Being in Transit: Space, Identities, and Belonging

As of 2017, 65.6 million individuals have been displaced from their homes, fleeing their homelands in search of refuge from the violence, oppression, and chaos of civil war. While there are clearly very strong humanitarian reasons to allow refugees to enter and make new homes and lives for themselves, some object because they prioritise the cultural identity of their country. Some have security issues about refugees being “terrorists;” some are concerned about the economic impact of refugees. These are but few of the many reasons why the refugee crisis has been a subject of debates, both political and philosophical. The mass movement of people across internal and external borders only proves that there are certain aspects of the human condition that cannot be confined within the strict idea of territories and nation-states, that the political and legal approach in organising the interaction and relationships between people is deficient. I argue that there is a need to recalibrate all existing ideologies in relation to the interactions and relationships between peoples coming from different parts of the world. In order to do this, I intend to examine the current legal norm and connect it to cosmopolitan ethics that are grounded on the idea of spatiality. Elucidating on the ideas presented by thinkers such as Seyla Benhabib, Anthony Kwame Appiah, Gloria Anzaldua, and Tetsuro Watsuji, I argue that to fully actualise cosmopolitan ethics we must investigate how space operates in the existence of man—a deterritorialised existence found in the borders.