Keywords

Introduction

Transnational migration is not new. It has been a constant element of human existence. In recent years, the issue of migration, voluntary and nonvoluntary, has been a frequent subject of public discourse in many countries, especially with regard to nonvoluntary migrants as refugees and asylum seekers. They come from different places such as Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iran, fleeing from war, genocide, political and religious persecution, harassment, discrimination, and torture. The numbers of refugees worldwide is at the highest level since World War II, and, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), more than 51 million people are forcibly displaced refugees or asylum seekers or internally displaced persons (Zetter 2015). Approximately 95% of this forced displacement occurs in the global south, and over 50% of those refugees live in urban areas (Zetter 2015). The majority of people fleeing their homes are internally displaced persons. The 1951 Refugee Convention does not consider them refugees, however, because they are not outside their own countries or states. Even though internally displaced persons flee their homes on the same grounds as refugees, they stay in the territory of their home country and do not seek refugee status in another state (Zetter 2015; Kugelmann 2010).

The refugee situation has evolved since World War II and the Cold War era, and the legislation does not seem congruent with today’s refugee situation. A refugee can be defined in at least two different ways: There can be de jure refugees, reflecting UNHCR’s legal definition, and de facto refugees, reflecting the empirical situation worldwide (Kugelmann 2010). According to the 1951 Refugee Convention, a de jure refugee is someone who

owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country. (UNHCR 1990, p. 6)

The convention stipulates the legal criteria of refugee status using a definition of being ‘at risk’. Thus, less than half of the world’s forcibly displaced people are refugees in a de jure sense. De facto refugees are refugees—for instance, asylum seekers—whose applications are pending or have been denied but who cannot be expelled due to humanitarian reasons. Such refugees are not included in the formally recognized status of refugees according to the Refugee Convention (Zetter 2015; Kugelmann 2010). Their legal and personal situations depend on the laws of the countries they are in. In some countries, de facto refugees receive the same social and political rights as de jure refugees, but in other countries de facto refugees have no social or political rights. Although different categories of refugees have different legal statuses and different political and social rights, they all differ from voluntary migrants and nonmigrants. Refugees have all been deprived of their legal status as citizens—either they have lost it (de facto refugees) or they cannot enjoy its associated rights (de jure refugees)—and thereby their right to political belonging and agency (Krause 2008; Kugelmann 2010).

Migration policies for providing safe havens usually place refugees and asylum seekers in detention centers, often at the margins of society, situated far from the average citizens who enjoy the unrestricted right to reside in their own countries. This type of center is usually called a ‘camp’ because it can contain a certain amount of people in a specific area (Turner 2015). Refugees thus come to live in fenced camps or in territories set aside as refugee settlements. The camp can be defined in different ways and can take different forms, such as the government-run camps in Turkey that host approximately 217,000 Syrian refugees, the Grande-Synthe camp near Dunkirk in France that accommodates up to 2500 migrants, or an old, abandoned school in a small town in Sweden that offers shelter to approximately 100 people. But camps are temporary (in some cases, some might say ‘permanently temporary’) solutions to house people who are “out of place” (Bauman 2002, p. 113; Turner 2015, p. 2). Thus, refugees are in a state of being neither/nor rather than either/or. They do not belong to the host country, and they no longer belong to the country they left; although they inhabit the territory, they are “in it, but not of it” (Bauman 2002, p. 113).

Even though the question of refugees cannot be confined to Europe, the issue in Europe deserves some attention because the European Union has become a geopolitical hotspot with regard to refugees seeking safe haven. A so-called ‘immigration crisis’ erupted in Europe in the middle of 2000, culminating in 2015 with a massive increase in displaced persons seeking asylum, the largest since the end of World War II (Guild et al. 2015; Peters and Besley 2015). In the wake of the crisis, EU member states are taking new measures to develop restrictive and defensive immigration policies to keep the unsolicited and uninvited migrants out. The focus on national security has eclipsed the focus on solidarity for the forcibly displaced populations within the European Union. The increasing needs for state security and border control have led to stricter asylum policies, preventing refugees from being granted temporary or permanent residence and making it more difficult to obtain asylum in the European Union (Kraler et al. 2015). These measures have not been able to stop people from entering the EU (or countries outside the EU, for that matter). As Zetter (2015, p. 3) points out, “Given the global scale of irregular migration, there are likely to be millions more forcibly displaced people who have not traveled through legal challenges or registered their claim for protection with authorities”. These nonvoluntary migrants are not seen as refugees in the legal sense; they are de facto refugees.

