Refugees and forced migration Flashcards
Arendt (1951)
The idea of the right to have rights comes back to Hannah Arendt. Unless there is a right to have rights, there is the likelihood of states being able to chip away at rights.
This has laid the ground for disasters; the refusal to recognise certain people as citizens that have rights. Stateless people are generated and normalised in the international political system. They have lost their citizenship rights. Human rights do not step up to the mark.
Agier (2002)
Camps present particular temporal conditions; they are sites of permanent temporariness (no clear end point). The social life of camps as “quarantine is their horizon”. The camp essentially acts as a border of containment within the nation state. The populations contained within these borders are deemed problematic in some way.
BUT the very survival of the camp and its organization creates opportunity for encounters, exchanges and reworking of the identities of those who reside there. The people who are forced into this massively reproduced segregation have to redefine themselves within a wholly unknown and unprecedented context
Example: Dadaab, in North-Eastern Kenya
The refugees are grouped into various blocks according to their origin, ethnicity and even clan status. All are given the same materials to live off (tarp, mattress and some kitchen utensils)
However, what has been emerging are different configurations of the space. In the Ethiopian neighbourhoods, there are high population densities with narrow alley ways and high fences. However, the Somalian areas are characterised by family enclosures with sparse spaces in between these dwellings.
In all cases there are the emergence of small ‘businesses’ (although not technically legal). These are generally funded by remittances. These activities presuppose the uses that transform the everyday vision that refugees have of space in their daily lives.
This case study brings into light a social differentiation within a camp. Camps create identity (both ethnic and non-ethnic) more so than they reproduce, maintain of reinforce. They are a relational and dynamic experience with identity
The camp engenders experiences of hybrid socialization that is plural.
Darling (2017)
Looking at the city with the lens of refugees offers insight into the dynamics of refugee experiences of increasingly fragmented forms of sovereign authority of exceptional spaces of borer control.
The refugee camp is constructed as the ‘proper’ space for refugee populations. It is a technology of spatial segregation that enables to containment of those displaced. This can be seen to be actively preventing integration into societies.
HOWEVER, many camps are now becoming part of cities, or are at least on the margins of the urban. Urban refugees are only a recent concern of the UNHCR, moving beyond considering these people as anomalies and spontaneous groups, lacking the legitimacy of those in camps. But, it is only when refugee mobility is ordered through practices of managed resettlement that a shift from camp to city is framed as a solution rather than intrusion.
The role of the city becomes a container for individuals whose lives are placed on hold by the classification of sovereign attempts to manage migration. Cities and their inhabitants are denied the agency to shape the dispersal process
The role of the city in border control must also must be recognized. Cities are increasingly practicing modes of local border controls. The border is extended into everyday life and the city is situated as a strategic location to do so.
Informality in the city is highlighting the ever-shifting urban relationship between the legal/illegal, legitimate/Illegitimate and the authorized/unauthorized. These practices constantly question the definitional limits and conditions of the formal.
Kriechauf (2018)
Kreichauf (2018) terms the ‘campization’ of refugee infrastructure in Europe. This refers to the built structures that are not suited for housing are increasingly being used to house refugees
The growth of camps in Europe serves three purposes…
1) Containment ensures that refugees remain subjects of the state
2) Development of camps as a means of employing and legitimating exclusive alien acts – camps justify the legal framings of exclusivity
3) Camps make refugee groups visible and begin a process of ‘territorial stigmatization’
There is a problem with this strategy in negotiating how to move from this space as an emergency response to the process of integration with the wider population. In an attempt to do so, the government developed ‘tempohomes’ across the city BUT this did not necessarily increase integration.
Case study: Athens
After the closing of the Balkans route in 2015 and the EU-Turkey agreement, the role of the city changed from short term assistance to long-term responsibilities of refugees. This has forced the city to provide broader based support and accommodation. The majority of these sites are in secluded areas that are fenced and controlled. It has been identified that the state has failed to provide basic humanitarian services in all of these sites; prompting NGOs and volunteers to fill the gaps.
Case study: Hovestaden, Copenhagen
This city has had a long tradition of accommodating asylum seekers. BUT, most shelters are located remotely from any urban settlements. This is part of Denmark’s objective to segregate asylum seekers into remote areas and disperse accepted refugees into low-immigrant areas. Neither asylum seekers, nor accepted refugees have the legal opportunity to live in Copenhagen or its suburbs.
Oesch (2017)
The refugee camp had been widely captures are an extra-territorial space of exception. In camps, refugees are stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life
We should be looking at the camp within a framework of ambiguity; it is simultaneously a space of inclusion and exclusion- the author terms this a zone of indistinction.
