Never have there been more refugees in the world as today: an estimated 45 million in total. So what's the current relationship between international law, emancipatory politics and the rights of the rightless?
On 16 February 2014, The New York Times Magazine ran an article entitled Container City." "Container City" refers to the Kilis camp in southern Turkey housing 14, 000 refugees from Syria. Protected by high gates and surrounded by barbed wire, Kilis from the outside shares features with many refugee camps all over the world that make them indistinguishable from prisons or criminal detention centres. Kilis houses its population in 2,053 identical containers, spread in neat rows. The pictures that accompany the article remind one of shipping containers at a harbour. Each container is a 23-by-10-foot trailer with three rooms; and a colour TV with close to 1000 channels, probably picking up programs from all the surrounding countries of the Mediterranean.
Yet there are some unique features of Kilis besides the cleanliness of its streets and the organization of proper electricity, water and sewage services which led one Syrian resident to refer to it as "a five star hotel." There are schools in the camp, sex-segregated according to the wishes of the Syrians; three grocery stores where refugees can buy supplies with a credit card; a beauty salon and a barbershop where refugees get free haircuts and other services; art workshops and gymnastics classes. But despite all this: "Nobody likes living there [...I]t is hard for us," said Basheer Alito, the section leader who was so effusive in his praise for the camps and the Turks. "Inside, we're unhappy. In my heart, it's temporary, not permanent."
The Kilis refugee camp is by now one of hundreds in dozens of countries around the world. A report by the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees notes that by mid-2014, the number of refugees worldwide stood at the highest level on record, namely at around 45 million; and with no end in sight to conflicts in places such as Syria, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo this number will only continue to increase. As the number of refugees has grown worldwide, not only has the number of camps grown as well, but the camps have ceased to be places where one held people temporarily; rather, they have become semi-permanent. The largest refugee camp in the world, Kenya's Dadaab, is 20 years old and houses 420,000 refugees. The Palestinian refugee camps in Southern Lebanon are in many cases nearly 70 to 50 years old, depending on whether the refugee population was created in 1948 or 1968. The refugees who live in these camps, and who in some cases have spent their entire lives there, become PRSs, that is, those in a "protracted refugee situation."
Refugees, asylees, IDPs (internally displaced persons), PRSs, stateless persons: these are new categories of human beings created by an international state-system in turmoil, human beings who are subject to a special kind of precarious existence. Although they share with other "suffering strangers" the status of victimhood and become the objects of our compassion – or as the UNHCR report puts it, become "persons of concern" – their plight reveals the most fateful disjunction between so-called "human rights" – or "the rights of man", in the older locution – and "the rights of the citizen"; between the universal claims to human dignity and the specificities of indignity suffered by those who possess only human rights. From Hannah Arendt's famous discussion of the "right to have rights" in The Origins of Totalitarianism to Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer to Judith Butler's "precarious lives" and Jacques Rancière's call to "the enactment of rights", the asylum seeker, the stateless and the refugee have become metaphors as well as symptoms of a much deeper malaise in the politics of modernity.
Yet as political fatigue about internationalism has gripped the United States in the wake of the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and president Obama's politics of caution in Syria has created further moral quagmires, we have moved from "the right to have rights" to the "critique of humanitarian reason." Didier Fassin, who for many years worked with Médecins Sans Frontières in a high capacity, and to whom we owe this term, 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." Subtitled "A Moral History of the Present", Fassin's felicitous book signals a more widespread retreat from the politics of human rights which began shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq to a denunciation of human rights, in the words of the Columbia historian, Samuel Moyn, as an "antipolitics" that survived as a "moral utopia when political utopias died." Some sought to achieve, writes Moyn, in his provocatively titled book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights of History, "through a moral critique of politics the sense of pure cause that had once been sought in politics itself"; further, human rights substituted a "plausible morality for failed politics." Fassin himself is more careful and balanced than Moyn in his critique of human rights discourse and practice, but nonetheless both works and the success they have enjoyed document an important moment at least in the zeitgeschichte of the United State's recent political culture.
This intellectual and political disillusionment was heralded even before Moyn's 2010 book. In a trenchant article of 2004 entitled "Who is the subject of the rights of man?", after the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at their height, Jacques Rancière begins by noting how the Rights of Man, or in more contemporary language, Human Rights, which were rejuvenated by the dissident movements of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s, became transformed in the first decade of the twenty-first century into "the rights of the rightless, of the populations hunted out of their homes and land and threatened by ethnic slaughter. They appeared more and more as the rights of the victims, the rights of those who were unable to enact any rights or even any claims in their name, so that eventually their rights had to be upheld by others, at the cost of shattering the edifice of International Rights, in the name of a new right to 'humanitarian interference' – which ultimately boiled down to the right to invasion." "Human rights, the rights of the rightless" became for Ranciere the ideological scaffolding for "humanitarian reason" at best and for "humanitarian intervention" at worst.
