Kiran Banerjee
University of Saskatchewan, Political Studies, Faculty Member
- Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs, Post-DocUniversity of Toronto, Political Science, Graduate Studentadd
- International Relations, Political Theory, Feminist Theory, Democratic Theory, Legitimacy and Authority, Multiculturalism, and 21 moreHuman Rights, Liberalism, Global Justice, History Of Political Thought (Political Science), Political Science, Political Philosophy, Philosophy, Peace and Conflict Studies, Law and Politics, Humanitarianism, Federalism, Feminism, Democratization, Republicanism, Cosmopolitanism, History of Philosophy, Democracy, Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Political theory (Philosophy), and Neo-republicanismedit
- I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Before joining... moreI am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan.
Before joining the University of Saskatchewan, I was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of International and Public Affairs and Research Scholar at the Global Policy Initiative, Columbia University.
I hold a doctorate from the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and received my Masters degree in the Social Sciences and BA degree in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2006.edit
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... 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 of John Rawls in particular. Controversy has centered on whether Rawls' broader philosophical approach is capable of addressing racial... 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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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... 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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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... 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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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... 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 and political life. A host of scholars, coming from a number of distinct traditions, have variously drawn our attention to the importance of... 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 membership and analyzes their significance as potential challenges to exclusionary conceptions of citizenship and the state. Taking seriously the... 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 account that attempts to overcome the exclusions revealed by statelessness by appealing to the mutability and contingency of community, as... 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.
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.
Research Interests:
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... 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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Abstract will be provided by author.
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... Banerjee, KM "Re-theorizing Human Rights through the Refugee: On Arendt's Critique of the Nation State" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association 67th Annual National... more
... Banerjee, KM "Re-theorizing Human Rights through the Refugee: On Arendt's Critique of the Nation State" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association 67th Annual National Conference, The Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL <Not ...
The sense of a moral duty to give refuge to a stranger in need resonates across human cultures and deep into our history. However, as PhD students Kiran Banerjee and Craig Damian Smith argue, the values of the nation state can clash with... more
The sense of a moral duty to give refuge to a stranger in need resonates across human cultures and deep into our history. However, as PhD students Kiran Banerjee and Craig Damian Smith argue, the values of the nation state can clash with our profound moral beliefs, creating big problems when we try to apply and honour international human rights. To get beyond this clash, they propose a radical re-thinking of the institutions that shape how nations respond to the voices of refugees.
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This paper analyzes the normative implications of differential regimes of citizenship in the context of the European Union. It begins by taking seriously the claims of scholars that transnational institutions like European Union... more
This paper analyzes the normative implications of differential regimes of citizenship in the context of the European Union. It begins by taking seriously the claims of scholars that transnational institutions like European Union citizenship promise to erode the tension between the rights of nationals and the rights of others. While a strong case can be made for the emergence of postnational forms of membership, the normative significance of these developments is less clear. To shed light on this dimension of contemporary developments, the paper examines transformations in citizenship within Germany to argue that present dynamics of inclusion are highly ambivalent. While recent shifts in the legal status of EU citizenship do herald the emergence of a robust form of transnational status, these transformations only highlight the growing gap between the rights of Europeans and nationals from outside the EU for whom limited access to national citizenship remains a concern. These divergent developments have in part been produced by an activist European Court of Justice, which has done much to expand the scope and significance of EU citizenship in remarkable ways. Yet at the same time, recent extensions of EU citizenship have done little to affect the status of third-country nationals, which from a normative perspective remain in need of further expansion. Because of this, I present a critique of the postnationalist perspective from the standpoint of Germany’s third-country nationals, suggesting that the status of this group is tantamount to that of second-class citizenship, with the growing rights and protections of EU citizens only underscoring this divergence. Moreover, I argue that recognizing these contradictory dynamics is normatively important for scholars to acknowledge because of the promissory role the EU frequently plays in the work of theorists of citizenship. In truth the contemporary politics of inclusion indicates a far less sanguine present.
As part of a broader turn to the emotions within the discipline, political theorists have increasingly come to recognize the central role of affect in social and political life. Indeed, a host of scholars coming from a number of distinct... more
As part of a broader turn to the emotions within the discipline, political theorists have increasingly come to recognize the central role of affect in social and political life. Indeed, 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, primarily enlightenment inspired liberal approaches toward politics, that either neglected or marginalized the emotions, dismissing the passions as inconsequential or potentially dangerous. This view of liberalism as a projected committed to distancing politics from the passions is often characterized as anchoring political life in deliberative public reason and a neutralist state. Consequently, according to such a portrayal of contemporary liberal theory, emotions are said to have no place in the public sphere, while proceduralist institutions abstract away from the affective attachments, now cast as private preference, of individuals qua citizens. In this paper we challenge this prevalent view, arguing 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 counter intuitive given that Rawls’ 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' 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.
This paper contributes to recent debates over the place of race in the work of John Rawls. Controversy has centered on whether Rawls’ broader philosophical approach is capable of addressing racial injustice, and if not, precisely why the... more
This paper contributes to recent debates over the place of race in the work of John Rawls. 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. The major figures of this debate are Anderson (2010), McCarthy (2004, 2009), Mills (1997, 2008, 2009, 2013), and Shelby (2004, 2013) who focus on the nature of Rawls’ emphasis on “ideal theory,” and whether that precludes his engagement with racial domination. Pace these scholars, we show that Rawls’ inability to account for, or address, racial injustice lies in Rawls’ 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. By restricting his political philosophy to this subject of justice, many meso-level institutions necessary for understanding the nature of American racial domination fall outside the scope of his analysis.