At the outset of his response to Ayelet Shachar, Jakob Huber observes that political theorists usually ask two kinds of questions when it comes to issues of refugees and asylum: who should be granted refugee status and how the burdens of refugee protection should be distributed among states. Shachar’s essay, by contrast, presents a third puzzle: does it matter from where refugees seek protection. Noting that Shachar herself is drawn to a negative conclusion, Huber makes the contrary case, building on Kant’s conception of cosmopolitan right (Weltbürgerrecht) in order to defend a right of safe passage. He begins by arguing that our answer to the shifting-border phenomenon is contingent on a deeper question concerning the relation between humanitarian claim-making and territorial presence. He then turns to a related interpretive puzzle. Against the widespread “natural law” reading, he puts forward an interpretation that characterizes cosmopolitan mobility as a form of political agency. This allows him to defend a right of safe passage as part and expressive of a broader shift aimed at acknowledging the choice and the voice of refugees. Huber concludes by suggesting that conceiving of mobility as a form of agency invites us to reframe migration as a whole and see it less as a problem than as a regular part of the human condition.

The Introduction discusses the rationale for a book about secular Muslim intellectuals in contemporary France. In particular, the Introduction will demonstrate that most scholarship on Islam in contemporary France has focused on debates around the Islamic headscarf or questions relating to Islamic fundamentalism, with little attention paid to those French Muslims working within the paradigms of islamité and laïcité. The Introduction also presents the interdisciplinary framing of the book, which will draw on current theoretical debates in Francophone postcolonial studies, the sociology and anthropology of Islam and secularisation, and philosophical, critical religious studies and critical theoretical approaches to themes such as alterity, belief, cultural pluralism, recognition and subjectivity. Furthermore, this chapter will discuss the methodology employed in this study, namely close textual and contextual analysis of the intellectuals’ published works and public interventions.

Leti Volpp begins her response to Ayelet Shachar’s lead essay by observing that the “shifting border,” while unsettling, is not entirely new. To support this assertion, she points to the examples of embassies, churches, and colonial territories as historical exceptions to the Westphalian model of coterminous territory and jurisdiction. Nonetheless, she commends Shachar for pushing thinking forward along multiple dimensions, providing a synthetic approach that will help direct future conversation. The rest of Volpp’s response is divided into two sections. In the first of these, she focuses on Shachar’s discussion of the “shifting border in action” and her analysis of state techniques that both “bleed” the border inward and stretch it out, in order to parse what might be distinctive about these politico-legal phenomena. Volpp then turns to Shachar’s two normative proposals. The first of these is to constrain the shifting border by ensuring that the human rights and constitutional provisions that govern executive power apply regardless of where border control activities are exercised. The second is to delink access to territory and asylum claims. Volpp is sympathetic to these suggestions, but remains skeptical at Shachar’s hope of eliciting greater state responsibility through affording extraterritorial protection. Nonetheless, she praises Shachar’s rich description and provocative normative framework, which provide a conceptual road map for navigating the unsettling legal topography of the shifting border.

This chapter is concerned with post-war British perceptions of Germany. It is argued that by continuing to locate Germanness as the alien Other to Britishness in the post-war period, Britons could hold on to a secure sense of British identity and unity forged in wartime. Many post-war British novels, films and comic strips depicted Germans as alien to all humanity. While the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! epitomises this tradition, the 1957 box-office hit The One That Got Away, starring the German actor Hardy Krüger and based on the true story of the prisoner of war Franz von Werra, challenged the stereotype. The fact that the dashing and good-looking Krüger exhibited character traits considered typical of British heroes, such as daring, wit and resourcefulness, led to uneasy and ambivalent responses in audiences and critics. Twelve years after the war, the humanness of Germans could still only be acknowledged in British popular culture as an anomaly.

This chapter examines the published works of Abdelwahab Meddeb. Of specific significance is Meddeb’s foregrounding of a language of Islamic secularism, which can be interpreted as an attempt to transform perceptions of Islam and thus to intervene in the symbolic power relations between the Republican state and France’s Muslim citizens. This chapter also poses questions about the consequences of deploying certain forms of discursive agency for secular Muslim intellectuals. What are the outcomes of their interventions in the public arena? What are the possible effets pervers (unintended consequences) of their interventions, if any? It is arguable that the work of Meddeb embodies most explicitly some of the tensions and paradoxes that can emerge when intellectuals speak for and on behalf of a ‘minority community’, or if we want to avoid that problematic term due to its suggestion of a hermetic and homogenous group, on behalf of a religious/cultural minority population.

In her response to Ayelet Shachar, Chimène I. Keitner argues that Shachar’s lead essay is as important for what it does not address as for what it does. Shachar identifies a number of strategies increasingly used by states to control immigration, but offering a critique of these strategies does not get us very far toward understanding, or attempting to alleviate, the structural and other factors that contribute to their adoption. As Keitner observes, “the shifting border is a symptom, not the disease.” Citing the proliferation of academic work on the subject, she asserts that the core problem is not a lack of conceptual tools, as Shachar thinks, but a lack of political will. In the rest of her response, Keitner traces the regulatory shift from location to identity that lies at the heart of Shachar’s account. She then canvasses some of the persistent obstacles to states’ acceptance of constraints on their ability to regulate entry by non-nationals. Finally, she suggests that governance models of migration regulation might ultimately be better suited than advocacy models to addressing contemporary challenges of global human protection. Keitner concludes by arguing that we do not lack visions of what solutions could look like; what we lack are effective strategies to combat the political mobilization of xenophobia, and programs to alleviate the deep and growing inequality within and between societies that drives destination states to implement restrictive measures to begin with.

In this reflective autobiographical piece, the UK-based Gibraltarian novelist M.G. Sanchez describes a verbal assault he suffered in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and then goes on to remember other occasions in the past when his British-Gibraltarian identity was similarly impugned. Drawing on his experiences in the UK, Gibraltar and mainland Europe, he suggests that the Brexit mindset existed years and even decades before Brexit itself, its spirit of divisiveness and rebellion fanned all along by the populism of the right-wing press and the nativist prejudices of a large number of Britons. By way of conclusion, Sanchez states that what most surprised him about the Brexit referendum was not that the UK voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, but that almost half of the population voted to remain. His own experiences, he says, had convinced him that the Leave campaign was going to win by an even bigger margin.