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- Convenors:
-
Sabine Strasser
(University of Bern)
Martin Sökefeld (LMU Munich)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 01/037
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In this roundtable we will challenge the current global orthodoxy of exclusion and examine possibilities to restore access to protection of people in need as a common good.
Long Abstract:
The militarisation of a global apartheid, the fortification of many national borders around the world, an increasing number of victims of deterrence and detours and the criminalization of solidarity with people seeking international protection fundamentally violate the right to asylum. States and their border guard agencies violently prevent people from entering their territory, willingly exposing them to dangers such as dehydration in the Sahara, drowning in the Channel or the Mediterranean and freezing to death as recently at the Polish-Belarus border. Since World War II, a common sense about the protection of refugees had developed which was legally enshrined in the Geneva Convention guaranteeing the right to apply for asylum of those who have to leave their countries in distress. Yet currently, the Geneva Convention with its minimal standards is practically abrogated on a daily basis by indiscriminate pushbacks. Appeals to keep borders open and thus protection accessible are rejected as naïve.
Understanding the international protection regime as commons that guarantee "the right to have rights" (Arendt), this roundtable seeks to interrogate genealogies of the current uncommoning of asylum and discuss possible interventions to restore the right to refuge. We invite short statements that challenge the current global orthodoxy and common sense of exclusion and discuss ideas and practices that seek to restore access to protection and solidarities from anthropological perspectives on human rights and global ir/responsibility.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Michal Buchowski (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Contribution short abstract:
Attitudes towards refugees/asylum seekers in Poland apparently depend on political interests and provenance of those seeking protection. In the last decade authorities' practices and society's reactions varied between rejection and enthusiastic acceptance. How can this un/commoning be interpreted?
Contribution long abstract:
During and after two Chechens wars (1994-1996 and 1999-2009) around hundred thousand (Muslim) Chechens entered Poland and were welcomed by both authorities and society. Polish citizens’ attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers – at least according to the European Social Survey’s data – were then consistently most positive in the whole EU (two-thirds in favour). During the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015 Polish right-wing populist authorities rejected the EU plan of relocation of (mainly) Syrian migrants to the country. Simultaneously, an Islamophobic campaign, reinforced by media coverage inciting cultural anxiety and moral panic, was launched. In result, anti-refugees stance dominated (three-quarter against accepting them in 2017). In 2021 thousands of asylum-seekers from Middle East tried to enter the EU by crossing Polish-Belarussian border. They were staunchly rejected by the authorities, which again invoked Islamophobic sentiments with overt racialised connotations. Pushbacks of migrants have been legalised. On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and within three weeks more than two million refugees fled to Poland. In contrast to the practices observed in the past seven years, refugees from Ukraine have been welcomed, hosted, and helped by spontaneously self-organised civilians. Is there any pattern in these changing attitudes towards refugees? Has the right to refuge been restored, or is this the case of ‘uncommoning asylum’, a system in which only selected groups are privileged?
Kiri Santer (University of Bern)
Contribution short abstract:
Cooperative deterrence and border externalisation are legally complex and involve an entangled and transnational web of actors from states, IOs, and EU agencies. Anthropologists should describe the intricacies of these processes but also characterise them in terms of North-South border (in)justice.
Contribution long abstract:
Cooperative deterrence is composed of measures and policies designed “to conscript countries of origin and of transit to effect migration control on behalf of the developed world” (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Hathaway, 2015). It has become the dominant paradigm enabling Europe to de facto suspend the right to asylum, without having to renounce its duties under international law. Processes of cooperative deterrence are legally complex and involved an entangled and transnational web of actors from states, international organisations, and EU agencies. As anthropologists of policy and border regimes, understanding and describing these processes presents us with a challenge: how to articulate the complex politico-legal border assemblages that produce these systematic exclusions without getting drowned in technicalities? How to trace the construction of these policies of exclusion in the variety of locations where they are designed and implemented? And how to precisely communicate the effects of these assemblages on refugee law for example, without reinstating the dichotomies of legitimate refugees versus illegitimate economic migrants? The contribution to this roundtable emphasises the need to name cooperative deterrence not as a cooperative endeavour to improve border management but as an indefinite suspension of the right to seek asylum (understood as commons and not just as legal protection). Following Achiume’s (2019) conceptualisation of migration from the Third to the First World, as decolonisation, this paper further emphasises that beyond technical understandings of legal regimes of asylum and their suspension, there is a pressing need to reconceptualise North-South migration as a question of historical justice.