This prevalent mood of disillusionment and cynicism among many concerning human rights and humanitarian politics is understandable; but it is not defensible. Developments in international law since 1948 have tried to give new legal meaning to "human dignity" and "human rights". Admittedly, these developments have in turn generated the paradoxes of "humanitarian reason", but the way to work through these paradoxes is not to turn against the jus gentium, the law of nations, of our world; instead, we need a new conceptualization of the relationship between international law and emancipatory politics; a new way of understanding how to negotiate the "facticity" and the "validity" of the law, including international human rights and humanitarian law, such as to create new vistas for the political.
by Seyla Benhabib, Eurozone | Read more:
Image: U.S Dept. of State via Wikipedia
On 16 February 2014, The New York Times Magazine ran an article entitled Container City." "Container City" refers to the Kilis camp in southern Turkey housing 14, 000 refugees from Syria. Protected by high gates and surrounded by barbed wire, Kilis from the outside shares features with many refugee camps all over the world that make them indistinguishable from prisons or criminal detention centres. Kilis houses its population in 2,053 identical containers, spread in neat rows. The pictures that accompany the article remind one of shipping containers at a harbour. Each container is a 23-by-10-foot trailer with three rooms; and a colour TV with close to 1000 channels, probably picking up programs from all the surrounding countries of the Mediterranean.
Yet there are some unique features of Kilis besides the cleanliness of its streets and the organization of proper electricity, water and sewage services which led one Syrian resident to refer to it as "a five star hotel." There are schools in the camp, sex-segregated according to the wishes of the Syrians; three grocery stores where refugees can buy supplies with a credit card; a beauty salon and a barbershop where refugees get free haircuts and other services; art workshops and gymnastics classes. But despite all this: "Nobody likes living there [...I]t is hard for us," said Basheer Alito, the section leader who was so effusive in his praise for the camps and the Turks. "Inside, we're unhappy. In my heart, it's temporary, not permanent."The Kilis refugee camp is by now one of hundreds in dozens of countries around the world. A report by the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees notes that by mid-2014, the number of refugees worldwide stood at the highest level on record, namely at around 45 million; and with no end in sight to conflicts in places such as Syria, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo this number will only continue to increase. As the number of refugees has grown worldwide, not only has the number of camps grown as well, but the camps have ceased to be places where one held people temporarily; rather, they have become semi-permanent. The largest refugee camp in the world, Kenya's Dadaab, is 20 years old and houses 420,000 refugees. The Palestinian refugee camps in Southern Lebanon are in many cases nearly 70 to 50 years old, depending on whether the refugee population was created in 1948 or 1968. The refugees who live in these camps, and who in some cases have spent their entire lives there, become PRSs, that is, those in a "protracted refugee situation."
Refugees, asylees, IDPs (internally displaced persons), PRSs, stateless persons: these are new categories of human beings created by an international state-system in turmoil, human beings who are subject to a special kind of precarious existence. Although they share with other "suffering strangers" the status of victimhood and become the objects of our compassion – or as the UNHCR report puts it, become "persons of concern" – their plight reveals the most fateful disjunction between so-called "human rights" – or "the rights of man", in the older locution – and "the rights of the citizen"; between the universal claims to human dignity and the specificities of indignity suffered by those who possess only human rights. From Hannah Arendt's famous discussion of the "right to have rights" in The Origins of Totalitarianism to Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer to Judith Butler's "precarious lives" and Jacques Rancière's call to "the enactment of rights", the asylum seeker, the stateless and the refugee have become metaphors as well as symptoms of a much deeper malaise in the politics of modernity.
Yet as political fatigue about internationalism has gripped the United States in the wake of the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and president Obama's politics of caution in Syria has created further moral quagmires, we have moved from "the right to have rights" to the "critique of humanitarian reason." Didier Fassin, who for many years worked with Médecins Sans Frontières in a high capacity, and to whom we owe this term, 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." Subtitled "A Moral History of the Present", Fassin's felicitous book signals a more widespread retreat from the politics of human rights which began shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq to a denunciation of human rights, in the words of the Columbia historian, Samuel Moyn, as an "antipolitics" that survived as a "moral utopia when political utopias died." Some sought to achieve, writes Moyn, in his provocatively titled book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights of History, "through a moral critique of politics the sense of pure cause that had once been sought in politics itself"; further, human rights substituted a "plausible morality for failed politics." Fassin himself is more careful and balanced than Moyn in his critique of human rights discourse and practice, but nonetheless both works and the success they have enjoyed document an important moment at least in the zeitgeschichte of the United State's recent political culture.
This intellectual and political disillusionment was heralded even before Moyn's 2010 book. In a trenchant article of 2004 entitled "Who is the subject of the rights of man?", after the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at their height, Jacques Rancière begins by noting how the Rights of Man, or in more contemporary language, Human Rights, which were rejuvenated by the dissident movements of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s, became transformed in the first decade of the twenty-first century into "the rights of the rightless, of the populations hunted out of their homes and land and threatened by ethnic slaughter. They appeared more and more as the rights of the victims, the rights of those who were unable to enact any rights or even any claims in their name, so that eventually their rights had to be upheld by others, at the cost of shattering the edifice of International Rights, in the name of a new right to 'humanitarian interference' – which ultimately boiled down to the right to invasion." "Human rights, the rights of the rightless" became for Ranciere the ideological scaffolding for "humanitarian reason" at best and for "humanitarian intervention" at worst.
This prevalent mood of disillusionment and cynicism among many concerning human rights and humanitarian politics is understandable; but it is not defensible. Developments in international law since 1948 have tried to give new legal meaning to "human dignity" and "human rights". Admittedly, these developments have in turn generated the paradoxes of "humanitarian reason", but the way to work through these paradoxes is not to turn against the jus gentium, the law of nations, of our world; instead, we need a new conceptualization of the relationship between international law and emancipatory politics; a new way of understanding how to negotiate the "facticity" and the "validity" of the law, including international human rights and humanitarian law, such as to create new vistas for the political.
by Seyla Benhabib, Eurozone | Read more:
Image: U.S Dept. of State via Wikipedia
