Asylum, Migration, Community by Maggie O'Neill (original) (raw)
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This article gives an overview of differing paradigms at the center of contemporary politico-philosophical discourses on forced migration. Focusing on two predominant approaches to refugee politics that revolve around the paradigms of inclusion and of alterity respectively, it reconstructs and, subsequently, critically assesses key assumptions and concepts these approaches build on as well as political positions they lead to and concrete policies they justify. In particular, the critique concentrates on their individualist bias, which is reflected in the emphasis of inclusion theories on the citizen as the essential, sovereign political subject and of alterity theories on the host as the essential, sovereign ethical subject. It will be argued that, as a consequence of this bias, the inclusion and alterity approaches run the risk of, among other things, reproducing and reinforcing asymmetrical relationships of power promoted by existing politico-legal regimes that regulate forced migration; regimes that tend to take refugees, both in terms of their (political and moral) consideration and their (political and legal) treatment, as a masse de manœuvre. It is against the background of this problematization that the final section of the article outlines an alternative way of thinking about refugee politics: Shifting to a communal angle, it points to possibilities of conceptually grasping modes of encounter, coexistence, and interaction between the long-established (i.e., citizens) and the new arrivals (i.e., refugees) – between ‘strangers’ who do not have a common political, ideological, or religious, historical, cultural, or ethnic ground ab initio. Based on a modified concept of solidarity – understood as synergetic, i.e. as a bond that emerges in common endeavors of ‘world-building’ – it thus suggests a reconceptualization of democratic citizenship and civil community consistent with present phenomena of migration.