迫害有什么错

IF 1.1 3区 哲学 Q3 ETHICS
Rebecca Buxton
{"title":"迫害有什么错","authors":"Rebecca Buxton","doi":"10.1111/josp.12496","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>The fact that persecution is seriously wrong should be obvious. Many of the worst events in human history were acts of persecution. During the reign of the Roman Empire, Christians were beaten, murdered, and forced to fight with wild animals. Until recently, Black Americans were hunted down by mobs and lynched by their compatriots.<sup>1</sup> They were often publicly hanged, but some were also burned alive, thrown from tall buildings, and dismembered. The centuries long persecution of Jewish people culminated in the terroristic policies of Nazi Germany and the murders of over six million Jews between 1941 and 1945. These individuals were violently targeted for their perceived membership in a particular social, religious, or political group. We know already, then, that persecution is a terrible injustice. What is not obvious, however, is <i>why</i> exactly this is the case. This might immediately seem like a ridiculous proposition: persecution often involves discrimination, cruelty, extreme violence, and mass murder. Surely we know that persecution is wrong precisely because it involves acts of the worst possible kind? This paper argues that the entire picture of the wrongness of persecution cannot be understood by pointing to these individual elements alone. To put it more strongly, persecution is wrong not only when (or because) it includes these other wrongs. Instead, I argue that part of the wrongness of persecution is located in the condition that it creates for the persecuted, but also for society more generally. In doing so, I follow two similar interventions from David Sussman (2004) on torture and Lea Ypi (<span>2013</span>) on colonialism.<sup>2</sup> Both papers begin with the intuition that such acts are serious wrongs. Their aim is to offer a new way of understanding why this is so. Like Ypi's, my title does not include a question mark. I ask you to accept that there is <i>something</i> wrong with persecution. My aim is to offer a new way of understanding what that something is.</p><p>As such, I will not consider whether persecution is <i>ever</i> justified. There are (at least) two political philosophers who maintain that persecution is compatible with legitimate governance. For St. Augustine (395AD), heretical persecution is “righteous” when the Church inflicts it upon “the impious.” This is what he calls “persecution in the spirit of love.”<sup>3</sup> Such persecution was therefore viewed as a legitimate way of punishing those who have strayed from God (Christenson, <span>1968</span>).<sup>4</sup> For Hobbes, persecution is a necessary power of the Sovereign, best described as an extension of the rights of war. Hobbes distinguishes between punishment and persecution: punishment being for misdemeanors committed within the boundaries of the commonwealth and persecution being suffered by those outside it. This “right of nature to make war” extends to all individuals who refuse to be subjected under the sovereign, even citizens. Persecution, on this Hobbesian account, is a response to political rebellion aimed at protecting the Commonwealth. For Augustine and Hobbes, persecution creates unity within the body politic. I will not directly intervene in this debate, although my argument is essentially antithetical to the Augustinian and Hobbesian accounts.<sup>5</sup> In other words, I will assume for the sake of argument that we agree that persecution is wrong.</p><p>I will also not offer a concrete definition of persecution, nor what we ought to do about it. First, I am not attempting to give a definitive account of what persecution “really” is. Instead, I am engaging in questions that flirt with definition to think about the concept of persecution more fully. When discussing terrorism, Jeremy Waldron (<span>2004</span>, 7) makes a similar move, arguing that “the point of undertaking such enquiry is not to arrive at a definition; the point is to ask hard questions, posed initially as questions about the way we use words, to focus a discussion of what we think is interesting and distinctive about this phenomenon.”<sup>6</sup> Although in what follows I will draw on ordinary and legal understandings of the term “persecution,” I do not put forward my own set of necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as persecution here. Instead, the more interesting question (in my view) is <i>why</i> persecution holds a special place in our moral and political world. Why does persecution illicit a particular kind of “special outrage”? Second, I am also not attempting to claim anything about what individual victims of persecution are owed in the here and now. In the political theory of refuge, an ongoing debate concerns whether only victims of persecution are entitled to international protection in the form of asylum. I will discuss this further in the final paragraphs of Section 3. However, here I should preliminarily make the case that, although I draw on literature from the political theory of refuge, I do not think discussions of meanings and wrongs of persecution necessarily have implications here. This is because the argument as to whether persecution is necessary for a claim to asylum depends on (a) what exactly the institution of asylum is for and (b) whether persecution exclusively creates the predicament that asylum is meant to remedy. As I explain in the following section, the meaning of persecution in the refugee case may be different from a more general conception of persecution. It is this more general notion of persecution with which I am concerned, for now.</p><p>The paper proceeds as follows. First, I discuss how persecution has been defined in international law. Here I argue for a reliance on what I call an “ordinary language” view of persecution. Such a view (roughly) sees persecution as a severe form of harm targeted at a person or group for a discriminatory reason. Second, I turn to the wrongs of persecution, considering three possible explanations: (i) violence, (ii) discrimination, and (iii) a denial of one's status in a political community. I do not argue here that such explanations are mistaken, merely that they are incomplete. Most importantly, the third explanation—which holds that individuals who are persecuted are stripped of their membership in the state—opens the door to a more social and political understanding of the wrong of persecution. I then defend my fuller explanation for the wrongful nature of persecution: that it re-organizes and disrupts the social order. I therefore turn to the broader function of persecution and its role in shaping social and political interaction. Focusing on the social impact of persecution, I argue, shows that persecution is not merely violence, discrimination, or a denial of membership. Instead, a core feature of persecution can be located in the effect that it has on political and social life, broadly construed. By rupturing the relationships between co-members, persecution remakes the political and social world. In this way, persecution undermines the potential for minimal cooperation and directly violates pre-existing associative duties.</p><p>We already know that persecution is a terrible wrong. Thinking about it in this new way does not really give us additional reasons to avoid persecution. We have good enough reasons to do that already. What I want to suggest is that, while the explanations that I will outline—violence, discrimination, and denial of membership—can explain a great deal of what is wrong with persecution, they remain incomplete.<sup>7</sup> The aim here is to offer a richer account of why persecution is objectionable. I do claim, however, that noting this collective feature of persecution has distinctive normative implications for its rectification. The wrongs of persecution are not over when violence or discrimination ends. Resolving persecution demands an approach that recenters the political community, and persecuted peoples' place within it.</p><p>The verb “to persecute” originates from the Latin “persequi” which means “to follow, pursue, or hunt down.” It first appeared in the English language in around the 15th century, perhaps unsurprisingly given the ongoing campaigns in England against both heretics and witches. However, most debates concerning the meaning of persecution arise from developments in international law in the latter half of the twentieth century. Persecution is classified in the Nuremberg Principles (1946) as a crime against humanity, alongside murder, torture, enslavement, and forced disappearance.<sup>8</sup> The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (<span>1998</span>) also defines persecution as a crime against humanity.<sup>9</sup> The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees (<span>1951</span>) places the concept of persecution at the heart of entitlement to asylum. However, even with this centrality in international law, few legal agreements have offered a formal definition. Some interpret this ambiguity as a benefit, allowing for the development and adaptation over time (Grahl-Madsen, <span>1992</span>; Maiani, <span>2010</span>).<sup>10</sup></p><p>In the absence of a shared definition of persecution, individual states deviate in how they understand the concept. According to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (<span>1969</span>), terms in treaties must be interpreted in good faith and in line with their “ordinary meaning.”<sup>11</sup> Many courts have therefore relied on dictionary definitions of persecution, like the one given above. British courts historically understood persecution in this way: the House of Lords  previously defined persecution as “to pursue with malignancy or injurious action, especially to oppress for holding a heretical belief”<sup>12</sup> (High Court v Secretary of State, <span>1990</span>). Beginning with this focus on ordinary language, interpretations of the meaning of persecution have broadly coalesced around several features. First, persecution must be inflicted by a human persecutor, though it need not be inflicted by the state. De facto state authorities can commit persecution, for instance, a militia or paramilitary group. However, purely natural disasters do not count as persecution, though weaponized environmental harms or victims being refused assistance could. Second, persecution picks out individuals for harm based on some characteristic: the Refugee Convention states that persecution must be inflicted because of someone's race, religion, nationality, or membership of a particular social group. Third, persecution must be “cruel” or “serious.” Most jurisdictions therefore agree that persecution is distinct from “mere” discrimination or harassment. The case of Nagoulko v. INS (2003) from the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals discussed whether being fired from a job because of one's religious beliefs amounts to persecution.<sup>13</sup> In this case, the claimant found stable employment elsewhere within a reasonable period. The Court concluded that such harm was not sufficiently severe as to constitute persecution. An individual can thus be discriminated against without being persecuted per se. However, the sustained and systematic denial of employment such that people are prevented from securing a minimally decent livelihood can (and should) be interpreted as a form of persecution. Several jurisdictions accept such an approach. The Australian Migration Act (<span>1958</span>), which offers a general characterization of persecution, states that instances of serious harm might include a threat to the person's life or liberty, significant physical harassment, significant physical ill-treatment, significant economic hardship, denial of access to basic services, and the denial of capacity to earn a livelihood of any kind.<sup>14</sup> The UK Home Office (<span>2016</span>, 16) also argues that discrimination can amount to persecution if it results in “sufficiently serious consequences for the person concerned.”<sup>15</sup> Of course, the line between discrimination and persecution remains blurred and complicated; the distinction between “mere” discrimination and persecution is often politically loaded.<sup>16</sup> Importantly, the severity of some episodic harms—for instance, a single instance of torture—are often thought to be sufficient to constitute persecution. The UK Home Office also accepts this. In the case of Mustafa Doymus v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (<span>2000</span>) it was decided that “persistency is a usual but not a universal criterion of persecution.”<sup>17</sup></p><p>So, defining persecution by relying on its ordinary meaning generally results in an understanding of persecution as a severe harm (whether aggregated or episodic) targeted at a person for a particular (discriminatory) reason.</p><p>The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties also states that—as well as an ordinary meaning approach—words must be interpreted in line with the context and purpose of the treatise in question. This focus has led to another, broader conceptualization of persecution within refugee law: <i>the failure of state protection approach</i>. Defenders of this model argue that the point and purpose of the Refugee Convention are to provide protection to those whose states have failed them. For instance, Anker (<span>2017</span>, 184) argues that the “state's legitimacy [is] based on its ability and duty to protect the basic needs and rights of its citizens.”<sup>18</sup> This view has been cemented in James Hathaway's human rights approach, which combines the tradition of human rights law with international refugee law. On this view, asylum is a form of surrogate protection. Persecution, then, is defined as the “sustained or systemic denial of basic human rights demonstrative of a failure of state protection” (Hathaway and Foster, <span>2014</span>, 185).<sup>19</sup> In recent years, some jurisdictions have adopted the human rights approach. The European Parliament noted in a Qualification Directive (<span>2011</span>) that persecution is a harm “sufficiently serious by [its] nature or repetition as to constitute a <i>severe violation of human rights</i>.”<sup>20</sup> The UK House of Lords likewise endorsed this approach in Horvath v. Secretary of State for the Home Department in <span>2000</span>.<sup>21</sup></p><p>Of course, it is an open question whether defining persecution by focusing on the purpose of refugee protection is useful for thinking about persecution separately from a particular system of international law. Whether this points us in the right direction vis-à-vis persecution more generally remains to be seen.<sup>22</sup> For a more general political theory of persecution, we would perhaps have difficulty working solely within such a framework. In aiming to give an account of persecution <i>beyond</i> its relevance to the refugee protection regime, I will therefore lean on an ordinary language approach, though I will come back to the importance of state protection later on. Importantly, this does not mean that I do not endorse the human rights approach within the context of refugee protection. All it means is that when thinking about persecution here, I want to be able to separate the discussion from a particular international convention and its legal history.</p><p>Some tentative conclusions can be drawn from this discussion. First, persecution is not the same as simply harm or violence. I can be severely harmed by being put in prison, but this is not obviously persecution (though in some cases it can be). Persecution is also not just a form of discrimination; it is something more severe. It is also not only committed by governments. Instead, I can be persecuted by my family, my friends, my neighbors, or society more generally. In the case of refugee protection, it is important whether the state can protect the individual from persecution. For our purposes, though, we need only focus on the persecution itself.</p><p>One might be worried, at this juncture, that acts of “persecution” are not a unified category at all. They might instead be “acts that bear various resemblances to one another” (Sussman, <span>2005</span>, 11).<sup>23</sup> I think we can comfortably accept that these conditions and similarities are loose rather than rigid. That is, we need not give an account of what counts as persecution in every possible case. The aim here is to give a general sense of persecution and its various contours. Whether individual, horrible acts fall within this category will remain cause for debate. Importantly, these conditions fit with the kinds of events that we already accept as acts of persecution, such as those I outlined in the introduction. So, there are evidently some clear-cut cases of persecution, where others are more slippery.<sup>24</sup> My attention will now turn as to why persecution is wrong. Of course, this will demand continuing to feel around for the edges of this concept.