CFP: The pre-history and afterlife of Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Jodie Boyd Announcement
Location
Australia
Subject Fields
Diplomacy and International Relations, Human Rights, Immigration & Migration History / Studies, Law and Legal History, Political History / Studies

Associate Professor Savitri Taylor (La Trobe Law School) and Professor Klaus Neumann (Swinburne Institute for Social Research) invite the submission of abstracts for papers for publication in a special issue of a journal shaped around the wider sphere of protection of non-citizens.

We aim to bring together contributions that move beyond the 1951 Convention to consider the history of a raft of international, state-based and other human rights instruments relating to non-citizen protection from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

To this end, we are asking participants to collaborate in the development of scholarly articles rather than, as is usual, to submit work that has been initiated independently of this collaboration.

Please submit abstracts of up to 500 words by 30 November 2016 to j.boyd@latrobe.edu.au

Background

The question of how governments ought to respond to the protection claims of non-citizens has been one of the most vexed issues of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From the 1920s, when hundreds of thousands of Armenians, Assyrians and anti-communist Russians were on the move in search of protection, the rightlessness entailed by de jure or de facto statelessness has been a major problem of human and state security. It was widely recognised as such during the interwar years, was highlighted by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and subsequently became a major focus of international law, political science and political philosophy.

Human rights advocates have, therefore, tried to convince nation-states not only to grant protection to particular groups of non-citizens, but to recognise, as a matter of principle, the right of individuals to seek protection and to receive it where necessary. At the same time governments have acknowledged the problems created by large numbers of people who do not have the protection of their “own” country, and attempted to design international legal instruments that respect the sovereign rights of nation-states while granting certain rights to these non-citizens.

These attempts have largely drawn on the 1951 Refugee Convention and have aimed to strengthen the role of the UNHCR. The right to asylum, as it was formulated in an early draft of the 1948 Universal Declaration, or even the right of asylum, which was to be enshrined in the aborted Convention on Territorial Asylum, have played an increasingly marginal role in discussions about how to respond to forced displacement.

Call for Abstracts: 30 November 2016

We aim to bring together contributions that move beyond the 1951 Convention to consider the history of a raft of international, state-based and other human rights instruments relating to non-citizen protection from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

Much of the extant scholarship focuses on particular aspects of surrogate protection and approaches its subject matter from a historian’s or legal scholar’s or political scientist’s perspective. We would like bring together these perspectives and expand the knowledge base about individual states’ contributions to international law relating to the protection of non-citizens, and the impact that such law in turn had on government policy and administrative practice.

By focusing on how policy and practice emerge in the interplay of competing interests (for example, foreign policy versus immigration), the outcomes of our collaboration will make a significant contribution to understandings of the development of provisions of surrogate protection to non-citizens, and provide valuable insights into the formulation of refugee and asylum seeker policies and administrative practices.

Please note: A special issue proposal will be made to a target journal after abstracts have been reviewed.

 

Contact Information

For any inquiries relating to this project or your proposed abstract, please contact Associate Professor Savitri Taylor – S.Taylor@latrobe.edu.au

Abstracts of up to 500 words may be submitted to Jodie Boyd (Research Assistant) - j.boyd@latrobe.edu.au

 

Contact Email
j.boyd@latrobe.edu.au