Refugees and global justice: an intersectional approach on the vulnerability of citizenship1

Abstract

The current refugee situation shows in an exemplary manner how moral blindness, indifference and loss of sensitivity (Bauman & Donskis, 2015) are affecting migrant policies. The challenges to the European conception of human rights, to the definition of refugee drafted in the Geneva Conference and to our very morality that this so-called ‘refugee crisis’ is posing should be analysed in order to reinforce global confidence in human rights guarantees.
This moral blindness is being materialised in Europe as national identity movements and reinforcement of politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2010; 2011). In order to escape these identity politics of belonging and to be open towards a real cosmopolitanism, our moral and political responsibility should be re-activated (Young, 2011; McIntyre, 1981; Rorty, 1988; Nussbaum, 2006). As Judith Butler highlights after her Levinasian turn, vulnerability is an universal anthropological condition (Butler, 2004): humans are all susceptible to being harmed. Butler introduces a conceptual distinction between these two possibilities of vulnerability. ‘Precariousness’ is the common, anthropological vulnerability; ‘precarity’ is the culturally and socially produced vulnerability.
Nowadays, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism are intersectional proposals that are being made by various authors in order to face inequalities and precarity in this context of global vulnerability. We would like to explore Will Kimlicka’s multiculturalism, Bhabha’s vernacular cosmopolitanism and Seyla Benhabib’s cosmopolitanism without illusions. These proposals are intersectional approaches that try to give an account on the actual situation of minorities. This situation is not successfully analysed from a Neoliberal point of view, which tries to give the illusion of European transnationalism and does not take structural inequalities into consideration. Facing this Neoliberal logic, intersectionality provides a multidimensional framework that allows a better understanding of inequality in this global world.