Oh
you
So I want to welcome everybody welcome
dr. Bethany to the 33rd annual Alford
steer not lecturing and I want to thank
the members my colleagues in the
philosophy political science department
for continuing this critical tradition
that invites public intellectuals and
academics to our campus we sometimes
forget maybe at our peril that one of
the responsibilities of the university
is to foster a critical dialogue among
its communities and those include both
our eight schools and the cause of Arts
and Sciences as well as our local
community Carlin Newman in the idea of
the University emphasized the necessity
of extending the work that is done
within the walls of the Academy outside
those walls in order to promote the
greater welfare of those that have
served and I think this lecture series
has done that exceedingly well for these
33 years and it is one with much pride
that I welcome all of you today to talk
about dr. shealynn that I mean my
intuition tells me that her talk is
perhaps more urgent and relevant now we
find ourselves so hungry for clear
minded and clear voice tender
intellectuals to line our way thank you
doctor
for joining us and now I'll hand you
over to the chair of philosophy and
political science dr. Scott McLean we
will formally introduce our guests thank
you Thank You Dean smart for that
wonderful welcome to all of us Mike
Scott plane I'm professor of political
science here at Koryak and also chair of
the philosophy and political science
department and it is my honor to
introduce to you the 33rd annual
steering op lecturer dr. Sheila Babbitt
and she is Eugene Meyer professor of
political science and philosophy at Yale
University and we have one at university
are very honored to have dr. Benedict to
challenge our perspectives and provide
us with a greater understanding of the
world that we have inherited dr. Bennett
Eve is truly a world-class scholar and a
rare and valuable interpreter of our
late modern social condition as well as
our political condition
she's a global philosopher whose works
have been translated into over 10
languages including Persian German
Turkish French Chinese dr. Bennett
became to this country from her
birthplace in Istanbul Turkey in 1972
study at Brandeis University when she
arrived here she eventually got her
degree from Brandeis and then made her
way to Yale graduate school where she
earned a PhD she's taught at the New
School for Social Research and Harvard
University and has
triumphant return to Yale University as
the eg Mayer professor now I simply do
not have time and you do not have
patience to to for me to list all of her
many accomplishments in all of her many
honors around the world so I only
mentioned a few of them to you to get to
know her a little better
professor ben abhi is the recipient of
the Earth's blow cries for for 2009
which is one of Germany's most
prestigious awards in philosophy and
she's also the winner of the leopold
leopoldovich prize from the theological
faculty of the university of to begin in
2012 and she's also been a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
since 1995 she's held many impressive
and exciting professorship such as the
Spinoza chair in Amsterdam the goths
lecture in Princeton the John Seely
memorial lectures at Cambridge and the
Tanner lectures at the UC Berkeley and
was a photographer a dorm or a
distinguished professor in Spain I want
to tell you a little bit about her
research and maybe put it into some kind
of context for you dr. Bennett week's
first book critique Norman utopia which
came out in 1986 made a tremendous
impression on me personally as a
graduate student at Rutgers University
one of my professors suggested that I
made this book because it might help me
do a better job of interpreting the
critical theory of Theodor Adorno which
I was
and it did help made a tremendous impact
on me and I and I found that she had
written many books and many of them
extremely enlightening and in fact
better and better as she went along she
next launched a series of studies that
synthesized a lot of strands of
philosophical and political thought such
as the German critical theorist
tradition from the Frankfurt School
feminist theory democratic theory post
modernism and starting with her book the
rights of others alien citizens and
residents which came out in 2004 and by
the way we want one the Ralph Bunche
award at the American Political Science
Association so she crosses many
disciplinary boundaries and then moving
on to her recent book from 2013 which is
equality and difference human dignity
and popular sovereignty in the mirror of
political modernity she takes her point
of departure pata Arendt famous
formulation down in her book the origins
of totalitarianism where Iran talks
about refugees and stateless people who
appealed to cosmopolitan ideals and RN
uses her famous phrase they claimed the
right to have rights but the tragedy at
least for Arendt was that their struggle
for the right to out rights was always
centered on politics and democracy in
the nation-state not at the
international level for a rent the right
to have rights or human rights was not
backed by strong enough sanctions at the
international level
so stateless people were forever
according to heretic at the mercy or at
the benefit of the nation-state and
human rights at least up into our
current situation always depended on the
nation state for their power but dr.
