Inter-nationalism : Exploring the Liminal Space Between Nation-States and its Effects on Refugee Experience and Identity

Abstract

As the world experiences a global refugee crisis, with the highest number of displaced persons in modern history, there is a call to reexamine the way we conceptualize the refugee, especially in relation to the nation-state. As nations respond to the crisis with xenophobic behavior and nationalist exclusion policies, it is essential to understand the ways in which nation-states, nationalism, and the global state system affect refugees' experiences and identities within the process of forced displacement. While migration studies currently employs transnationalism as the primary tool to study the relationship between the nation-state and the migrant, this framework is no longer accurate for understanding the liminal experiences of refugees. By studying migration, identity, and belonging within the national 'here'/'there' dichotomy, we fail to properly acknowledge the existence of inter-national spaces that occur between, outside, and around the global nation-state system. This paper develops the concept of inter nationalism in order to analyze refugees' experiences with liminality and the effect this has on their loss of rights, identity transformation, and global reception. Ultimately, the global state system and the subsequent effects of nationalism place refugees in a liminal space/temporality that problematizes their identity formation and causes them to be inter national, thus increasing the vulnerability, marginalization, and negative reception they face.