Schiocchet, Leonardo. 2018. Anthropologists and refugees between global hegemony and the subaltern ‘other’. In Schiocchet, Leonardo (Ed.). Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia, 4(2), special issue "Anthropologists and Refugees between the Middle East and Europe", pp.1-10 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Refugees in Europe: Migration, Displacement and Integration
This paper is published in PerConcordiam: Journal of European Security and Defense Issues, Vol. 7, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 10-17 (The whole journal is uploaded). A large-scale migration and refugee crisis is unfolding in Europe. During the course of 2015, more than 1 million people arrived aboard overflowing and often unseaworthy vessels crossing the Mediterranean Sea to European Union member countries Italy and Greece. Almost 3,800 people died in the attempt. Most of the new arrivals have headed farther north into the EU, with Germany expecting to receive 1 million asylum applications in 2015. Global displacement stands at over 60 million people, the highest number since World War II. Many have drawn on this statistic to suggest that the population movement into the EU is unprecedented in scope and manageability. The numbers are indeed high and the EU’s response — poorly coordinated and piecemeal, driven in part by fear and hostility, in part by sympathy and generosity — has made it less manageable than it needs be. The chaotic nature of the influx has led many to feel that Europe is overwhelmed. The challenges are indeed great, but it is worth noting that the continent has dealt with larger flows, even in recent history: Twenty years ago, 3 million people were displaced at the end of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the vast majority of them having fled within Europe. Europe’s long history of migration and displacement shows that mass population movements are catalysts for change — sometimes for the worse, leading to conflict and violence, and sometimes for the better, with the newcomers contributing to the prosperity and strength of host communities. If Europe’s migration and displacement history offers a lesson for today, it would be that sympathetic and pragmatic approaches to admitting and integrating refugees usually pay off in the longer term, while xenophobic and fear-driven attempts at “stopping the flow” through harsh security measures increase the risk of conflict and instability. This article is not meant to provide a historical blueprint for how to respond to today’s crisis — that would be impossible. But by taking a historical view, we can add nuance and perspective to today’s challenges, encouraging a less panicked and more measured response.
Repressentations of Displacement from the Middle East and North Africa
Public Culture, 2016
Forced migration moves in and out of the public sphere, with political, media, and civil society attention ebbing and flowing across time and space. However, while displacement is increasingly common—“one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum” (UNHCR 2015b)—and also increasingly protracted, with over half of the world’s refugees (more than 14 million people) having been displaced for over ten years, the vast majority of contexts of forced migration typically remain invisible in the global North until moments identified as “crises” arise, puncturing and punctuating this invisibility. In the contemporary context, and since the summer of 2015 specifically, European and North American political discourses, media represenations, and civil society campaigns have become saturated with images of certain refugees, in particular those from the Middle East. The current hypervisibility of Middle Eastern refugees in media and political discourses is, on many levels, understandable given the sheer number of refugees fleeing from diverse, intersecting crises and conflicts across the Middle East and farther afield and also in light of the challenges faced by Northern states and Northern-led organizations attempting to respond to these processes of forced migration. However, hypervisibility is itself regionally governed; it is arguably not the “humanitarian crisis” evolving in the Middle East but rather Europe’s (self-)position(ing) as a space overwhelmed by the arrival of an estimated 1 million refugees in 2015 that is at the core of this process of hypervisibilization in the European public sphere. In contrast, forced migrants across the global South remain invisible precisely because they are of no consequence to Europe. Ultimately, processes of (hyper)visibility have themselves also simultaneously been characterized by the reinscription of diverse forms of invisibility and marginalization. This article draws on my research with and about refugees from the Middle East and North Africa both to historicize and to contextualize what I refer to as intersecting processes of repressentation and footnoting (following Jacques Derrida) in the study of, and diverse responses to, forced migration (Fiddian- Qasmiyeh 2010, 2014a, 2016a). In particular, I evoke the concept of repressentation to examine the extent to which certain groups of forced migrants and certain identity markers (real, imagined, and imposed), on the one hand, and certain modes of “humanitarian” response to forced migration, on the other, are centralized and heralded while others are concealed from public view for diverse reasons and with different effects. The deconstructive framework underpinning my work as a whole leads me purposefully to centralize what has previously been assigned a peripheral position throughout the ever-expanding “archive of knowledge” (Foucault 1989: 25) vis-à-vis particular refugee situations and simultane- ously to critically interrogate how, why, and with what effect only certain bodies, identity markers, and models of humanitarian response become hypervisible in the public sphere. I start by tracing the roles of visibility and invisibility in constituting the “ideal refugee” (and the concomitant figure of the “a-refugee”), before turning to my ongoing research into refugee-refugee humanitarianism as an invisible form of Southern-led (rather than Northern-led or Northern-dominated) responses to displacement from Syria.
