Beyond the ethics of admission

Stateless people, refugee camps and moral obligations

Bibliographic Data

ID11340104
AuthorsSerena Parekh (0000-0002-0148-6570, Northeastern University, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume40
Issue7
Pages645-663
Publication date2014-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhilosophy & Social Criticism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0191-4537 • E-ISSN: 1461-734X
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0191453713498254
OpenAlexW2129756036
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited29

This article examines our moral obligations to refugees and stateless people. I argue that in order to understand our moral obligations to stateless people, both de jure refugees and de facto stateless people, we ought to reconceptualize the harm of statelessness as entailing both a legal/political harm (the loss of citizenship) and an ontological harm, a deprivation of certain fundamental human qualities. To do this, I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt and show that the ontological deprivation has three distinct though interconnected elements: a reduction to the merely human or bare life, a separation from the common realm of humanity and abandonment, and the diminishment of agency or ability to act in the Arendtian sense. If we pull apart the legal/political harm of statelessness from the ontological harm, we are better able to see that we can address some of the features of the ontological deprivation even though we may not be able to rectify the political harm. I conclude this article by discussing some suggestions that follow from a recognition of the reality and harm of the ontological deprivation

Citizenship · Harm · Human rights · Humanity · Law and economics · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Realm · Refugee · Sociology · State (computer science · Stateless protocol · Statelessness · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Theology and Sovereignty