</p><p>Before discussing my own account of why persecution is wrong, I want to briefly consider some other, more obvious, explanations. Perhaps the two clearest candidates for persecution's wrongness are <i>violence</i> and <i>discrimination</i>. First, on violence. Persecution is often extremely violent, meaning that involves a person employing “physical force directly against a living being for the purpose of harming him” (Runkle, <span>1976</span>, 371).<sup>25</sup> The persecuted are often forcibly expelled, tortured, sexually assaulted, or murdered. The fact that persecution is usually so violent explains much of our immediate moral repulsion from it. However, we should bear in mind that persecution need not always involve extreme violence against the individual. As we have already seen, non-violent harms can potentially aggregate to constitute persecution, such as a denial of employment or housing. Likewise, many acts of persecution involve injury to an individual's property but not harm to their bodies. This again results in a particular condition, one which makes it very difficult for the individual to live her life.<sup>26</sup> Instead of violence alone, then, the wrongness of persecution is located in the condition of the individual who suffers it. Importantly for our sake, the wrongness of persecution is not identical to the wrongness of its violent techniques. Instead, we are already drawn to complicate the picture by adding conditions to our notion of violence in the case of persecution.</p><p>It may be the case that accidental persecution is impossible. Various definitions of persecution highlight its cruel and malignant character. The International Penal Court for the former Yugoslavia proposed in 2002 that persecution is “the <i>manifest or flagrant denial</i>, for reasons of discrimination, of a fundamental right consecrated by customary or conventional international law” (Cavaillé, <span>2010</span>).<sup>31</sup> The intention of the persecutor therefore seems important. However, persecution need not always be malignant in character. For instance, cases of persecution that were committed “for the individual's own good” will still amount to persecution. In Pitcherskaia v. INS (<span>1997</span>) a lesbian woman who fled Russia was found to have a well-founded fear of persecution, even though the serious harms she suffered were intended to “cure” her of homosexuality.<sup>32</sup> The important point here, though, is that persecution is not totally random, it involves at least some element of intentionality, and it involves a targeting agent in a way that is not necessary for discrimination.</p><p>Now, it may not be immediately clear that all acts that we describe as persecution involve discrimination of this intentional kind, at least not on a typical understanding of it. As the discussion of refugee law showed, persecution is often thought to relate to a specific “nexus clause” of religion, nationality, race, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. But not all everyday uses of the word persecution match this framework. For instance, we might speak about an abusive husband “persecuting” his wife or a man “persecuting” his neighbors, though this may not involve discrimination of the sort we have in mind. Here the way in which we use to the word persecution instead appears to track the fact that the victims are <i>tormented</i>. So, what about cases where we use the word persecution in this more general way?</p><p>There are two things to say here. First, in such cases, there may still be discrimination of the kind we have been concerned with so far, just not quite so obviously. Domestic violence is gendered in a way that makes it a form of discrimination (and persecution) even if the smaller scale of a husband and wife makes this lens feel improper.<sup>33</sup> The primary harm of domestic violence does not appear to be discrimination when we zoom in on the relationship between two individuals, but taking gender-based violence in a broader sense can show that we are still right to treat these cases as forms of discrimination against women. Second, it is not obvious that discrimination needs to latch onto the fact that an individual is a woman, a person of color, or gay, for instance. Many forms of discrimination do, of course, take this shape. But we can also understand the concept of discrimination in a slightly broader way. The husband can be said to persecute his wife because he picks out <i>her</i> for ill-treatment. In this sense, the wife is pursued, hunted, and singled out. For persecution to be discriminatory in its techniques, then, we can merely maintain that it is not general. Of course, this is a different way of understanding discrimination and one that would require more justification. All that I will say here is that it is at least feasible to think about persecution <i>as</i> discriminatory simply on the grounds that it is not totally random.</p><p>The neighbor case may be slightly more complicated, particularly if we imagine someone who simply terrorizes his neighbors, no matter who they are. We might speak of this as a form of persecution, even while the neighbor is not being discriminatory. This would imply not all cases of persecution involve discrimination. One way to respond to this is simply to claim an individual who harms everyone equally regardless of any qualities is not obviously a persecutor, though they may be just as bad. Our use of word persecution here is perhaps not literal. And so, while the bad neighbor might make other people's lives a living hell, persecution may not be the correct way to describe what is going on here. Second, we could also simply accept that not every instance of the word persecution in our ordinary language will involve discrimination: the neighbor case is a rare exception to the rule.<sup>34</sup> As I said earlier, my aim here is not to offer an airtight account of persecution, but simply to show that persecution often has effects we do not currently recognize. This is all to clarify that <i>most</i> forms of persecution that I am talking about here will involve discrimination in a largely straightforward way, but these outlier cases do not disrupt the more general claim.</p><p>A third possible way of explaining the wrongful nature of persecution arises from the political theory of refuge. Focusing on this discussion stands in tension with my earlier claim that we should look beyond the specificities of the refugee protection regime. However, looking to the political theory of refuge as opposed to its development in international law can offer a slightly different perspective. Political theorists who defend the special place of persecution within the refugee protection regime argue that it amounts to the denial of a person's status as a member in their political community. Therefore, persecution is essentially a form of banishment. According to Price (<span>2009</span>, 243), refugees “not only face a threat to their bodily integrity or liberty; they are also <i>effectively expelled from their political communities</i>. They are not only victims but also exiles.”<sup>36</sup> The persecuted individual's country of origin has repudiated their membership (Owen, <span>2020</span>, 32).<sup>37</sup> Denial of membership—understood as the loss of effective citizenship—can be worrisome for at least two reasons (Buxton, <span>2021</span>).<sup>38</sup> First, it violates an individual's prior claim to be recognized and protected within a particular community. Those who suffer persecution are usually citizens with a strong entitlement to inclusion within a specific state or group—persecution not only undermines this membership, through signaling that such an individual does not deserve the protection of their rights, it actively rejects it. Black Americans, for instance, had claims to equal treatment as human beings but also equal treatment <i>as Americans</i>. Their treatment denied their claims to inclusion in a political group that was systematically built on their exploitation. Therefore, as Shklar (<span>1993</span>, 181) puts it, “Governments… frequently abuse residents under their jurisdiction by denying them membership in the polity and other rights, not as a matter of legal punishment but because they belong to a group that is thought to be inherently unfit for inclusion.”<sup>39</sup> Second, the denial of membership violates the condition that all individuals within our system of global governance require membership <i>somewhere</i>. Owen argues that it is a requirement of legitimacy of the international order to ensure that all individuals enjoy “practical standing” in at least one state. When an individual is persecuted by their own Government, that requirement to have membership somewhere is undermined.<sup>40</sup> The membership account does a good job of shifting our focus toward the <i>political</i> consequences of persecution. This political element complements the “combination of violence and discrimination” alternative to understanding persecution. This is because it can single out the individual's experience of persecution as opposed to a broader account of discrimination or suffering; persecution plays a role in defining an individual's status within a community.</p><p>There are two things to note here. First, as we have already discussed, political theorists of refuge are not attempting to give an all-encompassing account of the wrongs of persecution. Their target instead is to think about persecution's relationship to asylum. Therefore, although this account may point us in the right direction, it potentially leaves something left to be said. Second, and relatedly, the denial of membership view focuses on the wrongs committed against individuals. This, again, is determined by the current structure of the refugee protection regime. An individual's entitlement to asylum depends on whether she can show that <i>she specifically</i> has a well-founded fear of persecution. As I will show in the following section, this focus may leave us unable to give voice to some of the pernicious social and political consequences of persecution. In other words, there remains a need for a more collective view of the wrong of persecution.</p><p>Rather than pushing against the denial of membership account, the following section aims to develop it by shifting our focus away from the political effects of persecution on the individual and turning towards persecution and political life more generally.</p><p>The previous accounts of the wrong of persecution have hinted toward a particular <i>condition</i> in which the persecuted individual is placed. The denial of membership view captures something important about the nature of persecution—that it undermines the persecuted person's place within the political and social world. In this section, I argue that the three previous potential explanations lack a proper account of the <i>collective</i> political consequences of persecution. The particularity of persecution cannot be explained by reference to these previous three elements, nor their aggregation. Instead, persecution creates, first, a particular condition for the individual, such that their social structure is turned against them but, more radically, a change in the condition of society itself. Governments and non-state actors not only violate the rights of individuals when they persecute them. They also violate the very political and social conditions that they ought to maintain. This account therefore presupposes the existence of particular moral and political obligations on the part of persecutors beyond “mere” obligations not to violate rights.</p><p>We already know that persecution is used by governments, neighborhoods, and family groups to remake the collective membership in their image. Persecution necessarily <i>others</i> those who are persecuted. Persecution thus not only undermines the individual's ability to claim rights within a particular sphere, but it does so in a way that reshapes and mobilizes society for this purpose. My account therefore locates at least some of the wrongness of persecution in how it affects political or social life more broadly. This is not to undermine the extreme effects that persecution has on the individuals who suffer it, and part of my account will remain focused on the experience of the persecuted. Persecution is wrong for at least all the reasons given so far: it is often violent, (wrongfully) discriminatory, and undermines the individual's claim to membership. But persecution is also wrong because it violates and undermines some pre-existing conditions from which obligations arise.</p><p>It is generally accepted that states ought to secure minimal conditions for political life, such as the protection of human rights or pursuing the promotion of justice. Ypi argues that an ideal political association depends on reciprocity, a condition that is fundamentally violated in the case of colonialism. In the context of persecution, the active pursuit of a group through violent means likewise renders such minimal conditions untenable. First, let us maintain a focus on the individual who suffers persecution. Many first-hand accounts highlight what it feels like to be persecuted. For instance, Holocaust survivors often note the intense fear that they felt, not only of Nazi officials and party members, but of everyone around them. Leah Hammerstein, a Jewish woman who worked in a German hospital on false papers describes it as an experience of “total isolation, total loneliness… You are among people, and you are like on an island all alone. There is nobody you can do to ask for help. You can nobody ask [sic.] for advice. You have to make life-threatening decisions all by yourself in a very short time, and you never knew whether your decision would be beneficial or detrimental to your existence. It was like playing Russian roulette with your life” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, <span>1996</span>).<sup>41</sup> Raszka Galek Brunswick, who posed as a Polish Catholic on a German farm, said she chose that job because “I thought for my own sake, I would probably be safer to be away from everybody” (United States Holocaust Museum, <span>1989</span>).<sup>42</sup> Another woman who, with her sisters, gained false papers and pretended to be Christians living in Warsaw, recounted that her father told her: “No matter what happens, no matter who you meet, you cannot trust anybody” (Virginia Currents, <span>2020</span>).<sup>43</sup> Pointing out that people live in fear when they are persecuted, perhaps so obvious as to be benign. But this focus adds something to our political and moral vocabulary when thinking about persecution. It shows that persecution disrupts the basic conditions of pre-existing political society. Persecution changes how people interact with one another, even when individual acts of violence have yet to occur: the threat of potential violence is always present. This can extend further beyond the persecuted group. In <i>Alone in Berlin</i> Hans Fallada recounts the story of Otto and Elise Hampel who begin committing acts of civil disobedience against the Nazi regime. In the fictionalized version of their story, Fallada recounts how Otto and Elise could no longer trust anyone in their apartment block. When Otto was working on the factory floor, Fallada (<span>1947</span>) commented: “The air was thick with betrayal. No one could trust anyone else, and in that dismal atmosphere the men seemed to grow even duller, devolving into mechanical extensions of the machines they serviced.”<sup>44</sup> The point I am making here is not, importantly, about individualized access to “relationship goods.”<sup>45</sup> People who face persecution <i>do</i> suffer from a lack of interpersonal benefits, such that they are no longer able to trust those around them. Here the point I want to highlight, however, is that for victims of persecution, their entire social structure is often leveraged in way that violates pre-existing cooperative obligations and expectations.</p><p>This can potentially be seen more clearly in the case of family-based persecution. To take a contemporary example, many young people are expelled from their families after they come out as non-straight or gender non-conforming (Ritholtz, <span>2022</span>).<sup>46</sup> Such expulsion also often includes targeted harassment, hate campaigns, and ensuring that the individual does not have access to any friends or family members for support.<sup>47</sup> For LGBT people fleeing persecution, the family is often the first locus of harm (Buxton and Ritholtz, <span>2021</span>).<sup>48</sup> Along with all the other wrongs committed in such an expulsion (the wrongs that we mentioned in the previous section), such families have also violated their pre-existing obligation towards this family member <i>as a family member</i>; they have changed <i>who</i> is part of the family and violated their prior associative obligations to them. Persecution is not therefore solely violence, discrimination, or lack of membership. It also involves up-ending pre-existing moral, social, and political obligations and the structures that depend on them.