Benavidez taken up the challenge over
any and has meditated on how the
politics of migration and immigration
and refugee status and stateless peoples
of all sorts point to visible palpable
fissures between the Universalist values
and norms of human rights and the
particularity is involved in the norms
which govern our lives as members of
nation states or democracies and those
kinds of polity politics do not revolve
so much around human rights but around a
contradiction which says that nation
states have sovereignty to define their
national borders and to decide and
determine how one becomes a member or
how one achieves standing within that
order the recent news of president
Trump's revoking a doctor which means
deferred action for childhood arrivals
and the confusion about whether this
will become law which has at least
changed three times in the news today
whether it is
was a deal that would be passed in the
Congress with the Democrats really not
me I think points directly to the
problematic that Professor Ben Abebe has
has pointed out for us and raised for us
dr. Bennett the enemy has written the
fissures between cosmopolitan values of
human rights and the nationalistic or
democratic norms of national sovereignty
democracy participation might be healed
possibly by reformulating
the idea of membership of what we owe to
strangers and outsiders and how that can
become more in line with democratic
political practice as well as theory
will you please join me in welcoming our
honored guest here dr. sheila enemy
thank you very much for this wonderful
invitation 33 years of a named lecture
is a tradition and I'm honored to be the
33rd in the in the series and thank you
for your gracious introductions and
thank you Scott for this very
substantial introduction of a into my in
my lecture now there is a handout for
you to be able to follow the quotations
I'm going to use and this is not a
PowerPoint lecture I'm just going to
introduce a few images to you and that's
why the screen is on the title of my
lecture is reflections on Hannah
Arendt's the right to have rights on
migrants and refugees in contemporary
political thought in the first two
decades of the 21st century it is
astonishing that the fate of refugees
and asylum seekers would emerge as a
worldwide problem in an age when the
movement of everything across borders
from capital to fashion from information
to news from germs to money has
intensified human mobility continues to
be criminalized the refugee is
increasingly treated not only as an
alien body but as the enemy who is
interned in detention camps in
deportation sites or in the absurd
language of the European bureaucracy
gathered in hotspots the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees notes
that at the end of 2015 the number of
forcibly displaced persons both in their
own country and across international
borders stood at 65 point 3 Millions
the highest level on record with no
the insight to conflicts in places such
as Syria Afghanistan Iraq Libya the
Central African Republic and the
Democratic Republic of the Congo the
number at the end of 2016 those figures
are not yet um most likely stands at
about 67 million people worldwide
one in every 113 person is displaced
among these 67 million people which is a
very aggregate figure 20 1.3 million are
refugees who have crossed international
borders 38 million are internally
displaced people who have not crossed
the borders 20 million people are
stateless whether they reside within
their own country or outside their own
country that is as puzzling as this may
seem the nature of contemporary civil
wars and conflicts as such that people
are rendered stateless within the
territory in which they reside because
they belong to different ethnic or
religious groups as these numbers have
grown not only has the number of camps
increased they were all over but camps
have ceased to be places where one held
people temporarily rather camps have
become semi-permanent the largest
refugee camp in the world is in Kenya
Dada
it is twenty years old and it houses
four hundred and twenty thousand
refugees the Palestinian refugee camps
in southern Lebanon are in either
seventy or fifty years old depending on
whether the refugee population was
created after the 1948 or the 1968 wars
the refugees who live in these camps and
in some cases who have spent their
entire lives there there are now
third-generation refugees become PR SS
that is those in protected refugee
situation according to the language of
the United
as you well know President Trump has
recently taken various executive
decisions suspending the entry in
particular of Syrian refugees into the
United States he reduced the number
recently to about 50,000 okay the number
keeps shrinking this may be part of the
daca deal I'm not sure he president
Trump has also frozen the visas of
Nationals of Iraq Iran Libya Somalia
Sudan Syria and Yemen until the various
court cells have interfered but the
status of individuals from these
countries and in particular their
relatives is still in a murky football
between the various among various courts
and finally as was mentioned the daca
program has been terminated only but it
has been extended for another six months
until Congress passes legislation
regularizing the status of these young
people and this is now being negotiated
but in effect these developments are
part of a larger trend since September
11 2001 the United States has instituted
a new form of migration regime which
legal scholars refer to as cream maker
Asian there is criminalization and
migration crime aggression under this
new regime not only have deportations of
so-called aliens with criminal records
big or small increased but many families
also have been torn apart through the
deportation of either undocumented
parents or their children and I regret
to inform you that during President
Obama's administration these
deportations and some of these practices
were also established so there is some
kind of continuity of which we are not
always as aware as we should be refugees
asylees
applause persons IDPs internally
displaced persons PR s's those impacted
refugee situations
daka's these are new categories of human
beings created by an international state
system in turmoil they are subject to a
special kind of precarious existence and
their plight reveals the most fateful
disjunction between so-called human
rights and the rights of the citizen
between the universal claim to human
dignity and the specific cease of
indignity suffered by those who possess
only their human rights but not
citizenship rights the condition of
refugees asylum seekers and migrants has
not been a much discussed topic in
political philosophy the state centric
assumption of much modern political
