Publications by Kiran Banerjee
Migration Governance in North America: Policy, Politics, and Community, McGill University Press. (Uncorrected proofs)
In the wake of a series of significant and likely enduring changes across the continent this flag... more In the wake of a series of significant and likely enduring changes across the continent this flagship volume puts policy developments and migrant organizing in conversation across borders, investigates often contentious domestic, regional, and global migration politics, and reveals how intersecting policy frameworks affect the movement of people.
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Migration Governance in North America, McGill University Press. (Uncorrected proofs)
This chapter examines the provision of asylum in North America alongside the regional development... more This chapter examines the provision of asylum in North America alongside the regional development of bilateral instruments for asylum coordination between signatories to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.
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European Journal of International Security, 2020
Military attachés and wartime observers have received surprisingly little attention in internatio... more Military attachés and wartime observers have received surprisingly little attention in international relations. Why do states exchange attachés, permitting uniformed foreigners to gather intelligence on their territory and during their wars? To explain, we adopt a broadly practice-theoretic approach, focusing on the individuals who developed the role by living it, showing how they both innovated a distinct military practice and established institutional legitimacy for attachés. We address an early historical case in which the practice proliferated: the Russo-Japanese War, throughout which observers represented multiple European states, on both sides of the conflict. Sometimes termed the first modern war, the conflict saw Japan’s entry into the Eurocentric great power system. In this context, embedded attachés had a dual effect. On the one hand, a professional attaché community established itself: we show how local innovation by embedded officers, in the context of this structurally destabilizing event, permitted the creation of a new institutional role that might otherwise have been impossible. On the other, the Japanese made use of the attachés as witnesses for western governments, observing their performance of great power-hood, as they defeated Russia. The argument has implications for understanding both the military attaché system and communities of practice as such.
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Nomad-State Relationships in International Relations: Before and After Borders, 2020
This chapter engages the theoretical core of International Relations from a critical perspective,... more This chapter engages the theoretical core of International Relations from a critical perspective, aiming to problematize and complicate its underlying assumptions. While acknowledging the value of the “nomad-state” relationship as a subject of study in International Relations, we draw this emerging research agenda into conversation with work on the history, politics, and sociology of human mobility. As other scholars have emphasized, nomadic groups, cultures, and peoples remain largely neglected in IR. However, we argue that this is an instance of the field’s broader inattention to migration, which until recently was consigned to the domain of “low politics” and area studies. Despite its important contribution, a focus on “nomads as the state’s other” leaves unchallenged the dominant paradigm of a world of stationary people within bounded states. We complicate (and perhaps upend) this view of mobility as exception by historicizing the relationship between states and human mobility. In particular, we draw attention to the contingency of borders and migration controls, emphasizing the recent institutional and technological developments which reified and naturalized static, territorialized populations. In doing so, we advance the provocative claim that for much of history this view of the state’s relationship to human mobility has been more myth than reality.
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Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 2018
As readers of the Model International Mobility Convention (MIMC) will note, the first four chapte... more As readers of the Model International Mobility Convention (MIMC) will note, the first four chapters of the project center primarily on the more-or-less voluntary migration of persons. In contrast, Chapter V is devoted to the situation of individuals who are forced to cross international borders in search of safety and refuge. Whether caused by persecution, generalized violence, or forms of state breakdown and insecurity that expose individuals to serious harm, the MIMC's turn to forced migration signals a shift in attention to persons in need of international protection and the humanitarian considerations these circumstances raise. In this comment, I will largely focus on providing an analysis and overview of Chapter V and the responsibility sharing provisions of Chapter VIII. I begin by sketching the larger context of contemporary forced migration that informs the approach of the MIMC. From here I discuss how the MIMC addresses the relationship between migration and vulnerability to develop responses to many of the gaps that currently exist in international protection. This will highlight how these provisions aim to both deepen rights protections, by refining the existing framework of the refugee regime, while also expanding the scope of coverage, by accounting for persons with strong claims to protection who fall outside the formal refugee definition articulated in the 1951 Refugee Convention. By way of conclusion I briefly consider some of the enduring difficulties that have beset efforts to develop a more effective, equitable, and truly global approach to international protection and the proposals the MIMC advances for meeting these challenges.