</p><p>Ronald Christenson argues that one of the key logics of persecution is the solidification of an in-group. Persecution, by naming and singling out an “other,” reifies and unionizes those remaining within the community. He writes: “Hitler persecuted Jews on behalf of the Volk, as Stalin persecuted kulaks in the name of the Proletariat, and as others have persecuted for The People, The Nation, The Church, The Race” (<span>1968</span>, 420).<sup>49</sup> This central logic of persecution—the creation of cleavage between groups—can help us to locate the condition of the persecuted. Scholars of political violence have noted persecution's ability to reshape communities through violent displays and public executions. As Lee Ann Fujii (<span>2021</span>, 2) puts it in <i>Show Time</i>, “when actors put violence on display, they are bringing to life ideas about how the world should be and more specifically how it should be ordered—who should have power and who should be included and on what basis people should claim belonging.”<sup>50</sup> Amy Louise Wood (<span>2009</span>, 11) makes a similar claim when discussing lynching in the United States. As events often involving large groups, lynchings allowed for the wrongful formation of an in-group and maintained a political order that maintained the domination of whites. While taking part in a lynch-mob, “the feel and push of the crowd created the sense of belonging and commonality that sustained the violence.”<sup>51</sup> Such acts of violence therefore allowed people to reimagine the political order and their place within it.</p><p>One of the key logics of persecution, then, is the creation not only of an out group, but an <i>in group</i>. There are several ways in which persecution does this. First, persecution makes violence and hatred against a certain set of people appear sociologically legitimate, particularly when it is state-sanctioned: persecutory logics therefore become diffused throughout communities and individuals who had previously lived together peacefully can suddenly turn violent. During The Genocide of the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia, neighbors who had lived alongside one another for decades suddenly became violent adversaries. One man from Kistanje recounted how his neighbors—who he had known well—had suddenly turned against him and killed his children (Carmichael, <span>2006</span>, 251).<sup>52</sup> Similar events occurred in the 1994 Rwandan genocide where neighbors would turn on one another in response to a campaign of extreme hatred. Fujii (<span>2009</span>, 3) notes that killing one's neighbors is “more than just a physical act; it is an act of social violation. It destroys not just bodies, but bonds.”<sup>53</sup> Persecution thus does not only draw on pre-existing fear and hatred, but also further solidifies such hatred. It changes the boundaries of the family, community, or state.<sup>54</sup></p><p>A potentially more slippery way in which persecution disrupts and remakes the social network is through changing the persecuted person's identity of condition more generally. Persecution should therefore be recognized as a mechanism for social control, but also (and relatedly) as a way to change the understandings of a particular group within the social order. In <i>Ain't I A Woman</i> (<span>1981</span>, 32), bell hooks noted this important feature of Witch Trials: “The Salem Witchcraft Trials were an extreme expression of patriarchal society's persecution of women. They were a message to all women that unless they remained within passive, subordinate roles they would be punished, even put to death.”<sup>55</sup> Persecution therefore did not only harm the women who were specifically targeted but harmed all women as a <i>class</i>. Feminist theorists have also discussed this diffuse feature of subjugation in discussions of rape. Jean Hampton (<span>1995</span>, 132) argues that rape “is a moral injury to all women… rape confirms that women are for men: to be used, dominated, treated as objects.”<sup>56</sup> These forms of violence therefore change the position and character of the entire group, rather than only the individuals who suffer it.</p><p>The wrongness of persecution is therefore partly collective rather than individual. The accounts that we discussed earlier—violence, discrimination, and membership loss—focused on the individuals who suffer persecution. However, it is not only about individuals facing severe harms and wrongs, but the restructuring of society and the relations within it. It is perhaps helpful, here, to return to the relationship between discrimination and persecution, as this may be a feature that they share. That is, discrimination includes individualized harms, but it also harms the entire group. Discrimination against women does not only harm individual women, but it also harms <i>women as a group</i>. It is almost certainly the case that persecution is not <i>sui generis</i>. In putting forward the view that persecution disrupts and undermines our social world, I do not go so far as to claim that persecution exclusively creates such a condition. For instance, Hannah Arendt (<span>1951</span>) argues that totalitarianism is characterized by an extreme form of political loneliness.<sup>57</sup> Jeremy Waldron (<span>2004</span>) argues that terrorism might also have a similar effect.<sup>58</sup> Of course, neither terrorism nor totalitarianism has a necessarily targeted character. They are often by their nature indiscriminate. So, while they might have a similar effect on society, the distinctiveness of persecution can be at least partly maintained. The aim here is thus not to claim that persecution is totally unique, but simply to offer a richer political vocabulary when thinking about persecution.</p><p>I noted in the introduction that this more collective account of persecution has implications for potential redress. The main consequence is that we can now make sense of the fact that persecution is not undone when the violence or discrimination ends. Instead, if persecution results in the remaking of the community, then the resolution of persecution must follow the same path. In situations where persecution has taken place, then, compensatory redress for loss of property of individual harms will not be sufficient.<sup>59</sup> A more collective approach will be required. This helps to explain why overcoming a history of persecution is so difficult. Many states still struggle with legacies of persecution and the long shadow that they leave behind them. Even for acts of persecution in the distance past, we may still require a restorative approach that seeks to reckon with the impact such a history still has on modern society. Apologies for that history are a recent potential step forward. But attempting to think about these legacies for our current state of affairs would demand a more radical project. Many accounts of reparative justice already focus on rebuilding community. The view of persecution that I have put forward merely offers another reason in favor of them.</p><p>Many questions remain about the nature and effects of persecution. This paper has attempted to add one more explanation of the wrongness of persecution to the mix: that persecution undermines the minimal conditions of political life and changes the social and political world. Such an explanation does not only locate the wrongness of persecution in the harm that it does to the individual—though this is surely an extremely important element—but also points to the social and political order more broadly. This allows us to understand persecution better in at least two ways. First, it recenters persecution's place within <i>politics</i> as opposed to a purely ethical account. That is, we need not rely only on moral theory to explain why persecution is bad; we can give an answer from the perspective internal to politics as well. Second, this view allows us to see the relationship between persecution and other forms of political and social control. If persecution is to be understood as undermining co-citizens ability to interact with one another, then more generalized campaigns of violence, such as those occurring under totalitarianism, might be made more legible in this way as well.</p><p>The authors declare no conflicts of interest.</p>","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josp.12496","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"What is wrong with persecution\",\"authors\":\"Rebecca Buxton\",\"doi\":\"10.1111/josp.12496\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>The fact that persecution is seriously wrong should be obvious. Many of the worst events in human history were acts of persecution. During the reign of the Roman Empire, Christians were beaten, murdered, and forced to fight with wild animals. Until recently, Black Americans were hunted down by mobs and lynched by their compatriots.<sup>1</sup> They were often publicly hanged, but some were also burned alive, thrown from tall buildings, and dismembered. The centuries long persecution of Jewish people culminated in the terroristic policies of Nazi Germany and the murders of over six million Jews between 1941 and 1945. These individuals were violently targeted for their perceived membership in a particular social, religious, or political group. We know already, then, that persecution is a terrible injustice. What is not obvious, however, is <i>why</i> exactly this is the case. This might immediately seem like a ridiculous proposition: persecution often involves discrimination, cruelty, extreme violence, and mass murder. Surely we know that persecution is wrong precisely because it involves acts of the worst possible kind? This paper argues that the entire picture of the wrongness of persecution cannot be understood by pointing to these individual elements alone. To put it more strongly, persecution is wrong not only when (or because) it includes these other wrongs. Instead, I argue that part of the wrongness of persecution is located in the condition that it creates for the persecuted, but also for society more generally. In doing so, I follow two similar interventions from David Sussman (2004) on torture and Lea Ypi (<span>2013</span>) on colonialism.<sup>2</sup> Both papers begin with the intuition that such acts are serious wrongs. Their aim is to offer a new way of understanding why this is so. Like Ypi's, my title does not include a question mark. I ask you to accept that there is <i>something</i> wrong with persecution. My aim is to offer a new way of understanding what that something is.</p><p>As such, I will not consider whether persecution is <i>ever</i> justified. There are (at least) two political philosophers who maintain that persecution is compatible with legitimate governance. For St. Augustine (395AD), heretical persecution is “righteous” when the Church inflicts it upon “the impious.” This is what he calls “persecution in the spirit of love.”<sup>3</sup> Such persecution was therefore viewed as a legitimate way of punishing those who have strayed from God (Christenson, <span>1968</span>).<sup>4</sup> For Hobbes, persecution is a necessary power of the Sovereign, best described as an extension of the rights of war. Hobbes distinguishes between punishment and persecution: punishment being for misdemeanors committed within the boundaries of the commonwealth and persecution being suffered by those outside it. This “right of nature to make war” extends to all individuals who refuse to be subjected under the sovereign, even citizens. Persecution, on this Hobbesian account, is a response to political rebellion aimed at protecting the Commonwealth. For Augustine and Hobbes, persecution creates unity within the body politic. I will not directly intervene in this debate, although my argument is essentially antithetical to the Augustinian and Hobbesian accounts.<sup>5</sup> In other words, I will assume for the sake of argument that we agree that persecution is wrong.</p><p>I will also not offer a concrete definition of persecution, nor what we ought to do about it. First, I am not attempting to give a definitive account of what persecution “really” is. Instead, I am engaging in questions that flirt with definition to think about the concept of persecution more fully. When discussing terrorism, Jeremy Waldron (<span>2004</span>, 7) makes a similar move, arguing that “the point of undertaking such enquiry is not to arrive at a definition; the point is to ask hard questions, posed initially as questions about the way we use words, to focus a discussion of what we think is interesting and distinctive about this phenomenon.”<sup>6</sup> Although in what follows I will draw on ordinary and legal understandings of the term “persecution,” I do not put forward my own set of necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as persecution here. Instead, the more interesting question (in my view) is <i>why</i> persecution holds a special place in our moral and political world. Why does persecution illicit a particular kind of “special outrage”? Second, I am also not attempting to claim anything about what individual victims of persecution are owed in the here and now. In the political theory of refuge, an ongoing debate concerns whether only victims of persecution are entitled to international protection in the form of asylum. I will discuss this further in the final paragraphs of Section 3. However, here I should preliminarily make the case that, although I draw on literature from the political theory of refuge, I do not think discussions of meanings and wrongs of persecution necessarily have implications here. This is because the argument as to whether persecution is necessary for a claim to asylum depends on (a) what exactly the institution of asylum is for and (b) whether persecution exclusively creates the predicament that asylum is meant to remedy. As I explain in the following section, the meaning of persecution in the refugee case may be different from a more general conception of persecution. It is this more general notion of persecution with which I am concerned, for now.</p><p>The paper proceeds as follows. First, I discuss how persecution has been defined in international law. Here I argue for a reliance on what I call an “ordinary language” view of persecution. Such a view (roughly) sees persecution as a severe form of harm targeted at a person or group for a discriminatory reason. Second, I turn to the wrongs of persecution, considering three possible explanations: (i) violence, (ii) discrimination, and (iii) a denial of one's status in a political community. I do not argue here that such explanations are mistaken, merely that they are incomplete. Most importantly, the third explanation—which holds that individuals who are persecuted are stripped of their membership in the state—opens the door to a more social and political understanding of the wrong of persecution. I then defend my fuller explanation for the wrongful nature of persecution: that it re-organizes and disrupts the social order. I therefore turn to the broader function of persecution and its role in shaping social and political interaction. Focusing on the social impact of persecution, I argue, shows that persecution is not merely violence, discrimination, or a denial of membership. Instead, a core feature of persecution can be located in the effect that it has on political and social life, broadly construed. By rupturing the relationships between co-members, persecution remakes the political and social world. In this way, persecution undermines the potential for minimal cooperation and directly violates pre-existing associative duties.</p><p>We already know that persecution is a terrible wrong. Thinking about it in this new way does not really give us additional reasons to avoid persecution. We have good enough reasons to do that already. What I want to suggest is that, while the explanations that I will outline—violence, discrimination, and denial of membership—can explain a great deal of what is wrong with persecution, they remain incomplete.<sup>7</sup> The aim here is to offer a richer account of why persecution is objectionable. I do claim, however, that noting this collective feature of persecution has distinctive normative implications for its rectification. The wrongs of persecution are not over when violence or discrimination ends. Resolving persecution demands an approach that recenters the political community, and persecuted peoples' place within it.</p><p>The verb “to persecute” originates from the Latin “persequi” which means “to follow, pursue, or hunt down.” It first appeared in the English language in around the 15th century, perhaps unsurprisingly given the ongoing campaigns in England against both heretics and witches. However, most debates concerning the meaning of persecution arise from developments in international law in the latter half of the twentieth century. Persecution is classified in the Nuremberg Principles (1946) as a crime against humanity, alongside murder, torture, enslavement, and forced disappearance.<sup>8</sup> The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (<span>1998</span>) also defines persecution as a crime against humanity.