thought has blinded us to the
significance of borders and the
movements of people across them
normative questions of transnational
movement of peoples have not always been
separated out in the recent literature
on justice for example on global
distributive justice does not pay
attention certainly so much to the
movement of people's as it does to the
global redistribution of wealth Goods a
notable exception to this blindness of
political philosophy has been Hannah
Arendt 1906 1975 now I'm going to assume
some degree of knowledge but may I
please see hands on the part of the
students who know something about aren't
students and why you have to put her
into your curriculum ok if that's the
case I'm just going to give you a few
biographical details which I hadn't
intended to but ok this is aren't and
this is her later on
she was born in Hannover Germany to a
German Jewish family in 1906 the family
moves to königsberg the birthplace of
the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1924
the young Arendt decides to go to
Marburg to study philosophy there is a
rumour that there is a real philosopher
again maybe one can learn to think you
know who taught us Martin Heidegger
thank you she is a student of Martin
Heidegger soon as those of you who have
at least seen the movie about her which
is quite okay she meets Martin Heidegger
they have an affair
Heidegger recommends to her that she
leave for Heidelberg where she meets the
philosopher Kalia Spurs and in 1929 she
writes her dissertation on the concept
of love in st. Augustine and she writes
it in Latin now Arendt gets involved in
Jewish politics as early as 1928 when
she meets Kurt Blumenfeld and this
involvement continues until you the
Magnus's death in 1958 and it resumes in
1963 with Eichmann in Jerusalem a title
which I'm sure you have heard about
which brings her great notoriety and in
fact after this she stops writing about
Jewish politics but in 1933 Arendt is
arrested for a brief period of time in
Berlin where she's been collecting some
literature about the anti-semitic
organizations of major professional
associations and she manages to escape
Germany via Prague to Paris with her
elderly mother just two more steps here
in Paris she meets her second husband
under a blue hair who is a
of the Spartacus party the party that
followed was a luxembourg in germany and
with the defeat of France both she and
her husband are spent to the camp at
gorse G urs this is a camp that has a
woman section and a male section and it
is a camp that also holds prisoners from
the Spanish Civil War it is not an
extermination camp but individuals from
girls are sent to Auschwitz
in buses aren't escapes and she escapes
across the Pyrenees into Spain and to
Portugal and with the help of the
American front Services Committee she
manages to take the boat from Lisbon in
1941 okay she's on a list of European
intellectuals that the American friend
Services Committee is trying to say from
Europe so much for the detail I have a
new book coming out called playing chess
with history which is a little bit about
as there's life there in France and in
Spain so let us now turn with this
biographical background in mind to
Aaron's famous analysis of the right to
have rights in her masterpiece the
origins of totalitarianism I want to
begin by discussing the philosophical
perplexities of our aunt's phrase my
first question will be what is the
conceptual structure of the phrase the
right to have rights second how does our
and justify rights in general and what
are the various dimensions of the loss
of rights that aren't distinguishes in
the second half of my lecture I will put
Aaron's formulations in the light of
International in in the light of
developments in international human
rights law in the post-world War two
period and in the conclusion I will
circle back to a consideration of Hana
our and significant maybe also for
feminist theory today briefly so let's
begin with the first passage in your
handout in this much cited passage from
the origins of totalitarianism first
published in the UK as the burden of our
times Arendt writes we become aware of
the existence of a right to have rights
and that means to live in a framework
where one is judged by one's actions and
opinions and the right to belong to some
kind of organized community only one
millions of people emerge who had lost
and could not regain these rights
because of the new global political
situation the right that corresponds to
this loss and that was never even
mentioned among the human rights cannot
be expressed in the categories of the
eighteenth century because they presume
that rights spring from the nature of
man the right to have rights or the
right of every individual to belong to
humanity should be guaranteed by
humanity itself it is by no means
certain whether this is possible and of
God so let me begin by parsing this
passage for you when aren't rights of
the right to have right is the term
right being used in the same fashion in
the two halves of this phrase a right
means a claim addressed by a person or
an agent let's say X two other persons
or agents why to do or to refrain from
certain things for example I do not have
a right to prevent you from driving your
car in the highway if you obey the speed
limits and other traffic signals and if
I'm not a traffic cop or whatever I
wouldn't have the right to stop you in
any event so rights relations are
relations among individuals entitled to
do certain things and addresses who have
to act in certain ways with respect to
that entitlement once you are a citizen
a lawful resident or a visitor in a
country for example and I'm sure there
are many of you who are non-us citizens
but visitors and visiting students here
you have a right to certain things
including the use of schools hospitals
libraries etc okay so you have a right
to let's say a B C and D in virtue of
being X but what does it mean to argue
that you have a right to have rights
okay you have a right to the use of your
car you have a right to the use of
library privileges you have a right to
go to a hospital who is being addressed
in the claim that you have a right to
have rights doesn't simply mean that you
have a right to nationality is the right
to have rights a claim that you should
be recognized as a citizen she says the
right to have rights is the right to the
claim to be recognized as a member of
the human community but exactly which
community which specific community but
then she adds at the end of this court
well it's not by at all possible whether
humanity can guarantee your right to
have rights so the first question then
is in what sense is aren't using this
dislocation
the second question is how is she
justifying rights as we know this is one