This paper should be taken as a semi-fictive and critical effort aimed at making the reader feel the refugee ‘other’ and thus battling systematic violence, inequality and discrimination present in the current ‘refugee crisis.’ The particular refugee whose memoirs are recorded on these pages, Ahmad Waleed Rahimi, is in fact a composite, rather than a real person. Ahmad was born out of numerous interviews with refugees of all sorts of nationalities, genders, classes and ethnicities. The narrative follows the commonest themes and concerns I heard in these open-ended and semi-structured interviews. Indeed, the motifs reproduced in this paper have come up in most if not all the interviews. I decided not to use the narrative of a single person for two reasons. First, I wanted to be sure of protecting any one refugee’s identity and security. In the present circumstances, even a record of a refugee passing through a specific place at a specific time could potentially result in push-backs and deportation – no academic would want to be liable for endangering any refugee’s journey and safety. Secondly, my goal was to provoke rather than represent, describe rather than analyse. Thus, I aimed at achieving the great depth of the refugee experience, which can more easily be achieved through multiple voices condensed into one than through the lone voice of a single refugee. I understood and accepted the problematics of such an approach, which reduces the multiplicity of contradictory experiences to a single experience. However, while I would not necessarily take this approach in researching other social groups, I found it strikingly beneficial and constructive in representing the reality of a refugee’s life along the Western Balkan route. Throughout my research, one observation would always dominate the field: in order to regulate and govern movement and migration, the EU turns plurality into a body. Hence the title, ‘Tell Me How You Move, And I Will Tell You Where You Are From’: by channelling the refugee flow in a particular way, Europe establishes refugees as particular types of subjects, as non-European, non-liberal, undocumented and undeserving subjects. Thus, I found that the plurality of refugees can indeed be condensed into a refugee body, the body of an Ahmad Waleed Rahimi, who narrates the everyday situations and events of an average European refugee-citizen. Admittedly, there are clear political reasons behind this kind of work. The EU is, for the first time, reacting to a global impact in an utterly uncoordinated and disintegrating fashion. Some talk about these circumstances as the end of the EU. Nonetheless the chaos of this crumbling system generates a need for new understandings. This, I believe, is the crucial moment in which we can redefine ‘Europeanness’ and accept refugees as the ‘New Europeans.’ In my opinion, the EU remains the most accomplished experiment in economic, social and political integration in human history, and the challenge of the present moment is to accept and integrate refugees as, not the European Other, but Europeans in the making. In this process, moreover, refugees are not Europe’s passive victims, but agents in its construction. It is important how we write history.
The current refugee crisis is one of the most acute issues in Europe, and has become a serious problem. It stems from the Arab Spring movement from December 2011, which resulted in many regional upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), most importantly the on-going Syrian civil war. The eruption of civil war in Syria drew sectarian and terrorist conflict into the country from neighboring Iraq, attracting regional intervention by Turkey and Iran and global involvement by the US, Russia and their allies. The result is that millions of people have fled their homeland to live in neighboring countries, but the unsafely of the whole region, particularly Syria and Iraq due to the advance of Daesh from 2014, has caused most refugees to attempt to move to Europe to avoid the Palestinian trap of living as stateless persons in refugee camps for decades (Independent, 2015).
How Middle Eastern Refugees Will Shake Up The European System (Forbes 2015-10)
The death toll continues to rise as boats carrying Middle Eastern refugees fleeing to Europe by sea sink in the Mediterranean. Winter threatens refugee camps and the crisis in Europe grows more complex. Preserving boarders and building walls between European states won't solve the problem. Recognizing migration as a major asset to European countries may be a better tack. But Europe, with its soft spot for social security and pride in liberal values may need to decide on which chair it sits.
Refugees and Europe a Review Essay
Central and Eastern European Review
The two books complement one another, Carr's looking specifically at situations on Borders, while Maley's is more concerned with the individuals affected by the laws of the countries into which they are attempting to flee. Both writers are extremely sympathetic to tolerance of refugee immigration to Europe, Matthew Carr, follows his personal investigations both along many of Europe's outer borders, as well as within many state institutions and also NGOs. William Maley writes as Chair on the Australian Refugee Council for five years to 2003. Introducing the reader to Europe's borders, Carr suggests that 'Europe begins in Africa' in two Spanish colonial 'autonomous cities', Ceuta and Melilla, towns which he later explains are centres of hundreds of tragedies for Africans attempting to reach Europe. On the other hand, at the notorious Berlin Wall, in all its 30 years of existence, only l25 people lost their lives trying to cross it. Carr's book is divided basically into two parts: 'Hard Borders' and 'Border Crossings'. Carr discusses the physical and bureaucratic barriers and the political and human consequences of these barriers, creating what are widely known as 'illegal immigrants' (a non-legal term). The Lisbon Treaty of 2008 set out with ideals of respect for people in need of safety, coming from places of war and turmoil. At the time of publication, there were 214 million people living outside their national borders and another 26 million displaced within their countries (since then however,
Middle East Refugees' Crisis: Europeans' Three Dimensional Approaches
Policy perspectives (Islamabad), 2016
The Middle East crises reiterate the popular sentiment that the region will retain her volatility for years to come, whilst refreshing our memory of the transnationalism of modern political upheaval. The wave and magnitude of the displaced people out of the Middle East, particularly from Syria does not merely underpin the depth of the humanitarian crisis, but the ferocity shown by the victims trying to reach the supposedly shore of hope, help, prosperity, and posterity in Europe. The crisis further illuminates the often rejected view that the Muslim societies cannot command a common voice to resolving common crisis mostly challenging fellow religious and cultural kin. Yet, the crisis also lay bare before our naked eyes that irrespective of the looming and daunting crises confronting Europe, Europeans have not altogether forsaken their moral value of humanitarianism, though the latter is challenged by the growing propensity of far-rightism. The article is an attempt to understand the European reactions towards the refugee crisis through the prism of eventanalysis, policy-assessment, and public opinion. Doing the latter, the research delineates the three dimensional approaches (institution, state, and people) through which European have treated the crisis. The piece underscored the pertinence of the far-right tendency, not as mere farce, but a reckonable force potential enough to determine the final fate of the refugees seeking succor in Europe. The piece was not completed without expounding the extent to which Muslim/Arab states responded to the crisis.-Author.] Dr. Bakare Najimdeen, a Senior IPS Associate, teaches International Relations at Islamabad based universities.