Mayblin, L (2014) Colonialism, Decolonisation, and the Right to be Human: Britain and the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees. Journal of Historical Sociology. ISSN 0952-1909
Abstract
The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees is central to scholarship on refugee and asylum issues. It is the primary basis upon which asylum seekers make their claims to the majority of host states today and, as a key text of the human rights framework, has come to be associated with the very idea of a universalised rights-bearing human being. Yet British asylum policy today is characterized by efforts to limit access to the right to asylum. Many scholars believe this is because asylum seekers today are different, in character and number, to previous cohorts of applicants. This article goes back to the founding of the refugee rights regime and investigates the exclusions of colonized peoples from access to the right to asylum. Using Chimni's concept of the "myth of difference", the article demonstrates that asylum seekers have long existed outside of Europe, and that their exclusion from international rights has been both longstanding and intentional. This historical sociology suggests that the basis for critical work on the issue of asylum policy today must be one which takes colonial histories into account. © 2014 The Author.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2014 The Author. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Geography (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ESRC ES/I904247/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 24 Apr 2014 15:00 |
Last Modified: | 24 Apr 2014 15:00 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/johs.12053 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley-Blackwell |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/johs.12053 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:78672 |