aag border matters panel

Here’s the text of my talk from the 2012 Association of American Geographers meeting. The session was called “Border Matters!”

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The title of the paper is now “(Dis)locating Control: Transmigration and Precarity.” What I’d like to do here is condense the paper to its essential arguments; I will do this by outlining the points first, then elaborating upon them later.

• First, borders have lost their previously privileged position as sites of enforcement, especially as symbolic, pedagogical spaces of producing the interior/exterior relationship.
• Second, borders remain key sites in a network of policing and control technologies. However, states employ methods of interiorization, exteriorization, and excision to fundamentally alter the topology of state control.
• Third, the network of control is not solely the purview of the state, but includes supranational bodies (such as the EU, Frontex), non-governmental organizations (such as the IOM), states, and sub-state actors (the Minute Men in the US), and so on.
• Fourth, this network must be studied globally.
• Fifth, viewed globally, migration policing does not aim at inclusion/exclusion, but rather at the modulation of migration as part of what Deleuze called a “society of control.”
• Sixth, control societies are predicated upon open systems and deterritorialization, rather than the systems of enclosure necessary for disciplinary and biopower societies.
• Finally, control is a form of power largely ignored in the migration literature, but better explains the various “exceptional” arrangements of “inclusive exclusions” and “exclusive inclusions” that characterize migration today. In other words, biopower and disciplinary power do not adequately describe how and why the proliferation of migrant securitizations also result in the abandonment of life in favor of control.

My argument hinges upon understanding that the shift to control societies does not mean that there are no disciplinary or biopolitical technologies at work: there are indeed inclusions and exclusions, processes and technologies of enclosure, and so on. But I argue that the tendency, or the gravitational center around which these technologies orbit, is a deterritorialized network of technologies of modulating migrant populations.

            So, now I have to support these arguments, which of course I won’t be able to do in a satisfactory manner in the time allotted, but I’ll try.

Part I: Modulation Away From Borders

            There has been an increase in research documenting technologies of migration control that no longer take either the border as their ‘proper’ site or territorial exclusion as their primary goal. This wave can be conceptualized as a shift from a logic of border enforcement (discourses of sovereign power) to, broadly speaking, a logic of population management (discourses of biopower). Yet I take Foucault’s work on biopolitics to be delimited by its historicity and specificity: essentially, biopolitics is not merely taking life to be the central concern of politics, but it is the establishment of a regime of security over a territory for the purpose of making the population more productive. [I take Foucault’s definition of biopolitics because a) it takes into account both individuals and masses, b) it is oriented towards production, c) it is clearly territorial, and d) it is historicized as a governmentality. Crucially, then, it is not simply taking any life as the object and end of a politics, but a specific form of life, in a particular time and place, for specific ends.] What we see today is different in both operation and effect, in that contemporary governance is no longer territorial (although it retains territorial elements), nor is it directed at a bounded population (although it does not supersede population-level projects entirely), nor is it about the preservation and promotion of life (although it sometimes does this). To be more precise, there is a new diagram of power at work that is primarily indifferent towards life… except only when it is strategically useful to be otherwise. This helps to explain why both Foucault’s lectures in The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) and Deleuze’s essay on control (1995)  largely ignore the term “biopolitics” and instead, respectively, focus on neoliberalism and the transition from discipline to control. In effect, both recognize that biopower is a constitutive component of a different set of technologies with different ends. Indeed, Protevi notes that after 1980, biopolitics and control are contemporaneous, and work through distinct modes, actors, targets, practices, forms, outcomes, and so on. Following Nealon’s (2008) notion of the intensifications of power, Protevi points out that biopolitics and control are in fact complementary, but that in a control society what matters more than life itself are the mechanisms by which life is put in relation to and modulated with the political, the economic, and the social.

            What I mean by governance is no longer territorial is supported, I think, in the various ways in which migrant policing is no longer strictly territorial. To be clear, I focus here on technologies of migrant population modulation undertaken by the state – for reasons of space – but there are complementary technologies that are non-state oriented. These primary technologies of state-oriented migrant modulation are interiorization, exteriorization, and excision. I point to trends of internalization in the United States, then trends of externalization in the European Union. This is not because such trends are limited to those contexts; I am merely providing a heuristic based on the primary trends in each area. Specific local histories and practices would complicate this heuristic, although I am confident that they would be in line with the global tendency toward control outlined here. Rather than a full explication of each technology, I will simply provide an example for each:

Internalization

            I focus here on the use of license checkpoints, but I acknowledge that there are in fact many technologies at work in the interiorization of policing, including the use of migrant detention, the devolution of enforcement from federal to local officials, and others. The license checkpoint is a nexus of these changes:

These checkpoints are mobilized ostensibly to screen every vehicle and driver passing through the checkpoint for a valid license; routinely, however, this is used as an excuse in order to facilitate the policing of immigration status. Since these stops are often limited to roads that lead from large workplaces to domestic areas with high immigrant populations, they qualify as a selective technology that has the effect of disciplining large numbers of immigrants without actually physically encountering each of them. This discipline results in incapacitation (Coleman and Kocher 2011) but is no longer part of the closed system of enclosures, an integral part of how Foucault characterized biopolitics in Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory, Population. Instead, traffic stops are relatively open systems, part of a network of policing techniques designed to incapacitate and make precarious.

