Refugees: Towards a Politics of Responsibility

There have never been more refugees, across the world from Myanmar to Syria, than at this moment. Many more millions of refugees are likely to be displaced by the effects of climate change. Why has politics failed to produce adequate responses to these challenges, and not heeded the lessons of refugee crises of the past? Are human rights and international law, or more radically, the case for ‘open borders’, sufficient to address them?

Nathan Bell argues for nothing less than a new concept of the political: that societies (liberal or not, in the mode of the sovereign state or some other form) embrace an ethos of responsibility for others, where the right to seek asylum becomes foundational for politics itself. Such a proposal is at the antipodes of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, such that hospitality and not hostility forms the basis of political decision-making.

This book comprises two halves: the first establishes the theoretical basis of the ethos of responsibility, with particular reference to the writings of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, while the second half examines these theorists in the context of historical and contemporary case studies. Finally, the book calls for a ‘politics of hauntology’ in memory of the missing - those who might have been rescued, and those yet to come, who are already among the disappeared.

In this urgent work, Bell demonstrates that a radical reconfiguration of the understanding of politics is required in order to safeguard the future and human dignity of stateless persons.