<sup>9</sup> The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees (<span>1951</span>) places the concept of persecution at the heart of entitlement to asylum. However, even with this centrality in international law, few legal agreements have offered a formal definition. Some interpret this ambiguity as a benefit, allowing for the development and adaptation over time (Grahl-Madsen, <span>1992</span>; Maiani, <span>2010</span>).<sup>10</sup></p><p>In the absence of a shared definition of persecution, individual states deviate in how they understand the concept. According to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (<span>1969</span>), terms in treaties must be interpreted in good faith and in line with their “ordinary meaning.”<sup>11</sup> Many courts have therefore relied on dictionary definitions of persecution, like the one given above. British courts historically understood persecution in this way: the House of Lords  previously defined persecution as “to pursue with malignancy or injurious action, especially to oppress for holding a heretical belief”<sup>12</sup> (High Court v Secretary of State, <span>1990</span>). Beginning with this focus on ordinary language, interpretations of the meaning of persecution have broadly coalesced around several features. First, persecution must be inflicted by a human persecutor, though it need not be inflicted by the state. De facto state authorities can commit persecution, for instance, a militia or paramilitary group. However, purely natural disasters do not count as persecution, though weaponized environmental harms or victims being refused assistance could. Second, persecution picks out individuals for harm based on some characteristic: the Refugee Convention states that persecution must be inflicted because of someone's race, religion, nationality, or membership of a particular social group. Third, persecution must be “cruel” or “serious.” Most jurisdictions therefore agree that persecution is distinct from “mere” discrimination or harassment. The case of Nagoulko v. INS (2003) from the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals discussed whether being fired from a job because of one's religious beliefs amounts to persecution.<sup>13</sup> In this case, the claimant found stable employment elsewhere within a reasonable period. The Court concluded that such harm was not sufficiently severe as to constitute persecution. An individual can thus be discriminated against without being persecuted per se. However, the sustained and systematic denial of employment such that people are prevented from securing a minimally decent livelihood can (and should) be interpreted as a form of persecution. Several jurisdictions accept such an approach. The Australian Migration Act (<span>1958</span>), which offers a general characterization of persecution, states that instances of serious harm might include a threat to the person's life or liberty, significant physical harassment, significant physical ill-treatment, significant economic hardship, denial of access to basic services, and the denial of capacity to earn a livelihood of any kind.<sup>14</sup> The UK Home Office (<span>2016</span>, 16) also argues that discrimination can amount to persecution if it results in “sufficiently serious consequences for the person concerned.”<sup>15</sup> Of course, the line between discrimination and persecution remains blurred and complicated; the distinction between “mere” discrimination and persecution is often politically loaded.<sup>16</sup> Importantly, the severity of some episodic harms—for instance, a single instance of torture—are often thought to be sufficient to constitute persecution. The UK Home Office also accepts this. In the case of Mustafa Doymus v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (<span>2000</span>) it was decided that “persistency is a usual but not a universal criterion of persecution.”<sup>17</sup></p><p>So, defining persecution by relying on its ordinary meaning generally results in an understanding of persecution as a severe harm (whether aggregated or episodic) targeted at a person for a particular (discriminatory) reason.</p><p>The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties also states that—as well as an ordinary meaning approach—words must be interpreted in line with the context and purpose of the treatise in question. This focus has led to another, broader conceptualization of persecution within refugee law: <i>the failure of state protection approach</i>. Defenders of this model argue that the point and purpose of the Refugee Convention are to provide protection to those whose states have failed them. For instance, Anker (<span>2017</span>, 184) argues that the “state's legitimacy [is] based on its ability and duty to protect the basic needs and rights of its citizens.”<sup>18</sup> This view has been cemented in James Hathaway's human rights approach, which combines the tradition of human rights law with international refugee law. On this view, asylum is a form of surrogate protection. Persecution, then, is defined as the “sustained or systemic denial of basic human rights demonstrative of a failure of state protection” (Hathaway and Foster, <span>2014</span>, 185).<sup>19</sup> In recent years, some jurisdictions have adopted the human rights approach. The European Parliament noted in a Qualification Directive (<span>2011</span>) that persecution is a harm “sufficiently serious by [its] nature or repetition as to constitute a <i>severe violation of human rights</i>.”<sup>20</sup> The UK House of Lords likewise endorsed this approach in Horvath v. Secretary of State for the Home Department in <span>2000</span>.<sup>21</sup></p><p>Of course, it is an open question whether defining persecution by focusing on the purpose of refugee protection is useful for thinking about persecution separately from a particular system of international law. Whether this points us in the right direction vis-à-vis persecution more generally remains to be seen.<sup>22</sup> For a more general political theory of persecution, we would perhaps have difficulty working solely within such a framework. In aiming to give an account of persecution <i>beyond</i> its relevance to the refugee protection regime, I will therefore lean on an ordinary language approach, though I will come back to the importance of state protection later on. Importantly, this does not mean that I do not endorse the human rights approach within the context of refugee protection. All it means is that when thinking about persecution here, I want to be able to separate the discussion from a particular international convention and its legal history.</p><p>Some tentative conclusions can be drawn from this discussion. First, persecution is not the same as simply harm or violence. I can be severely harmed by being put in prison, but this is not obviously persecution (though in some cases it can be). Persecution is also not just a form of discrimination; it is something more severe. It is also not only committed by governments. Instead, I can be persecuted by my family, my friends, my neighbors, or society more generally. In the case of refugee protection, it is important whether the state can protect the individual from persecution. For our purposes, though, we need only focus on the persecution itself.</p><p>One might be worried, at this juncture, that acts of “persecution” are not a unified category at all. They might instead be “acts that bear various resemblances to one another” (Sussman, <span>2005</span>, 11).<sup>23</sup> I think we can comfortably accept that these conditions and similarities are loose rather than rigid. That is, we need not give an account of what counts as persecution in every possible case. The aim here is to give a general sense of persecution and its various contours. Whether individual, horrible acts fall within this category will remain cause for debate. Importantly, these conditions fit with the kinds of events that we already accept as acts of persecution, such as those I outlined in the introduction. So, there are evidently some clear-cut cases of persecution, where others are more slippery.<sup>24</sup> My attention will now turn as to why persecution is wrong. Of course, this will demand continuing to feel around for the edges of this concept.</p><p>Before discussing my own account of why persecution is wrong, I want to briefly consider some other, more obvious, explanations. Perhaps the two clearest candidates for persecution's wrongness are <i>violence</i> and <i>discrimination</i>. First, on violence. Persecution is often extremely violent, meaning that involves a person employing “physical force directly against a living being for the purpose of harming him” (Runkle, <span>1976</span>, 371).<sup>25</sup> The persecuted are often forcibly expelled, tortured, sexually assaulted, or murdered. The fact that persecution is usually so violent explains much of our immediate moral repulsion from it. However, we should bear in mind that persecution need not always involve extreme violence against the individual. As we have already seen, non-violent harms can potentially aggregate to constitute persecution, such as a denial of employment or housing. Likewise, many acts of persecution involve injury to an individual's property but not harm to their bodies. This again results in a particular condition, one which makes it very difficult for the individual to live her life.<sup>26</sup> Instead of violence alone, then, the wrongness of persecution is located in the condition of the individual who suffers it. Importantly for our sake, the wrongness of persecution is not identical to the wrongness of its violent techniques. Instead, we are already drawn to complicate the picture by adding conditions to our notion of violence in the case of persecution.</p><p>It may be the case that accidental persecution is impossible. Various definitions of persecution highlight its cruel and malignant character. The International Penal Court for the former Yugoslavia proposed in 2002 that persecution is “the <i>manifest or flagrant denial</i>, for reasons of discrimination, of a fundamental right consecrated by customary or conventional international law” (Cavaillé, <span>2010</span>).<sup>31</sup> The intention of the persecutor therefore seems important. However, persecution need not always be malignant in character. For instance, cases of persecution that were committed “for the individual's own good” will still amount to persecution. In Pitcherskaia v. INS (<span>1997</span>) a lesbian woman who fled Russia was found to have a well-founded fear of persecution, even though the serious harms she suffered were intended to “cure” her of homosexuality.<sup>32</sup> The important point here, though, is that persecution is not totally random, it involves at least some element of intentionality, and it involves a targeting agent in a way that is not necessary for discrimination.</p><p>Now, it may not be immediately clear that all acts that we describe as persecution involve discrimination of this intentional kind, at least not on a typical understanding of it. As the discussion of refugee law showed, persecution is often thought to relate to a specific “nexus clause” of religion, nationality, race, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. But not all everyday uses of the word persecution match this framework. For instance, we might speak about an abusive husband “persecuting” his wife or a man “persecuting” his neighbors, though this may not involve discrimination of the sort we have in mind. Here the way in which we use to the word persecution instead appears to track the fact that the victims are <i>tormented</i>. So, what about cases where we use the word persecution in this more general way?</p><p>There are two things to say here. First, in such cases, there may still be discrimination of the kind we have been concerned with so far, just not quite so obviously. Domestic violence is gendered in a way that makes it a form of discrimination (and persecution) even if the smaller scale of a husband and wife makes this lens feel improper.<sup>33</sup> The primary harm of domestic violence does not appear to be discrimination when we zoom in on the relationship between two individuals, but taking gender-based violence in a broader sense can show that we are still right to treat these cases as forms of discrimination against women. Second, it is not obvious that discrimination needs to latch onto the fact that an individual is a woman, a person of color, or gay, for instance. Many forms of discrimination do, of course, take this shape. But we can also understand the concept of discrimination in a slightly broader way. The husband can be said to persecute his wife because he picks out <i>her</i> for ill-treatment. In this sense, the wife is pursued, hunted, and singled out. For persecution to be discriminatory in its techniques, then, we can merely maintain that it is not general. Of course, this is a different way of understanding discrimination and one that would require more justification. All that I will say here is that it is at least feasible to think about persecution <i>as</i> discriminatory simply on the grounds that it is not totally random.</p><p>The neighbor case may be slightly more complicated, particularly if we imagine someone who simply terrorizes his neighbors, no matter who they are. We might speak of this as a form of persecution, even while the neighbor is not being discriminatory. This would imply not all cases of persecution involve discrimination. One way to respond to this is simply to claim an individual who harms everyone equally regardless of any qualities is not obviously a persecutor, though they may be just as bad. Our use of word persecution here is perhaps not literal. And so, while the bad neighbor might make other people's lives a living hell, persecution may not be the correct way to describe what is going on here. Second, we could also simply accept that not every instance of the word persecution in our ordinary language will involve discrimination: the neighbor case is a rare exception to the rule.<sup>34</sup> As I said earlier, my aim here is not to offer an airtight account of persecution, but simply to show that persecution often has effects we do not currently recognize. This is all to clarify that <i>most</i> forms of persecution that I am talking about here will involve discrimination in a largely straightforward way, but these outlier cases do not disrupt the more general claim.</p><p>A third possible way of explaining the wrongful nature of persecution arises from the political theory of refuge. Focusing on this discussion stands in tension with my earlier claim that we should look beyond the specificities of the refugee protection regime. However, looking to the political theory of refuge as opposed to its development in international law can offer a slightly different perspective. Political theorists who defend the special place of persecution within the refugee protection regime argue that it amounts to the denial of a person's status as a member in their political community. Therefore, persecution is essentially a form of banishment. According to Price (<span>2009</span>, 243), refugees “not only face a threat to their bodily integrity or liberty; they are also <i>effectively expelled from their political communities</i>. They are not only victims but also exiles.”<sup>36</sup> The persecuted individual's country of origin has repudiated their membership (Owen, <span>2020</span>, 32).<sup>37</sup> Denial of membership—understood as the loss of effective citizenship—can be worrisome for at least two reasons (Buxton, <span>2021</span>).<sup>38</sup> First, it violates an individual's prior claim to be recognized and protected within a particular community. Those who suffer persecution are usually citizens with a strong entitlement to inclusion within a specific state or group—persecution not only undermines this membership, through signaling that such an individual does not deserve the protection of their rights, it actively rejects it. Black Americans, for instance, had claims to equal treatment as human beings but also equal treatment <i>as Americans</i>. Their treatment denied their claims to inclusion in a political group that was systematically built on their exploitation. Therefore, as Shklar (<span>1993</span>, 181) puts it, “Governments… frequently abuse residents under their jurisdiction by denying them membership in the polity and other rights, not as a matter of legal punishment but because they belong to a group that is thought to be inherently unfit for inclusion.”<sup>39</sup> Second, the denial of membership violates the condition that all individuals within our system of global governance require membership <i>somewhere</i>. Owen argues that it is a requirement of legitimacy of the international order to ensure that all individuals enjoy “practical standing” in at least one state. When an individual is persecuted by their own Government, that requirement to have membership somewhere is undermined.<sup>40</sup> The membership account does a good job of shifting our focus toward the <i>political</i> consequences of persecution. This political element complements the “combination of violence and discrimination” alternative to understanding persecution. This is because it can single out the individual's experience of persecution as opposed to a broader account of discrimination or suffering; persecution plays a role in defining an individual's status within a community.