenges that two interrelated theoretical traditions of Refugee Studies have implicitly posed to one another. First, I examine the analytic philosophers’ assumption that we cannot understand the nature of a refugee claim until we know what entitles an individual to make it – i.e., what root cause for displacement could explain, and justify, such status. Second, after examining Critical Citizenship Studies, I mainly discuss a renewed Arendtian tradition whose cosmopolitan claim has advocated granting the right of citizenship to all forced displaced persons. By demonstrating why each response leaves room for strong rebuttals from the other side, I make clear the urgency of rethinking today’s international refugee regime as well as the place of political theory in it.

Flucht - Geschlecht - Sexualität Eine menschenrechtsbasierte Perspektive auf Grundversorgung und Asylberechtigung

inführung und Nachschlagewerk zu den „neuen“ Verfolgungsgründen Geschlecht und Sexualität Als „neue“ Verfolgungsgründe sind Sexualität und Geschlecht vor den Gerichten anerkannt und mittlerweile in die Rechtsgrundlagen aufgenommen worden. Das Asylsystem steht damit vor spezifischen Herausforderungen. Diese Herausforderungen greift das Buch für den LGBTI+ Bereich auf und stellt dabei Erkenntnisse der Legal Gender Studies in den Dienst konkreter Rechtsfragen. Das Ergebnis ist eine menschenrechtsbasierte Perspektive auf das Gemeinsame Europäische Asylsystem und dessen Umsetzung in Österreich. Im Fokus stehen Grundversorgung und Asylberechtigung als in der Praxis eng verzahnte Bereiche: Ein sicheres Ankommen im Aufnahmestaat ist - gerade - für LGBTI+ Asylsuchende grundlegende Voraussetzung für eine effektive Mitwirkung im Zugang zum Schutz. Mit terminologischen Grundlagen, dem Konflikt um „Diskretionserwartungen“ oder Gewaltschutz in Unterkünften gibt das Buch in klassischen ebenso wie in bisher unerschlossenen Fragen konkrete Beispiele und Anregungen für die Fallprüfung. Das Werk ist das erste zum Thema Geschlecht und Sexualität im Asylrecht in Österreich und schlägt damit eine Brücke zu den internationalen Refugee Studies und der deutschsprachigen Fluchtforschung.

Performing Refugee’s Body and Memory: Poetics of Diaspora in lê thi diem thúy’s Autoperformance

Despite the fact that substantial scholarship in Asian diasporic and refugee narratives has been developed in the post-Cold War era, critical refugee studies related to autoperformance have yet to be examined. Within this context of addressing autoperformance as an aesthetic genre, this paper explores the poetics of Vietnamese refugeehood as mediated in lê thi diem thúy’s ?Red Fiery Summer (1995) and the bodies between us (1996). While the former historicizes the Vietnam War from the diasporic perspective of a refugee, the latter articulates the counter master narratives by performing bodily memories of refugeehood. Informed by Marianne Hirsch’s “post-memory”, the paper demonstrates how body and memory could be inextricably and interdependently rendered as a poetics of diaspora in performance. This paper further argues that autoperforming these two aspects is critical to revisiting the history of the Vietnam War and calling the militarism of the U.S.A. into question.