The state of affairs of people being on the move is complex, and it influences different societies in different ways. The refugee situation also influences educational praxis and educational research and raises the question of how educators should respond to the refugee crisis (Devine 2015). The question concerns not only the growing numbers of refugee children in schools and of people involved in adult education or other sorts of educational measures—or even how the crisis affects ideas of national identity and notions of solidarity and social coherence; the question also concerns understanding and taking responsibility for the crisis the refugees are facing and what it means to be in but not of a place.

When it comes to the question of refugees, educational research has generally focused more on migrants (refugees included) and the process of admission, inclusion, and citizenship, rather than on the existential state of the refugee living in a condition of statelessness. Even if the processes of admission, inclusion, and citizenship are important issues, the focus seems too narrow because it only includes de jure refugees and misses those who remain outside the political community (Krause 2008; Parekh 2014). Since refugees have no legal or effective citizenship and thus cannot enjoy its associated rights, they live more or less outside humankind. They are Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998) incarnate, as their political and legal status is considered a temporary state. With the help of the works of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben on refugees and citizenship, I will show that even if questions of admission, inclusion, and citizenship are important when it comes to issues concerning refugees and education, the existential dimension must be illuminated as well (cf. Parekh 2014). Without ignoring the legislative dimension, our including the existential dimension is fundamental for keeping alive the educational questions about the past and the present, the local and the global, and inhabitants and migrants. Hence, in the analyses that follow, I will explore the complexity that surrounds the question of refugees in educational research.

Refugees and Educational Research

Educational research on refugees usually takes its point of departure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, as Brown (2013, pp. xiii–xiv) expresses it, says that “we all have a responsibility to protect, educate, and provide solace for the displaced (migrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, stateless, and undocumented) among us”.

Empirical studies on refugees and education usually focus on the relation between education and refugees in their homelands or in their host countries, describing how education actually works during conflicts. In such situations regular education tends to be disturbed or disrupted, and there are no guarantees that the home country or host country will want to start a systematic education for children who inhabit different detention centers or camps (see, e.g., Demirdjian 2012; Brown and Krasteva 2013). The studies usually describe actual educational conditions or situations and successful or unsuccessful educational efforts and either suggest or discuss policies and practices for the promotion of social justice and educational opportunities for refugees.

Educational research with a philosophical approach generally focuses more on what education can do for refugees in terms of enabling them to be included in and a part of society, rather than on life in the camp. That education is an important tool for social inclusion is widely recognized, but integrational measures take varying forms. A more liberal tradition of integration is based on a vision of individuals as autonomous beings and views social participation as a free and autonomous choice. A more communitarian approach proposes a collective solution and takes care not to disregard a person’s language, culture, religion, tradition, values, ethnicity, and so forth when it comes to social inclusion and social relations (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2006). The discussion of inclusion and education usually relates to questions of multiculturalism, the multicultural society, and multicultural education in liberal democracies. It does so for at least two reasons: (a) because states are more ethnically diverse due to migration and (b) because the increased legal and political status of minorities has led to greater acceptance of cultural diversity (Enslin and Hedge 2010, p. 387). The term multicultural society applies to a society that contains a variety of ethnic and national cultures and where there is a flow of cultural propositions and liberties of cultural choice. A multicultural democracy needs an increased recognition of diversity in order to promote a sense of unity and recognition of an overarching set of values, ideals, and goals to which all citizens are committed. Below, in relation to the question of refugees, I will discuss three traditions that all show how it is possible to invoke such ideals in education.

