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David Owen

University of Southampton, Politics and International Relations, Faculty Member

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I did my BSc (1982-85) and PhD (1985-89) at Durham University before discovering the marked absence of jobs in Thatcherite Britain. I then taught in a variety of more or less precarious posts before settling at the University of Southampton in 1995 where I have remained ever since except for various visiting posts elsewhere (mainly Frankfurt).
Phone: +44 2380 594743
Address: Politics and International Relations
School of Social Sciences
University of Southampton
Highfield Campus
Southampton SO17 1BJ
Hampshire, U.K.

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Dimitri Courant

Harvard University

Keith Sutherland

University of Exeter

Hubertus Buchstein

Universität Greifswald

Adela Gąsiorowska

University of Warsaw

Trinity College Dublin

Anthoula Malkopoulou

Uppsala University

Barbara Goodwin

University of East Anglia

University of South Carolina

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Papers by David Owen

Sortition: Past and Present

by Keith Sutherland, Josine Blok, Irad Malkin, Daniela Cammack, Paul Cartledge, Ruth Chang, Barbara Goodwin, Nadia Urbinati, Helene Landemore, Laurence Morel, David Owen, Joanna Podgórska-Rykała, Ben Saunders, Yves Sintomer, Graham Smith, Paolo Spada, and Peter Stone

Journal of Sortition, 2025

Since ancient times sortition (random selection by lot) has been used both to distribute politica... more Since ancient times sortition (random selection by lot) has been used both to distribute political office and as a general prophylactic against factionalism and corruption in societies as diverse as classical-era Athens and the Most Serene Republic of Venice. Lotteries have also been employed for the allocation of scarce goods such as social housing and school places to eliminate bias and ensure just distribution, along with drawing lots in circumstances where unpopular tasks or tragic choices are involved (as some situations are beyond rational human decision-making). More recently, developments in public opinion polling using random sampling have led to the proliferation of citizens’ assemblies selected by lot. Some activists have even proposed such bodies as an alternative to elected representatives. The Journal of Sortition benefits from an editorial board with a wide range of expertise and perspectives in this area. In this introduction to the first issue, we have invited our editors (including James Fishkin, Graham Smith, Yves Sintomer, Helene Landemore, Josiah Ober, Paul Cartledge and others) to explain why they are interested in sortition, and to outline the benefits (and pitfalls) of the recent explosion of interest in the topic.

Refugees, legitimacy and development

Ethics & Global Politics

In this paper I focus on Gillian Brock's treatment of the case of refugees. After noting a potent... more In this paper I focus on Gillian Brock's treatment of the case of refugees. After noting a potential distinction between our otherwise closely related theoretical approaches in which we view the refugee regime as a legitimacy repair (Owen) or legitimacy correction (Brock) mechanism, I draw a contrast between our ways of addressing this regime and argue that the difference between my historical approach and Brock's presentist approach turns out to have implications for how we conceive what is due to refugees. Focusing on her advocacy of a developmental turn in refugee protection, I develop the concern that her articulation of this approach remains too closely tied to the humanitarian perspective of Betts and Collier in a way that underestimates the significance of political rights to refugee autonomy.

The circumstances of sortition

The sortition chamber proposal laid out by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright defends extending sor... more The sortition chamber proposal laid out by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright defends extending sortition into the legislative branch of government and specifies how such a body would work. We sympathize with the motivation for this enterprise: Sortition ought to be more widely institutionalized within contemporary democratic polities. Nevertheless, reflection on the practice of antecedents of the sortition chamber—in particular its historical use in Ancient Greece and more recent application in contemporary minipublics—raises questions about its feasibility and desirability. Our critical analysis considers primarily the democratic value of the proposal to replace one half of a bicameral elected system with a sortition chamber. We also offer general considerations for situating a sortition chamber within a democratic ecology more favorable to its operation.

Orientation and Enlightenment: An Essay on Critique and Genealogy

Freedom, equality and struggles of recognition: Tully, Ranciere and the agonistic reorientation

Nepal has witnessed significant progress in poverty reduction with poverty rates declining from 4... more Nepal has witnessed significant progress in poverty reduction with poverty rates declining from 41 percent in 1996 to 25 percent by 2011. Using panel data from the Nepal Living Standard Surveys, this paper examines the dynamics of chronic and transient poverty and their socioeconomic determinants between 1996 and 2011. While the incidence of chronic poverty was relatively small, findings suggest that almost onehalf of the population moved in and out of poverty at least once during the period. Despite an overrepresentation of the middle and lower caste Hindus, Newars, and indigenous groups among the poor, this analysis shows that it is human capital-not caste/ethnic discrimination or penalty-that may have impacted the transient and chronic poverty experience. Findings from this analysis shed important insights into the structure and determinants of poverty dynamics, forming a valid basis to rethink policy interventions.

Cultural Diversity and the Conversation of Justice

Political Theory, 1999

... David Boucher, John Divers, Mark Evans, Andrew Mason, Kelly Oliver, Aaron Ridley, Tracy Stron... more

Foucault, psychiatry and the spectre of dangerousness

The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 1991

Constituting the polity, constituting the demos: on the place of the all affected interests principle in democratic theory and in resolving the democratic boundary problem

Ethics & Global Politics, 2012

This essay considers the role of the ‘all affected interests’ principle in democratic theory, foc... more This essay considers the role of the ‘all affected interests’ principle in democratic theory, focusing on debates concerning its form, substance and relationship to the resolution of the democratic boundary problem. It begins by defending an ‘all actually affected’ formulation of the principle against Goodin's ‘incoherence argument’ critique of this formulation, before addressing issues concerning how to specify the choice set appropriate to the principle. Turning to the substance of the principle, the argument rejects Nozick's dismissal of its intuitive appeal and considers the two arguments advanced in favour of the principle as a criterion of democratic inclusion: the interlinked interests argument and the tracking power argument. It is shown that neither of these arguments can substantiate a view of the principle as a criterion of democratic inclusion, although both ground a constitutional understanding of the principle as specifying the scope of a duty of justification. It is then proposed that the principle can play an important role in a two-stage resolution of the democratic boundary problem in which it addresses the question of who is entitled to inclusion in the ‘pre-political’ demos that determines whether to constitute a polity. The second stage of this resolution requires an answer to the question of who should constitute the ‘political demos’, that is, the demos of a constituted polity and it is argued that a version of the “all subjected persons” principle can appropriately play this role.

