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- Convenors:
-
Ville Laakkonen
(Tampere University)
Gerhild Perl (University of Trier)
Saila Kivilahti (Tampere University)
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- Discussant:
-
Laura Huttunen
(Tampere University)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel addresses different moments and modes of disappearances in the context of undocumented migration. We suggest that disappearances are a powerful lens to analyze policies and politics as well as intimate and cultural practices.
Long Abstract:
Since the end of the Cold War and the ensuing enlargement of the Schengen Area, people have been disappearing at Europe's southern fringes. Current EU border policies, including visa regimes, surveillance and the regulation of movement, have made the crossing to Europe a dangerous undertaking for some. With the gradual expansion of border control, the Mediterranean Sea has become the 'world's deadliest border' (Albahari 2015). However, the Mediterranean is not the only site of death and disappearance. Around the world, walls are being built, fences erected, military technologies used to prevent people from the global south entering the global north. At every stage of the journey, migrants are dealing with violent restrictions to their everyday lives. States intrude migrants' lifeworlds intimately, causing marginalisation and disappearances, via e.g. illegalization, detention and removal. Against this backdrop, our panel explores how trans/national states and disappearances are intimately intertwined by discussing manifold disappearances such as death, detainment, deportation, displacement, abuse and killing in migrants' countries of origin, transit and destination. We invite papers that explore different cases of and approaches to disappearances within contemporary migration regimes. We are interested in the questions of how states and state actors respond to and conceptualize disappearances; if and how families of the disappeared search, take action and organize themselves; and what kind of politics disappearances engender. We seek to develop new conceptualisations of contemporary disappearances as a powerful lens to address key anthropological issues such as governance, violence, citizenship, kinship, death and burial, personhood and identity.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the experiences of ‘detainable’ people in the UK asylum and Immigration system, with a focus on those ‘locked out’ of their asylum accommodation during a year of fieldwork in Glasgow, Scotland, and their attempts to navigate forms of disappearance and visibility.
Paper long abstract:
People within the UK asylum and immigration system must navigate a multitude of carceral techniques and spaces, often imbued with the threat of disappearance and questions of visibility. Based on 12 months’ fieldwork in Glasgow, Scotland, working with people going through both immigration detention and the asylum housing and support system, this paper will examine how people within this system try to work through questions of their ‘detainability’ and the possibility of being ‘disappeared’ through detention and deportation, in the everyday. It focuses on an attempt to evict 300 people from asylum accommodation in Glasgow, through so-called ‘lock-change evictions’ - replacing the locks on someone’s house while they are out – and the campaigns against this. Here, the physical boundaries of a house may become imbued with the ‘carcerality’ of changed locks, house searches, and moved belongings - but ‘staying put’ and engaging in strategic visibility, often through NGO and activist groups, can be a way to regain some control. Neighbourhood organising against disappearances and the spectral threat of a ‘lock-change’ must respond to the possibility of being ‘locked out’ of home, as well as ‘locked in’ an Immigration Removal Centre, with both becoming sites of disappearance. Concurrently, methodological questions of ethics, participation and observation require new consideration to avoid replicating carceral forms of surveillance and ‘capture’, to consider anthropology’s difficult role in making disappearance visible: to explore potential new futures beyond the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and their locks.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses EU bordering practices and techniques in Mediterranean migratory contexts. I argue that there is a distinct regimen of illegalisation and precarity at work which routinely inflicts a particular form of disappearability on people on the move as means of deterrence.
Paper long abstract:
Based on fieldwork in the Mediterranean, I argue that death and/or disppearance, through drowning, hypothermia, exhaustion, deprivation of medical care, and accidents, to name but a few instances, has become an integral part of border enforcement at the European Union's southern border zones. To engage analytically with such an instantiation of border violence, media spectacles, and humanitarian impulses, I propose to utilise the notion of 'disappearability'.
I draw from Coutin's notion of 'spaces of nonexistence' (2000) and recent anthropological discussions of the dislocation of the state borders (e.g. Andersson 2014; Heller and Pezzani 2017), to explore 'disappearability' as distinct social condition of precarity. This is to make sense of the myriad of disappearances, unknown destinies, and unnamed bodies of migrants attempting to cross to Europe, or the danger of meeting such fate, in which the particularities of the various migratory contexts are always implicated. Vessels which are not sea-worthy, sanctions imposed on carrier companies, regimes of surveillance, interception, and pushbacks, threats of deportation and detention, passages through rough terrain or in unsafe vehicles, human trafficking, and the state of being undocumented all reflect, and contribute to, this disappearable state.
