Refugee at The Activating Human Rights Conference 2008 Byron Bay (original) (raw)

Refugee Interrupted: Rethinking Human Dignity and Rights in Sovereignty, Governmentality and the Camp

Honours Thesis - 2014. For the first time in the post-World War 2 era, the number of refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people worldwide has exceeded 50 million people. The Australian government’s harsh immigration laws which regulate asylum seeker boat arrivals result in their indefinite detention beyond the territorial and legal boundaries of the state. A situation arises in which fundamental human rights are suspended and human dignity is threatened. Drawing upon the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, this thesis examines different modes of power and the relationship between sovereignty, rights, and outsiders. These developments are applied to the present situation of the Australian asylum detention regime. It will be shown how and why human rights are afforded only when aligned with the national interests of a sovereign state. Detainees in Australian immigration respond to the plight of being cast beyond the pale of the law in resisting state power through violent acts of self-harm. The emancipatory possibilities from power through embodied resistance are analysed through the underexplored first person, experiential perspective. Self-harm-as-resistance for politically and legally excluded detainees is revealed to be severely circumscribed by the lack of a truly public realm. Consequently, their reinstatement as rights-bearing individuals is left hanging in the balance.

Humanity and the Refugee: Another Stab at Universal Human Rights

This paper takes up the questions of (1) how the refugee crisis exhibits the fault lines in what might otherwise seem to be a robust human rights regime and (2) what kinds of ways of seeing and thinking might better attune us to solving these problems. There is surprising agreement internationally on the content of human rights, although there is a huge gulf between international agreements on human rights and the protection of those most vital. The subtitle of the paper, " another stab at universal rights, " has a double entendre: in the midst of a crisis that is stabbing international agreements on human rights to its core, I will take a stab at using the crisis situation to point a way forward toward a cosmopolitan social imaginary that uses human imagination, not just as an ability to represent in one's mind what one has seen elsewhere, but also as an ability to imagine something radically new. This social imaginary points to the necessity of according everyone, refugees included, as having a right to politics and thus a hand in shaping their own world, including their new, host communities.

William Maley. What is a refugee? Oxford University Press, New York, 2016, pp. 253, $34.08 (Paperback), ISBN 9780190652388

Book Review, 2022

Recently, with the activity of refugees and asylum-seekers in Europe, there has been a conceptional or terminological confusion, both in Europe and far beyond. While the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi, photographed beside a capsized boat, and the danger of the migration journey can be understood through news stories, in the 21st century, the term “asylum seeker” has become as common as “refuge”. The book titled, What is a refugee? written by William Maley, clearly explains in detail the concept of refugee and offers a guide to understanding migration.

Poeticizing A Story of Asylum: Refugees, Refuge, and Refuse

CULTURAL AND PEDAGOGICAL INQUIRY, 2017

Today, Rohingya refugees continue to flood across the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta from Myanmar to Bangladesh. For many of them, there is no promise of return, of reprieve, of refuge, as they seek asylum from religious persecution. There are no homes, only hospital rooms and hallways awaiting the wounded and injured. These are the news headlines on TV. In a post-truth era of poll-I-ticking, liking, loving, emoji-ing, tweeting, we are, our family, myself included, failing to witness what Solnit (2013) calls elsewhere the stories of lives faraway, nearby.

Human Rights and Refugee Protest against Immigration Detention: Refugees' Struggles for Recognition as Human

When detainees go on hunger strike or riot or occupy the roofs of detention centres, their actions are usually narrated by governments keen to discredit them and their actions as criminal and manipulative and evidence of their barbarity and difference. A secondary, counter-narration is provided by detainee supporters who explain the actions as evidence of detainees' distress and deteriorating mental health. The voices of the actors themselves, people held in detention and taking protest action, are rarely heard in depth. Drawing on in-depth interviews with refugees formerly held in Australian immigration detention centres, and the works of Hannah Arendt, this article argues that the experience of immigration detention is fundamentally dehumanizing and that while detainee protest was aimed at attaining certain material outcomes, it also served important existential functions. The fact of protest was a rejection of a powerless state, a way for detained refugees to experience their own agency and, with it, restoration of some of the " essential characteristics of human life " and a means to use their reduction to " bare humanity " as a basis for insisting upon a place in the polis.