Republicanism and the constitution of migrant statuses

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2014

This paper addresses republican conditions of legitimacy for the constitution of the civic status... more This paper addresses republican conditions of legitimacy for the constitution of the civic statuses of migrants. It identifies two legitimacy tests to which any civic status is subject, namely, that it does not make its bearers more vulnerable to the arbitrary exercise of private or public power (R1) and that the constitution of the person as bearer of this status is not itself the product of an arbitrary exercise of public power (R2). It is argued that R1 puts significant constraints on what can be legitimate migrant statuses and R2 links republicanism to cosmopolitanism in terms of a basic norm in respect of the production and allocation of civic statuses in that those who are subject to such a regime should have the effective power to 'shape and contest' the rules of this regime.

Open Borders and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Democratic Theory, 2020

This paper considers the implications of COVID for open borders. It notes that while COVID concer... more This paper considers the implications of COVID for open borders. It notes that while COVID concerns do not directly challenge arguments for open borders, the pandemic has revealed two more general phenomena that are salient for such arguments. The first concerns the increasing unmooring of legal borders from physical spaces and the interaction of surveillance and identification technologies with this process. The second addresses the issue of interdependency and the potentially negative implications of open borders if not underpinned by a global basic structure.

From Justification to Vindication: Lindahl and Asymmetrical Recognition

This commentary addresses Lindahl's discussion of asymmetrical recognition and his critique of le... more This commentary addresses Lindahl's discussion of asymmetrical recognition and his critique of legal universalism. I highlight some salient links between Lindahl's work and that of James Tully and Jacques Rancière, before drawing attention to two different ways in which he appeals to the concept 'unjustified' and proposing that his analysis needs to deploy a distinction between justification and vindication as modes of normativity.

Refugees and responsibilities of justice

This essay develops, within the terms of the recent New York Declaration, an account of the share... more This essay develops, within the terms of the recent New York Declaration, an account of the shared responsibility of states to refugees and of how the character of that responsibility effects the ways in which it can be fairly shared. However, it also moves beyond the question of the general obligations that states owe to refugees to consider ways in which refugee choices and refugee voice can be given appropriate standing with the global governance of refuge. It offers an argument for the normative significance of refugee’s reasons for choosing states of asylum and linked this to consideration of a refugee matching system and to refugee quota trading conceived as responsibility-trading, before turning to the issue of the inclusion of refugee voice in relation to the justification of the norms of refugee governance and in relation to the institutions and practices of refugee governance through which those norms are given practical expression.

Refugees, EU Citizenship and the Common European Asylum System A Normative Dilemma for EU Integration

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2019

This article argues that the practical difficulties and normative dilemmas at stake in the Europe... more This article argues that the practical difficulties and normative dilemmas at stake in the European refugee crisis as a crisis of EU integration extend beyond refugee policies into what we may call 'the citizenship regime' of the European Union in ways that are consequential for refugees, member states, and the European Union. It advances arguments for the relatively rapid access to citizenship of refugees, demonstrates that this norm has at least some acknowledgment in the policies of EU member states and considers what further differentiation of refugees from other classes of migrant might be a part of developing a just and legitimate Common European Asylum Regime. It argues that there are some reasons to favour a CEAS in which refugees receive EU citizenship prior to national citizenship in a member state. Keywords Refugees . European Union . Citizenship . Integration . Crisis That the Brefugee crisis^in Europe is also crisis of European integration is widely recognized. One reason that this matters is that, as Rainer Bauböck notes, 'the European Union offers the best conditions that can be assumed under real world circumstances for an effective regional refugee protection regime' (2017: 2) and the failure of EU to respond adequately to the challenge posed by mass refugee flows to Europe has troubling implications for the future prospects of both refugee protection envisaged by the 2016 New York Declaration and the project of the EU. It has been cogently argued that the sources of this EU failure lie in 'in institutional failures to Europeanize refugee policies' (Bauböck 2017: 2). This article argues that although adequate responses to the conjoined crises of refugee protection and EU integration do require that the Europeanisation of refugee policies through the reform and strengthening of the Common European Asylum System, the practical difficulties and normative dilemmas at stake in these conjoined crises extend beyond refugee policies into what we may call 'the citizenship regime' of the European Union in ways that are consequential for refugees, member states, and the European Union.

Foucault, Cavell and the Government of Self and Others. On Truth-telling, Friendship and an Ethics of Democracy

Iride, 2012

This essay addresses the ethical and political significance of Foucault’s late work on the ethics... more This essay addresses the ethical and political significance of Foucault’s late work on the ethics of care of the self and parrhesia. We argue, first, that understanding this significance requires seeing Foucault’s investigation of these classical practices against the backdrop of his identification of, and attempt to make perspicuous, the problem of biopolitical governance – specifically the paradox of relations of power and capacity. On this basis we go on, second, to consider how this turn may inform an ethics of democratic governance. In constructing this case, we demonstrate the relationship between the ethics of care of the self as a practice of freedom and the tradition of moral perfectionism identified by Stanley Cavell. This allows us to show how Cavell and Foucault mutually complement each other in the articulation of an approach to an ethics of democracy and we outline the fundamental features of such an approach.