            When the traffic stop is combined with the growth in the number of local law enforcement officers charged with immigration policing responsibilities, the result is non-immigration related offenses leading to immediate or delayed, but inevitable, contact with federal databases, which result in an increase in deportations. Federal programs, such as the 287(g) program, effectively deputizes local law enforcement officials, allowing them to access federal databases otherwise closed to them, and at other times obligating police to detain immigrants indefinitely until status can be verified. Coleman and Kocher (2011) argue that this assemblage of technologies results in a form of discipline that results in the “production of a docile population of ‘territorially present’ residents” who are not “legally present.” In other words, they can be deported but they cannot take an employer to court to claim lost wages. They further propose that “in the abstract immigration enforcement works through the production of an exemplary migrant precarity, i.e. an amplification of socio-economic and legal insecurities for certain immigrant bodies” (235). This uneven and selective enforcement helps explain why, for example, there is such a contradictory presence of “illegal” immigrants even after a meteoric rise in spending on, ostensibly, keeping them out.

Externalization

            Again, a very brief example, of “remote control:” An integral aspect of “remote control” is the prevalence of bilateral agreements between EU member states and its immediate neighbors, especially those in North Africa (Adepoju/van Noorloos/Zoomers 2009). [Note: Bilateral agreements are slowly giving way to Frontex/EU led agreements. This shift deserves recognition, but does not detract from the historical argument being made here. It remains to be seen how Frontex will alter the externalization of policing, but my suspicion is that it will extend the process rather than curtail it.] These agreements can be formalized, but EU member states tend to prefer informal agreements for a number of reasons. Informal agreements are less transparent, more flexible in the interpretation of human rights claims, especially the obligation of nonrefoulement, and subject to quick alteration based on a perceived crisis. Hamood (2008) points to the proposal to create “transit processing centers” in countries bordering the EU (20). These centers would serve as administrative and detention sites to prevent migrants and asylum seekers from reaching EU territory, where human rights obligations would set in. These bilateral agreements extend well beyond the establishment of camps, however, and include development aid, preferential immigration quotas, and circular migration schemes (Adepoju et al. 2009).

            These bilateral agreements reached their zenith in a series of arrangements between Italy and Gaddafi’s Libya. [After the collapse of Gaddafi’s regime in Libya it is difficult to know for sure whether such an agreement will be reestablished – as of the time of writing this was not clear – although it would be a safe assumption to imagine that Italy and the EU will base almost any aid to a fledgling Libyan government on the reduction of migrants and asylum seekers setting forth from the Maghreb.] The agreements generally stressed the use of Libya’s military to intercept clandestine immigrants in the Mediterranean (Hamood 2008; Adepoju et al. 2009; Andrijasevic 2009). A 2008 deal between the countries includes a provision that allows Italy to return intercepted migrants to Libya. A 2003 agreement placed Italian police officers in Tripoli full-time to provide Libya with “training and equipment, in particular to assist border surveillance and management” (Hamood 2008, 32). As previously noted, these technologies of remote control result, in part, in a protracted or fragmented journey (Collyer 2007; 2010) and effectively deny political, religious, and ideological refugees the human rights protections many of the EU member states themselves were instrumental in securing.

Excision

            A final problem posed to understanding the contemporary governance of transmigration is the strategic manipulation of territory, or excision, that deeply troubles the “security, territory, population” triplet posed by Foucault (2007). The US, EU, and Australia all engage in the strategic manipulation of territory to create exclusion zones that are formally part of the national territory, but legally outside of the spaces in which migrants can claim workers’ rights or refugees can potentially claim asylum (Mountz 2010). For example, Australia has responded to an influx of asylum seekers by exercising the “power of excision,” or the declaration of “hundreds of islands off the coast of Australia [as] no longer part of Australian territory for the purposes of migration” (xviii). Especially in the case of Australia – but also relevant to Italy and the island of Lampedusa – Mountz notes that,

[b]orders are thus pushed farther away and nearly erased… [and] asylum processing is contracted out to poorer countries. This combines with remote detention (inside sovereign territory) to create a powerful geography of exclusion. (127)

These geographies of exclusion are an intriguing aspect of the paradigm of population modulation, in that they effectively curtail the sovereignty states are ostensibly protecting from “extreme” population flows.

