My research explores the historical relationship between international sovereignty and human rights in the United States. In particular, I am interested in how the processes of immigration and deportation created contradictions between sovereignty and rights and how bureaucrats in the United States and their counterparts around the world attempted to resolve those contradictions. Their attempts to reconcile these conflicting impulses determined who had access to the nation-state and reimagined an increasingly interconnected world where every person had rights.
The people responsible for this reconciliation were not policymakers, individual migrants, or activists, but most often mid-level bureaucrats attempting to make sense of conflicting policies and visions of world order. That such individuals maintained the cogs of the international machine is even more notable because of how often their work remains invisible in our historiography. More often than not, their success was in rendering their labor invisible. My work uncovers their struggles and negotiations, and establishes the significance of their labor in constructing and maintaining the international order.
Book project
In my book project, The Undeportables: Diplomacy at the Periphery of Human Rights, I investigate how American foreign policy, particularly the non-recognition of Soviet Russia through the 1920s, reshaped other governmental initiatives, such as the development of an immigration and deportation apparatus to manage foreign bodies in the US. I analyze what it meant that the US federal government, as it enacted increasingly strict immigration protocols after World War I, could not deport a group of people that they had explicitly identified as undesirable.
I argue that the absence of a diplomatic guarantor of rights, as was the case for immigrants from Russia, forced the government to articulate what rights a person was entitled to as a human, rather than as a citizen of another nation-state.
Set against the backdrop of the US emergence as an imperial power from the turn of the century through World War II, the project reconstructs the transnational networks, nation-state power dynamics, and emerging rights practices that marked a shift in rights talk. Attention to this shift reveals the mutuality of transnational networks and nation-state sovereignty and repositions the US as a participant of rights discourse, not a bystander to it.
Echoes of history
Many of my inquiries into human rights, statelessness, sovereignty, and deportation resonate directly with current political events, and the questions that motivate my research program are therefore particularly urgent. Who has access to the nation-state? What responsibility do intermediary countries have in assisting with deportations? How can migrants, who do not have access to citizenship rights from their country of origin, attempt to protect themselves from a nation hostile to their very presence? The ongoing contests over these questions are part of the very fabric of the US immigration and foreign policy bureaucracy.
My work uncovers the roots of the debates unfolding in the policy world over these and other critical questions. Their attempts to reconcile these conflicting impulses determined who had access to the nation-state and reimagined an increasingly interconnected world where every person had rights.
Savitri Maya Kunze 