Just as borders are social constructions, so are border government and bordered populations. Migrants and refugees are not merely out there as natural constituents of the population. Rather, they are âmade upâ according to selection processes and fateful classifications assigned to them by states and professional groups. Neither is a âmigration managementâ perspective a natural way of approaching human mobility, nor is its underpinning narrative the only possible narrative about how mobility is governed. Both âmigrantsâ and âmigration managementâ are embedded in particular ways of seeing, knowing and doing mobility. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2016,1 this book takes the case of Turkey to enquire into the nature of this seeing, knowing and doing.
The humanitarian crisis involving thousands of drownings in the seas between Europe and its southern and eastern neighbours cannot be simply read as the result of unfortunate accidents. Neither is it simply the fault of unscrupulous smugglers or apparently misinformed migrants who embark on hazardous routes unaware of the perils that await them. It seems clear that the fate of this anonymous mass of individuals is intimately associated with the bordering practices that target the âmigration threatâ emanating from the âwrongâ side of the Mediterranean.
Within this picture, Turkey is positioned as not quite belonging to Europe or completely outside of it. Turkey was never colonised by a European state (indeed, it led a powerful empire), yet its encounters with Europe have often been marked by Othering. Turkeyâs ambivalent and shifting positionality on the international stage, combined with its critical geographical positioning as a key entry state for migration and refugee flows into Europe, presents an important case for the study of contemporary bordering practices.
In the last two decades Turkey has witnessed a variety of bordering interventions to address its migration âproblemâ. Fences and walls have been constructed along Turkeyâs Bulgarian, Greek and Syrian borders. Policing and patrolling missions have been strengthened along the Aegean Sea through Frontex operations. The US Homeland Security has introduced dense security database checks in its resettlement process for refugees located in Turkey. In 2013, the Turkish government ratified its first law to address migration and international protection. At the same time it formed a national migration management agency in support of this law. By 2015 Turkey became the country hosting the largest number of refugees in the world. This landscape provides a rich setting through which to advance our understandings of contemporary bordering.
The Critical Border Studies (CBS) perspective informing this study provides the conceptual tools to question taken-for-granted understandings of the border as merely a line demarcating a geographical barrier and to engage with the different practices, often deterritorialised, through which borders are constructed. Accordingly, my enquiry treats the diffuse and multifaceted nature of borders as an assemblage of practices, techniques, technologies as territorialised and deterritorialised. CBS goes beyond an analysis of actors and practices explicitly associated with border control (e.g. passports, patrolling border guards, surveillance technology) to examine the borderwork carried out by less traditional actors and practices. In Turkey, seemingly disparate actors and practices are brought together in the name of controlling, managing, processing, saving and soul-lifting mobile populations. This study draws together an analysis of missionaries as they encourage conversion to Christianity in Istanbul; the International Centre for Migration and Policy Developmentâs (ICMPDâs) training sessions in human resources to Ankara-based civil servants; intergovernmental dialogue for those based in Vienna; risk analysis in refugee resettlement from Turkey and the US. I explore how intersecting rationalities of governing mobile populations inform a shared commitment among many of these actors to a migration management perspective.
I argue that the interrelated rationalities of humanitarianism, securitisation and orientalism support a migration management perspective which has the following characteristics: firstly, it purports to generate scientific, neutral expertise and aligned technical interventions which are politically indifferent. Secondly, it approaches the border as a filter that should facilitate economically beneficial migration while hindering the movement of âundesirableâ mobility in all its forms. Thirdly, it favours consensual rather than coercive interventions to steer states and people towards appropriate behaviour regarding the control and management of human mobility. Fourthly, it aspires to achieve a win-win-win ideal that can benefit all stakeholders (sending, transit and receiving countries as well as migrants). We are attuned to seeing humanitarian initiatives as based on an idea of universal solidarity but humanitarianism reserves such acts for some, while abandoning others.
A humanitarian rationality legitimates divisions between desirable and undesirable mobility, deserving and undeserving migrants. One of its effects is to open up space for bordering practices from actors less traditionally associated with border security. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the domain of refugee resettlement where there are surprising linkages between Turkish state officials, Homeland Security, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Christian missionaries.
According to Fassin (in Walters 2006, 143), âhumanitarian government can be defined as the administration of human collectivities in the name of a higher moral principle which sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of suffering as the highest value of actionâ. Humanitarianism is associated with a desire to relieve suffering as such. It is based on compassion rather than rights and is thus considered âabove politicsâ. And yet humanitarianism is inherently political as it seeks to control and intervene in populations and territories. Sites of humanitarian intervention such as the refugee camps serve to contain âundesirableâ populations in the global South, where the vast majority of humanitarian projects are carried out (Agier 2011). The camp, as a confined space of monitoring, managing and surveillance, functions to protect life but also to deny the camp population a political existence. This space is inherently about both care and control (Agier 2011; Hyndmen 2000; Malkki 1992). The âhumanitarianism of bordersâ (Walters 2011) legitimates specific forms of intervention and ways of governing a victim population. It is in a dialectical relation with other kinds of bordering practices (militarisation, technologisation, securitisation) that have increasingly rendered border crossings âa matter of life and deathâ for certain members of the global mobile population (Walters 2011, 147). The humanitarian and security border are mutually constitutive. Once a space is classified as humanitarian, it gives certain actors the authority to act.
Appeals to humanitarianism underpin the demands of the EU to intervene in countries of the global South to improve their migration and asylum systems. States create the conditions for humanitarian organisations to act, but they also determine the limits of what counts as humanitarian. Smugglers are a case in point; they are not treated as humanitarian actors supporting desperate individuals fleeing warzones but as criminals infringing on the sovereign claims of states. The illegal migrant smuggler can never become the humanitarian hero saving the lives of Syrian children fleeing Assadâs bombs. Part of the answer has to do with the actual practices of migrant smugglers but part may also lie within an orientalist reasoning that treats all migrants and smugglers from south of the Mediterranean as an invading force.
In his seminal study, Orientalism, Said (2003) argued that whether the gaze upon the Orient constructs it as exotic or inferior, it is always the Other of the West. Orientalism is not a conscious conspiracy to undermine the non-West, but rather an effect of unreflective colonial assumptions that treat the non-West always as object and the West as subject. Islamophobia is a derivative of orientalism in that it describes the problem of prejudice, while orientalism addresses questions of power and knowledge more broadly. Critical engagement with the relationship between âthe rationalities, technologies and programmes of migration governance and the histories of colonialismâ (Walters 2015, 11) raises questions as to how the international government of borders relates to North/South inequalities and whether this has fed into the ra...