Dehumanization in the Global Migration Crisis

What does it mean to fail to recognise people's humanity? This book analyses dehumanization in the global migration crisis to answer this complex question. Drawing from interviews with refugees and asylum seekers, Dehumanization in the Global Migration Crisis presents a philosophical, yet empirically grounded account of what dehumanization entails. While dehumanization is commonly used as a key concept in scholarship, popular media, and public debate to call attention to remediable harms faced by the forcibly displaced, its precise meaning is far from clear. A wide variety of practices is called dehumanizing, ranging from international policies that confine people under undignified circumstances within refugee camps to using (forced) migrants as bargaining chips in political negotiations. Yet, (how) do these practices exactly deny the humanity of the persons involved? What sense of humanity is at stake in the adversities that refugees, asylum seekers, and unwanted migrants face?

Through a detailed examination of victims' descriptions of their lived experiences with dehumanization, animalization, objectification, and brutalization, De Ruiter finds that dehumanisation is best understood as a distinct form of moral exclusion that is characterised by blindness to the significance of their human subjectivity. The book provides a critical discourse analysis of the usage of the term dehumanization in reporting on the global migration crisis, and sets out what should be done to counteract the dehumanization of refugees, asylum seekers, and unwanted migrants.

Adrienne de Ruiter, Assistant Professor in Humanism and Philosophy, University of Humanistic Studies

Adrienne de Ruiter is a political philosopher and ethicist. She studied Liberal Arts and Sciences and Philosophy at Utrecht University and completed master degrees in Middle East Studies at Leiden University, Conflict Studies and Human Rights at Utrecht University, and Contemporary Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her doctoral research in Political Science at the European University Institute focused on the dehumanization of refugees and asylum seekers. She taught global justice, human rights, and ethics of war at the University of Newcastle and is currently Assistant Professor in Humanism and Philosophy at the University of Humanistic Studies.