</p><p>There are two things to note here. First, as we have already discussed, political theorists of refuge are not attempting to give an all-encompassing account of the wrongs of persecution. Their target instead is to think about persecution's relationship to asylum. Therefore, although this account may point us in the right direction, it potentially leaves something left to be said. Second, and relatedly, the denial of membership view focuses on the wrongs committed against individuals. This, again, is determined by the current structure of the refugee protection regime. An individual's entitlement to asylum depends on whether she can show that <i>she specifically</i> has a well-founded fear of persecution. As I will show in the following section, this focus may leave us unable to give voice to some of the pernicious social and political consequences of persecution. In other words, there remains a need for a more collective view of the wrong of persecution.</p><p>Rather than pushing against the denial of membership account, the following section aims to develop it by shifting our focus away from the political effects of persecution on the individual and turning towards persecution and political life more generally.</p><p>The previous accounts of the wrong of persecution have hinted toward a particular <i>condition</i> in which the persecuted individual is placed. The denial of membership view captures something important about the nature of persecution—that it undermines the persecuted person's place within the political and social world. In this section, I argue that the three previous potential explanations lack a proper account of the <i>collective</i> political consequences of persecution. The particularity of persecution cannot be explained by reference to these previous three elements, nor their aggregation. Instead, persecution creates, first, a particular condition for the individual, such that their social structure is turned against them but, more radically, a change in the condition of society itself. Governments and non-state actors not only violate the rights of individuals when they persecute them. They also violate the very political and social conditions that they ought to maintain. This account therefore presupposes the existence of particular moral and political obligations on the part of persecutors beyond “mere” obligations not to violate rights.</p><p>We already know that persecution is used by governments, neighborhoods, and family groups to remake the collective membership in their image. Persecution necessarily <i>others</i> those who are persecuted. Persecution thus not only undermines the individual's ability to claim rights within a particular sphere, but it does so in a way that reshapes and mobilizes society for this purpose. My account therefore locates at least some of the wrongness of persecution in how it affects political or social life more broadly. This is not to undermine the extreme effects that persecution has on the individuals who suffer it, and part of my account will remain focused on the experience of the persecuted. Persecution is wrong for at least all the reasons given so far: it is often violent, (wrongfully) discriminatory, and undermines the individual's claim to membership. But persecution is also wrong because it violates and undermines some pre-existing conditions from which obligations arise.</p><p>It is generally accepted that states ought to secure minimal conditions for political life, such as the protection of human rights or pursuing the promotion of justice. Ypi argues that an ideal political association depends on reciprocity, a condition that is fundamentally violated in the case of colonialism. In the context of persecution, the active pursuit of a group through violent means likewise renders such minimal conditions untenable. First, let us maintain a focus on the individual who suffers persecution. Many first-hand accounts highlight what it feels like to be persecuted. For instance, Holocaust survivors often note the intense fear that they felt, not only of Nazi officials and party members, but of everyone around them. Leah Hammerstein, a Jewish woman who worked in a German hospital on false papers describes it as an experience of “total isolation, total loneliness… You are among people, and you are like on an island all alone. There is nobody you can do to ask for help. You can nobody ask [sic.] for advice. You have to make life-threatening decisions all by yourself in a very short time, and you never knew whether your decision would be beneficial or detrimental to your existence. It was like playing Russian roulette with your life” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, <span>1996</span>).<sup>41</sup> Raszka Galek Brunswick, who posed as a Polish Catholic on a German farm, said she chose that job because “I thought for my own sake, I would probably be safer to be away from everybody” (United States Holocaust Museum, <span>1989</span>).<sup>42</sup> Another woman who, with her sisters, gained false papers and pretended to be Christians living in Warsaw, recounted that her father told her: “No matter what happens, no matter who you meet, you cannot trust anybody” (Virginia Currents, <span>2020</span>).<sup>43</sup> Pointing out that people live in fear when they are persecuted, perhaps so obvious as to be benign. But this focus adds something to our political and moral vocabulary when thinking about persecution. It shows that persecution disrupts the basic conditions of pre-existing political society. Persecution changes how people interact with one another, even when individual acts of violence have yet to occur: the threat of potential violence is always present. This can extend further beyond the persecuted group. In <i>Alone in Berlin</i> Hans Fallada recounts the story of Otto and Elise Hampel who begin committing acts of civil disobedience against the Nazi regime. In the fictionalized version of their story, Fallada recounts how Otto and Elise could no longer trust anyone in their apartment block. When Otto was working on the factory floor, Fallada (<span>1947</span>) commented: “The air was thick with betrayal. No one could trust anyone else, and in that dismal atmosphere the men seemed to grow even duller, devolving into mechanical extensions of the machines they serviced.”<sup>44</sup> The point I am making here is not, importantly, about individualized access to “relationship goods.”<sup>45</sup> People who face persecution <i>do</i> suffer from a lack of interpersonal benefits, such that they are no longer able to trust those around them. Here the point I want to highlight, however, is that for victims of persecution, their entire social structure is often leveraged in way that violates pre-existing cooperative obligations and expectations.</p><p>This can potentially be seen more clearly in the case of family-based persecution. To take a contemporary example, many young people are expelled from their families after they come out as non-straight or gender non-conforming (Ritholtz, <span>2022</span>).<sup>46</sup> Such expulsion also often includes targeted harassment, hate campaigns, and ensuring that the individual does not have access to any friends or family members for support.<sup>47</sup> For LGBT people fleeing persecution, the family is often the first locus of harm (Buxton and Ritholtz, <span>2021</span>).<sup>48</sup> Along with all the other wrongs committed in such an expulsion (the wrongs that we mentioned in the previous section), such families have also violated their pre-existing obligation towards this family member <i>as a family member</i>; they have changed <i>who</i> is part of the family and violated their prior associative obligations to them. Persecution is not therefore solely violence, discrimination, or lack of membership. It also involves up-ending pre-existing moral, social, and political obligations and the structures that depend on them.</p><p>Ronald Christenson argues that one of the key logics of persecution is the solidification of an in-group. Persecution, by naming and singling out an “other,” reifies and unionizes those remaining within the community. He writes: “Hitler persecuted Jews on behalf of the Volk, as Stalin persecuted kulaks in the name of the Proletariat, and as others have persecuted for The People, The Nation, The Church, The Race” (<span>1968</span>, 420).<sup>49</sup> This central logic of persecution—the creation of cleavage between groups—can help us to locate the condition of the persecuted. Scholars of political violence have noted persecution's ability to reshape communities through violent displays and public executions. As Lee Ann Fujii (<span>2021</span>, 2) puts it in <i>Show Time</i>, “when actors put violence on display, they are bringing to life ideas about how the world should be and more specifically how it should be ordered—who should have power and who should be included and on what basis people should claim belonging.”<sup>50</sup> Amy Louise Wood (<span>2009</span>, 11) makes a similar claim when discussing lynching in the United States. As events often involving large groups, lynchings allowed for the wrongful formation of an in-group and maintained a political order that maintained the domination of whites. While taking part in a lynch-mob, “the feel and push of the crowd created the sense of belonging and commonality that sustained the violence.”<sup>51</sup> Such acts of violence therefore allowed people to reimagine the political order and their place within it.</p><p>One of the key logics of persecution, then, is the creation not only of an out group, but an <i>in group</i>. There are several ways in which persecution does this. First, persecution makes violence and hatred against a certain set of people appear sociologically legitimate, particularly when it is state-sanctioned: persecutory logics therefore become diffused throughout communities and individuals who had previously lived together peacefully can suddenly turn violent. During The Genocide of the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia, neighbors who had lived alongside one another for decades suddenly became violent adversaries. One man from Kistanje recounted how his neighbors—who he had known well—had suddenly turned against him and killed his children (Carmichael, <span>2006</span>, 251).<sup>52</sup> Similar events occurred in the 1994 Rwandan genocide where neighbors would turn on one another in response to a campaign of extreme hatred. Fujii (<span>2009</span>, 3) notes that killing one's neighbors is “more than just a physical act; it is an act of social violation. It destroys not just bodies, but bonds.”<sup>53</sup> Persecution thus does not only draw on pre-existing fear and hatred, but also further solidifies such hatred. It changes the boundaries of the family, community, or state.<sup>54</sup></p><p>A potentially more slippery way in which persecution disrupts and remakes the social network is through changing the persecuted person's identity of condition more generally. Persecution should therefore be recognized as a mechanism for social control, but also (and relatedly) as a way to change the understandings of a particular group within the social order. In <i>Ain't I A Woman</i> (<span>1981</span>, 32), bell hooks noted this important feature of Witch Trials: “The Salem Witchcraft Trials were an extreme expression of patriarchal society's persecution of women. They were a message to all women that unless they remained within passive, subordinate roles they would be punished, even put to death.”<sup>55</sup> Persecution therefore did not only harm the women who were specifically targeted but harmed all women as a <i>class</i>. Feminist theorists have also discussed this diffuse feature of subjugation in discussions of rape. Jean Hampton (<span>1995</span>, 132) argues that rape “is a moral injury to all women… rape confirms that women are for men: to be used, dominated, treated as objects.”<sup>56</sup> These forms of violence therefore change the position and character of the entire group, rather than only the individuals who suffer it.</p><p>The wrongness of persecution is therefore partly collective rather than individual. The accounts that we discussed earlier—violence, discrimination, and membership loss—focused on the individuals who suffer persecution. However, it is not only about individuals facing severe harms and wrongs, but the restructuring of society and the relations within it. It is perhaps helpful, here, to return to the relationship between discrimination and persecution, as this may be a feature that they share. That is, discrimination includes individualized harms, but it also harms the entire group. Discrimination against women does not only harm individual women, but it also harms <i>women as a group</i>. It is almost certainly the case that persecution is not <i>sui generis</i>. In putting forward the view that persecution disrupts and undermines our social world, I do not go so far as to claim that persecution exclusively creates such a condition. For instance, Hannah Arendt (<span>1951</span>) argues that totalitarianism is characterized by an extreme form of political loneliness.<sup>57</sup> Jeremy Waldron (<span>2004</span>) argues that terrorism might also have a similar effect.<sup>58</sup> Of course, neither terrorism nor totalitarianism has a necessarily targeted character. They are often by their nature indiscriminate. So, while they might have a similar effect on society, the distinctiveness of persecution can be at least partly maintained. The aim here is thus not to claim that persecution is totally unique, but simply to offer a richer political vocabulary when thinking about persecution.</p><p>I noted in the introduction that this more collective account of persecution has implications for potential redress. The main consequence is that we can now make sense of the fact that persecution is not undone when the violence or discrimination ends. Instead, if persecution results in the remaking of the community, then the resolution of persecution must follow the same path. In situations where persecution has taken place, then, compensatory redress for loss of property of individual harms will not be sufficient.<sup>59</sup> A more collective approach will be required. This helps to explain why overcoming a history of persecution is so difficult. Many states still struggle with legacies of persecution and the long shadow that they leave behind them. Even for acts of persecution in the distance past, we may still require a restorative approach that seeks to reckon with the impact such a history still has on modern society. Apologies for that history are a recent potential step forward. But attempting to think about these legacies for our current state of affairs would demand a more radical project. Many accounts of reparative justice already focus on rebuilding community. The view of persecution that I have put forward merely offers another reason in favor of them.</p><p>Many questions remain about the nature and effects of persecution. This paper has attempted to add one more explanation of the wrongness of persecution to the mix: that persecution undermines the minimal conditions of political life and changes the social and political world. Such an explanation does not only locate the wrongness of persecution in the harm that it does to the individual—though this is surely an extremely important element—but also points to the social and political order more broadly. This allows us to understand persecution better in at least two ways. First, it recenters persecution's place within <i>politics</i> as opposed to a purely ethical account. That is, we need not rely only on moral theory to explain why persecution is bad; we can give an answer from the perspective internal to politics as well. Second, this view allows us to see the relationship between persecution and other forms of political and social control. If persecution is to be understood as undermining co-citizens ability to interact with one another, then more generalized campaigns of violence, such as those occurring under totalitarianism, might be made more legible in this way as well.</p><p>The authors declare no conflicts of interest.</p>\",\"PeriodicalId\":46756,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Journal of Social Philosophy\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":1.1000,\"publicationDate\":\"2022-11-10\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josp.12496\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Journal of Social Philosophy\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"98\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josp.12496\",\"RegionNum\":3,\"RegionCategory\":\"哲学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q3\",\"JCRName\":\"ETHICS\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Social Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josp.12496","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ETHICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

