International, Politics, Philosophy (IPP)

“There are some things that money can’t buy.” Is citizenship among them? This talk will explore this question by highlighting the core legal and ethical puzzles associated with the surge in cash-for-passport programs. The spread of these new programs is one of the most significant developments in citizenship practice in the past few decades. It tests our deepest intuitions about the meaning and attributes of the relationship between the individual and the political community to which she belongs. Shachar will identify the main strategies employed by a growing number of states putting their visas and passports for sale, selectively opening their otherwise bolted gates of admission to the super rich, while making admission harder for most other categories of migrants. Moving from the positive to the normative, the discussion will draw attention to several lines of critique of these new programs, highlighting their distortive democratic and distributional impacts in a world in which governments and intermediaries are testing, blurring and eroding the state-market boundary regulating access to membership.

Ayelet Shachar

Director, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity &
Professor of Law and Political Science, University of Toronto

Discussant: Hélène Thiollet (CNRS-CERI, Sciences Po)

Lieu : Salle Goguel, 56, rue des Saints Pères (4 étage) – entrée 27, rue Saint Guillaume

Samuel Moyn (Harvard)

The Political Origins of Global Justice

This paper attempts to recover the intellectual origins of contemporary ‘global justice,’ especially its cosmopolitan variant that holds that egalitarian distributive justice should apply at the worldwide level. The central claim of the paper is that the founder of global justice, Charles Beitz, was first inspired by then critical of a forgotten 1970s movement known as the ‘New International Economic Order,” rather than extrapolating from any prior chapter of Western thought. Some conclusions are drawn both about the loss of a theory of agency in contemporary normative thought, and how this episode might help think further about the larger transition in global political economy from national welfarism to global market fundamentalism since World War II.

Sciences Po
199, Bd Saint Germain
Salle 502

17.00-19.00

Discussant: Tom Theuns (Sciences Po, ULB)

Gilad Ben-Nun (Global & European Studies Institute (GESI) – University of Leipzig)

This paper explains how the Non Refoulement Principle (Art. 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention), seen today as the bedrock of modern international legal refugee protection, was drafted. It provides a plausible explanation as to why UN member States agreed to limit their National Sovereignty in this regard, focusing on a network analysis of the drafter’s circles. The existence of a humanitarianly-minded coalition of State-delegates, during the Refugee Convention’s Travaux préparatoires, facilitated the creation of this vital international legal tool. The impact of the drafters’ work came to the fore some six decades after their fruitful joint efforts, during the current refugee crisis on the High Seas of the Mediterranean. A second point of reference in this lecture will concentrate on the methodological approaches to the interpretation of treaties- between historical approaches and textual readings – and explain why these methodological issues are crucial as they directly influence the lives of thousands of African migrants. Thanks to the historical reading by the European Court for Human Rights, who broke ranks with the American and Australian Supreme Court in their textual reading of Non Refoulement, European Navies exchanged their ‘push back’ operations in the Mediterranean Sea, and in favour of search and rescue operations – in contrast to both the Australian and American Coast Guards.

Discutant : Benjamin Boudou (Sciences Po-CERI)

Lieu : CERI, salle Jean Monnet, 17.00-19.00