Leonardo Menezes // On Not Being at Home in the World: Refugees, State (Failure) and Home-Making

Abstract: Forcibly displaced persons are defined, most starkly, by the loss of home. All refugees have been compelled to leave their home and to construct another, whether provisionally or permanently. This fact suggests that the concept of home ought to occupy a central place in normative theorizing about migration and refuge. Yet existing discussions engage the notion of home in ways that are less comprehensive than one might expect. Contemporary normative debates on refugee protection—concerning who qualifies as a refugee, whether affluent states have obligations to admit refugees, under what conditions, and in what numbers—presume a largely state-centric conception of home as the primary locus of ethical life and the main conceptual bridge between justice and human flourishing. Political theorists have therefore focused on refining arguments for and against refugee admission into wealthy liberal-democratic nation-states, typically (though not always explicitly) assumed to be North American or Western European ones (Carens 2013; Fine and Ypi 2016; Miller 2016). Even theorists who defend open borders or contest the state’s right to restrict immigration (Abizadeh 2008; Gerver 2021; Kukathas 2012; 2021; Longo 2018) retain the state as the privileged interlocutor.

This paper develops an alternative approach by articulating a relational, African philosophical account of home(-making) in contexts of forced displacement. I proceed in two steps. First, I argue that the near-seamless inference from the claim that states ought to secure the well-being of their citizens to the assumption that all states are capable, in principle, of doing so reflects a failure to acknowledge the heterogeneity of post-colonial state forms. Diagnosing this normative assumption requires a philosophical, rather than merely empirical, account of state failure and fragility (Wiredu 1999; Menkiti 2017; Okeja 2022). Second, I sketch a non-statist conception of justice grounded in African communalist philosophies of relationality. On these views, persons are not independent moral atoms but nodes within an expansive web of interdependence; the self is constituted through relations rather than standing prior to them. I argue that this relational ontology reframes the duties that individuals and communities bear toward forcibly displaced people. It also yields a revised moral baseline for refugee protection—one that reconfigures the relevant rights, duties, values, and needs through the lens of relational home-making rather than state-centric membership.

Bio: Leonardo Barros da Silva Menezes is a Brazilian researcher with a solid international academic background in political philosophy/political theory. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Minho (Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society), in Portugal, where his research focuses on the intersection between the political philosophy of refuge and African political philosophy. His work investigates the moral, political, and epistemic dimensions of forced migration in the Global South, examining how the ideas and practices of actors in this context (refugees, migrants, citizens, and policymakers) can reshape the normative frameworks and conceptual repertoires used by political theorists when addressing issues of justice and (forced) migration. Before beginning his doctoral studies, Leonardo completed two master’s degrees: a Master’s in Political Theory at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), in France, supported by the Émile Boutmy scholarship; and a Master’s in Political Science at the University of São Paulo (USP), in Brazil, where he was a CAPES scholarship holder.