On the Violence of Self-Determination: The Palestinian Refugee as the Ontological Other

Abstract

The discourse on migration and refugee studies continues to be framed around two main principles: sovereignty and identity. In contemporary politics, however, the refugee subject is defined and managed from a universal framework where the language of rights elevates the potency of liberalism as both a discourse and an instrument of domination. This article examines refugeehood from a framework that transcends the sovereignty/identity dichotomy. It offers a more nuanced contextual approach through which this mass socio-political phenomenon can be better understood. To validate the article's new methodology, it sets out to examine the Palestinian refugee question, the oldest unresolved refugee problem in the history of the modern Middle East. The article makes visible the performative role of question framing by giving particular attention to historical transfigurations in the conceptualization of the people's right to self-determination. As a discourse-based analysis, the article demonstrates how current discursive formations produce colonial knowledge that can facilitate the development of new social and political tools of population control. The article concludes by showing how conceptual transfiguration of the right to self-determination incited the orientalist scholarship on the Palestinian refugee question in the interest of legitimizing and normalizing Israel as a Western colonial establishment.