Professor Dan Bulley

In the last decade, Venezuelans have faced a range of challenges such that by 2023, nearly 7.2 million have fled, the vast majority hosted within the region. One country particularly stands out: Colombia has accepted over 2.5 million. Colombia’s behaviour does not appear motivated by legal obligations or universal ethical principles; it is hard to make sense of in terms of international ethical and political theory. Rather, Colombian state and society make reference to mundane, localised concepts of friendship, fraternity and the reciprocity of a shared history. Such everyday ethics is generally ignored in existing debates. I argue that immigration ethics could helpfully begin from concrete, everyday ethical behaviour rather than idealisation and abstraction. Instead of initially asking what states and societies should do regarding immigration, we could ask what do they already do, why and how? This article therefore explores how Colombian politicians and civil society actors understood their welcoming actions through an awareness of entangled histories, reciprocity, friendship and solidarity: everyday, vernacular ways in which responsibility-taking is rationalised and practiced. My argument is not that Colombia’s actions are normatively right, or an enactment of immigration justice. Rather, these actions were ambivalent: the messy, pragmatic result of negotiating different, competing responsibilities, principles and emotions. The results were imperfect, heavily gendered, but also unprecedented. Those advocating greater societal responsibility for immigrants would perhaps do best to look beyond the global north, shun the universal and start from local activities founded in vernacular, everyday ethics.

Immigration ethics debates remain deeply Eurocentric in their assumptions and focus. Due to the dominance of a universalising, liberal perspective, the thought and experience of the global south continues to be excluded, except as ‘senders’ or ‘transiters’ of people. Not only does the debate thereby misrepresent the majority of the world, it also necessarily excludes that majority from having anything useful to say about ethical approaches to immigration. In this way, it offers a partial, parochial, local theory that mischaracterises itself as genuinely international and universal. By making common cause with decolonising approaches from Latin America, this article seeks to challenge this Eurocentrism by drawing on an example of African immigration ethics: postcolonial Tanzania’s ‘open door’ era. Here, the combination of the OAU’s expanded definition of a refugee, alongside the 'traditional' indigenous values of Julius Nyerere’s pan-Africanism and native socialism (ujamaa), made for a generous, if highly restricted welcome for hundreds of thousands of people. This reveals the need for immigration ethics to dispense with the search for 'universal' norms that are limiting and exclusionary. Instead, it should explore pluriversality: the importance of local, creative, relational approaches to mobile populations that are ongoing in the global south.

This special issue starts from some simple questions, questions that are periodically raised throughout the arts, humanities and social sciences, including in Critical Security Studies (CSS) and critical International Relations (IR). Yet they are important enough to be repeatedly re-posed at key moments. What is an author? What role does the ‘author’ figure perform in contemporary CSS? How do claims made alongside or against an author undergird or undercut the authority of research, arguments, claims and statements in the field? What does it do to a field that sought to challenge, disrupt and overturn authority claims when its own reliance on foundational authors and their gendered, racialised assumptions is called into question?

The article engages the question ethical responsibility in relation to Grenfell. We argue that ethical, legal and political responses are guided by a state-centric and individualist concept of ethico-legal liability. While a crucial consideration, this can downplay the everyday relations and social structures that produced the disaster. We therefore draw on the literature on global ethics to identify a politics of responsibility in relation to Grenfell. On this view, the social relations and hierarchies that pervade London, a global city, speak of the complex (and violent) ways in which responsibility is ‘shared’.

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. Maja Zehfuss, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and Dan Bulley and Bal Sokhi-Bulley offer sharp, occasionally exasperated, meditations on the political import of deconstruction and the limits of Derrida’s diagnoses in Specters of Marx but also identify possible paths forward for a global politics taking inspiration in Derrida’s work of the 1990s.