Asylum

People who flee their own country face the desperate dilemma where to find safety and freedom, and where to be at home again? This dilemma is aggravated by the refugeeís uncertainty as to which state is held to be responsible for his or her protection. In Asylum. A Philosophical Inquiry into the International Protection of Refugees Oudejans critically assesses the international response to the refugee dilemma. Although ëasylumí is an essential and supposedly self-evident concept in international law, there is no agreement within the international community on the meaning of the word ëasylum.í Oudejans argues that this lack of understanding with respect to the concept of asylum is at the root of current failures in the international refugee protection regime. The book answers two questions: What is asylum? And why would democratic states care to grant asylum? The book develops an alternative conceptual framework wherein to articulate the refugee problem, also taking into account the issue of statelessness and the problem of irregular immigration. Oudejans engages with the legal and political debate on those topics, but also addresses the fundamental and philosophical questions that refugees raise for democratic states. Therefore, the book not only refreshes the understanding of the refugee question, but also offers a new theory on collective identity and popular sovereignty. To get an empirical purchase on the refugee problem, the author draws on the work of established legal scholars. In the philosophical part of the book, authors such as Arendt, Heidegger, Agamben, Honig and Benhabib are being discussed.