Prospects for Citizenship

Prospects for Citizenship, 2011

Ambivalences of Hospitality

Ambivalences of Hospitality appeals to an ethics of hospitality for asylum-seekers and refugees h... more Ambivalences of Hospitality appeals to an ethics of hospitality for asylum-seekers and refugees have been a prominent feature of philosophical and political discourse since at least Jacques Derrida's 1996 speech on cosmopolitan rights for asylum-seekers, refugees, and immigrants to the International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg, later published as the essay "On Cosmopolitanism." My purpose in this essay is not to offer another plea for an ethics of hospitality, nor simply to reject it, but to explore the ambivalences, limits, and possibilities of such an ethics. In particular, I am concerned with making three claims. The first is that there is a significant disjuncture between an ethics of hospitality and a politics of hospitality expressed as cosmopolitan right. The second, which I make in the second and third sections of this paper, is that a cosmopolitan right of hospitality does not, and cannot, fully capture our obligations to refugees. The third claim is that while Derrida's reflections on hospitality remain salient to thinking through this topic, it is crucial, for understanding the contemporary salience of an ethics of hospitality, to address how such an ethics is modulated and transformed by the discourse of moral equality and human dignity. HOSPITALITY AS ETHOS AND HOSPITALITY AS RIGHT In On Cosmopolitanism, Derrida advances the following thought: "To cultivate an ethic of hospitality"-is such an expression not tautologous? Despite all the tensions or contradictions which distinguish it, and despite all the perversions

Differentiating Refugees Asylum Sanctuary and Refuge

Differentiating Refugees Asylum, Sanctuary and Refuge Debates concerning who is entitled to refug... more Differentiating Refugees Asylum, Sanctuary and Refuge Debates concerning who is entitled to refugee status and what is owed to persons with that status have proliferated in recent years. Since Andrew Shacknove's radical challenge to the 1951 Refugee Convention specification of the figure of the refugee, posed against the background of the regional agreements expressed in the Organization of African Unity's 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees in Latin America, a range of accounts have been offered that, variously, defend, amend and extend the grounds and scope of the 1951 specification

On Exemplarity and Public Philosophy

Only the art itself can discover its possibilities, and the discovery of a new possibility is the... more Only the art itself can discover its possibilities, and the discovery of a new possibility is the discovery of a new medium. A medium is something through which or by means of which something specific gets done or said in particular ways. It provides, one might say, particular ways to get through to someone, to make sense; in art, they are forms, like forms of speech. To discover ways of making sense is always a matter of the relation of an artist to his art, each discovering the other.

Freedom, Equality and Struggles of Recognition

Within the broad field of philosophical reflection on recognition, we can distinguish two orienta... more Within the broad field of philosophical reflection on recognition, we can distinguish two orientations to struggles of recognition: the teleological and the agonistic. The first, running from Rousseau through Hegel to Honneth, focuses on attempting to articulate philosophically the norms of recognition that are required to support and sustain the achievement of social freedom. Whether worked out through appeal to a philosophical anthropology or by means of an immanent historical reconstruction, the role of the philosopher is to diagnose forms of social pathology that arise from non-recognition and misrecognition, and to specify the forms of recognition requisite to a just and good society (thereby also distinguishing genuine claims to recognition from false or ideological claims). The second, running from Nietzsche through Foucault to Tully and Rancie(re, sees the role of philosophy not in terms of specifying principles of recognition but rather in terms of re-describing the social and political practices in which participants are situated in order to enable them to free themselves from the grip of these current norms of recognition in order to subject them to critical appraisal or contestation. The first of these orientations has received considerable attention in terms of the political philosophy of recognition, but my focus in this chapter will be on the second orientation. In terms of the thematic focus on this volume, we can draw the distinction between the two orientations thus: the teleological orientation acknowledges that historically situated practices of recognition may be ambivalent in the sense of enabling forms of domination as well as self-realization but takes this to be a contingent feature of these practices and aims to articulate norms of recognition that transcend this ambivalence, whereas the agonistic orientation starts from the view that the ambivalence of recognition extends from practices to ideals, that the idea of transcending this ambivalence (as opposed to transgressing a particular instantiations of it) is itself in a source of such ambivalence in that theoretically articulated ideals of recognition that claim to transcend this ambivalence simply reproduce it. In addressing the agonistic orientation to recognition through consideration of two contemporary exponents of agonistic political theory-James Tully and Jacques Ranciere-I will be concerned to show how they enact this stance of acknowledging the ambivalence of recognition. The most economical way to illustrate their commitment to agonism is to draw attention to their respective critical reflections on the project of political philosophy articulated in the teleological approach to recognition. In the case of Ranciere, the project of political philosophy is seen as antipolitical in the most total and fundamental sense: political philosophy is the name given for a philosophical project that tries to eliminate the political moment of dissensus, of disruption and disorder, so as to establish a stable (and sometimes timeless) social order. (Chambers, 2014: 136) In the case of Tully, his adoption of the title 'public philosophy' for his practice announces his rejection of 'political philosophy' conceived as the orientation to a just, definitive and final resolution of the struggle over recognition that eliminates the possibility of reason-based disagreement and dissensus (2008: 306). 1 Both thinkers are thus agonistic theorists, first, because they each reject any theory that seeks to render unthinkable the possibility of an agonistic relationship to the existing social order and, second, because they each stress the importance of the practice of such agonistic relationships. More particularly, each shares the worry that the teleological orientation of the Hegelian approach to recognition, in reconstructing norms of recognition from developing historical practice, legitimates forms of recognition that limit or undermine subject's autonomy. 2 In this chapter, I show how the agonistic approach to recognition starts from an acknowledgment of recognition's ambivalence as practice and as ideal. However, I also take these two theorists as my focus in order to explore the relationship between equality and freedom in the agonistic orientation to

