How should rights to political participation be defined and distributed - and how does the fact of migration complicate the issue? Normative theorists often take the state as their starting point, arguing that state actions (coercion or some related idea) generate a duty to grant political rights to those affected by that action (by being coerced, living in the state’s territory, or some other inclusion principle). While this state-centric strategy has been useful for explaining the moral necessity of democratic participation rights, it often fails to include migrants who do not yet stand in the right kind of relationship to a receiving state. Instead, this paper argues that we can gain purchase on the problem of distributing political rights by first thinking both above and below the level of the state – bringing in both the individual and the international system. Individuals’ interests are crucial to generating a right to political participation and, given the fact of increasing mobility and migration today, the context for distributing political rights unavoidably transcends state borders. By looking to both the individual and international levels of analysis, we can see why stateless and other politically vulnerable migrants ought to be candidates for rights of political participation somewhere, even before they would qualify on any given state-centered theory of political inclusion. 

States don’t fall out of the story entirely, of course. First, the specific content of political rights depends on institutional context: the states in which they might plausibly participate. Second, determining which states have what duties to which migrants depends on migrants’ relationship with both sending and receiving states. On this account, democratic states have greater duties to speedily offer opportunities for political participation to migrants with no opportunities for participation in their sending states: stateless persons and political refugees.

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Author bio 

Joseph Cloward is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford university with an interest in political theory and comparative politics.

 

In this paper, I point at the rhetorical constructedness of the invaders/refugees divide
around which much of the polarization of the political debate surrounding migrations is
articulated today. In order to do so, I consider a case study from ancient south Italy, Metapontum, and the debate surrounding the status of the Greek migrants who settled there: were they colonizers or refugees? The social surface of the extant Greek textual evidence betrays both a colonial mindset on the part on the part of Greek migrants towards the lands where they settled (an emptyscape up for grabbing), and a rhetoric legitimizing their claims to the land by representing them as refugees, exiles, and survivors of wars and famines, while also appealing to the religious predestination of their arrival. Archaeological evidence and spatial data similarly suggest that while Greek migrants radically transformed the space within which they settled by manipulating the territory with large-scale engineering enterprises, at the same time they were forced to occupy the less desirable, most insalubrious corners of the region, the malarial coastal plains, while indigenous peoples kept inhabiting the best portions of the land. The intrinsic ambiguity of the status of Greek migrants in Metapontum, I argue, invites us to overcome the polarization of the political debate surrounding migrants.

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Author bio

Maddalena Scarperi is a PhD candidate in Ancient History in the Department of Classical
Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She gained her BA and MA from the University of
Trento, Italy, and spent time as a visiting student at Barnard College, Columbia University and
the University of Tübingen. She is currently writing a dissertation where she looks at both textual sources and material evidence to explore the lives of Metapontine local dwellers from a post-colonial, multi-scalar, and gender-based perspective. More about her dissertation project here.