摘要

然而,纯粹的自然灾害不能算作迫害,尽管武器化的环境危害或受害者被拒绝援助可以算作迫害。第二,迫害根据某些特征挑选出要伤害的个人:《难民公约》规定,必须因为某人的种族、宗教、国籍或某一特定社会群体的成员身份而施加迫害。第三,迫害必须“残酷”或“严重”。因此,大多数司法管辖区都同意,迫害不同于“单纯的”歧视或骚扰。2003年,美国第九巡回上诉法院的Nagoulko诉INS案讨论了因宗教信仰而被解雇是否构成迫害在这种情况下,索赔人在一段合理的时间内在其他地方找到了稳定的工作。法院的结论是,这种伤害不够严重,不足以构成迫害。因此,个人可以受到歧视,而不会受到迫害。然而,持续和系统地拒绝就业,使人们无法获得最低限度的体面生计,可以(也应该)被解释为一种迫害形式。一些司法管辖区接受这种做法。《澳大利亚移民法》(1958年)规定了迫害的一般特征,指出严重伤害的情况可能包括对人的生命或自由的威胁、严重的身体骚扰、严重的身体虐待、严重的经济困难、剥夺获得基本服务的机会以及剥夺任何谋生能力英国内政部(2016,16)也认为,如果歧视“对相关人员造成足够严重的后果”,就可以构成迫害。当然,歧视和迫害之间的界限仍然模糊而复杂;“纯粹的”歧视和迫害之间的区别往往带有政治色彩重要的是,一些偶发伤害的严重程度——例如,一次酷刑——通常被认为足以构成迫害。英国内政部也接受这一点。在穆斯塔法·多默斯诉内政部国务秘书一案(2000年)中,法院裁定“持续是迫害的通常标准,但不是普遍标准。”17因此,依靠其普通含义来定义迫害,通常会导致对迫害的理解,即迫害是基于特定(歧视性)原因针对某人的严重伤害(无论是集中的还是偶发的)。《维也纳条约法公约》还规定,除了一般意义方法外,必须根据有关论文的上下文和目的解释词语。这种关注导致了难民法中迫害的另一个更广泛的概念:国家保护方法的失败。这种模式的捍卫者认为,《难民公约》的意义和目的是为那些国家辜负了他们的人提供保护。例如,Anker(2017,184)认为,“国家的合法性[是]基于其保护公民基本需求和权利的能力和义务。这一观点在詹姆斯·哈撒韦的人权方法中得到了巩固,该方法将人权法的传统与国际难民法结合起来。根据这种观点,庇护是一种替代保护。因此,迫害被定义为“持续或系统地剥夺基本人权,表明国家保护的失败”(Hathaway和Foster, 2014, 185)近年来,一些司法管辖区采取了人权方针。欧洲议会(European Parliament)在2011年的资格指令(Qualification Directive)中指出,迫害是一种“就其性质或重复而言,严重到构成严重侵犯人权的伤害”。20英国上议院在2000年霍瓦特诉内政部国务大臣案中也同样赞同这种做法。21当然,将迫害的定义集中在保护难民的目的上,是否有助于将迫害与特定的国际法体系分开考虑,这是一个悬而未决的问题。这是否为我们指明了正确的方向,以对付-à-vis更普遍的迫害,还有待观察对于一个更普遍的政治迫害理论,我们可能很难在这样一个框架内单独工作。因此,为了超越迫害与难民保护制度的相关性来描述迫害,我将采用一种普通的语言方法,尽管我将在后面回到国家保护的重要性。重要的是,这并不意味着我不赞同在难民保护范围内采取人权办法。它的意思是,当我在这里思考迫害时,我希望能够将讨论与特定的国际公约及其法律历史分开。从这次讨论中可以得出一些初步的结论。 首先,在这种情况下,可能仍然存在我们到目前为止所关注的那种歧视,只是不那么明显。家庭暴力在某种程度上是性别的,这使它成为一种歧视(和迫害),即使丈夫和妻子的规模较小使这种镜头感觉不合适当我们放大到两个人之间的关系时,家庭暴力的主要危害似乎不是歧视,但从更广泛的意义上看,基于性别的暴力可以表明,我们仍然有权利将这些案件视为对妇女的歧视形式。其次,歧视是否需要依赖于一个人是女性、有色人种或同性恋等事实,这一点并不明显。当然,许多形式的歧视都是这种形式。但我们也可以从更广泛的角度来理解歧视的概念。丈夫可以说是在迫害他的妻子,因为他把她挑出来虐待。从这个意义上说,妻子被追求、被追捕、被挑出来。如果迫害在手段上具有歧视性,那么,我们只能认为它不具有普遍性。当然,这是理解歧视的另一种方式,需要更多的理由。我在这里要说的是,把迫害看作是歧视至少是可行的,因为它不是完全随机的。邻居的情况可能会稍微复杂一些,特别是如果我们想象一个人只是恐吓他的邻居,不管他们是谁。我们可以说这是一种迫害,即使邻居并没有歧视。这意味着并非所有的迫害案件都涉及歧视。对此的一种回应方式是简单地宣称,一个不论其品质如何都能一视同仁地伤害所有人的人,显然不是一个迫害者,尽管他们可能同样糟糕。我们在这里使用的“逼迫”一词可能不是字面意思。所以,虽然坏邻居可能会把别人的生活变成人间地狱,但迫害可能不是描述这里发生的事情的正确方式。其次,我们也可以简单地接受,在我们的日常语言中,并不是每一个“迫害”一词的实例都涉及歧视:邻居的案例是这个规则的一个罕见的例外正如我前面说过的,我在这里的目的并不是要提供一个关于迫害的无懈可击的描述,而只是要表明,迫害往往具有我们目前没有认识到的影响。这一切都是为了澄清,我在这里谈论的大多数形式的迫害都会以一种很大程度上直接的方式涉及歧视,但这些例外情况并不会破坏更普遍的说法。第三种解释迫害的错误本质的可能方法来自政治避难理论。把注意力集中在这一讨论上,与我早先提出的我们应该超越难民保护制度的特殊性的主张是矛盾的。然而,将避难的政治理论与它在国际法中的发展相对照,可以提供一个稍微不同的观点。为难民保护制度中特殊的迫害场所辩护的政治理论家认为,这相当于否认一个人作为其政治社区成员的地位。因此,迫害本质上是一种放逐。根据Price(2009, 243)的说法,难民“不仅面临着身体完整或自由的威胁;他们实际上也被驱逐出自己的政治团体。他们不仅是受害者,也是流亡者。“36受迫害个人的原籍国已拒绝其成员资格(Owen, 2020, 32)剥夺成员资格——被理解为丧失有效公民身份——至少有两个原因令人担忧(Buxton, 2021)首先,它违反了个人先前在特定社区中得到承认和保护的要求。那些遭受迫害的人通常是有强烈权利被纳入特定国家或群体的公民。迫害不仅通过发出这样的信号来破坏这种成员资格,表明这样的个人不值得保护他们的权利,而且还积极地拒绝这种保护。例如,美国黑人不仅要求作为人的平等待遇,而且要求作为美国人的平等待遇。他们的遭遇使他们无法要求加入一个有系统地建立在剥削他们基础上的政治团体。因此,正如Shklar(1993,181)所说,“政府……经常滥用其管辖范围内的居民,剥夺他们的政治成员资格和其他权利,而不是作为法律惩罚,而是因为他们属于一个被认为天生不适合纳入的群体。”39其次,拒绝成员资格违反了我们全球治理体系内的所有个人都需要在某个地方成为成员的条件。 莉亚·哈默斯坦(Leah Hammerstein)是一名持假证件在德国一家医院工作的犹太妇女,她将这种经历描述为“完全孤立、完全孤独……你身处人群之中,却像独自一人在孤岛上。”没有人能帮你寻求帮助。你不能问[原文如此]。征求意见。你必须在很短的时间内独自做出危及生命的决定,你永远不知道你的决定对你的生存是有益的还是有害的。这就像用你的生命玩俄罗斯轮盘赌”(美国大屠杀纪念博物馆,1996年)Raszka Galek Brunswick在一个德国农场假扮成波兰天主教徒,她说她选择这份工作是因为“我想,为了我自己,远离所有人可能会更安全”(美国大屠杀博物馆,1989年)43 .另一位妇女和她的姐妹们获得了假证件,假装是住在华沙的基督徒,她讲述了她的父亲告诉她:“无论发生什么,无论你遇到谁,你都不能相信任何人”(Virginia Currents, 2020)指出当人们受到迫害时,他们生活在恐惧之中,这也许是显而易见的善意。但是,当我们思考迫害时,这种关注给我们的政治和道德词汇增加了一些东西。这表明迫害破坏了原有政治社会的基本条件。迫害改变了人们相互交往的方式,即使个人暴力行为尚未发生:潜在暴力的威胁始终存在。这可以延伸到受迫害群体之外。在《独自在柏林》中,汉斯·法拉达讲述了奥托和埃莉斯·汉佩尔夫妇开始对纳粹政权采取非暴力不服从行动的故事。在他们的故事的虚构版本中,法拉达讲述了奥托和伊莉斯如何不再相信他们公寓楼里的任何人。当奥托在工厂工作时,法拉达(1947)评论说:“空气中充满了背叛。谁也不能相信别人,在这种沉闷的气氛中,这些人似乎变得更加迟钝,变成了他们所服务的机器的机械延伸。44重要的是,我在这里要说的重点,并不是关于个性化获取“关系产品”的途径。遭受迫害的人确实会因为缺乏人际利益而受苦,因此他们不再能够信任周围的人。这里我想强调的一点是,对于受迫害的受害者来说,他们的整个社会结构的杠杆作用往往违反了先前存在的合作义务和期望。这一点在基于家庭的迫害案件中可能更为明显。举一个当代的例子,许多年轻人在出柜后是非异性恋或性别不符合标准而被家庭驱逐(Ritholtz, 2022)这种驱逐通常还包括有针对性的骚扰、仇恨运动,并确保个人无法获得任何朋友或家人的支持对于逃离迫害的LGBT人群来说,家庭往往是第一个受到伤害的地方(Buxton和Ritholtz, 2021)除了在这种驱逐中犯下的所有其他错误(我们在前一节中提到的错误)之外,这些家庭还违反了他们作为家庭成员对该家庭成员所承担的预先存在的义务;他们改变了谁是家庭的一部分,违反了他们以前对家庭的关联义务。因此,迫害不仅仅是暴力、歧视或缺乏成员资格。它还涉及颠覆现有的道德、社会和政治义务以及依赖于这些义务的结构。罗纳德•克里斯滕森认为,迫害的关键逻辑之一是群体内部的固化。迫害,通过点名和挑出一个“他者”,使那些留在社区内的人具体化和团结起来。他写道:“希特勒以人民的名义迫害犹太人,就像斯大林以无产阶级的名义迫害富农一样,就像其他人为了人民、国家、教会和种族而迫害犹太人一样”(1968,420)迫害的核心逻辑——群体之间分裂的产生——可以帮助我们定位被迫害者的状况。研究政治暴力的学者注意到,迫害能够通过暴力展示和公开处决重塑社区。正如李·安·藤井(Lee Ann Fujii, 2021, 2)在《秀时间》(Show Time)中所说的那样,“当演员把暴力表演出来时,他们是在把关于世界应该是什么样子的想法,更具体地说,是关于世界应该如何秩序化的想法带入生活——谁应该拥有权力,谁应该被包括在内,人们应该在什么基础上主张归属。”50 Amy Louise Wood(2009, 11)在讨论美国的私刑时也提出了类似的观点。私刑通常涉及大群体,因此会导致内部群体的错误形成,并维持白人统治的政治秩序。 在参与私刑暴民时,“人群的感觉和推动创造了归属感和共同性,从而维持了暴力。”51 .因此,这种暴力行为使人们重新设想政治秩序及其在其中的地位。因此,迫害的关键逻辑之一是,不仅创造了一个外部群体,而且创造了一个内部群体。迫害可以通过几种方式做到这一点。首先,迫害使针对特定人群的暴力和仇恨在社会学上显得合法,特别是在国家批准的情况下:迫害逻辑因此在整个社区蔓延,以前和平共处的个人可能突然变得暴力。在克罗地亚独立国对塞尔维亚人的种族灭绝期间,几十年来彼此生活在一起的邻居突然变成了暴力对手。一名来自基斯塔杰的男子讲述了他的邻居——他非常熟悉的邻居——如何突然反对他并杀害了他的孩子(Carmichael, 2006, 251)类似的事件发生在1994年的卢旺达种族灭绝事件中,当时邻国会互相攻击,以回应极端仇恨的运动。Fujii(2009, 3)指出,杀死邻居“不仅仅是一种身体行为;这是一种违反社会的行为。它摧毁的不仅是身体,还有纽带。因此,迫害不仅利用了已有的恐惧和仇恨,而且进一步巩固了这种仇恨。它改变了家庭、社区或国家的界限。迫害破坏和重塑社会网络的一种潜在的更狡猾的方式是通过更普遍地改变受迫害者的身份和状况。因此,迫害应被认为是社会控制的一种机制,也是(相对地)改变社会秩序中对特定群体的理解的一种方式。在《我不是女人》(1981,32)中,贝尔·胡克斯指出了女巫审判的重要特征:“塞勒姆巫术审判是父权社会对女性迫害的极端表现。这是对所有女性的一个信息,除非她们一直处于被动的从属地位,否则她们将受到惩罚,甚至被处死。“55因此,迫害不仅伤害了特别针对的妇女,而且伤害了所有妇女。女权主义理论家也在讨论强奸时讨论了这种征服的扩散特征。Jean Hampton(1995,132)认为强奸“是对所有女性的一种道德伤害……强奸证实了女性是为男性服务的:被男人利用、支配、被当作物品对待。”“56因此,这些形式的暴力改变了整个群体的地位和性质,而不仅仅是遭受暴力的个人。因此,迫害的错误部分是集体的,而不是个人的。我们之前讨论过的关于暴力、歧视和失去会员资格的描述主要针对遭受迫害的个人。然而,它不仅仅是关于个人面临严重伤害和错误,而是关于社会及其内部关系的重组。在这里,回到歧视和迫害之间的关系也许是有帮助的,因为这可能是它们共同的特征。也就是说,歧视包括个人的伤害,但它也伤害了整个群体。对妇女的歧视不仅伤害到个别妇女,也伤害到整个妇女群体。几乎可以肯定的是,迫害并不是自生的。在提出迫害扰乱和破坏我们的社会世界的观点时,我并没有走得太远,以至于声称迫害完全造成了这种情况。例如,汉娜·阿伦特(1951)认为极权主义的特点是一种极端形式的政治孤独Jeremy Waldron(2004)认为恐怖主义也可能有类似的影响当然,无论是恐怖主义还是极权主义,都没有必然的目标特征。他们往往天生不分青红皂白。因此,尽管它们可能对社会产生类似的影响,但迫害的独特性至少在一定程度上得以维持。因此,这里的目的不是声称迫害是完全独特的,而只是在思考迫害时提供更丰富的政治词汇。我在导言中指出,这种对迫害的更集体的叙述对可能的补救有影响。主要的结果是,我们现在可以理解这样一个事实,即暴力或歧视结束后,迫害并没有消失。相反,如果迫害导致了社会的重建,那么解决迫害就必须遵循同样的道路。59 .因此,在发生迫害的情况下,对个人财产损失或伤害的补偿性补救是不够的需要采取一种更加集体的方式。这有助于解释为什么克服一段受迫害的历史是如此困难。 许多州仍在与迫害的遗留问题及其留下的漫长阴影作斗争。即使对于遥远的过去的迫害行为,我们可能仍然需要一种恢复性的方法,试图考虑到这样一段历史对现代社会的影响。为那段历史道歉是最近可能向前迈出的一步。但是,试图为我们当前的事态思考这些遗产将需要一个更激进的项目。许多关于补偿性司法的说法已经把重点放在重建社区上。我所提出的关于迫害的观点只是为他们提供了另一个支持他们的理由。关于迫害的性质和影响,仍然存在许多问题。本文试图为迫害的错误添加另一种解释:迫害破坏了政治生活的最低限度条件,改变了社会和政治世界。这样的解释不仅将迫害的错误定位于它对个人造成的伤害——尽管这无疑是一个极其重要的因素——而且还指出了更广泛的社会和政治秩序。这至少可以让我们从两个方面更好地理解迫害。首先,它重新审视了迫害在政治中的地位,而不是纯粹的道德解释。也就是说,我们不需要仅仅依靠道德理论来解释为什么迫害是不好的;我们也可以从政治内部的角度给出答案。其次,这种观点让我们看到了迫害与其他形式的政治和社会控制之间的关系。如果迫害被理解为破坏了共同公民相互交流的能力,那么更广泛的暴力运动,比如在极权主义下发生的暴力运动,可能也会以这种方式变得更清晰。作者声明无利益冲突。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
What is wrong with persecution

The fact that persecution is seriously wrong should be obvious. Many of the worst events in human history were acts of persecution. During the reign of the Roman Empire, Christians were beaten, murdered, and forced to fight with wild animals. Until recently, Black Americans were hunted down by mobs and lynched by their compatriots.1 They were often publicly hanged, but some were also burned alive, thrown from tall buildings, and dismembered. The centuries long persecution of Jewish people culminated in the terroristic policies of Nazi Germany and the murders of over six million Jews between 1941 and 1945. These individuals were violently targeted for their perceived membership in a particular social, religious, or political group. We know already, then, that persecution is a terrible injustice. What is not obvious, however, is why exactly this is the case. This might immediately seem like a ridiculous proposition: persecution often involves discrimination, cruelty, extreme violence, and mass murder. Surely we know that persecution is wrong precisely because it involves acts of the worst possible kind? This paper argues that the entire picture of the wrongness of persecution cannot be understood by pointing to these individual elements alone. To put it more strongly, persecution is wrong not only when (or because) it includes these other wrongs. Instead, I argue that part of the wrongness of persecution is located in the condition that it creates for the persecuted, but also for society more generally. In doing so, I follow two similar interventions from David Sussman (2004) on torture and Lea Ypi (2013) on colonialism.2 Both papers begin with the intuition that such acts are serious wrongs. Their aim is to offer a new way of understanding why this is so. Like Ypi's, my title does not include a question mark. I ask you to accept that there is something wrong with persecution. My aim is to offer a new way of understanding what that something is.

