Human Rights, Migration, and Social Conflict: Toward a Decolonized Global Justice. By Ariadna Estevez.

Abstract

The main argument presented in Ariadna Estévez’s critical analysis of the causal relationship between globalization, migration, and social conflict is as follows: since failure to respect the universal human rights of immigrants generates conflict in receiving and transit nations, recognizing human rights would be in the best interest of sending, receiving and transit countries alike. Estévez’s analysis is based on a comparison of certain elements of North American (the three NAFTA countries of the USA, Canada and Mexico) and European (European Union and individual member states) immigration policy that result from discrimination against immigrants, in particular the securitization of cooperation for development and borders, the use of temporary detention centres, the toughening of asylum policy, the criminalization of migration and the social marginalization of immigrants. Following Giddens, Estévez argues that conflict is the predictable but not inevitable result of the structuration relationship between globalization and migration. In turn, three main conceptual frameworks underpin her analysis: firstly, De Genova’s conceptualization of illegality as being constituted by legal apparatuses that produce conditions which serve to maintain the vulnerability and control of immigrants rather than as situations inherent to undocumented migration; Coutin’s theory of illegality as a space of nonexistence; and Honneth’s theory of intersubjective recognition. Based on case examples from the North American and European countries included in the analysis, the normative possibilities for the recognition of immigrants are evaluated through the lenses of citizenship and universal human rights. As citizenship includes a historical tendency to exclusion, the normative proposal is based on human rights understood not from a hegemonic or liberal perspective but as part of an intertextual conceptualization. The latter forms the basis for the normative proposal of a decolonized global justice.