(iPoster) Re-Theorizing Representation, Participation and Agency across the Refugee Regime

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 1 (Normative)

Abstract

Alongside a growing sense of urgency arising from our world's unparalleled levels of force displacement a set of important initiatives have now unfolded in an attempt to re-think global refugee protection. A central issue that has emerged is the role of refugee participation in responses to forced displacement. Building on the recommendations of activists, scholars, and civil society actors, the recent UN Global Compact for Refugees recognizes the need to rethink the humanitarian approaches that have predominated for the past half-century: these have largely treated refugees as objects of humanitarian intervention, giving little place to voice or participation, thereby effacing the agency of displaced persons. This development offers to address one of the deepest normative failures of the current refugee regime: if refugeehood is theorized in terms of the denial what Hannah Arendt called the “right to have rights” - understood as the foreclosing of spaces of speech and action enjoyed by citizens of a polity - then the treatment of displaced persons within the international system has constituted more of a continuation, rather than a remedy or reprieve, of this a situation. Such a demand to explicitly address the voice and agency of refugees is therefore urgent and long overdue.

However, the content of what meaningful representation and participation constitutes in this situation remains striking undefined. Even interventions led by refugee-advocacy groups for including refugees in all aspects of responses to displacement - under the principle “nothing about us without us” - appeared to take the import of key concepts for granted. Approaching these issues from the standpoint of political theory, this paper attempts to problematize the concept of representation when applied to refugee agency and participation. The intervention is motivated by the recognition of both theoretical and empirical dilemmas raised by the situation of refugees. On the one hand, refugeehood arguably constitutes a form of identity which seemingly eludes solidarity insofar as it is defined by the experience of being denied the status of a member of a political community, one which implicitly informs our dominant understandings of meaningful participation and agency. On the other hand, the lived experiences of forced migrants are markedly heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed, further complicating the deployment of the idea of representation in this context. Not only do refugees, when treated as a group, exhibit a diverse array of backgrounds (at least) informed by the intersection of age, gender, race, and class, but their experiences are conditioned in relation to their countries of origin and causes of displacement, as well as their subsequent host countries of asylum or resettlement. To speak of supporting participation and agency in the context of contemporary displacement must therefore contend with the twin challenges that refugeehood is defined by the loss of membership and that to speak of refugee representation often assumes a commonality, and perhaps even singularity, that risks obscuring diverse experiences and the possibility of power differentials informed by broader structural conditions.

Author

• Kiran Banerjee, University of Toronto