Forced displacement, humanitarianism and written encounters: Re-imagining the political-juridical at the discursive limits of modernity

Abstract

In this thesis, I will examine the modern political-juridical discourse in order to re-imagine the space of the political-juridical anew. My examination focuses on what I argue to be the very limits of the discourse: on one hand, there are the corporeal limits found in the lives of the displaced and, on the other, the spatial limits at the exceptional spaces of humanitarianism. Utilising Giorgio Agamben's criticism of the modern political-juridical structure, and Liisa Malkki's conceptualisation of the national order of things, I will argue that these two limitations of modern imagination enable the operation of modern politics through their very own exclusion. I will argue that while the modern political-juridical discourse is characterised by what I call solitary sovereignty and its constant need to distinguish between bare life and politically qualified life, any attempt to re-imagine this order must begin by recognising the ways in which the subject - all subjects - play a role in the making of the sovereign decision and, furthermore, how these influencing and deciding subjects are all relational by very their very definition. So as to fully conceive the implications of this argument, I will argue that what needs to be radically rethought is the ontology of decision, and hence the very moments of sovereignty.

The thesis proceeds on two levels of analysis. On one hand, there is my traditional, footnoted theoretical argumentation that draws on various sources from international treaty and customary law to political theory to social anthropology. On the other hand, however, there is a more creative side in the work. Namely, alongside my theoretical argumentation, there runs poetry that I have composed from the words of seven interviewees - four refugees and three humanitarian workers. Together the poetry and my theorisation are meant to form a collage - an architectural painting of a kind. In this multifaceted method of representation, I have three aims in particular. First, I hope to provide my interviewees an independent space in the text, from which they can "speak back" to my theoretical arguments that touch their lived experiences. By refusing to comment upon the voices and stories of my interviewees explicitly, I thus hope to engage the reader in the meaning-making processes more thoroughly than a more traditional method of representation might do. Thirdly, the collagist thesis as a whole is eventually meant to form an artwork that illustrates and opens up a very specific kind of space of representation. That is, a space, where the reader (and writer) cannot but recognise the relationality of her/his subjective mind at moments where s/he comes to "decide" how this world is (or should be) organised, and thought about. Thus, through this experimental method of writing I hope to "write encounters" in and for the field of IR, and hence provide alternative spaces to re-imagine the political-juridical discourse that continues to give meaning to "our" academic discipline, too.

Asiasanat:forced displacement, humanitarianism, subjectivity, relationality, Agamben, sovereignty, modernity, political-juridical, discourse