Case Study: Al- Huessein camp, Jordan
This camp was planned in a disciplinary and functional way. It has a regular grid plan that stands out from the other urban infrastructure that surrounds it. The camp was therefore planned as a space designated to host a population which was perceived as homogenous
Most of the facilities are located in the centre of the camp. This reflects Bentham’s panopticon- providing care and control at the same time. The ration distribution building is located in the centre of the city and has a rooftop terrace that that government own- providing a 360 view of the camp from above
BUT, although the camp has official boundaries is does not have any physical manifestations of these boundaries. This is a conciliation of discipline and liberalism- allowing circulation inwards and outwards of the camp.
This is mainly due to the fact that Palestinian refugees were not required by law to live in a camp- they were instead set up to assist poor refugees who needed assistance. The camp is now fully integrated into the built environment. Inhabitants are even able to sell or rent their houses (not legal but it tolerated).
Chimni (1998)
In the post-1945 period the policy of Northern states has moved from the neglect of refugees in the Third World, to their use as pawns in Cold War politics, to their containment now.
As long as the Cold War lasted, its humanitarian language assumed an autonomy which, from the beginning of the sixties, extended in its spatial reach to even non-Cold War refugees in the Third World. BUT, once the Cold War ended, and the refugee no longer possessed ideological or geopolitical value. This rethinking translated into a series of restrictive measures which, together with those introduced earlier, constitute today what has been called the non-entrée regime.
Example: Rwanda
Instead of looking at the complex social and economic realities which led to the mass killings, the Western media have sought to portray the genocide in Rwanda as an open and shut case of ethnic conflict
BUT, it was the deterioration of the economic environment which immediately followed the collapse of the international coffee market and the sweeping macro-economic reforms by the Bretton Woods institutions which exacerbated simmering ethnic tensions and accelerated the process of political collapse
This was a classic case of dependency syndrome.
Gill et al. (2018)
Argues that the EU has been a proponent of the development of carceral spaces. The development of detention centres in countries that are not part of the 1951 agreement. Mobility is linked to detention and imprisonment. Offshoring is increasingly being used to restrict the mobility of migrants
Example: Australia and Nauru
A regional processing centre was set up here in 2001; essentially a detention centre. By 2014, there were 1344 asylum seekers on the island (still 189 in 2018). These asylum seekers were prevented from reaching the places in which they intended to claim asylum. They are instead transported to places outside of the international law. This is an example of the externalization of borders
Mountz (2011)
Islands are part of a broader enforcement archipelago of detention, a tactic of migration control. They are key sites of territorial struggle where nation-states use distance, invisibility, and sub-national jurisdictional status.
Geopolitical arrangements among state and non-state institutions, whether entrepreneurial with third parties or bilateral with other states, carry out the complicated work of processing, deterrence, and detention, re-placing sovereign arrangements in the management of displacement.
Example: Australia and the ‘Pacific Solution’
In 1992 the government implemented a policy of mandatory detention of anyone who arrived without a visa. Despite this effort at deterrence, in the late 1990s, arrivals by sea increased with smugglers operating through Southeast Asia.
In response to this, the government introduced the ‘Pacific Solution’ to extend remote detention practices offshore. Australia would not land migrants arriving by sea. Instead, detention was outsourced to islands north of Australia, including the island of Manus in Papua New Guinea, and Nauru.
While mandatory detention ended in 2008 and the Pacific Solution looked like it would become a thing of the past, remnants of the Pacific Solution continued to haunt potential asylum-seekers en route to Australia through the residual institutional infrastructure of state violence. The facility on Christmas Island opened, and those intercepted at sea continue to be detained there.
Rajaram (2003)
In September 2001, Australia effected a “Pacific Solution” to its “refugee problem”. This was the interception and transfer of “unauthorised boat arrivals” to processing centres in the Pacific Third World.
These centres were agreed to by poor countries that were approached precisely because of their vulnerability and dependence upon Australia. This was done in exchange for increases in aid.
The Pacific region, in effect, came to be mapped in terms of its utility to Australia, both downplaying and concealing complex economic, social and political issues.
The use of other sovereign spaces in the Pacific Third World creates “not- Australia”, so as to regularize and re-emphasize the proper moral and political limits of “real-Australia”.
Steinberg (2016)
The category of the refugee became settled in international law with the signing of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Forced migration is a powerful tool for posing ethical questions.
a) What are our obligations to those who flee?
b) What is the relationship between hospitality and belonging?
c) How ought we to treat human beings?
d) Where do we draw the boundaries of community, of reciprocity, of obligation?
Hannah Arendt argues that refugees were manufactured by the organization of the world into nation-states, for human beings came to realize their natural rights within circumscribed, bounded territories.. Those who lose national membership thereby lose access to the entities that secure their rights as human beings
BUT, the term ‘forced migration’ becomes un-useful when studying migrants themselves. For the moment you use the term to understand people on the move, it breaks down: distinctions between different types of migrants are impossible to hold up.