FROM JUSTIFICATION TO VINDICATION: LINDAHL AND ASYMMETRICAL RECOGNITION

This commentary addresses Lindahl's discussion of asymmetrical recognition and his critique of le... more This commentary addresses Lindahl's discussion of asymmetrical recognition and his critique of legal universalism. I highlight some salient links between Lindahl's work and that of James Tully and Jacques Rancière, before drawing attention to two different ways in which he appeals to the concept 'unjustified' and proposing that his analysis needs to deploy a distinction between justification and vindication as modes of normativity.

Sortition: Past and Present

by Keith Sutherland, Josine Blok, Irad Malkin, Daniela Cammack, Paul Cartledge, Ruth Chang, Barbara Goodwin, Nadia Urbinati, Helene Landemore, Laurence Morel, David Owen, Joanna Podgórska-Rykała, Ben Saunders, Yves Sintomer, Graham Smith, Paolo Spada, and Peter Stone

Journal of Sortition, 2025

Since ancient times sortition (random selection by lot) has been used both to distribute politica... more Since ancient times sortition (random selection by lot) has been used both to distribute political office and as a general prophylactic against factionalism and corruption in societies as diverse as classical-era Athens and the Most Serene Republic of Venice. Lotteries have also been employed for the allocation of scarce goods such as social housing and school places to eliminate bias and ensure just distribution, along with drawing lots in circumstances where unpopular tasks or tragic choices are involved (as some situations are beyond rational human decision-making). More recently, developments in public opinion polling using random sampling have led to the proliferation of citizens’ assemblies selected by lot. Some activists have even proposed such bodies as an alternative to elected representatives. The Journal of Sortition benefits from an editorial board with a wide range of expertise and perspectives in this area. In this introduction to the first issue, we have invited our editors (including James Fishkin, Graham Smith, Yves Sintomer, Helene Landemore, Josiah Ober, Paul Cartledge and others) to explain why they are interested in sortition, and to outline the benefits (and pitfalls) of the recent explosion of interest in the topic.

Refugees, legitimacy and development

Ethics & Global Politics

In this paper I focus on Gillian Brock's treatment of the case of refugees. After noting a potent... more In this paper I focus on Gillian Brock's treatment of the case of refugees. After noting a potential distinction between our otherwise closely related theoretical approaches in which we view the refugee regime as a legitimacy repair (Owen) or legitimacy correction (Brock) mechanism, I draw a contrast between our ways of addressing this regime and argue that the difference between my historical approach and Brock's presentist approach turns out to have implications for how we conceive what is due to refugees. Focusing on her advocacy of a developmental turn in refugee protection, I develop the concern that her articulation of this approach remains too closely tied to the humanitarian perspective of Betts and Collier in a way that underestimates the significance of political rights to refugee autonomy.

The circumstances of sortition

The sortition chamber proposal laid out by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright defends extending sor... more The sortition chamber proposal laid out by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright defends extending sortition into the legislative branch of government and specifies how such a body would work. We sympathize with the motivation for this enterprise: Sortition ought to be more widely institutionalized within contemporary democratic polities. Nevertheless, reflection on the practice of antecedents of the sortition chamber—in particular its historical use in Ancient Greece and more recent application in contemporary minipublics—raises questions about its feasibility and desirability. Our critical analysis considers primarily the democratic value of the proposal to replace one half of a bicameral elected system with a sortition chamber. We also offer general considerations for situating a sortition chamber within a democratic ecology more favorable to its operation.

Orientation and Enlightenment: An Essay on Critique and Genealogy

Freedom, equality and struggles of recognition: Tully, Ranciere and the agonistic reorientation

Nepal has witnessed significant progress in poverty reduction with poverty rates declining from 4... more Nepal has witnessed significant progress in poverty reduction with poverty rates declining from 41 percent in 1996 to 25 percent by 2011. Using panel data from the Nepal Living Standard Surveys, this paper examines the dynamics of chronic and transient poverty and their socioeconomic determinants between 1996 and 2011. While the incidence of chronic poverty was relatively small, findings suggest that almost onehalf of the population moved in and out of poverty at least once during the period. Despite an overrepresentation of the middle and lower caste Hindus, Newars, and indigenous groups among the poor, this analysis shows that it is human capital-not caste/ethnic discrimination or penalty-that may have impacted the transient and chronic poverty experience. Findings from this analysis shed important insights into the structure and determinants of poverty dynamics, forming a valid basis to rethink policy interventions.

