In Giorgio Agamben’s 2008 essay “Beyond Human Rights,” he observes that the refugee—the limit figure par excellence—is the one figure today who reveals the illusion of sovereignty, throwing our established concepts of the nation-state into question. So sure is he of this turn in political philosophy, he declares that, “if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political […] and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee” (Agamben 2008, 16).
Agamben is neither the first nor the last to take the refugee as a central figure of political analysis. There is a slowly growing philosophical scholarship on the figure of the refugee, whose prevalence in political discourses is an increasing matter of both theoretical and pragmatic concern. From political refugees to war refugees, climate refugees to internally displaced persons, the refugee has been a figure both overlooked and inadequately theorized.
Kelly Oliver and Sabeen Ahmed invite papers for an anthology on philosophical approaches to refugee studies. Articles that approach the ‘refugee’ from any philosophical methodology are welcome.
Please send full papers along with an abstract of about 250 words by e-mail to sabeen.ahmed@vanderbilt.edu. Papers should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words, not including endnotes and bibliography. Full citations should follow the Chicago Manual formatting style, and in-text parenthetical citations should follow the author-year-page number style. Please refrain from using footnotes. We recommend using Times New Roman or a similar font, 1-inch margins, 12-point font, and a line spacing of 1.5 lines.
Papers that would like to be considered for the volume should be submitted no later than September 15th, 2017.