LEAD · Learning from Experience and Agency in Displacement (LEAD): Building a Refugee-led Approach to Displacement Justice

Both in political and academic conversations, refugees are often spoken about but rarely spoken to. Refugees, of course, often discuss displacement justice with their own communities in response to their personal experiences and expertise, and with charities and agencies with whom they interact. But politicians, policymakers, and philosophers alike do not often have experience of displacement and fail to include those who do. Because of this, philosophers lack the resources to develop a fully comprehensive account of what justice for refugees might require. The LEAD project aims to critically develop the theoretical and methodological tools for a refugee-led approach to displacement justice. In recent years, literature in refugee studies and the ethics of migration has begun to reflect on refugee agency. This work highlights how displaced people respond to their difficult circumstances and emphasises the importance of choice and autonomy. This “agential turn”, which is present throughout social and political philosophy more widely, aims to centre the perspectives of marginalised groups. However, such work often stops short of including displaced people in the project of theory building itself. We can therefore ask: what would a refugee-led approach to theorising about displacement justice look like? The project will include people with experience of displacement not only in testing this methodology but also in critically building it throughout the research programme. The novelty of this project is three-fold. First, the LEAD project will integrate lessons from refugee and forced migration studies into the ethics and political philosophy of displacement. The project therefore attempts to build bridges between these two disparate literatures. Second, the project will radically expand our ideas of who “counts” as an interlocutor in philosophical discussions by substantively collaborating with refugees and refugee-led organisations in the project of theory building.