of the most difficult questions in
political philosophy at large many
answers have been given to this since
the beginning of modern political
thought with Hobbes Locke Rousseau can't
etc throughout this discussion aren't
herself Palama sizes against the
grounding of human rights upon any
conception of human nature or history
for her conceptions of human nature
commit the mistake of treating humans
she says as if they were a mere
substance as if they were things in
nature but following Santa g'sten and
Heidegger for her humans are the ones
for whom the question of being has
become a question
she says she quotes Augustine quit ergo
Sunday was male square naturae soon what
then am I my god what is my nature my
nature is simply she says quest o makki
fact assume I have become a question to
myself so for a being who has become a
question to itself there is no nature as
such in which she claims rights can be
grounded but this implies a capacity for
self questioning and once freedom and
this is what differentiates us from
other substances in nature as such so
our it distinguishes between the human
condition and any static understanding
of human nature although human freedom
for her is not limitless it is subject
to the facticity of the human condition
what does she mean by the human
condition namely that we are born into a
world that we are born of others like us
and we perform human activities labor
work
and action so for her if there is any
justification of the right to have
rights it must be with reference to the
human condition alone now very briefly
why not then say that human history
shows us that rights are justified that
eventually in history as a consequence
of various revolutions we learned that
human beings are capable of exercising
and may be entitled to certain rights
Orange is very skeptical about any
philosophy of history and in her work
this usually takes the form of a polemic
with and against Karl Marx and for her
any account of history either privilege
a mechanism of social forces that act is
the engines of change or any
teleological philosophy that attributes
to history an end goal that say progress
is intellectually shallow even more she
thought that any such philosophy of
history particularly either of the
Hegelian kind or of the more orthodox
Marxist kind runs the danger of making
humans into instruments of developments
and trends that they are not aware of
and robs them of oppositional agency
what then is our and so on philosophical
justification of the right to have
rights if neither nature nor history can
serve as a justification what do we
appeal to some have interpreted aren't
as a political existentialist or as a
decision estándar to where she writes
our political life rests on the
assumption that we can produce equality
through organization because men can act
and change and build a common world
together with his equals only with his
equals we are not born
we become equal as members of a group on
the strength of our decision to
guarantee ourselves mutually equal
rights so what aren't here seems to be
suggesting is that we become equal by
establishing new institutions by
generating a political Commonwealth in
which we guarantee each other
equality but the establishment of every
new institution involves some degree of
exclusion also there is always the we
and the day there is always those of us
who are full citizens and those others
so the establishment of new institutions
does not solve the problem of us and
them or we are they I think this is
closer to to our ends eventual solution
to this problem but at the moment let's
point out that it does not it does not
preclude the question of exclusion now
there is another interpretation of
aren't as you can see I'm teasing you a
little bit I'm not going to just give
you you know the sort of pet answers the
question is here careful careful reading
of these passages and another reading of
our end is that aren't really did not
believe in any natural rights and that
she was closer to Edmund Burke for whom
the only rights that exist are the
rights of the Frenchmen Englishmen
entailments look at quote number three
where she says these facts and
reflections referring to herself offer
what seemed an ironical bitter and
belated confirmation of the famous
arguments with which Edmund Burke
opposed the French Revolutions
Declaration of the Rights of Man
according to Burke the rights we enjoy
spring from within the nation so that
neither not
law nor divine command nor any concept
of mankind such as Robespierre's human
race the sovereign of the earth etc are
needed as a source of law and of God but
surely this cannot be Arendt's meaning
because if all she wanted to say was
that rights were conventional
entitlements granted to human beings by
an existing legal system then the whole
concept of the right to have rights
would be rendered meaningless Hannah
Arendt unlike Jeremy Bentham then and
Alistair McIntyre in our times does not
consider human rights to be nonsense up
on stilts in Jeremy Bentham's famous
formulation so let me add here without
pursuing this vein much further we can
take it up in the discussion that I
think Arendt's anti foundationalism does
not permit her a very clear
philosophical answer to the
justification of Rights I have said in
my own work that there is a lack of
normative foundations in Arendt's work
and that we have to expand further some
of these insights that she has
formulated but I will leave those
problems where they are and I will not
try to to solve them now I want to now
change a framework of analysis and I
want to begin looking at Erin's claims
experientially and institutionally ok
now let's look at code number four
the fundamental deprivation of human
rights is manifest that first of all in
the deprivation of a place in the world
which makes opinions significant and
actions effective this extremity and
nothing else is the situation of people
deprived of human rights they are
deprived not of the right to freedom but
of the right to action not of the right
to think whatever they please but of the
right to opinion what does it mean to be
deprived of the right to action and
opinion there is in Orange words an
experiential a phenomenological and as
well as an institutional dimension which
goes to the heart of her theory of the
public sphere for orange
a place in the world is always the space
within which human behavior and action
takes place and thought and opinion are
communicated because she adds humans
cannot exist but by appearing to each
other the human condition unfolds in a
space of appearances in which we act
speak and interact but the space of
appearances is not always
institutionalized as a public political
sphere only under certain conditions
