The post—cold war world has returned us to a more complicated patchwork of new wars and fragmented sovereignties, in which protection norms based on individual human rights and well-founded claims of persecution are flatly inadequate to protect many vulnerable populations. Haddad argues that such claims of protection against the state "negative sovereignty" will always compete with the claims of "positive" state sovereignty based on issues of security, social order, or other political imperatives.
The question then becomes: What is to be done? Haddad argues that by recognizing the prevalence of the norm of state sovereignty, despite the practical limitations of states, it could be possible to expand, rather than contract or compromise, the notion of refugee protection.
Haddad is a rare example of a scholar whose efforts have included both academia and the highest level of international policy work; as such, she could hardly be better placed to speak of the ethical and political consequences of rethinking refugee protection.
Strikingly, she takes a resolutely conceptual and normative approach to the analysis, arguing that conventional policy analysis and international relations have been part of the problem in not recognizing how and why the very category of "refugee"needs rethinking. Defining what a refugee truly is thus becomes an historical "question of semantics," charting an "essentially contested concept" that tries to "negotiate a way between the is and the ought" p.
In this way, Haddad continually underlines the extent to which the use of the concept has always been normatively loaded and subject to political influence. The Refugee in International Society also works as a comprehensive advanced introduction to refugee studies. Haddad identifies her approach with the English School of international relations, but her book clearly owes much to the pioneering studies of Aristide Zolberg, who first put the question of nation-state formation at the heart of the creation of refugee and migrant flows.
She deftly synthesizes ideas that have been around in the literature this is above all a very thoroughly referenced and intertextual work but that have not been put together with this much cogency, or extended to their full implications.
These implications are large because they suggest a revision of the framework to include all kinds of mobile and displaced populations, set adrift by nation-building and nation-dissolving processes. In this sense all migrants in today's porous world are disruptive "pollutants" in the official political carve-up of the earth into territorially divided nation-state citizenries—a world of homeless persons who usually may have an unproblematic right to exit their country but face a far more restricted right to enter and gain status in others.
This, of course, begs the question of where Haddad would limit the claims of refugee status. The distinguishing factor of the "true" refugee appears still to be the issue of "forced" migration versus the "choice" to move of an economic migrant. As Haddad points out, economic migration can be "forced" if it is a result of a state deliberately discriminating against or barring whole segments of the population from economic activity.
Nevertheless, in the legal order we live in, for practical reasons only a small proportion of all migrants can be recognized officially as refugees; otherwise, the claims of those "really" deserving protection would have no moral or ethical weight. There are problems, too, in always sympathizing or siding with the refugee, as this study does. For example, the usually valid feminist move of feminizing all pronouns is ambiguous in its results.
This view overlooked the historical fact that refugees are an inevitable albeit unfortunate product of an international system of nation-state sovereignty that, by carving up populations into territorial jurisdictions that give rights and recognition according to citizenship status, always leaves certain peoples on the wrong side of borders or vulnerable to exclusion from basic rights.
The post—cold war world has returned us to a more complicated patchwork of new wars and fragmented sovereignties, in which protection norms based on individual human rights and well-founded claims of persecution are flatly inadequate to protect many vulnerable populations. Haddad argues that such claims of protection against the state "negative sovereignty" will always compete with the claims of "positive" state sovereignty based on issues of security, social order, or other political imperatives.
The question then becomes: What is to be done? Haddad argues that by recognizing the prevalence of the norm of state sovereignty, despite the practical limitations of states, it could be possible to expand, rather than contract or compromise, the notion of refugee protection.
Haddad is a rare example of a scholar whose efforts have included both academia and the highest level of international policy work; as such, she could hardly be better placed to speak of the ethical and political consequences of rethinking refugee protection. Strikingly, she takes a resolutely conceptual and normative approach to the analysis, arguing that conventional policy analysis and international relations have been part of the problem in not recognizing how and why the very category of "refugee"needs rethinking.
Defining what a refugee truly is thus becomes an historical "question of semantics," charting an "essentially contested concept" that tries to "negotiate a way between the is and the ought " p.
In this way, Haddad continually underlines the extent to which the use of the concept has always been normatively loaded and subject to political influence. The Refugee in International Society also works as a comprehensive advanced introduction to refugee studies. Haddad identifies her approach with the English School of international relations, but her book clearly owes much to the pioneering studies of Aristide Zolberg, who first put the question of nation-state formation at the heart of the creation of refugee and migrant flows.
She deftly synthesizes ideas that have been around in the literature this is above all a very thoroughly referenced and intertextual work but that have not been put together with this much cogency, or extended to their full implications. These implications are large because they suggest a revision of the framework to include all kinds of mobile and displaced populations, set adrift by nation-building and nation-dissolving processes. In this sense all migrants in today's porous world are disruptive "pollutants" in the official political carve-up of the earth into territorially divided nation-state citizenries—a world of homeless persons who usually may have an unproblematic right to exit their country but face a far more restricted right to enter and gain status in others.
This, of course, begs the question of where Haddad would limit the claims of refugee status. The distinguishing factor of the "true" refugee appears still to be the issue of "forced" migration versus the "choice" to move of an economic migrant.
As Haddad points out, economic migration can be "forced" if it is a result of a state deliberately discriminating against or barring whole segments of the population from economic activity. Nevertheless, in the legal order we live in, for practical reasons only a small proportion of all migrants can be recognized officially as refugees; otherwise, the claims of those "really" deserving protection would have no moral or ethical weight.
There are problems, too, in always sympathizing or siding with the refugee, as this study does. For example, the usually valid feminist move of feminizing all pronouns is ambiguous in its results. Does identifying all refugees as "she," as Haddad does, stress their agency as women or rather cement an image of all refugees as powerless victims?
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