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This paper contributes to recent debates over the place of race in liberal theory, and the work o... more This paper contributes to recent debates over the place of race in liberal theory, and the work of John Rawls in particular. Controversy has centered on whether Rawls' broader philosophical approach is capable of addressing racial injustice, and if not, precisely why the Rawlsian framework remains disconcertingly blind to such issues. Pace scholars who focus on Rawls' emphasis on " ideal theory, " and whether that precludes his engagement with racial domination, we show that Rawls' inability to account for, or address, racial injustice lies in his limited understanding of the kinds of 'associations' or institutions that condition and perpetuate racial oppression. As studies in Race and American Political Development have shown, non-statutory institutions like political parties, unions, and universities were key to the development and maintenance of racial hierarchical order. Fully understanding the role of these institutions in perpetuating racial injustice allows us to see that the limitations of Rawls is not his ideal theory, per se, but his preoccupation with the " basic structure " of society, which rendered such institutions outside his analysis. We conclude by drawing on thinkers in the Afro-Modern tradition who help us conceptualize how such institutions are complicit in, and can be weaponized against, racial domination.
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(with Rebecca Kingston, Yi-chun Chien, and James Mckee) in Emotions, Community, Citizenship: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, University of Toronto Press, 2017. (Uncorrected proofs)
Most people can understand what it is to feel or to emote, and they can understand others when th... more Most people can understand what it is to feel or to emote, and they can understand others when they give an account of their feelings, but researchers across academic disciplines conceptualize and make sense of the emotions in very different ways. Given some basic agreement on the phenomena as experienced, yet the diverse and often quite divergent ways we tend to make sense of it on reflection, there is hardly a better area for thinking about the possibility of cross-disciplinary dialogue. The purpose of this volume is to continue this dialogue in critical fashion among fields of scholarship often represented in the study of emotions. The idea of context is also a theme pursued capaciously here as we explore emotions in the context of competing areas of research , but also with particular emphasis on the different ways that disciplines study emotions in the social and political contexts in which they are experienced. Of course, there is no template for cross-disciplinary study, given that the field of investigation is always situated in some conceptually defined area of knowledge. The editors of this volume are all political scientists, and we have chosen the pieces included here as a means of shedding light on the wider dialogues possible between political science and other fields of study with respect to the emotions. This selection of chapters is meant to serve four purposes in particular: in the first instance, the collection demonstrates one possible cross section of the wide diversity of approaches possible in the field of emotion studies relevant to politics, and it identifies some of the key points of difference and possible dispute among these approaches; second, the collection demonstrates how political issues of context and human interrelated-ness have a thematic place in studies on emotion outside the discipline
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History of European Ideas (AOP July 2016), Jul 10, 2016
J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment played a pivotal role in inaugurating the important turn... more J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment played a pivotal role in inaugurating the important turn toward the classical republican tradition in the history of political thought. In this revival of republicanism the people are primarily presented as integral to combining active political participation and military prowess in the context of a common defense of liberty against foreign and domestic tyranny. In this essay we wish to revisit the role of the people in Pocock's interpretation of Machiavelli's republican thought. In doing so, we wish to bring Pocock's contentions relative to the governo popolare one step further by introducing and analyzing Machiavelli's expositions of popular behavior in the context of the Florentine Histories. Contrary to Pocock's assumptions, the Florentine Histories shows how Machiavelli became substantively more critical of the people as a sound political agent. We demonstrate this by reconstructing important shifts in the presentation of the people apparent in this later work, suggest a number of important elaborations to Machiavelli's understanding of both the people and citizenship.
