2021 Harrell-Bond Lecture, Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford: Empire’s Refugees

Abstract

Abstract International law offers us a story that naturalizes the selective evacuation of US, UK and other nationals from Afghanistan in 2021, and perhaps even renders benevolent their discretionary selection of Afghans who assisted with the occupation. In general, advocacy on behalf of refugees and migrants takes the form of expanding legal exceptions to the enforcement of borders, or pushing for the enforcement of existing exceptions found in international refugee law. In this lecture I propose greater attention to the operation of empire in relation to borders, and the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in the case of Afghanistan and others like it. I argue that an empire-centric lens forces attention on structural, geopolitical domination and subordination typically obscured by individualized persecution-based determinations of asylum. It also positions refugees and migrants as political agents with powerful demands of sovereign accountability rather than as vulnerable, if sympathetic, claimants. I also posit that empire-centric accounts may have greater potential for mobilizing different politics within imperial nation-states, politics that would put pressure on these states either to curb imperial intervention and domination, or at the very least take greater responsibility for the worlds they destroy and create.