Migration and the critique of ‘state thought’: Abdelmalek Sayad as a political theorist
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211041906 |
| Author | Benjamin Boudou |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
Migration and the
critique of ‘state
thought’: Abdelmalek
Sayad as a political
theorist
Benjamin Boudou
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic
Diversity, Germany
Abstract
This article argues for reading the Algerian-French sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad
(1933–1998) as a political theorist of migration. Various contributions have recently
called to move away from the court-like assessment of claims by host states and
foreigners and to engage more frankly with empirical work more attentive to concrete
experiences and power relations. I contend that Sayad’s sociological work constitutes a
substantial empirical and normative resource for ethical and political theory of migra-
tion, pointing to the persistence of ‘state thought’ and presenting original normative
perspectives on emigration, inclusion in democracy, naturalization or postcolonial rela-
tionships. Such a reading of Sayad from a political theory perspective would then con-
stitute a prime example of the cross-fertilization of empirical and normative
approaches.
Keywords
Citizenship, critical sociology, ethics of migration, integration, naturalization,
normativity
Corresponding author:
Benjamin Boudou, Department of Ethics, Law and Politics Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and
Ethnic Diversity, Hermann-Foege-Weg 11, 37073 Goettingen, Germany.
Email: boudou@mmg.mpg.de
European Journal of Political Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/14748851211041906
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2023, Vol. 22(3) 399–424
The ethics of migration has constituted an independent field since the 1980s, asking
normative questions about the scope of justice and democracy, i.e. about the fair-
ness and legitimacy of the exclusion of newcomers from territory and citizenship
(Fine and Ypi, 2016; Sager, 2016a). But the limited scope of moral philosophy,
mainly written from the perspective of a host state assessing the claims of immi-
grants (Miller, 2016; Wellman, 2019), has recently led many to argue for renewing
this normative approach. The analytic method consisting in ‘articulat[ing] a few
broad ideals or principles to which [philosophers] can appeal in assessing the jus-
tice of particular admissions policies’ (Jaggar, 2020: 91) is criticized for being
epistemologically limited and politically biased (Fine, 2020; Finlayson, 2020).
Instead, one should ground the conflicts of justifications in non-ideal and non-
institutional disputes, and move from ‘right-and-principle-based arguments’
abstracted from concrete experiences, to an approach based on ‘particular experi-
ences of migrants with named social identities’ (Reed-Sandoval, 2016: 26; see also
Fine, 2019). Empirical approaches should be more widely included in migration
ethics to better take into consideration ‘historical injustices and relationships of
domination and oppression’ faced by migrants (Sager, 2020: 4). These facts are too
often brushed aside for the sake of generalization. Adding more context and diver-
sifying the claims and experiences considered for normative reasoning would
enhance ‘intellectual humility’ (Ackerly et al., 2021: 4) and offer a more realistic
picture of power relations in migration discourses by including the voices of those
affected by them. When philosophers are more engaged with social sciences and
social scientists more aware of the normative reach of their work, studies in migra-
tion ethics become more sensitive to marginal cases and voices and to the political
dimension of their epistemological background.
In political theory and in sociology in general, proposals have been made to
bridge this gap between the normative and the empirical. On the one hand, theo-
rists import empirical methods within normative reasoning (Baub€
ock, 2008;
Cabrera, 2010; Doty, 2009; Gerver, 2018; Longo, 2017; Tonkiss, 2013) and insist
on the relevance of their approach for more positivist inquiries (Barry, 2002;
Gerring and Yesnowitz, 2006; Shapiro, 2002), especially when it comes to a
highly politicized and morally loaded issue such as migration (Carens, 2018).
Recent methodological studies have described how to do ‘qualitative political
theory’ (Cabrera, 2009), political theory ‘in an ethnographic key’ (Longo and
Zacka, 2019) or ‘grounded normative theory’ (Ackerly et al., 2021) that would
be informed by empirical data and more inclusive of ‘what people think’ (de Shalit,
2020). On the other hand, social scientists, like Andrew Abbott (2018: 172), seri-
ously consider creating ‘for sociology a normative subdiscipline equivalent to polit-
ical theory in the discipline of political science’. He adds that ‘this specialty would
produce formal, rigorous analyses of the political and normative questions on
which sociology bears, resting its arguments on a set of canonical moral texts’
(Abbott, 2018: 172). Tariq Modood (2020: 32) also ‘encourage[s] engagement
with normative questions for the sake of the quality of science rather than draw
[ing] positivist boundaries around itself’. He adds that ‘[sociology] thus has an
400 European Journal of Political Theory 22(3)
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