Twentieth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

It is a fact that in the field of refugees, human rights are not applicable by the nation-states when they suppose a mass phenomenon. This is because human rights remain guaranteed by the fictional union between nativity and nationality; this is, when the human is a citizen of a nation-state. Precisely, the refugee shows us the paradox: the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other mark, nevertheless, the radical crisis of the concept. Neither international organizations nor the nation-states are able to guarantee refugees’ human rights in their territories. This is the reason why we are studying the possibility of empowering European cities in this field. Cities must take charge of their local sovereignty and must question the principle of birth’s inscription and the trinity state-nation-territory on which the state-nation founds its sovereignty. In other words, cities must become spaces of extraterritoriality in the form of capitals of different states at the same time (Agamben). In this direction, we could re-consider the European model, not as an impossible Europe of nations, but as a reciprocal extraterritorial space for all its residents. In this line, European cities would establish an irreducible separation between the birth and the nationality deploying its juridical and political mechanisms in the guarantee of human rights to every resident. This way could be open by stopping considering the citizenship (the nexus nativity-nationality) as the principle of juridical recognition in favor of considering every human in constantly movement (exodus) over the world.