The Right to Exclude: A Critical Race Approach to Sovereignty, Borders, and International Law

Justin Desautels-Stein

feb 2023 · Oxford University Press

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In a world in which racism and xenophobia are endemic, what is the role of international law? To the extent international rules are thought to have any relevance at all, the typical approach characterizes international law as on the side of racial justice. Human rights instruments like the United Nations' International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are paradigmatic, offering the world international agreements in which governments are directed to avoid racist behavior and promote antiracist action. In The Right to Exclude, Justin Desautels-Stein goes against the grain and asks whether certain rules of international law might actually produce structures of racial hierarchy, rather than work to limit them. The intellectual fulcrum for this production, Desautels-Stein argues, lies in the ideological structures of sovereignty and property, the right to exclude that is shared in those twinned precincts, and the border regimes that result. Applying critical race theory to contemporary problems of migration, nationalism, multiculturalism, decolonization, and self-determination, Desautels-Stein expounds a theory of "postracial xenophobia", a structure of racial ideology that justifies and legitimates a pragmatic account of racialized foreignness, a racial xenos.

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Justin Desautels-Stein is Professor of Law at the University of Colorado and is the Founding Director of Colorado University's Center for Critical Thought. His work concentrates on the history of legal thought, with special emphases on the United States and International Relations. His most recent books include The Jurisprudence of Style: A Structuralist History of American Pragmatism and Liberal Legal Thought, and a co-edited volume with Christopher Tomlins, Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought. Professor Desautels-Stein holds graduate degrees from Harvard Law School, The Fletcher School at Tufts University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.