Restyling the subject of responsibility in international relations

Vivienne Jabri

pp. 161-184

in: Hakan Seckinelgin, Hideaki Shinoda (eds), Ethics and international relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001

Abstract

Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognising him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns `we" into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible, the foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.¹