Re-theorizing Human Rights through the Refugee: On the Interrelation between Democracy and Global Justice

Authors

  • Kiran Banerjee University of Toronto

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.34353

Keywords:

statelessness, citizenship, refugees, community, discourse ethics, political theory, agonistic democracy, human rights

Abstract

Drawing on Habermas’s notion of discourse ethics and agonistic democratic theory I offer an account that attempts to overcome the exclusions revealed by statelessness by appealing to the mutability and contingency of community, as well as the fundamentally unsettled nature of the political. I argue that by placing discourse ethics, as a means to theorize the issues raised by statelessness and the idea of a claim to community, in dialogue with the agonistic emphasis on openness and the contestability of terms, we are provided with potential resources for conceptualizing more open notions of political membership.

cover of Refuge issue 27 no. 1 2011

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Published

2011-09-30

How to Cite

Banerjee, K. (2011). Re-theorizing Human Rights through the Refugee: On the Interrelation between Democracy and Global Justice. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 27(1), 24–35. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.34353

Issue

Vol. 27 No. 1 (2011): General Issue

Section

Feature Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2011 Kiran Banerjee

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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