Mikhail Bakhtin and International Refugee Law: A Dialogic Approach to Treaty Negotiations and Cross-Cultural Legal Hearings

The current catastrophes in the Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, and the ongoing calamities in Afghanistan, Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Venezuela and elsewhere, all call out for a humanitarian approach to International Refugee Law (IRL). Rather than advancing towards this objective, the international community finds itself at an impasse, in which states act to enforce borders, repel potential asylum seekers, deny requisite visa and travel documents, and punish intermediaries. As a consequence, there are 35,000,000 people who have fled persecution in their country of origin in search of protection, and are currently in the limbo of refugee camps and border spaces, facing uncertain futures in potential host countries. This tragedy could be overcome if states would abide by the tenets of International Refugee Law (IRL) and, for those claimants who meet the conditions set forth by refugee treaties, provide a pathway towards protection and integration. In this article, I will offer a reading of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin's work as a means of crafting an approach to understanding and applying the tenets of IRL, and in so doing make a contribution to the overlap between law and humanities.