Abstract
On 18 June 2015, a press release from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that the number of refugees worldwide reached almost 60 million at the end of 2014, ‘more people than at any other time since records began [fleeing] their homes and [seeking] refuge and safety elsewhere’, according to the agency. What happens to those seeking asylum, particularly those who are less than welcome in their would-be destinations, and what they do in response to state efforts to control them, is central to Heather Johnson’s important book, Borders, Asylum and Non-Citizenship. More broadly, given the narrow confines of the official definition of a refugee, Johnson’s main concern is what she calls ‘irregular’ migrants.
Irregular migrants are ones that do not conform to the rules and processes established by the nation-state in which they find themselves or to which they are heading. (In this regard, it is a more expansive category than ‘illegal’.) Johnson, a lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Queens University, Belfast, illustrates how irregular migrants negotiate the policies, practices, and structures that seek to control them in three ‘sites of intervention’: immigrant detention centers in Australia (writ-large given the country’s ‘off-shoring’ of many of its facilities), the semi-autonomous Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla (exclaves, vestiges of colonialism, in northern Africa), and refugee camps in Tanzania. In doing so, Johnson illuminates (and realizes by making the case for) one of her three main goals for the book: the presence of what she calls ‘a global regime of international migration’, one based on ‘shared norms and expectations’ (p. 3). In addition to illustrating the existence of such a regime, Johnson has two other main goals: (1) to draw upon migrant narrative and voice to help the reader better understand irregularity and (2) to make the case for the agency of irregular migrants as meaningful and transformative at the scale of the everyday. In all these areas, the book succeeds.
Central to the global regime, Johnson argues, is a growing distinction between regular and irregular migration. This is especially the case in Australia, the only ‘developed’ nation-state to adopt a universal policy of detention for all unauthorized arrivals to the former British settler colony. While Australian policy might seem particularly harsh, it is only a matter of degree. It serves as a model of sorts for other countries, Johnson suggests, as they become increasingly restrictionist toward migrants who do not conform to official dictates. Indeed, in all three sites that she interrogates, ‘Prevention and containment with an emphasis on control dominate the policy regime’ (p. 102). Meanwhile, although the migrants associated with the different sites have taken diverse paths to arrive at their destinations, have distinct motives for fleeing their homelands, and confront different policy regimes, they share much. In short, their common experience is one in which their ‘irregularity is criminalized and marked by a refusal to participate in state border programmes and regimes’ (p. 106) – at least to the extent that these ‘programmes and regimes’ do not allow those effectively defined as irregular migrants to stay and lead lives of dignity.
This refusal manifests the agency that Johnson insists many migrants exercise. It is an agency of consequence in that irregular migrants ‘directly challenge the capacity of the state to exert control’ and ‘thus become a challenge to state security, both in contesting the inviolability or borders and in challenging the sovereign power to define, code and classify’ (p. 129). Hence, while relations of violence certainly characterize the (à la Giorgio Agamben) ‘Camp’-like border spaces that Johnson explores, this does not mean that migrants cannot and do not exercise agency. ‘Indeed’, she writes, ‘persistent contestations of the sovereign power and the exceptionality of the Camp are perceptible throughout their everyday strategies and activities’ (p. 149).
In emphasizing agency, Johnson is careful to note what it means to demand change – whether verbally articulated or made simply by one’s presence–asserting that conceiving of agency as the realization of a desired end is too limiting, especially from the vantage of ‘agency that begins from the exceptional space of the subaltern’ (p. 29). Instead, we should see agency as involving the contestation of ‘the shape and meaning of the space of the border, even if this is to produce a greater degree of restriction, a firmer politics of closure or a more steadfast refusal’. Seen in this manner, ‘the agency of the non-citizen comes into greater focus’ (p. 29). Even though one’s agency can and often does result in negative consequences or an intensification of the conditions against which one struggles, they can also be resisted, Johnson insists, and thus provide another opportunity for the exercise of agency.
In conceiving of the political in the way she does, Johnson takes inspiration from the work of philosopher Jacques Rancière. As she explains, the conventional notion of politics – ‘the procedures and systems of legitimation by which the societal contract is achieved’ (p. 165) – is actually the antithesis of politics. Politics begins when one denies legitimacy to that contract and resists it. In conjunction with the ethnography-informed view from ‘the other side of the fence’ that Johnson provides, Rancière’s work reveals ‘the ever-present capacity for action and voice that the space of the Camp seemingly denies’ (p. 175).
Johnson’s analysis rests on a particular theory of social change, one informed by feminist approaches that highlight the importance of the everyday and momentary in fueling large-scale and long-term change. Drawing on the words of the late political scientist Aristide Zolberg, Johnson insists that ‘a multitude of micro-events’ (p. 200) underlie mass mobilization. That said, she warns of the dangers of romanticizing individual and micro-level agency and admitting that they ‘carry limited political meaning without the production of longer-term struggles and patterns’ (p. 201) Still, Johnson suggests that the myriad instances of non-citizen resistance she encountered in her fieldwork in various contexts and sites speak to something larger: ‘an ongoing story of which we have only had a glimpse’ (p. 201).
Where that ‘ongoing story’ might lead in the face of an ever-growing international regime of migrant securitization, one in which ‘prevention of irregular migration is the goal – not the protection of refugees’ (p. 87) – is an open question. Helping the reader to even consider that question is one of the great strengths of Heather Johnson’s book. Combined with its empirical richness and theoretical nuance, it makes Borders, Asylum and Global Non-Citizenship a valuable read for researchers in the realm of international relations and migration studies, as well as a highly beneficial contribution to upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses.