What is asylum? More than protection, less than citizenship

Increasingly, States implement extraterritorial asylum policies that seek to keep recognized refugees safe in the region of origin or transit. With policies that offer protection elsewhere the meaning and purpose of asylum is in need of serious rethinking. In this article, I conceptually clarify the normative notion of asylum. First, I will demonstrate how in the history and theory of international refugee law protection has taken precedence over asylum. Whereas protection is typically understood as protection from refoulement, the concept of asylum is theoretically underexposed in law. Second, I will discuss the understanding of asylum as the conferral of new citizenship in normative theories on refugees. I will then make the case that both protection and citizenship are problematic in conceptualizing asylum. Drawing on the drafting histories of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the two subsequent Statelessness Conventions as well as on Arendt’s reflections on the spatiality of the law, this article elaborates the notion of an unplaced person as a new searchlight to understand the predicament of the refugee and to rethink asylum. I will make the case that asylum is more than protection as legal scholars commonly assume and less than citizenship as political philosophers tend to believe. Instead I suggest that asylum is to be properly understood as a legal place of one’s own where protection can be enjoyed anew.