SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The chapter sets out a set of conceptual resources with which to renew attention to the issues of ‘access to’ and ‘exclusion from’ legal justice, with particular attention to legal justice in the context of refugee claims. Drawing on scholarship that resists the opposition of absence and presence and distinguishes various different types of presence, as well as extensive empirical work with asylum seekers claiming refugee status, the chapter shows that they are frequently both present and absent during important parts of the proceedings. The law’s over-emphasis on bodily presence, however, often conceals these complexities. By highlighting this effect, the authors demonstrate that thinking about the relationship between law, space and refugee migration in terms of multiple forms of absence and presence is an important way to reveal how exclusions from legal justice arise.