Beyond asylum claims : refugee protest, responsibility, and Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Abstract

Protests by refugees and asylum seekers have become of increasing interest to scholars of forced migration, citizenship and political theory in recent years for the critical potential inherent in such acts of protest to reconfigure conceptions of ‘the political’, ‘the citizen’, and refugees as voiceless, a-political victims. This article turns to refugee and asylum seeker protest for a different reason. Rather than focusing on the act of protest, this article turns to the substantive content of such protests. Exploring the claims and demands of refugees and asylum seekers in two long-running protest movements, in Austria and Germany, the article argues that the protestors’ demands encompass more than the claim to asylum, and can fruitfully be understood as Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 28 rights claims – claims to a social and international order for the realisation of human rights. The article argues that these claims are not easily addressed by existing approaches to responsibility for forced migration, and turns instead to Iris Marion Young’s conception of political responsibility for structural injustice as a potentially promising framework.