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Embodied Possibilities, Sovereign Geographies, and Island Detention: Negotiating the ‘right to have rights’ on Guam, Lampedusa, and Christmas Island

Coddington, K.; Catania, R.T.; Loyd, J.; Mitchell-Eaton, E.; Mountz, A.

Embodied Possibilities, Sovereign Geographies, and Island Detention: Negotiating the ‘right to have rights’ on Guam, Lampedusa, and Christmas Island Thumbnail


Authors

K. Coddington

R.T. Catania

J. Loyd

E. Mitchell-Eaton

A. Mountz



Abstract

Sixty years after the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees attempted to negotiate the problematic political relationship between states and refugees highlighted by Hannah Arendt, shifting geopolitical, legal, and sovereign geographies have exacerbated the unevenness of refugees' ability to claim the right to seek asylum. In this article, we employ a framework of embodied epistemologies to extend Arendt's insights into the role of the stateless for sovereign logics. We argue that the 'right to have rights' as an embodied possibility is not only integral to the logics of sovereignty, but also to the creation of new political spaces. Our article draws on collaborative case studies in Guam/ Northern Marianas Islands, Lampedusa, and Christmas Island. We argue that while Arendt paid singular attention to the terrain of the sovereign, there exists a far more complex geography of the state that must be negotiated to claim rights. The 'right to have rights' is necessarily an embodied possibility and practice that creates new political spaces on the grounds of and across sovereign spaces and nation-state territories.

Citation

Coddington, K., Catania, R., Loyd, J., Mitchell-Eaton, E., & Mountz, A. (2012). Embodied Possibilities, Sovereign Geographies, and Island Detention: Negotiating the ‘right to have rights’ on Guam, Lampedusa, and Christmas Island. Shima (Sydney, N.S.W. Online), 6(2), 27-48

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Jan 1, 2012
Deposit Date May 27, 2015
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Shima : the international journal of research into island cultures.
Print ISSN 1834-6049
Publisher Macquarie University
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 6
Issue 2
Pages 27-48
Publisher URL http://www.shimajournal.org/issues/v6n2/f.%20Coddington%20et%20al.%20Shima%20v6%20n2%2027-48.pdf

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Copyright Statement
This work is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.





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