Refugees and Sovereignty

Dr Dimitris Vardoulakis (UWS)

It is instructive to follow the thread of online comments in an article by Alana Lentin arguing for an open borders policy when it comes to refugees arriving by boat to Australia (www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/23/open-borders-australia-asylum-seekers). Despite being published in the “lefty” Guardian, the article attracted several extremely hostile responses. It is clear that the proposal for open borders touched a raw nerve, which has to do with the wide-spread assumption that sovereignty is impossible without border security and regulation. The call for open borders is thus a challenge to ingrained and unquestioned – even unquestionable – assumptions about what it means to live in a sovereign state.

Relying on the theory of sovereignty that I develop in my book Sovereignty and its Other, I will argue that we can resist sovereignty by questioning its justifications of violence. But that is possible only on condition that we can correctly distinguish the different ways in which sovereignty can justify violence. I will propose a simple, tripartite schema of sovereign justifications of violence, and propose responses to these justifications.

Dimitris Vardoulakis is senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (Fordham UP, 2010) and Sovereignty and its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence (Fordham UP, 2013), as well as the editor of Spinoza Now (Minnesota UP, 2011).