A Caution

            There is a danger of overstating the prevalence of these new technologies of population modulation and reducing the border to a merely (and weakly) performative status. It is true that borders are performative (Brown 2010), as iterations of both the extent of sovereign power and the ‘container’ of rights claims. However, any study of borders/bordering and adjacent policing practices will show just how powerful these spaces remain. But as a tendency, borders are now responding to the paradigm of population modulation, or what Deleuze termed “control” (Deleuze 1995). It is not an overstatement, then, to note that the combination of internalization, externalization, and excision are drastically changing the way migration is governed. It is relatively easy to point to instances of each having occurred prior to the 1980s and the global rise of neoliberalism, but what is new is the specific assemblage of such technologies and how they operate together with particular effects and outcomes: precarization and control.

Control

Briefly, I want to differentiate my approach from the more common biopolitical understanding of migration policing. I base my argument on the contemporary crisis of enclosure institutions, which is partly a crisis in their territoriality. Various forms of power take different territorialities:

• Sovereign power: the king’s court, the pillory, the imperium bello where territorial expansion was displayed in the king’s medals rather than through the setting of ‘secure’ borders.
• Discipline: enclosures – i.e. hospitals, prisons, factories, the family unit; institutions with overlapping territorialities working on the body – i.e. the co-presence of church and state exacting allegiance and discipline.
• Biopower: nations as enclosures; presumes and intensifies disciplinary enclosures; utilizes the givenness of an already existing set of forces to increase productivity/health/lifespan.

Biopower, then, works primarily through closed systems, or at best through partially open ones. However, as Ong (2006) has noted, we are in a moment where sovereignty exists as yet another tool in the toolbox, where it is manipulated at will in order to suit particular ends. This form of graduated sovereignty does not work primarily through enclosures; it presumes open systems which must be modulated between, retaining only the final say over the extent of sovereignty. What moves to the fore here is not enclosure or life, but a mechanism or network of mechanisms, including, in this instance, the manipulation of sovereignty in ways that seemingly weaken the state itself. This is a natural byproduct of a society that takes a global political/economic space as its presumption and abandons the concern for life, even as life’s utterance, its discursive presence, proliferates.

            In sum, biopower is predicated upon a system of enclosures that presume impermeable borders – even if they do not exist in practice. The organization of social life and political organization centers on and resonates with these enclosures. However, after the generalized crisis of enclosures in the latter half of the 20^th Century into the present, there has arisen a new paradigm of power centered upon open systems. Control, as we will see, organizes social life and political organization away from borders, presumes a dissolution of enclosures, and reterritorializes governance around control mechanisms that are modular, adaptable, and highly selective.

            Control abandons the ideal subject, and only attempts to minimize the most obvious outliers (i.e. terrorists). Control is indifferent to life: life, territory, sovereignty, and discipline are simply utilized strategically under a process without a subject, a process without goals. Security for whom, or for what? Security today is achieved only by negating meaningful life. Movement curtailed, why, and to what end? Movement is fundamentally liberal, and in the triumph of liberal democracy and liberal economics, why do we insist on rigidly controlling it? Control, ultimately, becomes hegemonic without benefitting anyone; to paraphrase Arendt, how do we contend with the banality of control?

            This abandonment brings into clarity the distinguishing feature of control, as opposed to the border enforcement or population management paradigms. Deportation is thus not about shaping the ‘correct’ populace, as much as it is about producing striations in space otherwise tending toward smoothness. License checkpoints and visa systems determine appropriateness to travel, but do not oppose ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (or the dialectic of inclusion versus exclusion). Indeed, by acting as turbulence that redirects a flow, rather than a barrier that excludes, the internalization or externalization of transmigrant policing has fundamentally altered the relation among people, politics, and place. The spatiality of control does not revolve around the resonant centers of state, nation, borders, yet it is not an unmediated deterritorialization. Control reterritorializes along new striations, new power configurations, and new social subjectivities. Precisely by abandoning the ideal subject, control, and its other – precarity, differentiates itself from disciplinary and biopolitical regimes, which work to secure populations, not radically precarize them.

Conclusion

            Ultimately, I argue that the topological border, the border’s proliferation across space, has the specific effect of producing mass precarity, which is precisely the point. This precarity is not only advantageous to capital, but is politically and socially advantageous to the global north, as it replicates the colonial relation without a responsibility to support and protect actual colonial subjects. This is the capital and state wet-dream. It is the culmination of a relationship set in motion with the original colonial conquests in the 16^th Century; only now capitalism and the state are well-developed enough to maximize, at least for a time, the instability that comes with such a mobilization of mass precarization.

