Rethinking Refugees

Beyond State of Emergency

Peter Nyers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135436995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Rethinking Refugees: Beyond State of Emergency examines the ways in which refugees have been made objects of the complex discourse, practices, and strategies of humanitarianism making visible the link between our knowledge of refugees and questions about the changing status of political power, space, and identity. The author draws upon post-structural analytical tools to develop a critique of humanitarianism and to sketch a bio-political framework for understanding the relationship between the humanity of refugees and their capacity, or lack thereof, for political voice and action. Rethinking Refugees is a radically fresh approach to understanding refugees, their movements, and their place within an increasingly globalized international politics.

1

Emerging or Emergency Identities?

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.

—Walter Benjamin

Introduction

Refugees and their movements regularly emerge as a “problem” to world order. To those whose principal concern is with the maintenance and security of this order, any situation that is constructed as a problem—or worse yet, a crisis or an emergency—is of obvious significance and warrants immediate action. The speeches of politicians, the scripts of news anchors, the field manuals of humanitarian aid workers, and the pages of academic policy journals all contain anxious expressions of concern over the global refugee crisis. “What is to be done?” is the collective chorus. While the urgency of finding an enduring solution to the global refugee crisis is one that is widely shared, the basis of this consensus goes well beyond feelings of moral obligation that come with the knowledge of human suffering. Indeed, at the same time that refugees are defined as “humanitarian emergency” and thus as an object of ethical concern, they are also defined as representing a crisis to world order and therefore as an immediate political concern. Sadako Ogata, the former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), spoke to this point:

The subject of refugees and displaced people is high on the list of international concerns today not only because of its humanitarian significance, but also because of its impact on peace, security and stability. The world cannot reach a new order without effectively addressing the problem of human displacement.¹

The wording of the High Commissioner’s statement is worth reflecting on, for it points to a fundamental ambiguity that characterizes conventional responses to the phenomenon of global refugee flows: what is the relationship between a commitment to the principles of humanitarian action on one hand and to the principles and norms that underline the “peace, security, and stability” of the international system of states on the other? While the first commitment appeals to a common human identity as the basis for humanitarian action, the second directs our concern toward maintaining a world order that insists on citizenship as the authentic political identity. How these competing commitments to humans and citizens are resolved reveals much about how contemporary visions of political identity and community are being (re)articulated today.

A useful way to begin a critical questioning of the politics of the refugee is to consider Walter Benjamin’s views on states of emergency and counteremergency as represented in the epigram that opens this chapter. Refugees, as we shall see in this chapter, are cast as an abject population in a way that is systematically interrelated with the discourse of “the emergency.” As a consequence, Benjamin’s diagnosis of the “state of emergency” loses none of its relevance when it is applied to contemporary questions about humanitarianism, multilateral cooperation, and the global refugee crisis. Refugee identity is “not the exception but the rule” in the sense that the constitution of the normality requires the identification of difference, an Other through which coherence and unity of sovereign states and subjectivities are constituted and maintained.

Sovereign power is often thought about in terms of its inclusiveness. Indeed, the very language of liberal political theory encourages thinking about sovereignty in these terms: sovereign societies are brought together with the acceptance of a contract or a compact or through some vague general will. According to this view, a properly sovereign polity is one where the people (or their representatives) are empowered to determine the conditions that will structure and govern their own lives. In truth, however, this emphasis on inclusion obscures more than it illuminates, as modern forms of political sovereignty are as much based on the principles of exclusion as they are on inclusion, as much about dividing and differentiating practices as unifying and integrating the social order. One of the key performances of sovereign power, as Schmitt recognized, is to mark the limit of the normal and the beginning of the exceptional. “Sovereign is he [sic] who decides on the exception,”² said Schmitt, who went on to underscore how the sovereign relation makes possible the authoritative distinctions between friends and enemies, citizens and foreigners, insiders and outsiders. The dangers associated with such an account of the political are considerable, especially for an abject population such as refugees. With sovereignty, self-other encounters can readily be transformed into self-enemy confrontations. As a result, refugees can become stigmatized, made into a danger, and thus constructed as a threat to the nation-state and its citizen-subjects.