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Grenze und Demokratie – Praktiken der Schließung und Überschreitung, 2017
This paper contributes to the turn toward the problem of membership and political exclusion in in... more This paper contributes to the turn toward the problem of membership and political exclusion in international political theory that has begun to take seriously the challenge of radical exclusion posed by statelessness and the denial of citizenship. (Staples 2012, Kesby 2012). The aim of the paper is to articulate a novel account of statelessness as domination and with that to lay the foundation for addressing the claims to justice of stateless persons. As the paper argues, the neo-republican approach offers important resources for critically evaluating forms of domination at the global level and for rethinking our modes of political membership, suggesting that non-domination can serve as a global ideal. Against earlier renderings of neo-republicanism (Pettit 1997) that remain bound to the state, I argue for applying the non-domination ideal to the state-system itself. I demonstrate how neo-republicanism can deepen our understanding with regard to the nature of membership and inclusion in order to suggest novel republican solutions to the situation of stateless persons. In particular, the paper suggests that the insights of neo-republicanism help us recast citizenship as a potential source of domination while also allowing us to imagine forms of membership that avoid the problematic exclusions of national citizenship.
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In recent years, political theorists have come to recognize the central role of affect in social ... more In recent years, political theorists have come to recognize the central role of affect in social and political life. A host of scholars, coming from a number of distinct traditions, have variously drawn our attention to the importance of the emotions to the tradition of the history of political thought, as well as to normative political theory. This attentiveness to affect is often cast as a break with earlier, Enlightenment-inspired liberal approaches towards politics, approaches that marginalized the emotions, dismissing the passions as potentially dangerous, or neglected them altogether. According to the conventional liberal view, emotions are said to have no place in the public sphere, while proceduralist institutions abstract away from citizens’ affective attachments, now cast as private preferences of individuals qua citizens. In this paper we challenge this prevalent view. We argue that no less a liberal theorist than John Rawls is deeply attentive to the place of emotions in his account of liberalism. This may seem counterintuitive given that Rawls's work has been frequently criticized for epitomizing some of the deepest problems of contemporary liberal theory, as a result of the emphasis on rationalism and reasonableness in his account of liberal justice. However, against this prevalent reading, we demonstrate that Rawls is in fact highly concerned with the role of affect and presents us with an account of the embedded liberal subject. By drawing out these dimensions of Rawls’s thought, we hope to contribute to upending the conventional view of liberalism as affect-blind in order to encourage a more nuanced reading of the liberal tradition.
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This article looks to contemporary debates about the emergence of post-national forms of membersh... more This article looks to contemporary debates about the emergence of post-national forms of membership and analyzes their significance as potential challenges to exclusionary conceptions of citizenship and the state. Taking seriously the claims of cosmopolitan theorists that transnational institutions like the European Union offer the promise of eroding the tension between the rights of citizens and the rights of others, I use the case of contemporary shifts in German citizenship to argue that present dynamics of inclusion are far more ambivalent. While recent shifts in the legal status of EU citizenship do herald the emergence of a robust form of post-national status, these transformations only highlight the growing gap between the rights of Europeans and those of nationals from outside the EU for whom limited access to national citizenship remains a central concern. Recognizing these contradictory dynamics is important because of the promissory role the EU frequently plays in the work of cosmopolitans and post-nationalists; in truth the contemporary politics of inclusion indicates a far less sanguine present.
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Drawing on Habermas’s notion of discourse ethics and
agonistic democratic theory I offer an acco... more Drawing on Habermas’s notion of discourse ethics and
agonistic democratic theory I offer an account that
attempts to overcome the exclusions revealed by statelessness
by appealing to the mutability and contingency of
community, as well as the fundamentally unsettled nature
of the political. I argue that by placing discourse ethics, as
a means to theorize the issues raised by statelessness and
the idea of a claim to community, in dialogue with the
agonistic emphasis on openness and the contestability of
terms, we are provided with potential resources for conceptualizing
more open notions of political membership.
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Books by Kiran Banerjee
Millions of people arrive in North America each year, including highly skilled immigrants and tem... more Millions of people arrive in North America each year, including highly skilled immigrants and temporary workers, refugees, and international students. Migration, border control, and asylum are ongoing flashpoints in Canadian, American, and Mexican relations, and deeply affect the domestic politics and economies of each country.
While migration has emerged as an only increasingly charged topic in public discourse, research has largely focused on North America’s lack of regional integration around mobility, often neglecting aspects of regional cooperation, hierarchy, and global engagement. Migration Governance in North America advances that conversation by examining the complex dynamics of mobilities across the continent through contemporary analysis and historical context. Situating North America within the global migration landscape, contributors from Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Europe unpack such issues as temporary labour mobility, border security, asylum governance, refugee resettlement, and the role of local actors and activists in coping with changing policies and politics.