            Understanding control and the modulation technologies it employs not only provides a description of the tendency of global governance, but it opens a space for weaponizing precarity, to use it against capital and the state, rather than to lament the loss of stable identities and rights. This is where I hope to take the next paper.

violence in america’s prisons

More from the n+1 article, ”Raise the Crime Rate,” by Christopher Glazek:

“Progressives lament the growth of private prisons (prisons for profit). But it’s sadism, not avarice, that fuels the country’s prison crisis. Prisoners are not the victims of poor planning (as other progressive reformers have argued)—they are the victims of an ideological system that dehumanizes an entire class of human being and permits nearly infinite violence against it. As much as a physical space, prisons denote an ethical space, or, more precisely, a space where ordinary ethics are suspended. Bunk beds, in and of themselves, are not cruel and unusual. University dorms have bunk beds, too. What matters is what happens in those beds. In the dorm room, sex, typically consensual. In prisons, also sex, but often violent rape. The prisons are “overcrowded,” we are told (and, in fact, courts have ruled). “Overcrowding” is a euphemism for an authoritarian nightmare.”

“As sites of governmental authority, prisons destabilize Weber’s definition of the state as the monopolist of violence. In prisons, the monopoly is suspended: anybody is free to commit rape and be reasonably assured that no state official will notice or care (barring those instances when the management knowingly encourages rape, unleashing favored inmates on troublemakers as a strategy for administrative control). The prison staff is above the law; the prison inmates, below it. Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon— that is, one of total surveillance—America’s prisons are its blind spots, places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen. Though important symbols of bureaucratic authority, they are spaces that lie beyond our system of bureaucratic oversight. As far as the outside world is concerned, every American prison functions as a black site.”

america’s real crime rate

A bit of interesting stuff from the Economist (rare, I know…).

Basic argument: rates of violent crime haven’t actually fallen much in the US, they have merely been displaced from cities to prisons – where rates of violent crime remain intolerably, inexplicably high.

“What is America’s crime rate, really? If America’s penal system as a whole amounts to a crime against humanity, maybe that ought to count for something, too.”

The article discusses two recent articles on the topic:

“The Caging of America” by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker.

“Raise the Crime Rate” by Christopher Glazek in n+1.

Stuart Hall interviewed by the Guardian

“Naturally, we arrive at the riots of the summer, the place where the austerity, these so-called “failures” of multiculturalism, the absence of politics, all meet, in Foot Locker, of all places. “The riots bothered me a great deal, on two counts. First, nothing really has changed. Some kids at the bottom of the ladder are deeply alienated, they’ve taken the message of Thatcherism and Blairism and the coalition: what you have to do is hustle. Because nobody’s going to help you. And they’ve got no organised political voice, no organised black voice and no sympathetic voice on the left. That kind of anger, coupled with no political expression, leads to riots. It always has. The second point is: where does this find expression in going into a store and stealing trainers? This is the point at which consumerism, which is the cutting edge of neoliberalism, has got to them too. Consumerism puts everyone into a single channel. You’re not doing well, but you’re still free to consume. We’re all equal in the eyes of the market.” …

And this is the most pessimistic of all his ideas: that three decades of neoliberalism have got into people’s consciousness and infected the way young people respond to poverty just as they have neutered the way politicians express themselves. “I got involved in cultural studies because I didn’t think life was purely economically determined. I took all this up as an argument with economic determinism. I lived my life as an argument with Marxism, and with neoliberalism. Their point is that, in the last instance, economy will determine it. But when is the last instance? If you’re analysing the present conjuncture, you can’t start and end at the economy. It is necessary, but insufficient.”"

The Guardian

introduction to a theory of the young girl

Tiqqun

dissertation prospectus – the figure of the refugee: displacement, mobility and the politics to come

I’m finally done with my prospectus, and it has been sent to my committee for review and comments. It’s a purely descriptive document – I was basically asked to write theory out of it so that I could “prove” to my committee that I was planning a manageable project. Here it is:

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Introduction

            This dissertation approaches the figure of the refugee through three case studies. The first is an archival exploration of British asylum practices in the period following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Second, I will study refugee and immigrant controls in the Mediterranean by conducting fieldwork in Palestine, the Morocco/Spain border region at Ceuta and Melilla, and Lampedusa, Italy. Third, I will look at the parallel cases of the Sans-Papiers and the Roma in France. These projects will be detailed below, but for now I summarize by saying that taken together, these case studies focus on the refugee as a nexus of political, economic, and social problematics. The figure of the refugee haunts our understanding of the political, unbinding the nation-state, citizenship, security, rights, and sovereignty. The goal of the dissertation is to approximate the figure of the refugee via these three vectors, and hone in on the ways this figure opens onto numerous debates in political theory, Refugee Studies, and other relevant fields of disciplinary knowledge.