As such, I will not consider whether persecution is ever justified. There are (at least) two political philosophers who maintain that persecution is compatible with legitimate governance. For St. Augustine (395AD), heretical persecution is “righteous” when the Church inflicts it upon “the impious.” This is what he calls “persecution in the spirit of love.”3 Such persecution was therefore viewed as a legitimate way of punishing those who have strayed from God (Christenson, 1968).4 For Hobbes, persecution is a necessary power of the Sovereign, best described as an extension of the rights of war. Hobbes distinguishes between punishment and persecution: punishment being for misdemeanors committed within the boundaries of the commonwealth and persecution being suffered by those outside it. This “right of nature to make war” extends to all individuals who refuse to be subjected under the sovereign, even citizens. Persecution, on this Hobbesian account, is a response to political rebellion aimed at protecting the Commonwealth. For Augustine and Hobbes, persecution creates unity within the body politic. I will not directly intervene in this debate, although my argument is essentially antithetical to the Augustinian and Hobbesian accounts.5 In other words, I will assume for the sake of argument that we agree that persecution is wrong.

I will also not offer a concrete definition of persecution, nor what we ought to do about it. First, I am not attempting to give a definitive account of what persecution “really” is. Instead, I am engaging in questions that flirt with definition to think about the concept of persecution more fully. When discussing terrorism, Jeremy Waldron (2004, 7) makes a similar move, arguing that “the point of undertaking such enquiry is not to arrive at a definition; the point is to ask hard questions, posed initially as questions about the way we use words, to focus a discussion of what we think is interesting and distinctive about this phenomenon.”6 Although in what follows I will draw on ordinary and legal understandings of the term “persecution,” I do not put forward my own set of necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as persecution here. Instead, the more interesting question (in my view) is why persecution holds a special place in our moral and political world. Why does persecution illicit a particular kind of “special outrage”? Second, I am also not attempting to claim anything about what individual victims of persecution are owed in the here and now. In the political theory of refuge, an ongoing debate concerns whether only victims of persecution are entitled to international protection in the form of asylum. I will discuss this further in the final paragraphs of Section 3. However, here I should preliminarily make the case that, although I draw on literature from the political theory of refuge, I do not think discussions of meanings and wrongs of persecution necessarily have implications here. This is because the argument as to whether persecution is necessary for a claim to asylum depends on (a) what exactly the institution of asylum is for and (b) whether persecution exclusively creates the predicament that asylum is meant to remedy. As I explain in the following section, the meaning of persecution in the refugee case may be different from a more general conception of persecution. It is this more general notion of persecution with which I am concerned, for now.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, I discuss how persecution has been defined in international law. Here I argue for a reliance on what I call an “ordinary language” view of persecution. Such a view (roughly) sees persecution as a severe form of harm targeted at a person or group for a discriminatory reason. Second, I turn to the wrongs of persecution, considering three possible explanations: (i) violence, (ii) discrimination, and (iii) a denial of one's status in a political community. I do not argue here that such explanations are mistaken, merely that they are incomplete. Most importantly, the third explanation—which holds that individuals who are persecuted are stripped of their membership in the state—opens the door to a more social and political understanding of the wrong of persecution. I then defend my fuller explanation for the wrongful nature of persecution: that it re-organizes and disrupts the social order. I therefore turn to the broader function of persecution and its role in shaping social and political interaction. Focusing on the social impact of persecution, I argue, shows that persecution is not merely violence, discrimination, or a denial of membership. Instead, a core feature of persecution can be located in the effect that it has on political and social life, broadly construed. By rupturing the relationships between co-members, persecution remakes the political and social world. In this way, persecution undermines the potential for minimal cooperation and directly violates pre-existing associative duties.

We already know that persecution is a terrible wrong. Thinking about it in this new way does not really give us additional reasons to avoid persecution. We have good enough reasons to do that already. What I want to suggest is that, while the explanations that I will outline—violence, discrimination, and denial of membership—can explain a great deal of what is wrong with persecution, they remain incomplete.7 The aim here is to offer a richer account of why persecution is objectionable. I do claim, however, that noting this collective feature of persecution has distinctive normative implications for its rectification. The wrongs of persecution are not over when violence or discrimination ends. Resolving persecution demands an approach that recenters the political community, and persecuted peoples' place within it.

The verb “to persecute” originates from the Latin “persequi” which means “to follow, pursue, or hunt down.” It first appeared in the English language in around the 15th century, perhaps unsurprisingly given the ongoing campaigns in England against both heretics and witches. However, most debates concerning the meaning of persecution arise from developments in international law in the latter half of the twentieth century. Persecution is classified in the Nuremberg Principles (1946) as a crime against humanity, alongside murder, torture, enslavement, and forced disappearance.8 The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) also defines persecution as a crime against humanity.9 The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees (1951) places the concept of persecution at the heart of entitlement to asylum. However, even with this centrality in international law, few legal agreements have offered a formal definition. Some interpret this ambiguity as a benefit, allowing for the development and adaptation over time (Grahl-Madsen, 1992; Maiani, 2010).10

In the absence of a shared definition of persecution, individual states deviate in how they understand the concept. According to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), terms in treaties must be interpreted in good faith and in line with their “ordinary meaning.”11 Many courts have therefore relied on dictionary definitions of persecution, like the one given above. British courts historically understood persecution in this way: the House of Lords  previously defined persecution as “to pursue with malignancy or injurious action, especially to oppress for holding a heretical belief”12 (High Court v Secretary of State, 1990). Beginning with this focus on ordinary language, interpretations of the meaning of persecution have broadly coalesced around several features. First, persecution must be inflicted by a human persecutor, though it need not be inflicted by the state. De facto state authorities can commit persecution, for instance, a militia or paramilitary group. However, purely natural disasters do not count as persecution, though weaponized environmental harms or victims being refused assistance could. Second, persecution picks out individuals for harm based on some characteristic: the Refugee Convention states that persecution must be inflicted because of someone's race, religion, nationality, or membership of a particular social group. Third, persecution must be “cruel” or “serious.” Most jurisdictions therefore agree that persecution is distinct from “mere” discrimination or harassment. The case of Nagoulko v. INS (2003) from the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals discussed whether being fired from a job because of one's religious beliefs amounts to persecution.13 In this case, the claimant found stable employment elsewhere within a reasonable period. The Court concluded that such harm was not sufficiently severe as to constitute persecution. An individual can thus be discriminated against without being persecuted per se. However, the sustained and systematic denial of employment such that people are prevented from securing a minimally decent livelihood can (and should) be interpreted as a form of persecution. Several jurisdictions accept such an approach. The Australian Migration Act (1958), which offers a general characterization of persecution, states that instances of serious harm might include a threat to the person's life or liberty, significant physical harassment, significant physical ill-treatment, significant economic hardship, denial of access to basic services, and the denial of capacity to earn a livelihood of any kind.14 The UK Home Office (2016, 16) also argues that discrimination can amount to persecution if it results in “sufficiently serious consequences for the person concerned.”15 Of course, the line between discrimination and persecution remains blurred and complicated; the distinction between “mere” discrimination and persecution is often politically loaded.16 Importantly, the severity of some episodic harms—for instance, a single instance of torture—are often thought to be sufficient to constitute persecution. The UK Home Office also accepts this. In the case of Mustafa Doymus v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (2000) it was decided that “persistency is a usual but not a universal criterion of persecution.”17

So, defining persecution by relying on its ordinary meaning generally results in an understanding of persecution as a severe harm (whether aggregated or episodic) targeted at a person for a particular (discriminatory) reason.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties also states that—as well as an ordinary meaning approach—words must be interpreted in line with the context and purpose of the treatise in question. This focus has led to another, broader conceptualization of persecution within refugee law: the failure of state protection approach. Defenders of this model argue that the point and purpose of the Refugee Convention are to provide protection to those whose states have failed them. For instance, Anker (2017, 184) argues that the “state's legitimacy [is] based on its ability and duty to protect the basic needs and rights of its citizens.”18 This view has been cemented in James Hathaway's human rights approach, which combines the tradition of human rights law with international refugee law. On this view, asylum is a form of surrogate protection. Persecution, then, is defined as the “sustained or systemic denial of basic human rights demonstrative of a failure of state protection” (Hathaway and Foster, 2014, 185).19 In recent years, some jurisdictions have adopted the human rights approach. The European Parliament noted in a Qualification Directive (2011) that persecution is a harm “sufficiently serious by [its] nature or repetition as to constitute a severe violation of human rights.”20 The UK House of Lords likewise endorsed this approach in Horvath v. Secretary of State for the Home Department in 2000.21

Of course, it is an open question whether defining persecution by focusing on the purpose of refugee protection is useful for thinking about persecution separately from a particular system of international law. Whether this points us in the right direction vis-à-vis persecution more generally remains to be seen.22 For a more general political theory of persecution, we would perhaps have difficulty working solely within such a framework. In aiming to give an account of persecution beyond its relevance to the refugee protection regime, I will therefore lean on an ordinary language approach, though I will come back to the importance of state protection later on. Importantly, this does not mean that I do not endorse the human rights approach within the context of refugee protection. All it means is that when thinking about persecution here, I want to be able to separate the discussion from a particular international convention and its legal history.

Some tentative conclusions can be drawn from this discussion. First, persecution is not the same as simply harm or violence. I can be severely harmed by being put in prison, but this is not obviously persecution (though in some cases it can be). Persecution is also not just a form of discrimination; it is something more severe. It is also not only committed by governments. Instead, I can be persecuted by my family, my friends, my neighbors, or society more generally. In the case of refugee protection, it is important whether the state can protect the individual from persecution. For our purposes, though, we need only focus on the persecution itself.

One might be worried, at this juncture, that acts of “persecution” are not a unified category at all. They might instead be “acts that bear various resemblances to one another” (Sussman, 2005, 11).23 I think we can comfortably accept that these conditions and similarities are loose rather than rigid. That is, we need not give an account of what counts as persecution in every possible case. The aim here is to give a general sense of persecution and its various contours. Whether individual, horrible acts fall within this category will remain cause for debate. Importantly, these conditions fit with the kinds of events that we already accept as acts of persecution, such as those I outlined in the introduction. So, there are evidently some clear-cut cases of persecution, where others are more slippery.24 My attention will now turn as to why persecution is wrong. Of course, this will demand continuing to feel around for the edges of this concept.

Before discussing my own account of why persecution is wrong, I want to briefly consider some other, more obvious, explanations. Perhaps the two clearest candidates for persecution's wrongness are violence and discrimination. First, on violence. Persecution is often extremely violent, meaning that involves a person employing “physical force directly against a living being for the purpose of harming him” (Runkle, 1976, 371).25 The persecuted are often forcibly expelled, tortured, sexually assaulted, or murdered. The fact that persecution is usually so violent explains much of our immediate moral repulsion from it. However, we should bear in mind that persecution need not always involve extreme violence against the individual. As we have already seen, non-violent harms can potentially aggregate to constitute persecution, such as a denial of employment or housing. Likewise, many acts of persecution involve injury to an individual's property but not harm to their bodies. This again results in a particular condition, one which makes it very difficult for the individual to live her life.26 Instead of violence alone, then, the wrongness of persecution is located in the condition of the individual who suffers it. Importantly for our sake, the wrongness of persecution is not identical to the wrongness of its violent techniques. Instead, we are already drawn to complicate the picture by adding conditions to our notion of violence in the case of persecution.

It may be the case that accidental persecution is impossible. Various definitions of persecution highlight its cruel and malignant character. The International Penal Court for the former Yugoslavia proposed in 2002 that persecution is “the manifest or flagrant denial, for reasons of discrimination, of a fundamental right consecrated by customary or conventional international law” (Cavaillé, 2010).31 The intention of the persecutor therefore seems important. However, persecution need not always be malignant in character. For instance, cases of persecution that were committed “for the individual's own good” will still amount to persecution. In Pitcherskaia v. INS (1997) a lesbian woman who fled Russia was found to have a well-founded fear of persecution, even though the serious harms she suffered were intended to “cure” her of homosexuality.32 The important point here, though, is that persecution is not totally random, it involves at least some element of intentionality, and it involves a targeting agent in a way that is not necessary for discrimination.

Now, it may not be immediately clear that all acts that we describe as persecution involve discrimination of this intentional kind, at least not on a typical understanding of it. As the discussion of refugee law showed, persecution is often thought to relate to a specific “nexus clause” of religion, nationality, race, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. But not all everyday uses of the word persecution match this framework. For instance, we might speak about an abusive husband “persecuting” his wife or a man “persecuting” his neighbors, though this may not involve discrimination of the sort we have in mind. Here the way in which we use to the word persecution instead appears to track the fact that the victims are tormented. So, what about cases where we use the word persecution in this more general way?

There are two things to say here. First, in such cases, there may still be discrimination of the kind we have been concerned with so far, just not quite so obviously. Domestic violence is gendered in a way that makes it a form of discrimination (and persecution) even if the smaller scale of a husband and wife makes this lens feel improper.33 The primary harm of domestic violence does not appear to be discrimination when we zoom in on the relationship between two individuals, but taking gender-based violence in a broader sense can show that we are still right to treat these cases as forms of discrimination against women. Second, it is not obvious that discrimination needs to latch onto the fact that an individual is a woman, a person of color, or gay, for instance. Many forms of discrimination do, of course, take this shape. But we can also understand the concept of discrimination in a slightly broader way. The husband can be said to persecute his wife because he picks out her for ill-treatment. In this sense, the wife is pursued, hunted, and singled out. For persecution to be discriminatory in its techniques, then, we can merely maintain that it is not general. Of course, this is a different way of understanding discrimination and one that would require more justification. All that I will say here is that it is at least feasible to think about persecution as discriminatory simply on the grounds that it is not totally random.