Cultural Diversity and the Conversation of Justice

Political Theory, 1999

... David Boucher, John Divers, Mark Evans, Andrew Mason, Kelly Oliver, Aaron Ridley, Tracy Stron... more

Foucault, psychiatry and the spectre of dangerousness

The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 1991

Constituting the polity, constituting the demos: on the place of the all affected interests principle in democratic theory and in resolving the democratic boundary problem

Ethics & Global Politics, 2012

This essay considers the role of the ‘all affected interests’ principle in democratic theory, foc... more This essay considers the role of the ‘all affected interests’ principle in democratic theory, focusing on debates concerning its form, substance and relationship to the resolution of the democratic boundary problem. It begins by defending an ‘all actually affected’ formulation of the principle against Goodin's ‘incoherence argument’ critique of this formulation, before addressing issues concerning how to specify the choice set appropriate to the principle. Turning to the substance of the principle, the argument rejects Nozick's dismissal of its intuitive appeal and considers the two arguments advanced in favour of the principle as a criterion of democratic inclusion: the interlinked interests argument and the tracking power argument. It is shown that neither of these arguments can substantiate a view of the principle as a criterion of democratic inclusion, although both ground a constitutional understanding of the principle as specifying the scope of a duty of justification. It is then proposed that the principle can play an important role in a two-stage resolution of the democratic boundary problem in which it addresses the question of who is entitled to inclusion in the ‘pre-political’ demos that determines whether to constitute a polity. The second stage of this resolution requires an answer to the question of who should constitute the ‘political demos’, that is, the demos of a constituted polity and it is argued that a version of the “all subjected persons” principle can appropriately play this role.

Republicanism and the constitution of migrant statuses

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2014

This paper addresses republican conditions of legitimacy for the constitution of the civic status... more This paper addresses republican conditions of legitimacy for the constitution of the civic statuses of migrants. It identifies two legitimacy tests to which any civic status is subject, namely, that it does not make its bearers more vulnerable to the arbitrary exercise of private or public power (R1) and that the constitution of the person as bearer of this status is not itself the product of an arbitrary exercise of public power (R2). It is argued that R1 puts significant constraints on what can be legitimate migrant statuses and R2 links republicanism to cosmopolitanism in terms of a basic norm in respect of the production and allocation of civic statuses in that those who are subject to such a regime should have the effective power to 'shape and contest' the rules of this regime.

Open Borders and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Democratic Theory, 2020

This paper considers the implications of COVID for open borders. It notes that while COVID concer... more This paper considers the implications of COVID for open borders. It notes that while COVID concerns do not directly challenge arguments for open borders, the pandemic has revealed two more general phenomena that are salient for such arguments. The first concerns the increasing unmooring of legal borders from physical spaces and the interaction of surveillance and identification technologies with this process. The second addresses the issue of interdependency and the potentially negative implications of open borders if not underpinned by a global basic structure.

From Justification to Vindication: Lindahl and Asymmetrical Recognition

This commentary addresses Lindahl's discussion of asymmetrical recognition and his critique of le... more This commentary addresses Lindahl's discussion of asymmetrical recognition and his critique of legal universalism. I highlight some salient links between Lindahl's work and that of James Tully and Jacques Rancière, before drawing attention to two different ways in which he appeals to the concept 'unjustified' and proposing that his analysis needs to deploy a distinction between justification and vindication as modes of normativity.

Refugees and responsibilities of justice

This essay develops, within the terms of the recent New York Declaration, an account of the share... more This essay develops, within the terms of the recent New York Declaration, an account of the shared responsibility of states to refugees and of how the character of that responsibility effects the ways in which it can be fairly shared. However, it also moves beyond the question of the general obligations that states owe to refugees to consider ways in which refugee choices and refugee voice can be given appropriate standing with the global governance of refuge. It offers an argument for the normative significance of refugee’s reasons for choosing states of asylum and linked this to consideration of a refugee matching system and to refugee quota trading conceived as responsibility-trading, before turning to the issue of the inclusion of refugee voice in relation to the justification of the norms of refugee governance and in relation to the institutions and practices of refugee governance through which those norms are given practical expression.

Refugees, EU Citizenship and the Common European Asylum System A Normative Dilemma for EU Integration

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2019

This article argues that the practical difficulties and normative dilemmas at stake in the Europe... more This article argues that the practical difficulties and normative dilemmas at stake in the European refugee crisis as a crisis of EU integration extend beyond refugee policies into what we may call 'the citizenship regime' of the European Union in ways that are consequential for refugees, member states, and the European Union. It advances arguments for the relatively rapid access to citizenship of refugees, demonstrates that this norm has at least some acknowledgment in the policies of EU member states and considers what further differentiation of refugees from other classes of migrant might be a part of developing a just and legitimate Common European Asylum Regime. It argues that there are some reasons to favour a CEAS in which refugees receive EU citizenship prior to national citizenship in a member state. Keywords Refugees . European Union . Citizenship . Integration . Crisis That the Brefugee crisis^in Europe is also crisis of European integration is widely recognized. One reason that this matters is that, as Rainer Bauböck notes, 'the European Union offers the best conditions that can be assumed under real world circumstances for an effective regional refugee protection regime' (2017: 2) and the failure of EU to respond adequately to the challenge posed by mass refugee flows to Europe has troubling implications for the future prospects of both refugee protection envisaged by the 2016 New York Declaration and the project of the EU. It has been cogently argued that the sources of this EU failure lie in 'in institutional failures to Europeanize refugee policies' (Bauböck 2017: 2). This article argues that although adequate responses to the conjoined crises of refugee protection and EU integration do require that the Europeanisation of refugee policies through the reform and strengthening of the Common European Asylum System, the practical difficulties and normative dilemmas at stake in these conjoined crises extend beyond refugee policies into what we may call 'the citizenship regime' of the European Union in ways that are consequential for refugees, member states, and the European Union.

Foucault, Cavell and the Government of Self and Others. On Truth-telling, Friendship and an Ethics of Democracy

Iride, 2012

This essay addresses the ethical and political significance of Foucault’s late work on the ethics... more This essay addresses the ethical and political significance of Foucault’s late work on the ethics of care of the self and parrhesia. We argue, first, that understanding this significance requires seeing Foucault’s investigation of these classical practices against the backdrop of his identification of, and attempt to make perspicuous, the problem of biopolitical governance – specifically the paradox of relations of power and capacity. On this basis we go on, second, to consider how this turn may inform an ethics of democratic governance. In constructing this case, we demonstrate the relationship between the ethics of care of the self as a practice of freedom and the tradition of moral perfectionism identified by Stanley Cavell. This allows us to show how Cavell and Foucault mutually complement each other in the articulation of an approach to an ethics of democracy and we outline the fundamental features of such an approach.