In the wake of a series of significant and likely enduring changes across the continent this flagship volume puts policy developments and migrant organizing in conversation across borders, investigates often contentious domestic, regional, and global migration politics, and reveals how intersecting policy frameworks affect the movement of people.
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Papers by Kiran Banerjee
The norms diffusion literature played a crucial role in operationalizing the constructivist resea... more The norms diffusion literature played a crucial role in operationalizing the constructivist research project by illustrating how social facts drive and constrain state behaviour. Contra dominant structuralist accounts, the literature was crucial in revealing processes of change in the international system beyond shifts in balance of power. In seeking to carve a space in the discipline, however, the literature implicitly conflated ‘norms’ with normatively good, liberal state behaviour. This tendency has persisted throughout later iterations of norms research. We argue that changes in norms cut both ways. We do so by examining contemporary changes in the International Refugee Regime, and offer a state-centric account of the emergence of ‘bad’ or illiberal norms. Substantively, we examine the practice of refugee warehousing, territorial excision and safe third country agreements, and border and maritime interdictions which cumulatively undermine the peremptory norms of the regime. Importantly for our account, the very states whose illiberal practices we examine are those who were responsible for the liberal architecture of the International Refugee Regime in the postwar era, and therefore represent ‘critical states’ in the diffusion of bad norms. Our conclusion suggests a model of norms dynamics which, instead of focusing on domestic norms entrepreneurs, highlights state behavior as a driver of rather rapid changes in norms of behavior in the international system.
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Publications by Kiran Banerjee
agonistic democratic theory I offer an account that
attempts to overcome the exclusions revealed by statelessness
by appealing to the mutability and contingency of
community, as well as the fundamentally unsettled nature
of the political. I argue that by placing discourse ethics, as
a means to theorize the issues raised by statelessness and
the idea of a claim to community, in dialogue with the
agonistic emphasis on openness and the contestability of
terms, we are provided with potential resources for conceptualizing
more open notions of political membership.
Books by Kiran Banerjee
While migration has emerged as an only increasingly charged topic in public discourse, research has largely focused on North America’s lack of regional integration around mobility, often neglecting aspects of regional cooperation, hierarchy, and global engagement. Migration Governance in North America advances that conversation by examining the complex dynamics of mobilities across the continent through contemporary analysis and historical context. Situating North America within the global migration landscape, contributors from Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Europe unpack such issues as temporary labour mobility, border security, asylum governance, refugee resettlement, and the role of local actors and activists in coping with changing policies and politics.
In the wake of a series of significant and likely enduring changes across the continent this flagship volume puts policy developments and migrant organizing in conversation across borders, investigates often contentious domestic, regional, and global migration politics, and reveals how intersecting policy frameworks affect the movement of people.
Papers by Kiran Banerjee
agonistic democratic theory I offer an account that
attempts to overcome the exclusions revealed by statelessness
by appealing to the mutability and contingency of
community, as well as the fundamentally unsettled nature
of the political. I argue that by placing discourse ethics, as
a means to theorize the issues raised by statelessness and
the idea of a claim to community, in dialogue with the
agonistic emphasis on openness and the contestability of
terms, we are provided with potential resources for conceptualizing
more open notions of political membership.
While migration has emerged as an only increasingly charged topic in public discourse, research has largely focused on North America’s lack of regional integration around mobility, often neglecting aspects of regional cooperation, hierarchy, and global engagement. Migration Governance in North America advances that conversation by examining the complex dynamics of mobilities across the continent through contemporary analysis and historical context. Situating North America within the global migration landscape, contributors from Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Europe unpack such issues as temporary labour mobility, border security, asylum governance, refugee resettlement, and the role of local actors and activists in coping with changing policies and politics.
In the wake of a series of significant and likely enduring changes across the continent this flagship volume puts policy developments and migrant organizing in conversation across borders, investigates often contentious domestic, regional, and global migration politics, and reveals how intersecting policy frameworks affect the movement of people.