Gerhild Perl (University of Trier)
Contribution short abstract:
How can a proclaimed ‘watershed moment’ be mobilized to unveil the racist dynamics underpinning European asylum procedures and to intervene collectively? What potential for radical imagination might such a moment have for anthropological critique?
Contribution long abstract:
The bureaucratic hurdles in asylum procedures wear down. These procedures are lengthy, uncertain, exhausting, externally determined, and restrict the freedom of movement. However, in the European Union, we can currently observe a joint and unparalleled agreement on the prompt and non-bureaucratic processing of asylum and temporary protection procedures for refugees from Ukraine, which is extremely important and necessary. Regardless, the question of why these procedures take so long for refugees from other parts of the world and from supposedly ‘safe countries of origin’ is equally pressing. This vast disparity reveals yet another dimension of ‘uncommoning asylum,’ reflecting a racialized hierarchy of humanity. Several political and public stakeholders justify these differences by invoking shared European values such as democracy and liberalism. Ironically, these values are rendered ad absurdum by implementing the overtly unequal treatment of people seeking international protection. Extreme right-wing politicians put this regime of global apartheid bluntly. Taking advantage of the war, they have intensified their harmful discourse against migrants by drawing a boundary between ‘innocent European’ refugees and young, often ‘male Muslims who threaten to invade and colonize Europe’.
I want to discuss if and how this ‘watershed moment of European history’ – as high-ranking EU politicians have called the Russian government’s war against Ukraine – can be mobilized to unveil the historically constituted racist dynamics underpinning European asylum procedures and to intervene collectively. What potential for radical imagination might such a watershed moment have for anthropological critique, knowledge production, and transmission?
Siobhan McGuirk (University of Almería)
Contribution short abstract:
As states strive to foreclose and popular movements struggle to defend asylum access, multinational corporations seek maximum profit from border fortification regimes. Their practices allow states to ‘outsource’ protection obligations––and demand new, transnational disruption tactics in response.
Contribution long abstract:
Between state efforts to limit access to asylum and transnational popular movements fighting to defend international protection regimes stand private corporations manoeuvring to profit from interconnected systems of “deterrence”, border fortification, detention and deportation. In this short statement, I first provide a brief overview of the priorities and practices of some of the multinational commercial actors operating across borders to this end. Next, I highlight how states’ subcontracting of asylum system procedures also allows them to effectively ‘outsource’ responsibility for claimants’ lives and wellbeing. I close by noting some of the protest and disruption tactics adopted by immigrants’ rights activists worldwide that are specifically designed to halt and undo the corporatisation of asylum.
Rine Vieth (McGill University)
Contribution short abstract:
Taking seriously the fact that migrants are being required to demonstrate documentary evidence of their sexuality and/or religious belief, I argue that this unsettling disjuncture highlights the UK's refusal to take seriously the implications of embracing exclusion.
Contribution long abstract:
As the UK's "hostile environment policy" approaches its tenth anniversary, migration in the UK remains fraught: the Windrush scandal highlights the precarity of settled migrants, the UK's refusal to take in Ukrainian refugees emphasized how particular migrants are seen as more valuable (or are only valuable for labour), and post-Brexit bordering practices have led to the creation of the Borders Bill. Accepting the commons, I argue, is a challenge to particular understandings of state power; it challenges not just the borders of nation-states, but also the capacities of the state offices to assess "deservingness" of migrants seeking humanitarian status. Drawing on my research on UK migration bureaucracies, I argue that states' assessments of migrants claiming on the basis of sexuality and/or religious belief provide two case studies to show what happens when states refuse to take seriously the implications of the current regimes. Taking seriously the fact that migrants are being required to demonstrate documentary evidence of their sexuality and/or religious belief, I argue that this disjuncture highlights the UK's refusal to take seriously the implications of embracing exclusion. What happens when policies of exclusion are recognized as inhumane, but policies of welcoming are rejected? How do individuals refuse this exclusion of humanitarian migrants, with or without reference to international humanitarian regimes?