Paper short abstract:

Anthropologists are well suited to document the consequences of neoliberalism on vulnerable-made populations. However, research results are usually neglected. How can we be successful in installing processes that effectively incorporate our knowledge production into decision-making processes?

Paper long abstract:

Neoliberalism is a political, economic, and social system that claims that the market should be out of the government’s control as well as an ideology that affects subjectivities (Brown 2015). Neoliberal ideology has permeated every sphere of society, including the migration management apparatus—through tropes of self-sufficiency, personal responsibility, and privatization (Riva and Routon 2020), as well as through dominant representations of normative resettlement, and rhetorical dimensions of agency and self-representation (Dykstra-DeVette 2018). Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic has given states the perfect alibi to enable the closure the borders and thus ‘a way out’ to disavow their international responsibilities.

In this scenario, anthropologists are indeed well suited to document and examine the consequences of privatisation on vulnerable-made populations and funds are allocated to conduct such research. According to Barak Kalir and Céline Cantat (2020), between 2014-2020 the EU designated more than 3 billion Euros to finance research on asylum and migration, and yet, the results of this evidence-based research has been neglected by those same states that have chosen to fund such studies. What I propose for our roundtable is to include a conversation about the gap that exists between: the potential of anthropology to make a difference regarding the people who are most affected by neoliberal measures, and the mechanisms that make a difference—including activism and resistance movements. In other words, how can we be successful in installing processes that effectively incorporate our knowledge production into decision-making processes?