The neighbor case may be slightly more complicated, particularly if we imagine someone who simply terrorizes his neighbors, no matter who they are. We might speak of this as a form of persecution, even while the neighbor is not being discriminatory. This would imply not all cases of persecution involve discrimination. One way to respond to this is simply to claim an individual who harms everyone equally regardless of any qualities is not obviously a persecutor, though they may be just as bad. Our use of word persecution here is perhaps not literal. And so, while the bad neighbor might make other people's lives a living hell, persecution may not be the correct way to describe what is going on here. Second, we could also simply accept that not every instance of the word persecution in our ordinary language will involve discrimination: the neighbor case is a rare exception to the rule.34 As I said earlier, my aim here is not to offer an airtight account of persecution, but simply to show that persecution often has effects we do not currently recognize. This is all to clarify that most forms of persecution that I am talking about here will involve discrimination in a largely straightforward way, but these outlier cases do not disrupt the more general claim.

A third possible way of explaining the wrongful nature of persecution arises from the political theory of refuge. Focusing on this discussion stands in tension with my earlier claim that we should look beyond the specificities of the refugee protection regime. However, looking to the political theory of refuge as opposed to its development in international law can offer a slightly different perspective. Political theorists who defend the special place of persecution within the refugee protection regime argue that it amounts to the denial of a person's status as a member in their political community. Therefore, persecution is essentially a form of banishment. According to Price (2009, 243), refugees “not only face a threat to their bodily integrity or liberty; they are also effectively expelled from their political communities. They are not only victims but also exiles.”36 The persecuted individual's country of origin has repudiated their membership (Owen, 2020, 32).37 Denial of membership—understood as the loss of effective citizenship—can be worrisome for at least two reasons (Buxton, 2021).38 First, it violates an individual's prior claim to be recognized and protected within a particular community. Those who suffer persecution are usually citizens with a strong entitlement to inclusion within a specific state or group—persecution not only undermines this membership, through signaling that such an individual does not deserve the protection of their rights, it actively rejects it. Black Americans, for instance, had claims to equal treatment as human beings but also equal treatment as Americans. Their treatment denied their claims to inclusion in a political group that was systematically built on their exploitation. Therefore, as Shklar (1993, 181) puts it, “Governments… frequently abuse residents under their jurisdiction by denying them membership in the polity and other rights, not as a matter of legal punishment but because they belong to a group that is thought to be inherently unfit for inclusion.”39 Second, the denial of membership violates the condition that all individuals within our system of global governance require membership somewhere. Owen argues that it is a requirement of legitimacy of the international order to ensure that all individuals enjoy “practical standing” in at least one state. When an individual is persecuted by their own Government, that requirement to have membership somewhere is undermined.40 The membership account does a good job of shifting our focus toward the political consequences of persecution. This political element complements the “combination of violence and discrimination” alternative to understanding persecution. This is because it can single out the individual's experience of persecution as opposed to a broader account of discrimination or suffering; persecution plays a role in defining an individual's status within a community.

There are two things to note here. First, as we have already discussed, political theorists of refuge are not attempting to give an all-encompassing account of the wrongs of persecution. Their target instead is to think about persecution's relationship to asylum. Therefore, although this account may point us in the right direction, it potentially leaves something left to be said. Second, and relatedly, the denial of membership view focuses on the wrongs committed against individuals. This, again, is determined by the current structure of the refugee protection regime. An individual's entitlement to asylum depends on whether she can show that she specifically has a well-founded fear of persecution. As I will show in the following section, this focus may leave us unable to give voice to some of the pernicious social and political consequences of persecution. In other words, there remains a need for a more collective view of the wrong of persecution.

Rather than pushing against the denial of membership account, the following section aims to develop it by shifting our focus away from the political effects of persecution on the individual and turning towards persecution and political life more generally.

The previous accounts of the wrong of persecution have hinted toward a particular condition in which the persecuted individual is placed. The denial of membership view captures something important about the nature of persecution—that it undermines the persecuted person's place within the political and social world. In this section, I argue that the three previous potential explanations lack a proper account of the collective political consequences of persecution. The particularity of persecution cannot be explained by reference to these previous three elements, nor their aggregation. Instead, persecution creates, first, a particular condition for the individual, such that their social structure is turned against them but, more radically, a change in the condition of society itself. Governments and non-state actors not only violate the rights of individuals when they persecute them. They also violate the very political and social conditions that they ought to maintain. This account therefore presupposes the existence of particular moral and political obligations on the part of persecutors beyond “mere” obligations not to violate rights.

We already know that persecution is used by governments, neighborhoods, and family groups to remake the collective membership in their image. Persecution necessarily others those who are persecuted. Persecution thus not only undermines the individual's ability to claim rights within a particular sphere, but it does so in a way that reshapes and mobilizes society for this purpose. My account therefore locates at least some of the wrongness of persecution in how it affects political or social life more broadly. This is not to undermine the extreme effects that persecution has on the individuals who suffer it, and part of my account will remain focused on the experience of the persecuted. Persecution is wrong for at least all the reasons given so far: it is often violent, (wrongfully) discriminatory, and undermines the individual's claim to membership. But persecution is also wrong because it violates and undermines some pre-existing conditions from which obligations arise.

It is generally accepted that states ought to secure minimal conditions for political life, such as the protection of human rights or pursuing the promotion of justice. Ypi argues that an ideal political association depends on reciprocity, a condition that is fundamentally violated in the case of colonialism. In the context of persecution, the active pursuit of a group through violent means likewise renders such minimal conditions untenable. First, let us maintain a focus on the individual who suffers persecution. Many first-hand accounts highlight what it feels like to be persecuted. For instance, Holocaust survivors often note the intense fear that they felt, not only of Nazi officials and party members, but of everyone around them. Leah Hammerstein, a Jewish woman who worked in a German hospital on false papers describes it as an experience of “total isolation, total loneliness… You are among people, and you are like on an island all alone. There is nobody you can do to ask for help. You can nobody ask [sic.] for advice. You have to make life-threatening decisions all by yourself in a very short time, and you never knew whether your decision would be beneficial or detrimental to your existence. It was like playing Russian roulette with your life” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996).41 Raszka Galek Brunswick, who posed as a Polish Catholic on a German farm, said she chose that job because “I thought for my own sake, I would probably be safer to be away from everybody” (United States Holocaust Museum, 1989).42 Another woman who, with her sisters, gained false papers and pretended to be Christians living in Warsaw, recounted that her father told her: “No matter what happens, no matter who you meet, you cannot trust anybody” (Virginia Currents, 2020).43 Pointing out that people live in fear when they are persecuted, perhaps so obvious as to be benign. But this focus adds something to our political and moral vocabulary when thinking about persecution. It shows that persecution disrupts the basic conditions of pre-existing political society. Persecution changes how people interact with one another, even when individual acts of violence have yet to occur: the threat of potential violence is always present. This can extend further beyond the persecuted group. In Alone in Berlin Hans Fallada recounts the story of Otto and Elise Hampel who begin committing acts of civil disobedience against the Nazi regime. In the fictionalized version of their story, Fallada recounts how Otto and Elise could no longer trust anyone in their apartment block. When Otto was working on the factory floor, Fallada (1947) commented: “The air was thick with betrayal. No one could trust anyone else, and in that dismal atmosphere the men seemed to grow even duller, devolving into mechanical extensions of the machines they serviced.”44 The point I am making here is not, importantly, about individualized access to “relationship goods.”45 People who face persecution do suffer from a lack of interpersonal benefits, such that they are no longer able to trust those around them. Here the point I want to highlight, however, is that for victims of persecution, their entire social structure is often leveraged in way that violates pre-existing cooperative obligations and expectations.

This can potentially be seen more clearly in the case of family-based persecution. To take a contemporary example, many young people are expelled from their families after they come out as non-straight or gender non-conforming (Ritholtz, 2022).46 Such expulsion also often includes targeted harassment, hate campaigns, and ensuring that the individual does not have access to any friends or family members for support.47 For LGBT people fleeing persecution, the family is often the first locus of harm (Buxton and Ritholtz, 2021).48 Along with all the other wrongs committed in such an expulsion (the wrongs that we mentioned in the previous section), such families have also violated their pre-existing obligation towards this family member as a family member; they have changed who is part of the family and violated their prior associative obligations to them. Persecution is not therefore solely violence, discrimination, or lack of membership. It also involves up-ending pre-existing moral, social, and political obligations and the structures that depend on them.

Ronald Christenson argues that one of the key logics of persecution is the solidification of an in-group. Persecution, by naming and singling out an “other,” reifies and unionizes those remaining within the community. He writes: “Hitler persecuted Jews on behalf of the Volk, as Stalin persecuted kulaks in the name of the Proletariat, and as others have persecuted for The People, The Nation, The Church, The Race” (1968, 420).49 This central logic of persecution—the creation of cleavage between groups—can help us to locate the condition of the persecuted. Scholars of political violence have noted persecution's ability to reshape communities through violent displays and public executions. As Lee Ann Fujii (2021, 2) puts it in Show Time, “when actors put violence on display, they are bringing to life ideas about how the world should be and more specifically how it should be ordered—who should have power and who should be included and on what basis people should claim belonging.”50 Amy Louise Wood (2009, 11) makes a similar claim when discussing lynching in the United States. As events often involving large groups, lynchings allowed for the wrongful formation of an in-group and maintained a political order that maintained the domination of whites. While taking part in a lynch-mob, “the feel and push of the crowd created the sense of belonging and commonality that sustained the violence.”51 Such acts of violence therefore allowed people to reimagine the political order and their place within it.

One of the key logics of persecution, then, is the creation not only of an out group, but an in group. There are several ways in which persecution does this. First, persecution makes violence and hatred against a certain set of people appear sociologically legitimate, particularly when it is state-sanctioned: persecutory logics therefore become diffused throughout communities and individuals who had previously lived together peacefully can suddenly turn violent. During The Genocide of the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia, neighbors who had lived alongside one another for decades suddenly became violent adversaries. One man from Kistanje recounted how his neighbors—who he had known well—had suddenly turned against him and killed his children (Carmichael, 2006, 251).52 Similar events occurred in the 1994 Rwandan genocide where neighbors would turn on one another in response to a campaign of extreme hatred. Fujii (2009, 3) notes that killing one's neighbors is “more than just a physical act; it is an act of social violation. It destroys not just bodies, but bonds.”53 Persecution thus does not only draw on pre-existing fear and hatred, but also further solidifies such hatred. It changes the boundaries of the family, community, or state.54

A potentially more slippery way in which persecution disrupts and remakes the social network is through changing the persecuted person's identity of condition more generally. Persecution should therefore be recognized as a mechanism for social control, but also (and relatedly) as a way to change the understandings of a particular group within the social order. In Ain't I A Woman (1981, 32), bell hooks noted this important feature of Witch Trials: “The Salem Witchcraft Trials were an extreme expression of patriarchal society's persecution of women. They were a message to all women that unless they remained within passive, subordinate roles they would be punished, even put to death.”55 Persecution therefore did not only harm the women who were specifically targeted but harmed all women as a class. Feminist theorists have also discussed this diffuse feature of subjugation in discussions of rape. Jean Hampton (1995, 132) argues that rape “is a moral injury to all women… rape confirms that women are for men: to be used, dominated, treated as objects.”56 These forms of violence therefore change the position and character of the entire group, rather than only the individuals who suffer it.

The wrongness of persecution is therefore partly collective rather than individual. The accounts that we discussed earlier—violence, discrimination, and membership loss—focused on the individuals who suffer persecution. However, it is not only about individuals facing severe harms and wrongs, but the restructuring of society and the relations within it. It is perhaps helpful, here, to return to the relationship between discrimination and persecution, as this may be a feature that they share. That is, discrimination includes individualized harms, but it also harms the entire group. Discrimination against women does not only harm individual women, but it also harms women as a group. It is almost certainly the case that persecution is not sui generis. In putting forward the view that persecution disrupts and undermines our social world, I do not go so far as to claim that persecution exclusively creates such a condition. For instance, Hannah Arendt (1951) argues that totalitarianism is characterized by an extreme form of political loneliness.57 Jeremy Waldron (2004) argues that terrorism might also have a similar effect.58 Of course, neither terrorism nor totalitarianism has a necessarily targeted character. They are often by their nature indiscriminate. So, while they might have a similar effect on society, the distinctiveness of persecution can be at least partly maintained. The aim here is thus not to claim that persecution is totally unique, but simply to offer a richer political vocabulary when thinking about persecution.

I noted in the introduction that this more collective account of persecution has implications for potential redress. The main consequence is that we can now make sense of the fact that persecution is not undone when the violence or discrimination ends. Instead, if persecution results in the remaking of the community, then the resolution of persecution must follow the same path. In situations where persecution has taken place, then, compensatory redress for loss of property of individual harms will not be sufficient.59 A more collective approach will be required. This helps to explain why overcoming a history of persecution is so difficult. Many states still struggle with legacies of persecution and the long shadow that they leave behind them. Even for acts of persecution in the distance past, we may still require a restorative approach that seeks to reckon with the impact such a history still has on modern society. Apologies for that history are a recent potential step forward. But attempting to think about these legacies for our current state of affairs would demand a more radical project. Many accounts of reparative justice already focus on rebuilding community. The view of persecution that I have put forward merely offers another reason in favor of them.

Many questions remain about the nature and effects of persecution. This paper has attempted to add one more explanation of the wrongness of persecution to the mix: that persecution undermines the minimal conditions of political life and changes the social and political world. Such an explanation does not only locate the wrongness of persecution in the harm that it does to the individual—though this is surely an extremely important element—but also points to the social and political order more broadly. This allows us to understand persecution better in at least two ways. First, it recenters persecution's place within politics as opposed to a purely ethical account. That is, we need not rely only on moral theory to explain why persecution is bad; we can give an answer from the perspective internal to politics as well. Second, this view allows us to see the relationship between persecution and other forms of political and social control. If persecution is to be understood as undermining co-citizens ability to interact with one another, then more generalized campaigns of violence, such as those occurring under totalitarianism, might be made more legible in this way as well.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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