Refugees are generally held to possess a strong claim to protection while they are exposed to serious danger. Yet a difficult question arises once that danger has receded sufficiently to allow return: may host states then require repatriation, or do refugees acquire a moral right to remain? Mollie Gerver defends such a right through an argument from reciprocity after rejecting citizenship-based and plans-based accounts as inadequate. While I share much of her criticism, I argue that reciprocity alone cannot bear the requisite normative weight. Gerver’s responses to objections leave important questions about the reach of the argument unresolved, while further considerations cast doubt on both the explanatory reach of reciprocal exchange and the continuity it demands across time and place. I situate this critique within the distinctive political logic of refugee protection. Where no independent entitlement to continued residence has arisen, the question of whether refugees may remain becomes a matter of democratic choice rather than being settled by the original claim to protection.
This article examines how exile voices are epistemically displaced in global public discourse during moments of authoritarian political rupture. Drawing on discourse studies, social epistemology, and exile scholarship, the manuscript introduces and defines exilic epistemic displacement as a patterned social and discursive process through which interpretive authority is relocated away from individuals with lived experience of authoritarian repression (i.e. exiles) and towards external actors positioned at a privileged and safe distance from its consequences (i.e. outsiders). Rather than proposing exilic epistemic displacement as an entirely new type of epistemic injustice, the article identifies and theorizes it as a recurring pattern through which multiple forms of epistemic injustice are organized in exile-outsider encounters. Through situated narrative encounters and discourse-analytic examples, the analysis illustrates how exiles' emotional responses - such as relief, hope, or cautious optimism - are frequently corrected, moralized, or dismissed by outsiders who lack experiential proximity to repression yet assert interpretive and moral authority. These dynamics reproduce testimonial, hermeneutical, and expressive forms of epistemic injustice by rendering exile knowledge suspect while privileging abstraction, ideological fluency, and moral distance. Conceptualizing exile as an epistemic condition rather than a legal or identity category, the article argues that struggles over political interpretation are also struggles over credibility, recognition, and authority. The manuscript concludes by reflecting on the implications of exilic epistemic displacement for public discourse, exile studies, and social epistemology in transnational political debate.
This contribution explores an argument for the deepening of citizenship as political membership through the blurring of the boundary between the ‘us’ of the citizens and the ‘them’ of the non-citizens. The argument is based on a vision of ‘cosmopolitanism from within’ and on a reinterpretation of national citizenship as a status that simultaneously entails belonging in a national community and belonging in humanity at large. This double capacity of the national citizen entails a norm of mutual reflexive recognition between the citizen and the ‘other’ migrant, or else non-citizen. The article focuses on three logics through which this norm of reflexive recognition may apply in the context of the national demos and facilitate, on the part of the citizen, the embracing of the interests and positions of ‘others’ as the citizen’s own. The three logics are sharedness, analogy, and reflexivity. After weighing possible objections to this argument of deepening citizenship as political membership through the operation of these three logics, the article considers the implications of the argument for broadening citizenship as legal status. It hints in this respect to a possible ‘third model’ of migration regulation, where citizen-regardingness complements security- and rights-based strategies for migration governance.
Much of the original philosophical literature on immigration focused on the general question of whether borders should be open. More recently, more specific questions regarding immigration have come to the fore. This article considers an important attempt to show that consideration of one of these more specific questions, the ethical limits on the enforcement of immigration law, leads to an answer to the general question of whether borders should be open. On this indirect argument for open borders, even if we assume that states have the right to exclude, the ethical limits on the means used to enforce this right imply that borders should be open. In early 2026, with President Trump using novel tactics to enforce immigration law and anti-immigrant sentiment on the rise in many countries, it may seem that this indirect argument is correct. However, using the United States’ Chinese Exclusion Cases as an example, I argue that the ethical limits on the means used to enforce the right to exclude do not imply that borders should be open.
In this article I advance the inquiry of democratic citizenship in the digital age or ‘digital citizenship,’ for short, through an ideology critique of what I refer to as the ideology of digital empowerment. According to this ideology, which was prevalent from the early 1990s until the early 2010s, digital technologies would effectively contribute to democratic citizens’ political empowerment. Following the introduction, I explain the basic ideas I explain the basic ideas of such an ideology critique and distinguish between its empirical, genealogical, functional, and normative levels of analyses. Then, I identify Aristotelian, Machiavellian, Hobbesian, and Kantian understandings of this ideology to show its past existence across a broad range of conceptions of democratic citizenship. Following that, I empirically analyse these understandings, showing for each of them that the reality of digital citizenship did not hold up to the ideology’s promise. Subsequently, I provide a genealogical analysis of how the ideology came into being by describing the crisis of democratic citizenship at the end of the 20th century, and I complement this analysis by identifying the belief management mechanisms that supported the ideology’s dissemination. In the penultimate section, I pursue a functional analysis of the cultural, psychological, and social conditions that explain why citizens kept endorsing the ideology despite it being erroneous. Finally, I conclude by sketching, from today’s perspective, a normative analysis that addresses the technological oligarchs’ damage to democratic citizenship which this ideology facilitated.