Prospects for Citizenship

Prospects for Citizenship, 2011

Ambivalences of Hospitality

Ambivalences of Hospitality appeals to an ethics of hospitality for asylum-seekers and refugees h... more Ambivalences of Hospitality appeals to an ethics of hospitality for asylum-seekers and refugees have been a prominent feature of philosophical and political discourse since at least Jacques Derrida's 1996 speech on cosmopolitan rights for asylum-seekers, refugees, and immigrants to the International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg, later published as the essay "On Cosmopolitanism." My purpose in this essay is not to offer another plea for an ethics of hospitality, nor simply to reject it, but to explore the ambivalences, limits, and possibilities of such an ethics. In particular, I am concerned with making three claims. The first is that there is a significant disjuncture between an ethics of hospitality and a politics of hospitality expressed as cosmopolitan right. The second, which I make in the second and third sections of this paper, is that a cosmopolitan right of hospitality does not, and cannot, fully capture our obligations to refugees. The third claim is that while Derrida's reflections on hospitality remain salient to thinking through this topic, it is crucial, for understanding the contemporary salience of an ethics of hospitality, to address how such an ethics is modulated and transformed by the discourse of moral equality and human dignity. HOSPITALITY AS ETHOS AND HOSPITALITY AS RIGHT In On Cosmopolitanism, Derrida advances the following thought: "To cultivate an ethic of hospitality"-is such an expression not tautologous? Despite all the tensions or contradictions which distinguish it, and despite all the perversions

Differentiating Refugees Asylum Sanctuary and Refuge

Differentiating Refugees Asylum, Sanctuary and Refuge Debates concerning who is entitled to refug... more Differentiating Refugees Asylum, Sanctuary and Refuge Debates concerning who is entitled to refugee status and what is owed to persons with that status have proliferated in recent years. Since Andrew Shacknove's radical challenge to the 1951 Refugee Convention specification of the figure of the refugee, posed against the background of the regional agreements expressed in the Organization of African Unity's 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees in Latin America, a range of accounts have been offered that, variously, defend, amend and extend the grounds and scope of the 1951 specification

On Exemplarity and Public Philosophy

Only the art itself can discover its possibilities, and the discovery of a new possibility is the... more Only the art itself can discover its possibilities, and the discovery of a new possibility is the discovery of a new medium. A medium is something through which or by means of which something specific gets done or said in particular ways. It provides, one might say, particular ways to get through to someone, to make sense; in art, they are forms, like forms of speech. To discover ways of making sense is always a matter of the relation of an artist to his art, each discovering the other.

Freedom, Equality and Struggles of Recognition

Within the broad field of philosophical reflection on recognition, we can distinguish two orienta... more Within the broad field of philosophical reflection on recognition, we can distinguish two orientations to struggles of recognition: the teleological and the agonistic. The first, running from Rousseau through Hegel to Honneth, focuses on attempting to articulate philosophically the norms of recognition that are required to support and sustain the achievement of social freedom. Whether worked out through appeal to a philosophical anthropology or by means of an immanent historical reconstruction, the role of the philosopher is to diagnose forms of social pathology that arise from non-recognition and misrecognition, and to specify the forms of recognition requisite to a just and good society (thereby also distinguishing genuine claims to recognition from false or ideological claims). The second, running from Nietzsche through Foucault to Tully and Rancie(re, sees the role of philosophy not in terms of specifying principles of recognition but rather in terms of re-describing the social and political practices in which participants are situated in order to enable them to free themselves from the grip of these current norms of recognition in order to subject them to critical appraisal or contestation. The first of these orientations has received considerable attention in terms of the political philosophy of recognition, but my focus in this chapter will be on the second orientation. In terms of the thematic focus on this volume, we can draw the distinction between the two orientations thus: the teleological orientation acknowledges that historically situated practices of recognition may be ambivalent in the sense of enabling forms of domination as well as self-realization but takes this to be a contingent feature of these practices and aims to articulate norms of recognition that transcend this ambivalence, whereas the agonistic orientation starts from the view that the ambivalence of recognition extends from practices to ideals, that the idea of transcending this ambivalence (as opposed to transgressing a particular instantiations of it) is itself in a source of such ambivalence in that theoretically articulated ideals of recognition that claim to transcend this ambivalence simply reproduce it. In addressing the agonistic orientation to recognition through consideration of two contemporary exponents of agonistic political theory-James Tully and Jacques Ranciere-I will be concerned to show how they enact this stance of acknowledging the ambivalence of recognition. The most economical way to illustrate their commitment to agonism is to draw attention to their respective critical reflections on the project of political philosophy articulated in the teleological approach to recognition. In the case of Ranciere, the project of political philosophy is seen as antipolitical in the most total and fundamental sense: political philosophy is the name given for a philosophical project that tries to eliminate the political moment of dissensus, of disruption and disorder, so as to establish a stable (and sometimes timeless) social order. (Chambers, 2014: 136) In the case of Tully, his adoption of the title 'public philosophy' for his practice announces his rejection of 'political philosophy' conceived as the orientation to a just, definitive and final resolution of the struggle over recognition that eliminates the possibility of reason-based disagreement and dissensus (2008: 306). 1 Both thinkers are thus agonistic theorists, first, because they each reject any theory that seeks to render unthinkable the possibility of an agonistic relationship to the existing social order and, second, because they each stress the importance of the practice of such agonistic relationships. More particularly, each shares the worry that the teleological orientation of the Hegelian approach to recognition, in reconstructing norms of recognition from developing historical practice, legitimates forms of recognition that limit or undermine subject's autonomy. 2 In this chapter, I show how the agonistic approach to recognition starts from an acknowledgment of recognition's ambivalence as practice and as ideal. However, I also take these two theorists as my focus in order to explore the relationship between equality and freedom in the agonistic orientation to

