States as agents and as trustees
| Author | Avery Kolers |
| DOI | 10.1177/14748851211065133 |
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Symposium on Shachar’s The Shifting Border |
States as agents and as
trustees
Avery Kolers
Philosophy Department, University of Louisville, 2301 S. 3
rd
St,
Louisville, KY 40292
Abstract
In The Shifting Border, Ayelet Shachar observes that the ‘beast’of state migration policy
has broken out of its cage and shifted both outward –to intercept migrants before they
can ‘touch base’and thereby gain rights –and inward, to restrict and subvert the rights
of migrants and others in Exclusionary Zones within state territory. Shachar wants to
‘tame’the beast by obligating states and their agents to uphold basic rights wherever
they act. The current article first questions whether this ‘beast’is necessarily monstrous,
or whether it is not an admittedly excessive response to understandable challenges that
arise due to the passivity of territorial states in the face of external forces. The article
then suggests that the better response to this passivity is for states to embrace their
legitimating function of trusteeship for the people (or moral patients) of the world as
a whole.
Keywords
Shachar, Ayelet, Migration, States, Borders, Refugee Policy
Fundamentally, Ayelet Shachar does in The Shifting Border (2020) what she did previ-
ously in both Multicultural Jurisdictions (2009) and The Birthright Lottery (2001), and
what makes her voice both so distinctive and so incisive. The characteristic Ayelet
Shachar strategy is not to argue, as a moral philosopher might, to the conclusion that
some structure is unjust and must be revised (somehow or other), but rather from the
evident fact of injustice to explicate how the state’s capacity to deploy unjust oppressive
power is a legal construct, and hence can be revised in some specific way once we
Corresponding author:
Avery Kolers, Philosophy Department, University of Louisville, 2301 S. 3
rd
St, Louisville, KY 40292.
Email: akolers@louisville.edu
Symposium on Shachar’sThe Shifting Border
European Journal of Political Theory
2022, Vol. 21(3) 587–593
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14748851211065133
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