The Border and the Wound: Rethinking Rights in Times of Toxic Westphalianism

The particular intersection of the novel and the unchanged in today’s relations between borders, sovereignty, and migration—which can be called “toxic Westphalianism”—represents both a moral challenge and an opportunity to rethink rights with respect to violations of migrant rights in border spaces. In light of the history of Westphalian sovereignty, in which nonhuman considerations were excluded, theological elements were sublimated, and non-European territories were colonized, the examination of borders as systems of exclusion renders visible elements that can be brought together in challenging but promising ways. The situation demands Christian ethical attention, both as a moral concern and because of Christianity’s ambivalent historical relationship with sovereignty. Such attention facilitates rethinking rights in terms of encounters that ramify across wider social relationships. This account of rights does not occlude the universalism that typically accompanies assertions of rights so much as deploy it within specific acts of contestation or resistance.