The refugee is a limit-concept that occupies the ambiguous divide between the binary citizenry-humanity. By “limit-concept” I mean a concept that expresses the limits of a certain logic of intelligibility—in this case, the political. By “political” I mean something much broader than just “politics.” As Jenny Edkins points out, “The political has to do with the establishment of that very social order which sets out a particular, historically specific account of what counts as politics and defines other areas of social life as not politics.”³ As such, the refugee is constituted through a series of ontological omissions: whatever is present to the political subject (i.e., citizen) is absent to the refugee. The qualities of visibility, agency, and rational speech of the citizen-subject are conspicuously absent in conventional representations of refugees that cast them as invisible, speechless, and, above all, nonpolitical.

This chapter offers a critical assessment of the general discourse of “the emergency” within which refugees are subsumed. This discourse is thoroughly dominated by a problem-solving mentality that defines refugee movements as a technical problem in need of rapid solutions. This perspective not only is largely uncritical of prevailing and unequal global power relations but also discourages critical thinking about what constitutes a “normal” state of affairs. Situations deemed emergencies, however, are always interesting, for they bring to the forefront the unquestioned assumptions and tacit agreements that work to constitute a “normal” state of affairs. Consequently, to think of emergencies as Benjamin does—that is, as “not the exception but the rule”—means paying attention to those practices that work to reproduce and sustain prevailing conceptions of “normality” and “order.” I argue that speaking about refugees as a technical problem in need of a solution has affected the way in which international efforts to resolve the refugee problem have been structured. To demonstrate this, I examine the history of the largely ad hoc, temporary, and crisis-orientated international refugee organizations of the twentieth century, arguing that their significance resides in how their insistence on the emergency terms of the refugee phenomenon imprinted the discourse of the emergency onto the very identity of refugees themselves. I consider in the remaining sections of this chapter the effects, as well as the constraints and possibilities, this emergency identity imposes on refugees.

Analyzing visual representations of refugees is an important part of understanding the politics of refugee identity and practice. To be sure, it is vital to include such representations if only for the simple reason that “photographs and other visual representations of refugees are far more common than is the reproduction in print of what particular refugees have said.”⁴ As a consequence, I consider in this chapter visual representations of refugeeness and assess how they affect the political subjectivity of people categorized as refugees. I contrast the visual images of refugeeness employed by the UNHCR with those presented by the noted humanitarian photographer Sebastiåo Salgado. Following this discussion, I offer some conclusions on what refugeeness can tell us about the contemporary status of sovereign accounts of the political.

A Crisis Vocabulary

The phenomenon of the refugee has a long history of being subsumed within discourses of crisis and danger. To be sure, words such as “problem”, “crisis”, “complex political emergency”—and let’s not forget “border control” and “national security”—are commonly invoked whenever the subject of refugees and their movements arise. Refugee situations today are usually provoked by a complicated configuration of political, socioeconomic, and environmental forces that have conjoined to create a crisis situation. The suddenness and severity of post-cold war refugee flows has prompted a prominent UNHCR official to characterize these situations as “mega-crises” in a statement to the UN Security Council.⁵ It is, therefore, not surprising to find that “humanitarian emergency” has come to be one of the most popular concepts in the refugee studies literature, dominating the vocabulary of the government officials, aid workers, refugee advocates, academics, and journalists. The concept attains a great deal of credibility for the way it connects the urgency of crisis situations with a heightened sense of moral obligation for individuals and groups caught in these violent and unstable situations. After all, the number of refugees and crisis situations worldwide does not seem to be diminishing. The 1.5 million refugees the UNHCR recognized in 1951 had increased to nearly 15.2 million by 2001, together with an additional 9.5 million “persons of concern” to the agency, including asylum seekers, returnees, and internally displaced persons (IDPs).⁶ The financial costs of providing humanitarian assistance and protection to refugees have similarly increased: the UNHCR’s original budget of US$300,000 has been dwarfed by recent budgets that have exceeded US$1 billion every year since 1992. Together, these growing numbers and institutional capacities are representative of a rapidly expanding global population of the displaced, the marginalized, the excluded.

