Asylum after Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking (Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions) - Softcover

Asylum After Empire is a landmark book. It is a forensic account of how asylum became central to contemporary politics in the West. Mayblin blends insightful theoretical analysis with detailed historical enquiry to show how asylum is produced by, and is productive of, colonial modernity - it is the continuation of 19th and 20th century differential rights regimes by another name. Contemporary debates about refugees, Mayblin demonstrates, are really debates about human hierarchy. Asylum After Empire is not just a fine piece of scholarship, it matters. Read it. -- George Lawson, Associate Professor, London School of Economics Lucy Mayblin takes the reader on a seminal non-Eurocentric historical sociological journey that problematizes the current European asylum crisis, revealing how it has emerged not upon a discursive foundation of universal human rights but on one of human hierarchy; a discourse which remains today as the potent legacy of connected colonial histories which she traces back over a 200-year period. Such is the originality and seminal importance of this book that it has the potential to re-track Refugee Studies/Migration Studies and associated ventures connected to the disciplines of Sociology, Politics and International Relations onto fresh, non-Eurocentric terrain. -- John M. Hobson, Professor of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield This groundbreaking book is an illuminating application of post and de-colonial thought and the literature on race and racism to the policy of asylum. It challenges some of the fundamentals of refugee scholarship and politics and opens up new perspectives for academics and activists alike. -- Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration and Citizenship and Research Director at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society at the University of Oxford

This book critiques existing literature on the response of Western states to asylum seeking ‘others’ and outlines an alternative perspective to acknowledge the colonial histories that have shaped the contemporary response of states to movements of refugees.