FROM JUSTIFICATION TO VINDICATION: LINDAHL AND ASYMMETRICAL RECOGNITION

This commentary addresses Lindahl's discussion of asymmetrical recognition and his critique of le... more This commentary addresses Lindahl's discussion of asymmetrical recognition and his critique of legal universalism. I highlight some salient links between Lindahl's work and that of James Tully and Jacques Rancière, before drawing attention to two different ways in which he appeals to the concept 'unjustified' and proposing that his analysis needs to deploy a distinction between justification and vindication as modes of normativity.

The Ethics and Politics of Migration

Prospects for Citizenship

by Chris Armstrong and David Owen

Draft Notes on Models for EU Asylum Systems

Critical remarks on EU New Pact and tentative proposal of alternative models

Legitimation Narratives and Populism

This paper explores a realist approach to populism drawing on Rodrik's trilemma and Mair's reflec... more

Legitimation Narratives and the Challenge of Populism in Western Europe

The diverse range of political phenomena that are situated under the label 'populism' may lead on... more The diverse range of political phenomena that are situated under the label 'populism' may lead one to the view that the concept has little analytical value. The wager of this article is that this judgment would be premature. Rather, following Rosanvallon (2008 & 2011), I approach populism as a specifically democratic pathology of political life: 'Populism is not just an ideology. It is a perverse inversion of the ideals and procedures of democracy.' (2008: 265). Representative democracy is, I'll argue, constitutively open to the populist claim that it fails to represent the popular will but that claim acquires traction only under circumstances in which populist political actors can leverage public resentments and discontents against established political parties and institutions into a politically appealing narrative rhetorically structured in terms of an opposition between the people and the elite. In this article, I aim to do two things. The first is to take up and critically develop some of the relatively sketchy remarks offered in Bernard Williams' late work on political realism. My interest here is not in continuing the methodological dispute around 'moralist' and 'realist' approaches to political theory but in trying to put the political realist approach to work on the basis that its claim to be a viable and valuable approach to political theory needs to be vindicated in use. The second, and more substantive aim, is to provide a contextualisation and analysis of the re-emergence of populism over the last two decades, to distinguish two major contemporary forms of populism and to consider how the discontents that they exhibit might be addressed. I begin, however, with some preliminary reflections on populism and on the relationship of populism to legitimating narratives. Populism, Representation and Legitimation In his late work on political realism, Bernard Williams introduced the notion of 'the basic legitimation demand' (BLD). The rationale for doing so has two dimensions. The first identifies the fundamental political question-because solving it (and continuing to solve it) is a condition of posing and solving other political questions-as the establishing of 'order,

Realism in Ethics and Politics: Bernard Williams, political theory and the critique of morality

Epistemic Dignity and Racial Justice

Talk at University of Alabama This essay draws together three topics in contemporary political p... more Talk at University of Alabama
This essay draws together three topics in contemporary political philosophy: dignity, epistemic justice and racial justice. It does so in order to demonstrate the central role of dignitary harms in the reproduction of racial injustice and, in doing so, to elucidate the idea of epistemic dignity, the specific relationship of epistemic dignitary harms to racial injustice, and the limits of rights [state politics] in addressing epistemic injustice.

On Fundamental Justice, Transnational Power and Justification: Commentary on Forst's Normativity and Power

Commentary on Rainer Forst's Normativity and Power

Politics, Freedom and Communism: On Sam Chambers' The Lessons of Ranciere

Short symposium piece on Sam Chambers' The Lessons of Ranciere

A Politics of Exemplarity

Short symposium piece on Alessandro Ferrera's The Democratic Horizon

On Exemplarity and Public Philosophy

Chapter for collection honouring Jim Tully

Citizenship and Human Rights

Chapter for OUP Handbook of Citizenship

Review of David Miller Strangers in our midst (Harvard 2106) for IMR

Freedom, Equality and Struggles of Recognition Tully, Ranciere and the Agonistic Re-Orientation