Multicultural Education, Citizenship Education, and Cosmopolitan Education

I am aware that this short description of the traditions—multicultural education, citizenship education, and cosmopolitan education—does not include or represent the diversity and the complexity of their content. I will describe and discuss the main characteristics of the chosen traditions in relation to the question of education and refugees in order to clarify how these traditions respond to the refugee crisis. I will begin by describing multicultural education.

According to Gutmann (2009), multicultural education is not just an educational task directed to students; it is also a way of schooling society toward the very guiding principle of multiculturalism—namely, civil equality. A multicultural education that builds on ideals of freedom, justice, equality, equity, and human dignity helps students learn about, and of, other cultures and to develop positive attitudes toward cultural diversity and tolerance (Levinson 2009; Enslin and Hedge 2010). With tolerance comes respect for other cultures and the different ways people lead their lives. Multicultural education also promotes social change, especially by eliminating racism, prejudice, and discrimination.

Citizenship education is much in line with the guiding goals of multicultural education; that is, it aims to foster a caring and enlightened population, with citizens who participate in discussions concerning society (Banks 2008). Citizenship education is about bridging the gap between the individual as an autonomous subject entitled to the rights inherent in the human condition and the citizen as one entitled to the civic and political rights recognized by the national constitution of any given liberal democracy. People are both individuals and citizens of the societies to which they belong; hence, human rights and citizenship are strongly connected or interdependent.

Multicultural education and citizenship education carry their own internal tensions. In her mapping of multicultural education, Levinson (2009) points to one such tension involved with the goal of preserving minority groups’ cultures, or ways of living, saying that the goal “may require the implementation of an exclusive curriculum that teaches the beliefs of the minority group culture instead of the beliefs of other groups” (p. 437). This example shows, according to Levinson, how one goal within multicultural education works in opposition to other goals, “such as increasing individual autonomy or promoting mutual respect” (p. 437). On the other hand, some cultures might need a more preserving goal in order not to lose their language and cultural identity. Gutmann (2009) sees a challenge to civic equality when “some multicultural conditions successfully challenge the democratic framework itself” and suggests “the need for a guiding principle other than civic equality” (p. 422). Other scholars do not use universal principles or goals as Gutmann does; they acknowledge that existing structures are not enough for an inclusive education since the universal goals of multicultural education belong to the dominant culture (Enslin and Hedge 2010).

Multicultural education and citizenship education are used as arguments against the dehumanization of refugees. Since these types of education are not possible without identity politics, they risk estranging people rather than dissolving categories such as ‘we and them’, ‘inside and outside’, and ‘the familiar and the strange’; “the preservation of bounded membership within ethnic and citizenship boundaries” comes with identity (Zembylas 2010, p. 34; see also Månsson and Langmann 2011). Critics might argue that this is the case with multiculturalism and democracy in general, since they are principles for the regulation of social life from above. These traditions offer little or no space for inclusion of refugees, at least not for de facto refugees because they live outside the legal realm and thus do not belong to the political community.

When it comes to arguments against the dehumanization of strangers and for the promotion of equality and social justice on a global scale, the idea of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan education comes to mind. Cosmopolitanism denotes a vision, or an idea, of the world that sees all humanity as belonging to the same community as citizens of the world, a community that transcends local loyalties and traditions. The idea is to connect an abstract universalism (shared values such as freedom, justice, and equality) with a specific moral commitment that serves to govern a well-ordered society, or city-state, where citizens, irrespective of religious, cultural, or political affiliation, belong to the same polity on equal grounds and with equal entitlements and obligations (for an overview, see Held and Brown 2010). There is, however, a tension between an abstract universalism and the specific commitment. As Peters (2010) points out, there is a certain risk that the abstract principle of cosmopolitanism “mask a Eurocentrism of values and take the place of analysis anchored in the geopolitical realities of the contemporary world” (p. 3). Hence, cosmopolitanism needs to be rethought against the background of the emerging spatial policies of late-capitalist globalization in order to develop a new form of cosmopolitanism that responds to “the mounting pluralism in societies around the globe” (Todd 2009, p. 25). The cosmopolitan idea has been appealed to in the field of education as a form of critical global awareness or as the basis of citizenship education (Strand 2010). The notion of cosmopolitanism is, in other words, a benign form of globalization. Whether in its classical or its newer strand, “educational cosmopolitanism is devoted, by and large, to the world of human beings and/or human emergencies” (Spector 2014, p. 425).