'Disappearability' is a produced condition of everyday existence, which does not necessarily lead to a disappearance but does, nevertheless, put racialised and illegalised migrants under a particular risk. Furthermore, the state of being disappearable is a social space that manifest and disappears; while not at the forefront at all times, it looms above and whispers: 'you are not welcome here'.
Paper short abstract:
By approaching push-backs reported at Croatia's borders since 2016 as a series of multiple and multilevel disappearances, this paper strives to outline and conceptualize the structure of push-backs as a deportation technique of the contemporary European migration regime at the fringes of EU.
Paper long abstract:
The final closure of the ad hoc Balkan refugee corridor in March 2016 did not stop the movement of people across the Balkans towards the EU. Men, women and children continued to move along the pathway known as the Balkan route, while various physical and non-physical obstacles and deterrence practices started to proliferate in countries along the route. These obstacles and practices, created a so-called spatial substitution effect and fostered widespread use of riskier, longer, costly and dangerous migratory routes. Thus, today one of the most used branches of the Balkan route - the one activated in 2018, which goes through north-west Bosnia and Herzegovina and clandestinely proceeds into Croatia - leads through minefield areas left over from the 1990s war, deep forests and mountains, several rivers, police patrolled areas and areas under heavy surveillance. Manifold disappearances (disappearances of people, things, goods, personal objects, social, telecommunication and other networks etc.) are an integral part of this partition of the route. Manifested in different forms, from deportation to confiscation, they are condensed in the expulsion practices known as push-backs. By approaching push-backs reported at Croatia's eastern borders since early 2016 as a series of multiple, successive and multilevel disappearances, this paper strives to outline and conceptualize the structure of push-backs as a deportation technique of the contemporary European migration regime at the fringes of EU.
Paper short abstract:
In North of Italy, hundreds of undocumented asylum seekers have been facing expulsion from the so-called "reception system." I consider their condition as a de facto "administrative disappearance": the social services have been governing them as homeless, not considering their specific necessities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper stems from an ongoing research on homeless asylum seekers in Italy (and, specifically, Milan) and aims to highlight a governmentality directed towards this population.
Since 2011, Milan has become the destination for hundreds of undocumented asylum seekers (in different stages of their application for protection) coming from non-EU countries. The analysis of the procedures enacted by the state and local institutions makes it clear that those people have been disappearing as an administrative category.
In the last two years, the Milanese Prefecture has expelled some five hundred applicants for international protection; also, those whose legal path ended up in a rejection must be considered. At the same time, as the municipality-run reception centers closed, a reorganization of the Immigration Office has brought to the shutdown of a municipal department explicitly oriented to asylum and reception.
The new organization of the Immigration Office sees homeless asylum seekers only as sans-papiers with the result of dissolving their specific needs and problematics and reserving for them the same treatment as Italian and European citizens living on the street.
The analysis makes some questions arise: What happens to the institution of asylum when the administrative category of applicant disappears? Which practices enable and reinforce this dynamic? Which other forms of disappearance descend from the act of not dealing with somebody in light of his or her application for protection? Referring to the work of Didier Fassin, I argue that this process can be understood as part of a broader re-conceptualization of humanitarianism.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation examines the issue of enforced disappearances in three contexts: Chilean (during the time of general A. Pinochet's junta and now), Colombian (as a result of civil war) and Mexican (as a effect of illegal migration to the USA and organized crime in this state).
Paper long abstract:
The Inter-American Convention on the Forced Disappearance of Persons, adopted in 1994, said,
that enforced disappearance is "a grave and abominable offence against the inherent dignity of the human beings". According to official figures, 1,200 people were victims of enforced disappearances during military rule in Chile. The bodies of the overwhelming majority of them have not been found
to this day despite the efforts of their families, specialists in forensic medicine and some politicians. The current strikes in Chile also result in forced disappearances of protesters. In 2009,
the representatives of the Colombian justice system revealed that 28,000 people became forced disappeared during the country, civil, war. The long inability to reach agreement between the parties to the conflict hampered the search for their remains, but since 2016 this situation has been improving. It is difficult to estimate the exact number of forced disappeared in Mexico, both migrants from Central and South America, trying to reach the US, and local victims of gang wars, violence and kidnapping. Cautious government data from 2019 indicated 40,000 such people. This very general outline
of the problem indicates that the issue of forced disappearances in Latin America has a long tradition and is gaining strength. Its victims are both external migrants, searching for a new, better, life perspective in other country, and people internally dispersed throughout the country, fearing for their lives because of political instability, violence or human rights violations, made by the representatives of government, in their states.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the activism of two migrant women organisations following the death of a female asylum-seeker. The groups criticised Germany's refugee accommodation system, police negligence and the lack of media foucs. I also discuss aspects of Rita's funeral ritual after months of actions.