does the space of appearance become a
public sphere with its own institutions
laws and demarcations from other realms
for Orange the stateless the refugee and
the displaced persons are said to be
deprived not of the right to freedom but
of the right to action not of the right
to think whatever they please but of the
right to opinion strictly speaking such
individuals particularly under
conditions of internment camps are of
course deprived of freedoms to act in
certain ways so ours formula is in some
ways strange
but they are Despres deprived of the
right to action and the right to opinion
in the sense that they lack an
institutional framework through which
what they say and do can be heard
evaluated and respond to by others
individuals under conditions of
internment concentration deportation
camps have ceased to be the source of
recognized validity claims which can
only be parsed with respect to a shared
public framework in the world capacities
for responsibility and agency are
diminished such individuals face the
threat of becoming worthless worthless
precisely because they have no
demonstrable institutional and
interactional framework within which
they can be situated this aspect of the
diminution of the person and the
increasing sense of unreality that goes
through life in concentration
deportation camps have been explored
primarily through works of literature by
Elie Wiesel Primo levy Umbra Kurdish and
others it has been basically novelist
and chroniclers who have been explaining
who have explained to us most
successfully this dimension of world
lessness and loss of action an opinion
that Arendt is referring to
Arendt was well aware of the work of
social psychologists such as Bruno
Bettelheim who had also studied the
phenomenon of the camps and in some of
her reflections about the right to have
rights
she moves between a phenomenology of
worthlessness the experience of world
lessness and the more institutional
question of the loss of a public public
sphere what kind of moral and political
agency can we attribute to human beings
who are in the process of losing their
place in the world
it is clear that in camps as well human
action and words do not cease and humans
have not really lost all their capacity
for action and opinion but the oft noted
phenomenon of depression listlessness
staring into the world this association
in thought among camp inmates proves
that Arendt's phenomenology this
phenomenon of world lessness was quite
apt and I'm just claiming that this
comes to voice in particular in quote
number 4 if you want to read it again
let me now turn to the institutional and
legal dimensions of Arendt's discussion
so far I've gone through the
philosophical and phenomenological
dimensions since Hannah Arendt penned
her discussion of the right to have
rights internal national institutions
and international law have changed the
landscape against the background of
which she wrote look at our item 5 the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights of
1948 in articles 13 14 and 15 addresses
some of the questions formulated by
Aaron's reflections article 13 reads
everyone has the right of freedom of
movement and residence within the
borders of each state that is there is a
right to emigrate everyone has the right
to leave any country including his own
and to return but there is no right to
emigrate that is to enter an other
country there is a symmetry there which
is the source of a lot of legal issues
article 14 encodes the right of asylum
everyone has the right to seek and to
enjoy in other countries asylum from
persecution but this right may not be
invoked in the case of prosecutions
genuinely arising from non-political
crimes or from acts contrary to the
purposes and princess
of the United Nations in other words if
you are an ordinary criminal you can't
just go and claim asylum there are
conditions for being able to claim
asylum
now article 15 seeks guarantees against
denaturalization or the loss of
citizenship it says everyone has the
right to a nationality and no one shall
be arbitrarily deprived of his
nationality nor denied the right to
change his nationality the conditions of
refugees and asylum seekers so in the
post-war period have been addressed more
specifically by the 1951 Geneva
Convention on the state of refugees and
as many of you I'm sure know the United
the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights is hortatory but what becomes
binding law in the international sphere
are two major human rights covenants the
International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights and the International
Covenant on economic social and cultural
rights which are the international law
that expand and bind on the signatory
States these universal rights claims so
the legal landscape for the entitlement
to and exercise of the rights that
concerned Hannah Arendt has changed
article 15 of the UDHR that D
naturalization and rendering human
beings stateless is a violation of
international human rights is in
complete agreement with Arendt's
intentions the obverse side of the
naturalization that the status
obligation not to render individual
stateless is naturalization or gaining
access to citizenship or to some kind of
permanent membership or residency in a
polity so I haven't parsed this out
completely but I'm just going to throw
it
with respect to darker one of the things
that will need to be tested if no
compromise is reached is whether in
effect there will be some individuals
who will be rendered stateless if the
United States does not offer them
protection because their country of
origin may not have be taking them in or
because their parents and themselves may
have left their country of origin as
refugees and may not be able to regain
citizenship so this is something that we
have to watch about whether one of the
unintended consequences of this action
would once again go against the grain of
international law but unfortunately it
would not be the first time that the
United States in recent history violates
international human rights agreements so
naturalization as we see is not
guaranteed by international law that is
although international law says
rendering individual stateless is
against international human rights
international law does not say that
specific states have obligations to give
individuals citizenship and under what
conditions this remains a sovereign
privilege okay
and aren't herself was acutely aware
that although the developments in
international human rights law were
absolutely necessary to address the
plight of the stateless she continued to
believe that international law would
only become concerned with bilateral
laws and treaties or regulate relations
of sovereign nations and she was a
