Human rights, borders, and asylum : translating distant wrongs into domestic rights
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In Human Rights, Borders, and Asylum, I examine the complex and contradictory relationship between the professed universality of human rights and the lived experiences of asylum seekers in our bordered world, a world in which they are routinely subjected to detention, discrimination, deportation, and even death. Through a variety of methods - including legal and documentary analysis, historical research, 120 in-depth interviews, and participant observation at immigration detention centers, asylum offices, and immigration courts in nine U.S. cities - this dissertation looks at how the multitude of actors involved in the process of seeking asylum (or refugee status) declare, recognize, and deny rights claims. To understand how asylum seekers come to be recognized or denied as human rights subjects, I pay particular attention to groups who have been historically excluded from international refugee law and its enactment into U.S asylum and immigration law - namely women and children from Central America as well as sexual minorities - and how these claims interact with and have the potential to transform the law. I refer to this process as translating distant wrongs into domestic rights. While the continual expansion of the international human rights regime plays an important role in advancing certain minimum standards of treatment toward marginalized and vulnerable populations through legislation and enforcement, ultimately this dissertation highlights how normalized states of exception, arbitrary adjudication, and selective implementation leave asylum seekers in a precarious state. Thus, I argue that the juridical idea of dignity - the foundation of the international human rights regime - must be supplemented with recourse to the ethical principle of hospitality, that is, the notion of welcoming the "other" into one's home as a guest. Hospitality can reduce initial apprehensions in the host-guest encounter, constructing a liminal zone that is the starting point for an engaged dialogue between the citizen and non-citizen. From this space, dynamic alliances and transnational solidarities have the potential to emerge and thus stimulate social and political movements and legal strategies to challenge sovereign power and illegal/immoral state policy, recalibrating society's moral compass and pointing us in a direction toward recognizing the dignity of asylum seekers.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Murali, Krishna |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Primary advisor | Jiménez, Tomás R. (Tomás Roberto), 1975- |
| Primary advisor | Stacy, Helen |
| Thesis advisor | Jiménez, Tomás R. (Tomás Roberto), 1975- |
| Thesis advisor | Stacy, Helen |
| Thesis advisor | Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Tambar, Kabir |
| Advisor | Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958- |
| Advisor | Tambar, Kabir |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Krishna Murali. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Krishna Murali
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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