Paper long abstract:
The racialization of asylum-seekers at refugee camps and the failings of the German migration regime with respect to their housing allocation system became apparent when Rita, an asylum seeker from Kenya disappeared on April 7, 2019. It took the police three months to find her remains in a forest near the secluded camp in Hohenleipisch, in the state of Brandenburg, where she had been residing with her family. Activist groups such as Women in Exile and International Women's Space heavily criticised Gremany's mass refugee accommodation system, police negligence, and the lack of attention about her disappearance and death in the mainstream media. Following, six months of actions and activism, Rita's ashes were buried in Berlin and members of the Kenyan diaspora and a few activists attended the funeral.
This paper drawing on an ethnographic methodology traces the forms of resistance that anti-racist, feminist and migrant groups in Berlin and Brandenburg, adopted in response to Rita's death. Much scholarship on refugee activism has focused on struggles for citizenship (e.g.: Ataç, Rygeil, and Stier 2016) rather than resistance countering racialized exclusion of refugees from the state. This paper examines the ways in which initiatives adopted anti-racist and feminist perspectives, which enabled them to publicise and politicise Rita's untimely death. I also comment on how members of the Kenyan diaspora in Berlin came together at her burial to lend support to her family and children.
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses social and individual dimensions of the identity of disappeared undocumented migrants. The search and identification procedures relying on individual identity could benefit from more social consideration of identities fluid in time, place and purpose.
Paper long abstract:
The paper analyses the various identity strategies of undocumented migrants on the route from Western Africa to Spain. My preliminary empirical data suggests that persons can use different identities in different situations if it helps in getting or staying in the transit or destination countries, and in many instances, identity is not considered bound in a simple way to a specific individual. For example, it is not uncommon to take the identity of a deceased relative or purchase fake identification documents if they allow you a possibility to migrate. With this in mind, if an undocumented migrant disappears on the route, the relatives base their search and identification procedures in different considerations of a person than the authorities. The relatives seem to operate with more socially embedded understanding of identifiers, while the authorities rely more on individual identifiers.
Individual identity has not always been prerequisite to the bureaucratic activities, but has been stimulated by the movement of people and modern concepts of individuality (Caplan & Torpey 2001). Based on my preliminary fieldwork data, I argue that the search and identification procedures used by the authorities, currently relying on the protocols based on individual identity, could benefit from more social consideration of identities fluid in time, place and purpose. The analysis is based on academic discussions of persons in relation to cultural representations, categories and practices, and on the notions of various and changing subjectivities and identities (e.g. Busby 1999, Mosko 2010, Retsikas 2010).
Paper short abstract:
In Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement, political activists that engage in their 'home' countries' party politics risk forced disappearance. As a result, political actors use religious spaces for security, transforming the forms of political practice within the camp.
Paper long abstract:
In Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement, refugees are prohibited from participating in party politics by the camp's managerial bodies, the UNHCR and the Kenyan Refugee Affairs Secretariat, in accordance to the OAU refugee convention. These institutions attempt to limit refugees' political activity to community leadership roles that they bestow and control. Refugees that engage in their 'home' countries' party politics in these camps risk forced disappearance by various trans/national state actors working on behalf of foreign governments, such as the South Sudanese government. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research in Kakuma and Kalobeyei, this paper examines the effect of disappearances on two political groups and their actors, the SPLM-IO and a Somali organisation. The analysis builds upon scholarship that engages with 'shadow' organisations (Nugent, 1999; Nordstrom, 2004) to critically examine the effect of forced disappearance on political communities (Huttunen, 2016) and their understandings of the state (Krupa & Nugent, 2015). I argue that forced disappearances of political actors produce an effect that shapes an understanding of the state, while simultaneously changing the political actors' social lives and political communities. This effect also has tangible and material consequences, forcing political activists and agitators to operate in spaces not considered political by the camp authorities, such as churches and Sufi lodges. Within these religious spaces, political actors reconstruct understandings of the Kenyan state and also their 'home' states of South Sudan and Somalia.