skeptic that in effect international law
could regulate state sovereignty so
ironically done the existence of these
international treaties and the
institutions they have created have not
much altered the behavior of States nor
have they completely altered the
condition of refugees
yeah I want to focus now on this on this
irony and nowhere is this continuing
tension between sovereignty transcending
rights claims and sovereignty norms more
apparent than in the case still of the
major legal instruments of the post-war
period regulating refugee and Asylum
movements the 1951 Refugee Convention
and its 1967 protocol creates
distinctions between what are called
convention refugees and persons
displaced on account of civil war
general law as violence or natural
catastrophes
so a refugee as a result of catastrophic
climactic transformation is not a
convention refugee according to the
existing definitions in international
law on the one hand it is stated quote
the principle of non-refoulement that is
not rendering an individual back to the
country from which he or she has escaped
on the one hand the principle of Nora
full Moyne is so fundamental that no
reservations or derogations may be made
from it it provides that no one shall is
expelled or returned a refugee against
his or her will in any manner whatsoever
to a territory where he or she fears
threats to life or freedom was courting
here from the 1951 convention but this
injunction not to render a refugee to
conditions where they fear for their
life or freedom is then limited by the
creation of so-called five protected
categories race religion nationality
membership in a particular social group
or political opinion are the so called
protected categories and you can claim
refugee status if you can prove
persecution or discrimination on this on
this basis
with the leadership of Canada and then
the United States these categories were
recently expanded to cover gender based
on gender related crimes such as female
genital mutilation and practices of
child marriage as well but in general
the point that I am trying to make here
is that the convention refugee has been
modeled after the dissident the prisoner
of conscience and the resistance fighter
the convention refugee needs to prove
individual persecution and this imposes
on refugees themselves and the receiving
states quite a heavy administrative
procedure of examination and
verification and this is one of the
reason why in Greece for example there
is such a sort of backlog if you wish of
refugees trying to enter continental
Europe because the burden of proof is so
high to prove that your convention
refugee and the Greek government
basically says they do not have the
staff trained in international law to be
able to let these refugees pass borders
now there have been some recent
developments both in Africa and in Latin
America which have tried to expand this
definition of the refugee but maybe I'm
getting too much into the details here
of international law and let me come
back to some of the more general
questions
neither the 1951 Refugee Convention nor
the legal instruments that have been
created since then recognized conditions
of extreme poverty and material
deprivation as grounds for legitimate
asylum economic migrants are viewed as
individuals who raise spurious claims to
protection and refuge so the economic
migrant is radically distinguished then
in particularly in Europe
from the refugee an asylum seeker but
why are extreme property and material
deprivation itself not legitimate
grounds for seeking opportunities to
escape them particularly under
conditions of global economic
interdependence when the policies of
advanced capitalist economies and the
damage they caused to the environment
all over the globe have far-reaching
consequences what sense does it mean to
turn so-called economic migrants away at
the door or better still as is the
practice in Europe to douse them with
water cannons or set police dogs upon
them not redressing extreme poverty in
my opinion violates just as fundamental
a human right as does torture so this is
one of the blind spots of international
orders distinction between the
Convention refugee and economic migrant
furthermore the subject of human rights
is the individual person even if the
circumstances and causes leading
individuals to seek refuge in asylum are
always collective in centering on the
individual the law is forced to neglect
the interdependence of economic military
climate related factors in the Society
of States which give rise to these
collective circumstances that is
refugees are created as a consequence of
structural and systemic factors in the
Society of States finally laws and legal
regimes create further differentiations
and distinctions that trap individuals
in conditions of administrative
dependency this aspect of legal
government ality would generate such
distinctions among displaced persons
refugees in protracted situation
stateless persons is a double-edged
sword often robbing individuals of the
autonomy dignity and
initiative which the protection of their
human rights was intended to guarantee
refugee camps whether in deserts forests
or borders are sites of indignity and
humiliation to the elaborate game of
head counting status granting and legal
classification has in the meantime
spawned a transnational set of
institutions as well as creating armies
of eight workers humanitarians camp
directors international lawyers in
addition to hundreds of NGOs and a NGOs
these limitations of legal instruments
together with the apparatus of legal
government allottee give rise to what is
being called increasingly the pitfalls
of humanitarian reason
what is humanitarian reason quote number
seven
Didier facade to whom we order Sturm who
is currently at the Institute for
Advanced Study defines it as follows
humanitarian reason governs precarious
lives the lives of the unemployed and
the asylum seeker the lives of sick
immigrants and people with AIDS the
lives of disaster victims and victims of
conflict threatened and forgotten lives
that humanitarian government brings into
existence by protecting and revealing
them Vasa worked for many years before
we become a professor of sociology and
anthropology at Princeton with the
remarkable international organization
called medicine some frontier Doctors
Without Borders
and he's brutally honest about the
shortcomings of humanitarian reason
again he writes I don't have this quote
I have tried to grasp what humanitarian
reason means and what it hides to take
it neither as the best of all possible
governments nor as an illusion that
misleads us it seems to me that by
viewing it from various angles we can
render the
global logic of humanitarian reason more
intelligible and of court