Within the broad field of philosophical reflection on recognition, we can distinguish two orienta... more Within the broad field of philosophical reflection on recognition, we can distinguish two orientations to struggles of recognition: the teleological and the agonistic. The first, running from Rousseau through Hegel to Honneth, focuses on attempting to articulate philosophically the norms of recognition that are required to support and sustain the achievement of social freedom. Whether worked out through appeal to a philosophical anthropology or by means of an immanent historical reconstruction, the role of the philosopher is to diagnose forms of social pathology that arise from non-recognition and misrecognition, and to specify the forms of recognition requisite to a just and good society (thereby also distinguishing genuine claims to recognition from false or ideological claims). The second, running from Nietzsche through Foucault to Tully and Rancière, sees the role of philosophy not in terms of specifying principles of recognition but rather in terms of re-describing the social and political practices in which participants are situated in order to enable them to free themselves from the grip of these current norms of recognition in order to subject them to critical appraisal or contestation. The first of these orientations has received considerable attention in terms of the political philosophy of recognition, but my focus in this chapter will be on the second orientation. In terms of the thematic focus on this volume, we can draw the distinction between the two orientations thus: the teleological orientation acknowledges that historically situated practices of recognition may be ambivalent in the sense of enabling forms of domination as well as self-realization but takes this to be a contingent feature of these practices and aims to articulate norms of recognition that transcend this ambivalence, whereas the agonistic orientation starts from the view that the ambivalence of recognition extends from practices to ideals, that the idea of transcending this ambivalence (as opposed to transgressing a particular instantiations of it) is itself in a source of such ambivalence in that theoretically articulated ideals of recognition that claim to transcend this ambivalence simply reproduce it. In addressing the agonistic orientation to recognition through consideration of two contemporary exponents of agonistic political theory -James Tully and Jacques Ranciere -I will be concerned to show how they enact this stance of acknowledging the ambivalence of recognition. The most economical way to illustrate their commitment to agonism is to draw attention to their respective critical reflections on the project of political philosophy articulated in the teleological approach to recognition. In the case of Ranciere, the project of political philosophy is seen as antipolitical in the most total and fundamental sense: political philosophy is the name given for a philosophical project that tries to eliminate the political moment of dissensus, of disruption and disorder, so as to establish a stable (and sometimes timeless) social order. (Chambers, 2014: 136) In the case of Tully, his adoption of the title 'public philosophy' for his practice announces his rejection of 'political philosophy' conceived as the orientation to a just, definitive and final resolution of the struggle over recognition that eliminates the possibility of reason-based disagreement and dissensus (2008: 306). 1 Both thinkers are thus agonistic theorists, first, because they each reject any theory that seeks to render unthinkable the possibility of an agonistic relationship to the existing social order and, second, because they each stress the importance of the practice of such agonistic relationships. More particularly, each shares the worry that 1 For a clear articulation of this rejection of finality orientations, see Owen & Tully (2007). the teleological orientation of the Hegelian approach to recognition, in reconstructing norms of recognition from developing historical practice, legitimates forms of recognition that limit or undermine subject's autonomy. 2 In this chapter, I show how the agonistic approach to recognition starts from an acknowledgment of recognition's ambivalence as practice and as ideal. However, I also take these two theorists as my focus in order to explore the relationship between equality and freedom in the agonistic orientation to struggles of recognition since it is a notable feature of Ranciere's work that it's motivated by a radical commitment to equality, while that of Tully's is fundamentally directed to freedom.

Refugees, Economic Migrants and Weak Cosmopolitanism: a response to David Miller's "Strangers in our Midst"

Forthcoming in CRISPP Symposium

Populus, Demos and Self-Rule: response to Baubock

A response to Rainer Baubock's essay on democratic citizenship in a forthcoming Critical Powers v... more

In loco civitatis On the Normative Grounds and Character of the Institution of Refugeehood and of Responsibilities for Refugees

Draft, please do not quote. Hannah Arendt was perhaps the first to outline the thought of the r... more Draft, please do not quote. Hannah Arendt was perhaps the first to outline the thought of the refugee as an exemplary figure for a political order organised as a plurality of territorially bounded sovereign states. This in the sense not only that the refugee is best conceived as a distinctively modern political artefact of the international society of states, but also that the exceptional status of refugee is one of the political media through which the normative structure of this order of governance is reproduced. Arendt's thought has been both supported and elaborated by recent historical studies of the institution of refugeehood, perhaps most notably by Nevzat Soguk and Emma Haddad, but its implications for normative reflection on this modern institution have not, I think, been widely taken up. My strategy is, then, to try to make plausible a view of the international refugee regime which is not constructed in terms of humanitarian obligations but, rather, in terms of political obligations that arise as conditions of the political legitimacy of the international society of states considered as a global regime of governance, and to draw out the normative implications of this view for the institution of refugeehood and distribution of responsibility for refugees. In other words, I want to make a case for the claim that that we can rationally reconstruct the normative grounds and character of the international refugee regime in terms that require reference only to basic or minimum conditions of legitimacy of states and of the international society of states. Refugeehood, as I have already noted, is an exceptional status in that a person claiming this status from a state which is not their own (and which acts as the relevant representative of the international society of states) is entitled to a fair determination of whether they satisfy the relevant criteria and, if so, the state to which they have made application has a duty to ensure that they are not exposed to the relevant threat (typically, but not necessarily, through a grant of asylum in that state). What makes this status exceptional is that the refugee is entitled to the protection of a state which is not their own in the context of a governmental norm that states are fundamentally responsible to, and for, their own citizens. As Matthew Gibney has noted: Above all else … the state is fundamentally an answer to the question of who is responsible to whom in the modern world: states are responsible to their own citizens. The survival of the state as an entity over time rests, moreover, on its ability to portray itself convincingly as an answer to such a question. As a consequence, the claims of outsiders are assessed by states, including liberal democratic ones, through a logic that deprecates the interests and needs of outsiders – a logic that is exceedingly sensitive to the potential damage to its own authority involved in forcing its citizens to incur costs for the sake of strangers. Modern states are highly resistant to the moral claims of outsiders. (2004: 211)

Democracy and It's Futures

by David Owen and Antje Wiener

University of Victoria, BC, 2019

Live-stream event at University of Victoria workshop 'Democracy and its Futures' On the 21st and... more Live-stream event at University of Victoria workshop 'Democracy and its Futures'

On the 21st and 22nd of March 2019 Antje Wiener participated in a scholars/society workshop at the University of Victoria, Canada, titled 'Democracy and its Futures'. One element of the workshop sessions was the live streamed public event "Public Debates in Turbulent Times - Academica and Media". On Panel 2, hosted by Rebeccah Nelems from the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria, Wiener dicussed the question "What do distinctive democratic traditions offer to the debate?". Also on the panel: Pablo Ouziel from the University of Victoria as well as David Owen from the University of Southampton.