A Critical Cosmopolitan Approach Toward Climate Refugees’ Protection and Global Participation

• In Event: Dynamic Demographics and Ecosystems

Abstract

Facing the global rise of the populist right and shifting borders policies, cosmopolitan critiques have gained growing attention across the world. Seyla Benhabib considers shifting borders, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization as crucial policy changes that are declared in the name of citizens, but often without their participation. Facing these growing challenges, Benhabib considers critical cosmopolitanism, or cosmopolitan interdependence, as the appropriate strategy to address refugee protection and induce global solidarity. A critical cosmopolitan approach to the migration and refugee regimes centers human interactions at all levels, from the local to the national and transnational, in addition to strengthening new forms of global democratic participation. The case of climate refugees illustrates the limitations of the current refugee system and enhances the need for a critical cosmopolitan analysis. As climate refugees are placed outside the law, and despite recent developments before the Human Rights Committee, their status remains legally ambiguous. The international refugee regime, as governed by the 1951 Refugee Convention, does not recognize climate refugees as a protected category. Their only available legal avenue is via human rights law, which provides limited protection due to its high threshold requirements. Thus, climate refugees suffer from a protection gap, which requires solutions that better fit the globalist context and challenge existing isolationist policies. This paper employs Benhabib’s cosmopolitan framework and iterative democracy model to theorize climate refugees. It argues that climate refugees are entitled to new cosmopolitan rights as active political actors. In the current climax of political isolationism and shifting borders, critical cosmopolitanism offers political, legal, and moral avenues for the plight of climate refugees against the ontological exclusion of the current refugee framework. After explaining the limitations of the international refugee regime, human rights mechanisms, and regional temporary measures, the paper considers the cosmopolitan framework as the appropriate mechanism to bridge the existing protection gap. The paper calls for the adoption of critical cosmopolitanism as an ontologically holistic approach based on changing circumstantial arguments, redistributive justice, shared responsibility, and transnational solidarity. Based on Benhabib’s model of iterative democracy, the paper argues that the plight of climate refugees calls for the recognition of new cosmopolitan rights, including the human right to a secure environment, which encompasses a right to entry based on climate change claims and uplift climate refugees as active political participants.

Author

• Malak Harb, City University of New York, Graduate Center