There is no doubt that classical and new aspects of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan education express a humanitarian and moral response that capture mankind as such and include all human beings in a global community as citizens of the world. They therefore have the potential to also embrace the refugee (both de jure and de facto). However, when it comes to the situation of the refugee de facto, at least according to the empirical situation worldwide, cosmopolitanism seems to overlook the fact that such refugees live more or less outside of humankind and do not share the world with the rest of humanity. They are in it but not of it, and they are not part of the juridical and political system that surrounds them. According to Biesta (2015), these refugees fall outside the rationale or world view of cosmopolitanism because the very existence of de facto refugees makes it evident “that the world is…not an ordered and encompassing (kosmos) political entity (polis) but is actually full of cracks” (Biesta 2015, p. 1381). These refugees represent ‘the cracks’ Biesta is talking about in that they are neither foreigners nor citizens. Asylum for people who effectively live in limbo—as neither/nor rather than either/or—“is a demand that in a fundamental sense cannot be met by a system because it constantly exposes the insufficiency of systems and will continue to do so” (Biesta 2015, p. 1382).

To conclude, multicultural education and citizenship education are political and juridical responses to migration rather than to the refugee crisis in that they look at admission, inclusion, and citizenship from a more national or local perspective. Even though the education system is one of the critical arenas in society through which the incorporation of refugees is organized, the focus on the processes of admission, inclusion, and citizenship obscures the existential conditions or circumstances refugees face living in a state of statelessness. With the devotion to humanity and human rights, cosmopolitan education seems to be a proper political and moral response to the refugee crisis because it goes beyond the processes of admission and takes a global perspective on inclusion and citizenship by welcoming all humankind to share the same world together, despite differences. In this sense, there is a cosmopolitan response toward the other as neither/nor (see, for example, Todd 2009). However, with its focus on citizenship, humanity, and human rights, cosmopolitan education does not encompass de facto refugees because their empirical reality does not really fit cosmopolitan education’s rationale.

When it comes to developing an understanding of refugees and statelessness—or the state of temporariness, which is a more appropriate description of the current global situation—the works of Arendt and Agamben on refugees and statelessness are important. Their views on refugees and human rights offer ways of thinking differently about the educational response to the refugee crisis, as they go beyond traditions that really cannot approach terms like otherness, human rights, and citizenship without reference to identity or commonality. Arendt and Agamben perceive the state of the refugee not only as a legal issue but also as an existential matter (Parekh 2014). Agamben uses Arendt’s perspective on statelessness—namely, that the common conception of human rights contains a paradox: that is, it supposes each person in his or her natural condition to be the source and bearer of inborn rights while presupposing that person to be a citizen with membership in a nation-state (Gündoğdu 2011; Parekh 2014). Both Arendt and Agamben demystify the “cosmopolitan aura of human rights” (Gündoğdu 2011, p. 2), which turn out not to be universal “but in fact the property of citizens” (Schuilenburg 2008, p. 88; see also Todd 2009).

Refugees, Statelessness, and the Making of the Nonhuman

According to Arendt, the key to understanding the refugee as a stateless individual is to grasp his or her political significance. In her description of the state of mind of being a Jewish refugee, Arendt does not only describe her own experience; she also highlights the plight of the stateless human being who has no legitimate legal or political status (Arendt 1943). In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt (1951/1994a) gives witness to the emergence of an increasing number of people (i.e., refugees) whose condition literally places them outside the law. According to Arendt, in addition to a juridical dimension that entails the loss of political community, the state of statelessness has an existential dimension that entails the loss of identity, expulsion from common humanity, and the loss of agency (Parekh 2014).