Part I

            Ostensibly, this dissertation is about refugees, displacements, and mobilities; but it does not stem from a desire to offer ‘solutions to the refugee problem,’ as diverse commentators from Arendt to the major proponents in the field of what is now called Refugee Studies have urged. Instead, it begins from an incitement offered by Giorgio Agamben:

given the by now unstoppable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories, the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today – at least until the process of dissolution of the nation-state and of its sovereignty has achieved full completion – the forms and limits of a coming political community. It is even possible that, if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.

This incitement is, by now, well known and much-discussed. Interestingly enough, though, Agamben’s challenge has not generally been taken up by ‘theorists,’ but rather by social scientists who have reacted both positively (as does Peter Nyers, for example) and negatively (e.g. Patricia Owens). He is held to account for his empiricism, or narrowly read on the exception and bare life, or often misread entirely; yet few engage the dialectic central to his work: both homo sacer/exception and potentiality/form-of-life. A broader reading of Agamben’s philosophy – if one can name it such – brings together these crucial concepts and corrects the predominant reception of his work as offering merely negation of life, a thanatopolitics of bare life. This dissertation diverges from the oft-tread Refugee Studies reception of Agamben’s incitement to engage “political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee” on the philosophical grounds of potentiality and form-of-life (and yet it is not a dissertation about Agamben).

            This dissertation will explore how the category of ‘refugee’ developed in the late 17^th Century in European political thought, at the moment of the formalization and intensification of the global system of nation-states, in order to diffuse tensions and more easily handle the ‘purifications’ of multiple peoples into a singular national people. This system, with its gradual legal formalization and the development of a subsequent international human rights regime, worked relatively well for several centuries (on a political register, not necessarily in terms of effectiveness in delivering aid, for example) in large part due to the ability of metropolitan states to displace large portions of their populations to colonial areas. However, numerous historical events and evolving attitudes towards humanitarian aid processes and structures have left the refugee as a body in circulation, but as an empty conceptual category. Refugees are increasingly ever present, yet more and more frequently denied access to the legal-institutional and human rights provisions developed within the Westphalian system. Rather than ‘solutions to the refugee problem,’ what is needed now is a reconceptualization of the ways we imagine the interrelationship of people, place, and politics: the primary goal of this dissertation.

            Central to the problem is that the very conceptual and philosophical categories mobilized in refugee discourses have their foundation in a violent history of separation and expulsion. This history is exposed by Agamben, but obliquely; it is more directly posed by Domenico Losurdo in Liberalism: A Counter-History. Liberalism itself, according to Losurdo, is rooted in the distinction made between human and non-human, wherein the non-human was subjected directly to the violence of slavery, racial exclusion, and systematic oppression. This division is extended in Red, White, and Black where Wilderson highlights the structure of racial antagonism in the US as a division between White (settler, master, human), Red (savage, half-human), and Black (slave, non-human). The very categories of citizenship, the nation-state, security, rights, and sovereignty are predicated upon a logical foundation of colonialism and a material foundation of slavery and genocide. The concept of “refugee” is coextensive with modernity and its political schism. A basic timeline would be as follows: 1492 initiates colonialism and settler state genocide; 1648 formally founds the nation-state; 1685 locates the first identification of refugees after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The concept of refuge as a mass phenomenon (rather than the individual order of exile) follows quickly from the formalization of the coupling of nation and state, and effectively operates as an institution to manage conflict between newly formed nation-states as they distributed [partage] their populations along ethno-linguistic lines.

            Historically, the refugee as a mechanism for conflict management functioned well, because it was rarely deployed. In the context of Europe in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, excess populations were dispersed when metropolitan states sent ‘problem populations’ to the colonies. WWI and WWII marked moments of crisis in the imperial-colonial world system, though, and brought back the problem of excess populations, this time without easy territorial outlets. Arendt demonstrates the crisis in much of her writing about refugees; but the very way she poses the problem exposes a fundamental misrecognition of the history of colonial violence. For example, she wrote, “Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings – the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends” (1994, 111), an apt description of colonial governance. She identifies the how the colonial experience has come “home,” so to speak, to be visited upon those social groups who were formerly marginalized in Europe but not yet fully excluded. What Arendt more properly identifies, and Agamben picks up, is the new political condition of the dislocation of displacement, or the deterritorialization of the liberal schism into the heart of metropolitan states themselves. Displaced populations, with nowhere to go, become de facto stateless populations existing within states. In other words, the colonial foundation of modernity became universalized and injected into the bodies of the former colonial powers. It is upon this ruined foundation that Agamben locates his incitement to build political philosophy anew from the figure of the refugee.