in other words what I'm suggesting in
agreement with the Jefferson is that we
have to be skeptical about the capacity
of legal instrumentation alone to
address the problems of refugees and
asylum seekers in our world and yet at
the same time we have to understand what
I will call in a minute the enabling
URIs generative dimensions of the law as
well because some things have changed in
our world as compared to Hannah Arendt's
time the refugee the asylum seeker and
the stateless person are increasingly
aware aware of the rights that are
denied to them the so called lease on
poppy a without papers in France who
were youth without papers that basically
closed themselves up in churches to call
attention to their predicament the
dreamers in the United States who
militate for their right to enter
institutions of higher learning and to
gain civil status in this country and in
Spain los indignados the indignant ones
many of whom are migrant workers these
are movements of individuals who are
demanding the rights that they do not
seem to have according to the states in
which they may be residing but which
they claim to have as human beings and
in accordance with various international
human rights conventions these are the
rights to work to schooling for children
to healthcare a speedy resolution of
asylum applications representation via
Council in the courts in their own
language during intake interviews etc
today's refugees and asylum seekers
are aware of these rights under
international law also because of the
remarkable solidarity exercised by many
civil society groups and organizations
because of such solidarity these
individuals do not hesitate to invoke
these rights in the face of recalcitrant
and hostile border guards and policemen
and one of the most memorable examples
of this is when in recent years when
refugees from Syria were trying to cross
the border to Hungary in some cases to
go further to Germany to Scandinavia etc
and Hungarian Prime Minister Albin not
only closed the border but he also set
out you know water cannons and police
dogs there were citizens Hungarian
citizens lined up all throughout the
border areas and the roads saying we are
ashamed of our prime minister please
forgive us
ok so I'm referring to also civil
society activism that is joining hands
and trying to inform these individuals
of their own rights and claims and
equally we saw a version of this when as
a result of President Trump's first
executive orders banning refugees from
mainly Muslim countries international
lawyers as well as groups of activists
flooded Kennedy Airport Logan Airport
and tomorrow the my favorite is that
migrant taxi workers in New York you
know refuse to take passengers on on
that day ok so we we have this
remarkable phenomenon of civil society
solidarity with these groups and I want
to say that there is a sense in which
done new legal developments
international and humanitarian law can
also create what I'm calling a URIs
generative effect
and this is the final quote by this I'm
in the following URIs generativity laws
acquire meaning in that they are
interpreted within the context of
certain rules and significations which
often cannot be controlled there can be
no rules without interpretation rules
can only be followed insofar as they are
interpreted but there are also no rules
including legal norms which can control
the varieties of interpretation each
rule can be subject to with in all
different hermeneutical context in a
sense laws normativity does not consist
in the grounds of its form or validity
i illegalities alone law can also
structure an extra legal political and
cultural universe by developing new
vocabularies for public claim making by
giving individuals the new language of
rights by encouraging new forms of
subjectivity encouraging new legal
persons to engage with the public sphere
and by interjecting power relations
existing power relations with forms of
justice to come as Derrida says venir
means to come both future and a venir to
come law in the sense is not a method of
coercion and an instrument of domination
alone undoubtedly this is one of the
functions of law but law can also act as
an instrument for the politics of what I
call URIs generativity and international
humanitarian law and international law
has created possibilities for the
stateless the refugee and the asylum
seeker to negotiate the line between
being an abject subject of compassion
and being a political activist raising
claims to the recognition of his or her
international human rights so let me
conclude by returning to Hanna
what makes orange reflections on the
right to have right so compelling are
the various dimensions it addresses at
once for the philosophical purists her
non foundationalism and lack of clarity
concerning rights will present a problem
or let me say for my analytical
philosophy colleagues nevertheless this
phrase evokes so much and can be dealt
with at so many levels at once that it
will continue to enlighten us as we
continue to face the political
conundrums of our own days for Arendt
freedom is world building with others
and it requires a place in the world
within which we are situated in networks
of action and interaction with others
it's only because we are bodies in space
that we also need a place in the world
although Arendt has frequently been
misread as if she wanted to dispense
with embodiment particularly by recent
feminist theory this is not correct for
aren't the human condition is deeply
embodied and embedded in the webs of
narratives and spaces of appearance that
can only be housed in a material world
she puts it constituted through the
labor of our bodies and the work of our
hands in John Locke's words this
conception of embodied agency is not
only compatible with contemporary
feminist theories insights into
embodiment but we should also not forget
that errant is the theorist of natality
which he explicitly juxtaposed to what I
call the Western philosophical
traditions love affair with death from
Socrates to Heidegger natality for her
does not only mean dependency and the
precarity of human beings but also the
ontological fact that no human child who
is ever born
not even twins will be like any other in
their actions and words this embodied
capacity for human agency requires a
place in the world in and through which
it can involve unfold and this is
point at which contemporary migration
and refugee studies and feminist theory
can meet and cooperate the world's
refugee camps are mostly housed by women
and children who are more vulnerable
than men because of their bodily needs
and more dependent upon a stable place
in the world and their male counterparts
who are far more mobile more children
than adults die in refugee camps and