According to Arendt (1951/1994a), refugees experience two kinds of loss, one juridical and one political: the loss of their homes and thus of “a distinct place in the world” and the loss of governmental protection and thus of legal status in their home countries and “in all countries” (p. 173–174). When Arendt discusses the juridical state of the refugee as a stateless person, she is not referring to a number of rights protected by the law: the stateless person’s deprivation is much more profound in that they are deprived of the right to have rights—the fundamental right to belong to an organized community: “Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth” (Arendt 1951/1994a, p. 147).

Standing outside the law, being neither citizens nor foreigners, the stateless reveal a crisis of human rights rather than being protected by human rights: “If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implication of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declaration of such general rights provided” (Arendt 1951/1994a, p. 180). But according to Arendt (1951/1994a), that is not true. Instead of becoming a part of the nation they are admitted to, refugees’ “statelessness spread[s] like a contagious disease” (p. 165). Being neither a citizen nor a foreigner, the stateless person’s nonpolitical condition also affects the person’s identity and existential mode (Parekh 2014).

In an existential sense, statelessness deprives people not only of governmental protection “but also of all clearly established, officially recognized identity” (Arendt 1951/1994a, p. 167). This third kind of loss, which is existential rather than juridical or political, reduces stateless people to mere humans thrown back into a state of nature, so to speak. Being a mere human does not mean being human among peers: it means being less than human, deprived of human rights, suffering “rightlessness” and profound “loss of political status” (p. 175). Expelled from common humanity, a condition engendered by statelessness, refugees live politically, economically, and socially outside the common world, even though they are physically in it. According to the totalitarian ideology, they are superfluous:

The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth. The world of the dying, in which men are taught they are superfluous through a way of life in which punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in which exploitation is practiced without profit, and where work is performed without product, is a place where senselessness is daily produced anew. (Arendt 1951/1994b, p. 155)

The condition of being stateless also diminishes a person’s right to express an opinion, to speak, and act in a political manner as ordinary citizens may do (Arendt 1951/1994a, p. 176). Because of the severe limitations on the possibility to act politically, which amount to a deprivation of political agency, the refugee is no longer free.

Agamben (1998, 2008b) agrees with Arendt in his comment on the connection between the fates of the rights of man and the nation-state. Rather than serving to protect the human, the rights of man are connected to the rights of the citizen rather than the rights of the refugee. The refugee presence signals a crisis of the rights of man. The rights of man, or human rights, are thus not compatible with the (merely) human: the political and legal status of refugees is under consideration or questioned because refugees have fewer rights than citizens of the nation-state. A person is not a true human being, so to speak, until he or she becomes a citizen. This seems to be why Agamben (1998, 2008b) wants to separate “the concept of the refugee” from “the concept of the rights of man” (Agamben 1998, p. 78) instead of reconsidering human rights, as Arendt does.

Agamben (1998) goes back to the formulations of human rights in the eighteenth-century declarations. In his discussion on the juridical state of the refugee, in particular the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, he shows how these declarations highlight the fissure between political and natural life. When Agamben argues on questions regarding the relation between the nation-state, citizens, and refugees, he uses the ancient distinction between zoē (naked life) and bios (political life). This distinction separates the (merely) human life, which is called simple or natural life, from the qualified life of an individual or group belonging to a political community. Agamben uses the figure of Homo Sacer, from ancient Roman law, to describe the form of life called naked or simple life (Agamben 1998). Homo Sacer is comparable to the bandit, the outlaw who has been excommunicated and stripped of his right to belong to a political community. Once a person is excommunicated, he or she loses his or her juridical identity and is assigned the identity of an outlaw. Hence, the refugee does not live outside society, even though he or she is not considered to belong to the society. When a person is expelled from a political community, the existential conditions of his or her life change such that his or her life is less valuable than other people’s lives.