Part II

            The field of Refugee Studies is first and foremost a political and technological economy of management, predicated upon an understanding that refugeeness is a temporary condition resulting from the momentary ‘madness’ of nation-states (rather than from the ‘reason’ of liberalism’s foundational schism). The key debates are primarily limited to discursive arguments over labeling (who is a ‘proper’ refugee?), the distribution of aid (what do ‘proper’ refugees get?), and placement (where do ‘proper’ refugees go?). Betts (2010) describes three “ideal-type” contemporary projects of Forced Migration Studies: legal-institutional, empirical, and critical:

firstly, the legal-institutional which works predominantly with existing institutional categories to inform policy and practice; secondly, a critical approach, which explores and challenges the power, interests, and discourse underlying policy and practice; thirdly, an empirical approach, which works to identify what is actually happening, outside the prevailing concepts, categories and labels. (268)

The examples cited by Betts, in his reflections on the 12^th meeting of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration, remain largely managerial in nature, in that their primary purpose seems to be to make the provision of services and protections more efficient, or more democratic, or more logically consistent. Even the “critical” examples he cites are oriented towards better policy responses and reforming the refugee regime given new patterns of global forced migration. The field draws upon new ontologies of movement (i.e. Urry), but does not necessarily advocate for the disfiguring and reconfiguring of the political based upon such ontologies. The gravitational center of the field retains an assumption of stability in the relation of people, politics, and place. This can perhaps be attributed to a prominent gap in understanding the term “critical,” a situation summarized by Favell (2009); he notes, Refugee Studies is “[d]ominated by a mix of short-term pragmatic policy imperatives and a naturally defensive humanitarian bias that seeks to protect the claims of ‘true’ refugees from contamination with those of other migrants…” (209). Indeed, those who try to undertake a project that directly undercuts the Refugee Studies assumptions of the necessity of law, the humanitarian mission, and the primacy of rights are marginalized or even actively obstructed (Hatton, personal communication with the author). Betts’ observation that the critical discourse within Refugee Studies “challenges the power, interests, and discourse underlying policy and practice” is an apt descriptor, then, as it ‘challenges’ but does not attempt to reconstitute the political.

            The field of Refugee Studies, then, has developed from the 1980s to the present along only two primary paths of inquiry. First and foremost has been the purely “managerial-administrative discourse,” focused on identifying refugee populations, identifying the needs of those populations, and suggesting solutions to specific refugee situations or to “the problem of refugees” in general. Betts’ “critical” ideal-type would still largely be confined to this managerial-administrative discourse. The second path of inquiry has been doggedly reflexive in nature (the “reflexive discourse”), concerned with identifying the assumptions of the field, providing various “state of the field” overviews, questioning labels and the labeling process, and troubling the foundations of the managerial-administrative discourse, but not doing much to overturn them; in fact, the reflexive discourse has largely been subsumed under the managerial-administrative discourse from the field’s inception. Today, the newer “Critical Refugee Studies” discourse, primarily reflexive in nature, seems more about alleviating the conscious of the Global North than it is about making the world amenable to difference and mobility. Disregarding a few notable exceptions, Refugee Studies has not undergone a truly critical turn – if we understand “critical” to mean a rejection of both the managerial-administrative and reflexive discourses to instead assert the primacy of the figure of the refugee in and of itself. To put it another way, Refugee Studies has not yet moved beyond the turn to identity studies in order to assert the political subjectivity of the refugee unmoored from the “solutions” offered by the managerial-administrative discourse.

            Positively, however, recent developments in Refugee Studies have begun to position the field away from the managerial-administrative and reflexive discourses, taking a more materialist stance toward the field itself and how the concept of refugee, the practices of asylum, and the discourse of Refugee Studies have in fact acted as a mechanism of control (Chimni; Hatton). B. S. Chimni has shown how academic Refugee Studies, including legal-institutional (administrative or policy) research and the empirical and critical academic projects, along with refugee governance projects are both implicated in the extension of colonial paternalism into the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. He argues:

The move from Refugee Studies to Forced Migration Studies should in my view be explored against the backdrop of a western strategy to employ political humanitarianism to legitimize a new imperial world order. There is continuity here between the colonial era and the present that was only interrupted by the imperatives of cold war politics. The meaning of the turn to Forced Migration Studies, I therefore make bold to suggest, has to be examined in the matrix of the history of humanitarianism in and since the era of colonialism. (2009, 13)

This is an important observation, as it performs a necessary move uncommon for the Refugee Studies literature: Chimni calls into question the humanitarian and apolitical assumptions of the field and places it directly within a political register that is deeply marked by a history of violence and exclusion.