women in camps are subject to sexual
assault
prostitution abuse and sexual
trafficking in this sense analyzing the
gender politics of the right to have
rights and to address the gender
complexities of humanitarian reason is
our task ahead and let us say that on
our end started us on this path although
she herself did not complete it thank
you for listening
Thank You professor Kennedy all right
what I will be doing is I will have that
microphone and I'll be going up and down
stairs and passing it over to students
up there who want to ask questions
students get to go first
anyone else who's down lower can come
down to this podium in Houston there so
do we have any students who would like
to ask the first question
hi I was just wondering if you would say
like human if she's arguing that human
rights are more like a protective
against like institution yep just I I
don't quite hear the very beginning of
your sentence could you repeat well
rights always have these various aspects
don't they I mean citizens rights are
generally rights to equality right we
talk about the right to
non-discrimination we talk about equal
standing in the court of law in the eyes
of justice but we also have rights in
liberal democratic societies to privacy
privacy of association to privacy of
individual partnership and in the case
of the American tradition of course we
have an extremely expansive
interpretation of the First Amendment
which protects or regulates a
government's prerogative to limit speech
I mean many other countries do not have
for example as as large or as an
expansive generous interpretation of the
First Amendment for example in the UK
and in France that are liberal
democracies libel is regulated it is you
know justice evil in the courts I can
take you to court for insulting my
reputation for defaming etc etc so there
are different legal tradition
in liberal in different level liberal
constitutions and some rights are of
course rights to various entitlements
and to various kinds of goods rights of
equality other rights are rights to the
protection of individual and euro
autonomy that they are rights which
limit government and I don't think that
there is a single Constitution that
wouldn't have a combination of both
kinds of of Rights does that answer your
question okay okay
I was wondering how is refugee status
determined by civilians are fleeing from
an armed conflict yes good question the
determination of refugee status is at
the moment one of the one of the most
contested issues on the ground if you
talk to you know to international
lawyers or international aid workers
what happens the and is the in the
refugee camps there are United Nations
representatives you know representatives
of UNHCR there are representatives of
other NGOs the religious organizations
play a big role here individuals can
submit applications to the recognition
of refugee status increasingly it is the
head of household that is submitting
that is submitting the application so
when the United States for example
grants refugee status let's say to the
fifty thousand hundred thousand Syrians
these are individuals who have been
vetted in the camps that's why I think
much of the fear about refugees being
potential Isis terrorists is nonsense
okay precisely because and I'll make a
qualification in a minute because this
within the United State to come to the
United States there is a period of about
two to three waiting you know years and
the vetting process is extremely
complicated but it's a little bit more
porous within the European context
precisely because of the possibility of
moving let's say from Syria take you can
cross the Turkish border if you are not
caught by the guards in the early stages
of the conflict you can cross you
used to be able to cross by boat to
Greece or you could go overland you know
to Bulgaria okay in some cases like this
there have been some Isis fighters who
have infiltrated refugees movement this
has happened more in Europe but one has
to be careful because this language is
the language of the politics of of fear
and it is clear that this is a political
struggle and that some individuals have
used the possibility of refugee refugee
movements and the claims of refugees
forces it is I have never heard of such
a case in the context of us refugees and
I think even the examples within Europe
are quite quite limited so we have to be
very careful and very alert to this
politics of fear which has surrounded us
since 2001 September 11th that the
refugee is the terrorist the stranger
and other
do you believe that people mostly
Americans have some sort of moral
obligation to advocate politically for
laws that may establish things like
human rights for not just you know
because of how much to say the United
States has in the United Nations do you
believe the average American has a moral
obligation to advocate to those sort of
things on local political levels and
national political levels and
international political levels yes to
all sweet I like the question in what is
that moral obligation grounded okay I
think this is this is a very hard
question moral philosophy what do we owe
strangers I think the only plausible
answer that one can give to this is our
condition of shared humanity okay and
the realization the realization that
this shared humanity means also that we
have to act in such a way that the
maximum of our actions can be can be a
universal principle for all that is we
have to potentially imagine to speak
with can't a world in which we ourselves
were the asylum seekers and the refugees
and no door was open to us would that be
a human and a reasonable world so that I
would try to justify our moral
obligation in that way but moral
obligations are always limited by other
kind of considerations and beaten moral
philosophy and input in politics the
question is even when Rock recognising
that obligation
what kind of reasonable limits are there
is you know what are the trade-offs take
some discussions right if
a country has very high levels of
unemployment does it have a moral
obligation in the first place
to let's say the starving cotton farmer
from from Africa or does it have the
moral obligation to its own citizens
right this is always the question of
balancing balancing what I would say is
that of course there are some legitimate
grounds of self-interest there could be
no moral reasoning that did not
recognize it but very often very often
what happens in these discussions is
that there is a lack of information
about about these about these trade offs
okay it is simply not the case that the
person who is admitted as a refugee or
an asylum seeker takes the job of
someone who you know or the position of
someone who is unemployed it depends on
what the policy is in that particular
country