According to Agamben (1998), the distinction between zoē and bios rests on the biopolitical. Instead of distinguishing biopower from sovereign power, as Foucault did, Agamben sees sovereign power as biopolitical, as it is defined as power over life. When life becomes biopolitical, zoē becomes part of the qualified life—but only through a person’s excommunication. Biopolitics is not grounded in the community or the people: it rests on the power to declare the state of exception. Hence, biopolitics operates under the logic of the “ban” (p. 23), where the separation between zoē and bios is constituted by the simultaneous exclusion and inclusion of bare life. Zoē is trapped in a certain status known as “inclusive exclusion” (p. 12). The life of Homo Sacer is not only bare life but also a life trapped in a special relation to the law, a life lived in the ‘exception-zone’—the “inclusive exclusion (an exceptio) of zoē in the polis” (p. 12). With this in mind, Homo Sacer’s possibilities for agency seem remote, if not nonexistent (as for Arendt’s stateless person).

Homo Sacer is not only a figure in ancient Roman law; it is a recurrent figure in modern history. One example is Agamben’s reference to the racial laws and the legal status of Jews in Nazi Germany, where Jews were deprived of all dignity: “The Jew is a human being who has been deprived of all Würde, all dignity: he is merely human—and for that reason, non-human” (Agamben 2008a, p. 68). Another example is the Taliban fighters at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, who are neither prisoners nor convicted, and as such, subject to detention for indefinite periods of time (Agamben 2005). Stripped of political and legal rights, the Jew and the Taliban fighter share the fate of the refugee: existing in a state of exception, as less worthy than other human beings.

This political strategy that leaves the refugee in a state of exception produces a boundary that separates the outside from the inside. If there are no limits, or restrictions, to what it is possible to do to a person living outside the law, the refugee stands without legal protection. In order to understand the consequences the refugee faces, the refugee has to be regarded as “the central figure of our political history” (Agamben 2008b, p. 93). Further, in order to go beyond current refugee politics, the refugee must be considered for what he or she is: “nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed” (p. 94).

What the renewal of these categories means is not clear, however (see Schuilenburg 2008). What is clear is that Agamben is experimenting with going beyond biopolitics, or with escaping the gaze of sovereignty, by developing an alternative ontology based on relations not as we know them but “beyond every figure of relation” and beyond “the limit relation that is the sovereign Ban” (Agamben 1998, p. 33). It is in this respect that Agamben (2007) develops the notion of “whatever singularities” (p. 5), which manifests the rethinking of community. Whatever singularity is a manifestation of a community that allows a formation without the affirmation of identity; it is no more than a co-belonging of singularities. Whatever being is “neither particular nor universal; the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity” (p. 9). It is a community of singularities who share nothing more than their singularity.

Agamben sketches the contours of a common community—a community to come—but they remain vague and seem hard to operationalize. It is clear, however, that Agamben wants to challenge or even dissolve normative distinctions—such as nature and politics, human and nonhuman, and normality and exception—by which the world is constructed and understood and that he wants to go beyond the point where mere humans (such as refugees) are the main focus for political control and management:

Only in a world in which the spaces of states have been thus perforated and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or she is – only in such a world is the political survival of humankind today thinkable. (Agamben 2008b, p. 95)

Beyond Education for the Included

The thoughts of Agamben, developed with Arendt’s understanding of statelessness, can help us understand how different forms of domination manifest in discourse practices and are materialized in human relations, such as in education, for Agamben’s thoughts help us diagnose new forms of domination in contemporary politics that are either “hidden in benign humanitarian and liberal claims” (Zembylas 2010, p. 42) or protected by the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Since education is one of the most important tools for social inclusion and social participation, it is also a crucial issue for the integrational measures taken in order to meet the needs of refugees arriving in unknown places. The deliberative claims of education, social justice, and citizenship are governed by an idea or perhaps several different ideas that promote a certain social fabric in order to control plurality and a democratic way of life, and these ideas create possibilities for those who are supposed to be included in society. The transformation and structuring of social reality based on an “assumed sameness” of those who are supposed to be socialized is similar to the transformation of new members of society into governable subjects. In this process, citizenship becomes a marker of difference that specifies the juridical and political state of the person and risks strengthening rather than dissolving group identities. In this situation, it becomes obvious that education is a place for the included (including de jure refugees) rather than for de facto refugees, who are unprotected by the law.