            Chimni admits, and I agree, that this implication does not mean that Refugee Studies has not benefitted at least some refugees. He argues that, like all knowledge, Refugee Studies is “dual use” (14). Indeed,

Refugee Studies helped counter the image of refugee as a parasite, critiqued the practice of imposed aid, underlined the need for listening to refugee voices and adopting participatory approaches, elaborated the rights of refugees, highlighted the special needs of refugee women and children, paid attention to the psychosocial health of refugees, pointed to the dangers of involuntary repatriation, and identified the institutional and democracy deficits in intergovernmental and non-governmental agencies concerned with the welfare of refugees. (2009, 15)

This is a record any academic field can be proud of, but as he presses us to understand, it does not mean it should be sufficient justification for continuing with the status quo. Chimni is, in part, a foundational source for scholars wishing to push beyond the traditional boundaries of Refugee Studies while still being able to undertake the study of refugees:

As for Refugee Studies, it must be remembered that even when restrictive measures of Western states are criticized, what are validated are often particular philosophical and political ideas about what kind of boundaries western states may legislate… Invariably methodological nationalism carries the day, even when the turn to Forced Migration Studies is legitimized on the basis of a growing democratic space. The world of displacement has thus become a site of power to embed selective humanitarian practices that facilitate the exercise of hegemony. (2009, 24, emphasis mine)

This dissertation project takes up Chimni on the point of displacement having become a site for the contestation of power, but adds the express aim of developing a line of flight away from Refugee Studies towards exploring the potentiality of the figure of the refugee for a ‘coming politics.’ Rather than take the administrative standpoint and further facilitate the exercise of hegemony, this dissertation argues from the figure of the refugee for the political potential [potenza] of statelessness, mobility, and autonomous forms-of-life.

Part III

            A key portion of the dissertation will include chapters organized around three case studies, conceived as entry points towards the figure of the refugee. These cases are meant to speak across and through one another, to highlight parallels and disjunctures in historical and contemporary practices, concepts, policies, and subjects.

Liberalism, Asylum, and the Legacy of Colonialism  

            I will research the historical and philosophical conditions that gave rise to the political concept of “refugee” in Europe in the late 17^th Century, and subsequent shifts in those conditions. Through archival research I seek a better understanding of the historical trajectory of asylum in Europe. I intend to complete research at the United Kingdom’s National Archives in Kew to gather data with which I will write a case study of British asylum practices and discourses following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815). This time period is interesting because the relationship between France and England at the time was tense; however, ideological shifts in the UK led to what Collyer (2005) referred to as a liberal consensus committed to asylum, even if the political activities (i.e. anarchism) of some asylees were frowned upon. It is in this context that I wish to explore asylum in Britain as a case study by exploring Parliamentary records and newspaper (and other media) sources of the time period.

Refugee and Immigration Controls in the Mediterranean

            I will research various techniques of control shaping international migration at three locations around the Mediterranean, with a focus on border-sites both internal to and at the margins of nation-states. Such techniques of control ostensibly serve to filter populations as they move across territories, but often have the effect of blocking both ‘illegitimate’ and ‘legitimate’ (i.e. refugee) population flows. Through research in Palestine, the Morocco/Spain border region, and on the island of Lampedusa, Italy, I will observe and document the landscape (both literal and figural) of mobility and settlement, explore the impact of border checkpoints and barriers, document the processes of governance at work in migrant and refugee settlements, and interview people affected by techniques of controlling migration. These sites were selected partly due to their prominence in recent migration-related events, and also due to their longstanding statuses as foci for migration to ‘developed,’ Western states. Palestine is home to the largest population of “warehoused” refugees (those kept in camps for five years or more), in one of the most hotly contested lands in recent history. The cities of Ceuta and Melilla are intriguing research sites because they have acted as transit points for migration from the African continent to the European Union for decades. In fact, Ceuta has become infamous for the deaths of 18 would-be migrants, and the serious injury of over 50 others, by both Spanish and Moroccan security forces in September 2005. Finally, the island of Lampedusa is a crucial case study site due to the large flow of migrants passing through fleeing turbulence from the “Arab Spring” of 2011: the revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, and further civil upheaval in Morocco, Syria, and other African and Middle Eastern states.

