Abstracts
Cara Nine (University College Cork): “‘Moving Three Times is Like Having Your House on Fire Once’: Displacement, Cognition, and the Home”
“This essay explores the harms of displacement from one's home. I develop a view that can explain why moving house is deeply burdensome for individuals and families. In tying human functionality to small-scale places like the home, I employ insights from the philosophy of mind. The home serves as part of our extended cognitive functions, in particular the functions that support narrative identities. Indeed, the home functions in a variety of overlapping and crucial cognitive roles. This view can explain why coerced moves away from one's home, especially of vulnerable people, are more harmful than voluntary moves of people who enjoy social and financial security. This theory can (1) assist researchers in analysing the harms of internal and international displacement, and (2) direct philosophers to a deeper understanding of the human attachment to place.”
Cecilia Bailliet (University of Oslo): "The Alienation of Adjudication in Asylum Law"
“The world experienced a historic peak in the number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2015 by war and instability in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. While the media provides an endless flow of footage of refugees arriving by boats, trekking on foot, and crossing Nordic frontiers with bicycles, the response by national governments and regional institutions has been largely focused on control measures against smuggling and traffickers and external strategies including the maintenance of visa policies, the strengthening of interdiction by FRONTEX, the maintainance of carrier sanctions, and the establishment of agreements with “safe countries” such as Turkey. This is further confounded by the dominance of politicized narratives of invasion prompted by political parties within national legislatures and executive bodies, negatively impacting the national judiciary and reducing the independence of administrative agencies. It may be argued that there has been a weakening of the role of law and the rule of law within this arena. This paper argues that there is an increased trend towards the alienation of adjudication by courts and administrative agencies as the relevant institutions to develop refugee law. The paper will further underscore the trend towards diminished procedural rights, including the right of appeal, and the opportunity to receive legal aid; thereby facilitating increased use of detention and deportation without effective remedy.”
Nils Holtug (University of Copenhagen): “Identity, causality and social cohesion”
“According to the Identity Thesis, sharing an identity tends to promote social cohesion. The article focuses on two aspects of social cohesion, namely trust and solidarity. It distinguishes between different versions of the Identity Thesis that differ regarding the causal efficacy attributed to specific values and the sharing of values, and with respect to the value sets that may be fed into the thesis (relying on work in political theory on nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism). Having established the existence of different versions of the thesis, four different accounts of why shared identities could be expected to promote social cohesion are considered and assessed.”
Kieran Oberman (University of Edinburg): “EMIGRATION in a TIME OF CHOLERA: FREEDOM, BRAIN DRAIN and HUMAN RIGHTS”
“Can brain drain justify curtailing the right to emigrate? This article presents what might be called an “emergency justification” for emigration restrictions, one that defends the curtailment of a right as a means to prevent a severe cost. The justification presented in this article contrasts with the positions taken by Gillian Brock and Michael Blake in their highly engaging book Debating Brain Drain. While both authors mention the possibility of an emergency justification, neither pays it sufficient attention. As a result, both list various conditions for justifying emigration restrictions that prove superfluous. This article thus criticizes Brock and Blake for their treatment of emigration restrictions. But it also criticizes them for failing to condemn the more pressing danger: unjustified immigration restrictions.”
Sune Lægaard (Roskilde University): “Refugee definitions and preventive migration measures”
“Debates about international migration, border control and refugee protection raise a number of different philosophical questions about the conceptual framing of the issues and the normative responses these should give rise to. I will suggest that there is a connection between two of these issues and that it is not of the kind that might be expected.
The first issue is the question about the definition of refugeehood understood not merely as a descriptive but a moralized category, i.e. a category membership in which implies the existence of certain moral duties (non-refoulement, asylum, and resettlement) toward refugees. Debates about the definition of refugeehood concerns what the criteria for qualifying as a refugee are, e.g. whether it requires personal persecution (as the UN Refugee Convention holds) or whether one should adopt a broader humanitarian definition including everybody whose basic human rights are threatened as refugees.
The second issue concerns the normative evaluation of policy measures adopted by states to regulate migration – mostly to prevent unwanted immigration. These measures include visa requirements, carrier sanctions, and agreements with neighboring countries to outsource migration control. Debates about such preventive measures focus on their (lack of) effectiveness and their morally troublesome implications, e.g. in terms of human rights protection when border control becomes extraterritorial and is carried out by non-state agents.
At the face of it, these two debates concern different things. The first is a conceptual debate, the latter an evaluative one. My first, perhaps not that controversial, claim is that the two issues are connected.
My second claim in the paper is, however, that the two issues are not connected in quite the way one might think. In much of the debate, defense of a narrow refugee definition and acceptance of preventive migration measures often go together (this is, e.g., the view of most states). Similarly, advocacy of a broader humanitarian refugee definition and moral criticism of preventive measures tend to go together (this is a combination of views held, e.g., by many human rights activists and NGOs).
Contrary to this common constellation, I will argue that a narrow definition of refugeehood actually implies are less permissive view about which migration regulating measures states are allowed to put in place to limit migration. Conversely, a broader (humanitarian) definition of refugeehood is compatible with a more expansive set of migration regulation measures.”
Kim Angell (University of Oslo): "What is a just distribution of natural resources? A Lockean answer"
“What is a just global distribution of natural resources? This arguably timeless question is currently experiencing a renaissance. Part of the reason is the interesting recent developments in the theory of territorial rights. Among the set of such rights, states normally claim ownership over the natural resources found within their territory. How should such resource rights be distributed? In this paper I give a Lockean answer: in rough terms, a just global distribution of natural resources is determined by their role in promoting personal autonomy for all. In the paper’s first part, I develop my theory and also propose some general improvements to the broad class of so-called ‘attachment’-theories to which it belongs. In the second part, I defend my egalitarian attachment-theory from some well-known anti-egalitarian objections.”