Even though multicultural education, citizenship education, and cosmopolitan education have some differences, they also have something in common: their devotion to humanity, human rights, and citizenship. According to these traditions, a proper educational response to the refugee crisis is to be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which expresses that “we all have a responsibility to protect, educate, and provide solace for the displaced…among us” (Brown 2013, pp. xiii-xiv). Both multicultural education and citizenship education, with their focus on admission, inclusion, and citizenship, build their ideas of a just education within the existing political and juridical system and, it seems to me, focus more on migration and not particularly on refugees. A cosmopolitan educational perspective takes its response to the refugee crisis a step further by invoking a global perspective on citizenship that captures all mankind belonging to the same global community, without bringing any negative attention to local differences. The empirical situation of refugees seems to be given less attention, however, than globalization, human rights, and citizenship. The situation of de facto refugees does not really fit the picture of the cosmopolitan citizen of the world, which is shaped by a critical global awareness and based on citizenship and human rights.

With regard to citizenship and human rights, there is a need within educational research to focus on the parallel processes of the preservation and protection of human rights and citizenship and the making of the nonhuman. If a person is considered not truly human until he or she becomes a citizen, there is a need to either reconsider human rights, as Arendt does, or to detach the concept of the refugee from the concept of the rights of man, as Agamben suggests. Thus, Arendt’s and Agamben’s views on the “nonpolitical” and “nonjuridical” condition of refugees offer ways of thinking differently about the educational response to the refugee crisis, since they go beyond traditions that cannot come to terms with “whateverness” without reference to identity or commonality. A responsible educational response to the refugee crisis should start not from what we already know but from what we do not really know and travel toward a state that has not yet been. It would offer a view of education that is not built on the same power structures as society, where mere humans become the subject of political control and social security, and would go beyond education only for the included.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter, I have explored the question of how the current issue concerning refugees, or the refugee crisis, influences educational research (and thereby, presumably, educational praxis). As I said earlier, an educational response to the refugee crisis is not only about the number of refugees receiving education or how the crisis affects ideas of national identity and notions of solidarity. It must also involve understanding and taking responsibility for the problems refugees face and for their condition of being in but not of the place. The educational approaches I have addressed in this chapter—multicultural education, citizenship education, and cosmopolitan education—provide important contributions toward understanding how education can be more inclusive and more just. By including newcomers to a multicultural and democratic society, they focus on the juridical and political processes of what it means to be a refugee or what it means to become a citizen, but they seem to (more or less) forget the existential state of the refugee. The traditions described in this chapter do not include a notion of the state of the refugees but only notions of how the refugee can be one of us, a peer among peers in a pluralistic democracy. I have raised the question of the existential state of the refugee in order to give another perspective on the issue. Although we need not neglect the processes of admission, inclusion, and citizenship, we must try to understand the loss of human significance and agency the refugee faces as a nonvoluntary traveler who is denied equal access to society and the same rights as ordinary citizens if we are to share the world of the refugee and thus be able to approach the refugee in a common world rather than from a position outside the refugee’s world.

Sharing the world of the refugee is a question of proximity—rather than one of deliberation and achieving consensus—through which there is the possibility to meet the refugee on his or her own terms and in his or her own rights, as a human among humans. The potential for sharing an unknown person’s world is by no means certain, as living together in a world of difference has its obstacles. Nationality, religion, ideology, culture, and so forth have all been proven important elements in refocusing the concern for the refugee toward a concern for the well-being of society. There is, in the works of Arendt and Agamben, a call for a renewal of categories such that the refugee is not reduced to a lawless figure revealing a crisis of human rights. The refugee, or rather, acknowledgement of the state of the refugee, can instead be considered a vehicle for social and political change or transformation. Even though the borders have their own tragedies, they also have their own dynamics that might provide opportunities for something new to be born. Hence, educational concern for refugees must comprehend the existential question of what it means to be a refugee in order to sustain the conversation between the past and the present, the inside and the outside, the local and the global, and newcomers and residents.