            Palestine and the Moroccan/Spanish border region are in some ways similar sites. Palestine and Ceuta/Melilla each feature highly contested and stringently securitized borders characterized by physical barriers. Israel has constructed a security wall specifically designed to restrict the movement of Palestinians; Ceuta and Melilla are both separated from Morocco by a double-row of fences up to 9 meters in height.  Added to the physical barriers is the contestation over sovereign control: Morocco claims both cities do not belong to Spain, but are in fact Moroccan territories; the Israel/Palestine region has been contested territory for millennia, taking on its contemporary form in 1948, and it uses its border wall as a mechanism to appropriate and excise sovereign territory, exacerbating the land conflict. Lampedusa, related, but distinct, is an island off the coast of Sicily, famous recently for its “temporary stay and assistance center” (TSAC) that is, in reality, an overpopulated detention camp. Because it is an island, it is accorded a liminal status, where the isle itself is seen as borderland, even as the “TSAC” is isolated and fenced off from the surrounding, Italian, population. These sites have similarities, yet are singular, characterized by a great number of differences. Documenting their similarities and differences is the goal of this project.

Nomads and Strangers: Mobility and Presence in France

            The final case study will be primarily theoretical in nature (as opposed to archival or fieldwork-based). It hinges upon Balibar’s work on European citizenship, and the problematic posed by populations that are historically present but not considered to be members of any European member-state. The Roma are often associated with Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, but are not welcome, generally, as citizens in those states. A long history of forced displacements have contributed to the popular image of the Gypsy nomad, travelling Europe by caravan and earning a living performing small craft work and petty criminality. Yet even when Roma integrate into European states, many becoming citizens in France, Spain, or Germany, they are still positioned as problem populations who are never truly ‘assimilated.’ France has gone so far as to conduct raids of Roma camps, detain and then deport Roma ‘back’ to where they are supposed to be from: Eastern Europe. This of course was deeply problematic, at the least due to the fact that many of the Roma deported or detained were in fact citizens of France. The Roma have presented a problem of territorial presence combined with a legal exclusion that has no simple solution. The Sans-Papiers in France are another case where territorial presence and legal rights have a conflicted relationship. In the mid-1990s, several hundred Africans occupied St. Ambroise church in the 11^th arrondissement of Paris, demanding that their work status be regularized and that they be granted legal status and benefits equal to their French citizen counterparts. Their arguments hinged upon the relationship between presence, work, and rights; their demand to be ‘regularized’ challenged the role of birth/descent in the granting of citizenship rights, and argued for a kind of citizenship functionalism. Both the Roma and the Sans-Papiers present limit-cases for notions of membership and citizenship in relation to mobility. This case study will explore this relationship further.

Conclusion

            Returning to Agamben, we are left with a history of violence as the “hidden foundation” upon which most of our contemporary political concepts are constructed. Agamben’s work exposes this violence, and brings us back to the fundamental indistinction of modernity’s emancipatory and exclusionary impulses. This dissertation seeks a line of flight away from this foundation, and seeks a politics that does not stem from the will to realize an essence (Nancy). Unlike much of the scholarship that focuses on this history of violence as one of exclusion, I reverse this history and view it as a long project of inclusion. Drawing upon anthropological and philosophical models of state formation that reverse the understanding of political community by defining it in relation to its “constitutive outside,” I explore how the state and the nation work together to fix a people in place. The state-form is always already a moment of the cessation of mobility in order to produce a coherent interiority. To concretize this inversion, I will focus on the history of asylum in Britain, mechanisms of refugee and migrant controls in the Mediterranean, and theories of European citizenship and theorize from these cases what social and political relations are like. Etienne Balibar refers to this as a “clinical” method for studying politics and political philosophy, because it allows for the “progressive clarification of a central problem and its logical and practical implications” (Balibar 2004, vii).

            The central problem I am articulating is a question of being, articulated (via Agamben and Wittgenstein) as form-of-life. What exists outside of citizenship? Must we hold on to the term at all? What potential for organizing life exists beyond the state-nation diptych? Must we choose between anarchy (not anarchism) and the nation-state? Most importantly, are we doomed to a world reduced to, as Nancy puts it, political and technological economies, where difference is always already a problem to be solved, recuperated into the system to ensure smooth operation? This dissertation begins in the ruins of the Westphalian system in order to excavate modernity’s waste (Bauman) and imagine a politics to come.

            The figure of the refugee is the true figure of modernity, rather than the worker (proletarian) or the citizen. The refugee was always the other of modernity, the stranger (Simmel) who was not allowed to come today and stay tomorrow, but instead transformed into barbarian, the mythic figure of difference. By exploring the ways that the figure of the refugee binds and unbinds the nation-state, sovereignty, citizenship, security, and rights, this project seeks to transform the study of refugees from a managerial-administrative, solutions-oriented problematic to one that foregrounds the spectre of autonomy, resistance to various forms of governance, and the power [potenza] of life.