Browsing by Subject "Borders"
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Item Open Access At the Threshold with Simone Weil: A Political Theory of Migration and Refuge(2012) Gonzalez Rice, David LaurenceThe persistent presence of refugees challenges political theorists to rethink our approaches to citizenship and national sovereignty. I look to philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), who brings to the Western tradition her insight as a refugee who attended to other refugees. Deploying the tropes of Threshold, Refuge, and Attention (which I garner and elaborate from her writings) I read Weil as an eminently political theorist whose practice of befriending political strangers maintains the urgent, interrogative insight of the refugee while tempering certain "temptations of exile." On my reading, Weil's body of theory travels physically and conceptually among plural, intersecting, and conflicting bodies politic, finding in each a source of limited, imperfect, and precious Refuge.
I then put Weil into conversation with several contemporary scholars - Michael Walzer, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah - each of whom takes up a problematic between duties to existing political community and the call to engagements with political strangers. Bringing Weilian theory to bear on this conversation, I argue that polity depends deeply on those who heed the call to assume variously particular, vocational, and unenforceable duties across received borders.
Finally, by way of furthering Weil's incomplete experiments in Attention to the other, I look to "accompaniment" and related strategies adopted by human rights activists in recent decades in the Americas. These projects, I suggest, display many traits in common with Weil's political sensibility, but they also demonstrate possibilities beyond those imagined by Weil herself. As such, they provide practical guidance to those of us confronting political failures and refugee flows in the Western hemisphere today. I conclude that politico-humanitarian movements' own bodies of theory and practice point the way to sustained, cross-border, political relations.
Item Open Access Confronting the Imperial Narrative: Counter-Narratives from Iraqi and Syrian Refugees in Jordan(2018-05-22) Ahmed, MahaThis thesis explores how individual refugees respond to imposed narratives about their communities. Iraqi and Syrian refugees in Amman, Jordan (n=40) were interviewed during the summer of 2018. Each interviewee’s response was recorded and coded to gain insight into attitudes towards Western institutions responsible for resettlement cases. Given that normative social roles can be constructed in institutional narratives that serve to sustain power inequalities, the interviews reveal how these roles that define the “refugee” are constructed, naturalized, and challenged in displaced communities. The counter narratives from those who were interviewed directly point to the way institutional narratives shape neo-liberal forms of control centered on human rights rhetoric and explain how states use the commodification of suffering through the normative refugee asylum story to distance and other the marginalized. Finally, this thesis finds that refugees’ resentment towards imperial control, which comes out of counter-narratives, is centered around an unease with Western power and the rise of the military-industrial complex.Item Open Access Electing Citizens and Aliens: A Theology of Migration, Borders, and Belonging(2015) Ashworth, Justin ParrishThis work offers a theological reading of and response to migration restrictions in the United States of America, focusing on their instantiation in the U.S.-Mexico border and on the discourses and practices of citizenship and alienage that support these arrangements. Unlike most works in Christian immigration ethics, this work not only highlights the negative effects of migration policies, but also unearths the basic assumptions grounding these policies, all while displaying the racial and theological imaginaries grounding them.
The first part of this work argues that the assumption grounding all migration policies is “the preferential option for one’s own people,” that is, the view that citizens not only may but must prefer or prioritize the life of fellow citizens over that of non-citizens. The first chapter draws on French theorist Michel Foucault and decolonial intellectuals to offer a reading of three non-theological arguments for migration restrictions, namely, security, economics, and culture. In short, those who believe the U.S. must have migration restrictions believe that aliens may threaten the security, economy, and culture—in short, the life—of citizens. The second chapter interrogates theological arguments for national borders, the most visible way of restricting migration, showing that ultimately theologians assume the legitimacy of Westphalian nation-states. The third chapter offers a theological reading of the concrete effects of border practices on “illegal aliens,” arguing that national borders will continue to exist as long as citizens assume both that “our people” means “fellow citizens,” and also that they may and must prefer and prioritize their life over that of others. The latter assumption is particularly troubling because it implies that the insecurity, poverty, and cultural denigration that aliens face—though perhaps saddening—is ultimately just. The central argument of the second, constructive part of this work is that Christians (and others) should not prefer or prioritize fellow citizens over non-citizens. Chapter 4 discusses the nature and task of citizenship in light of the parable of the Merciful Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel, and chapter 5 employs Hispanic theologians to articulate an alternative account of faithful citizenship with undocumented Latina/o migrants.
The doctrine of election holds the dissertation together theologically. The first part shows that the preferential option for one’s own people—even when proclaimed by a theologian—is a secularized performance of the doctrine of election: citizens elect themselves for life and belonging, but in so doing they damn the undocumented to death and anxiety. The second part shows that God’s election of the Jews, favor for the poor, and destiny of fellowship for the world sets Christians on a trajectory of border-crossing solidarity that opposes the preferential option for one’s own and de-borders belonging.