The Displacement of the Rights of Displaced Persons: An Irreconciliation of Human Rights between Place and Movement

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that, despite contemporary efforts, on scholarly, legal, and political registers, to somehow include the rights claims of displaced persons within the modern international regime of human rights protection, respect for their rights itself is inescapably displaced. I establish this point on three central grounds: that modern human rights law is a set of spatially oriented and spatializing orders that necessarily produces nonsites of human displacement; that the political and legal theories on which modern international human rights law and protection are grounded are hostile to irregular human movement as a condition of freedom; and that the various manners in which “the human” as a subject of rights is discursively formed denies one the capacity to establish a sphere of human rights that could ever be universal in scope. Consequently, I conclude that serious address of the exclusionary character of modern international human rights law is insufficiently critical until it considers how it is that debate on the subject is normally confined within territorialized notions of human being and until it recognizes movement as a universal human norm.