The problem of refugees, however, does not lie with their numbers alone. It is a problem, first and foremost, of categorization, of making distinctions. All classifications have social conditions for their production and historical circumstances that make them credible.⁷ However, the im-mediacy—indeed, the emergency—of refugee crises has left little time for critical self-reflection on the conditions and circumstances that make such a system of discrimination possible. On one level, this commitment to immediate action over critical reflection is not surprising. Researchers have often pointed out that the stakes involved in crisis situations are extremely high: “The rules which govern collective life no longer function; fear and hostility are intensified; the living conditions of the most vulnerable or exposed groups deteriorate; their very lives may be in danger.”⁸ Who would want to deny that refugee situations represent a real and urgent crisis to the affected individuals, families, and communities? Who would want to efface the emergency character of the refugee condition? It is not surprising that, put in these terms, critical questioning of the emergency discourse in which refugees find themselves is often dismissed as an unhelpful distraction. Daniel Warner spoke to this point when he recalled the reaction of a High Commissioner to an academic exegesis of refugee discourse: “That was all very well Professor, but what am I to do with the problem tomorrow morning?”⁹

One of the enduring consequences of being subsumed within a discourse of the emergency is that the refugee phenomenon is almost exclusively interpreted as a problem in need of a solution. How different actors articulate the nature of the problem does, of course, vary considerably. For instance, the UNHCR and other humanitarian actors seeking to provide protection and assistance to refugees interpret the problem of refugee flows in a very different way than, say, xenophobic, elements within (un)civil society and state institutions and legislatures. Despite their differences, these divergent perspectives nonetheless share some important commonalties. For instance, when faced with situations deemed emergencies, the desire to secure timely, policy-relevant analyses and recommendations is strong, irrespective of one’s political views or moral position. Emergency situations, it is repeatedly stressed, require emergency responses: immediate, practical, and operational responses.

An example of this impulse to rapidly solve the problem of refugee crises can be culled from the ongoing policy-making debates held at the UNHCR. The “complex emergencies” that emerged from the violence and conflict in the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa in the early 1990s presented the UNHCR with such an “enormous and practical challenge” that the Executive Committee (EXCOM) of the organization commissioned “a detailed study of the organization’s role and performance in [these] recent emergency operations.”¹⁰ The findings of the study approached the question of the UNHCR’s relationship to humanitarian emergencies in an entirely practical and technical manner. Highlighted are operational issues such as logistics and the securing of lines of supply and communication. The question of agency coordination is similarly treated at length with recommendations for “closer integration of … policymaking and operational functions” as well as for a lead agency to coordinate emergency response efforts to avoid “confusion,” “inefficiency,” and “duplication.”¹¹ In general, the report is concerned with improving the efficiency and success rates of UN emergency operations and so concludes that “greater emphasis must be placed on operational objectives, establishing a clear chain of command, decentralization and rapid decision making.”¹²

The discourse on refugees and their movements is strongly allied to what Robert Cox identified as the “problem-solving” perspective. This approach is dominant not only among much of the academic scholarship on refugees but also within the policy-making circles of international humanitarian organizations dealing with refugees. It is an approach that is quite attractive to those responding to emergency situations, as its focus and emphasis is largely on practical and operational issues. It is also, however, an approach that is thoroughly implicated within a specific regime of power/knowledge that structures and orders the discourse on refugees and their movements. As Cox argued, the problem-solving approach “takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given framework for action” and in general works to “make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble.”¹³ Thus, typical problem-solving questions with respect to refugee flows include the following: What causes the “complex emergencies” that produce so many refugee movements? What are the political implications or effects of these movements? How can we remedy these situations? Indeed, how can we control and solve the problem of the refugee?

Who is this “we” that will solve the problem of refugees? This is a crucial question because, as the scare quotes highlight, the capacity to speak authoritatively about populations, problems, and solutions always involves a powe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Other titles in the Global Horizons Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Body Politics in Motion
• Chapter 1 Emerging or Emergency Identities?
• Chapter 2 On Humanitarian Violence
• Chapter 3 Fearful Subjects: Reason and Fear in the UN Refugee Definition
• Chapter 4 Human Hospitality/Animal Animosity: Canadian Responses to Refugee Crises at the Millennium
• Chapter 5 Evasive Maneuvers: Refugee Warrior Communities Recast the Political
• Conclusion Rethinking Refugeeness: Dangers and Prospects
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index