Why grateful refugees are epistemically harmed

Abstract

The belief that refugees should demonstrate gratitude is prevalent in popular culture and also noticeable in political theory, especially when questioning whether refugees are required to adhere to the laws of their host country. This paper addresses the ongoing discussion about whether refugees ought to be grateful to the state that hosts them, with some scholars suggesting that refugees have an obligation to demonstrate gratitude. Michael Rescher and Jason D’Cruz both advocate for this particular obligation, asserting that it underpins their political duties to the host nation. I show why such a duty reinforces different kinds of epistemic oppression against forcibly displaced people. This means that refugee gratitude generates diverse infringements on their capacity to utilize epistemically shared resources and contribute to the process of knowledge creation. Initially, I examine whether gratitude-based accounts of refuge produce first-order, testimonial epistemic forms of oppression, which seems not to be the case at first glance. Then, I consider second-order, hermeneutical epistemic kinds of oppression and show that refugees under obligations of gratitude lack the appropriate resources to communicate their experiences. Finally, I claim that the epistemic issues refugee gratitude raises are systemically inadequate –that is, they can only be solved if we replace this normative framework. Also, I took up the challenge of explaining why refugee gratitude can be regarded as an irreducible epistemic form of oppression—that is, one that is not intrinsically tied to social, political and historical formations, but to its epistemic system itself.