Abstract
On Freedom and Asylum: Rethinking Refuge, Matching the Present
‘Rescue and autonomy’: it is around these two words that Alexander Betts and Paul Collier pivot their thesis for rethinking the asylum regime in their book, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System. The book is, in fact, a sort of political manifesto and at the same time a fundamental theoretical contribution to the debate around the current limits of global refugee politics, in the light of what states and the EU have named a ‘migration crisis’. It traces a compelling historical genealogy of the emergence of the humanitarian approach to refugees, pointing to the pitfalls and the anachronism of the asylum system. In particular, the authors remark, the definition of ‘who is a refugee?’ that is centred on persecution and which is still used by UNHCR, building on article 51 of the Geneva Convention, does not capture the current multiple causes of refugee displacement – such as wars and internal conflicts or because people ‘simply cannot secure the minimum conditions of human dignity in their country of origin’.
Refuge builds on the twofold unquestioned assumption that we are confronted with a ‘tragedy’ – the tragedy of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean – and that a different governmental approach to the Syrian case would ‘not have led to the terrible outcomes that unfolded with the seeming inevitability of a tragedy’. Hence, the very narrative framework of the ‘refugee crisis’ is taken as an uncontested reality that we have to face. This intervention mobilises a different take on the present migration context, proposing a critical engagement with the book through a focus on the two notions that the authors put at the core: autonomy and rescue. Such a take will enable highlighting the biopolitical predicaments that underpin Betts and Collier’s book.
Autonomy vs Freedom?
Through a powerful critique of UNHCR’s modes of intervention, Betts and Collier contend that ‘refuge must be understood as not only a humanitarian issue but also one of development’. Indeed, they draw attention to a relevant shift in UNHCR’s approach, from a right-based agency, towards an organisation mainly providing humanitarian support. Thus, the authors highlight the increasing overlapping between refugee protection and humanitarian intervention, critically pointing to the latter subsuming and replacing the former. Despite UNHCR’s programmes for creating pathways for refugees towards autonomy – as for instance it is the case with the Refugee Cash Assistance Programme recently launched in Greece – according to the authors the daily activity of the UN agency ultimately consists in providing foods and shelters to ‘people of concern’, without appropriately addressing for instance the difficulties encountered by refugees in the urban context. This humanitarian mode of intervention hinges on a specific spatial form of containment: the refugee camp. Since the 1980s, Betts and Collier explain, refugee camps have proliferated across the globe and the camp has become the dominant mode for spatially governing asylum seekers, by de facto placing ‘refugees out of sight and out of mind’. On this point, it is worth mentioning the relevance of analyses that have situated refugee camps within a colonial genealogy of spatial strategies for governing, grouping and confining populations. As Marc Bernardot (2008) illustrates in his book Camps d’Etrangers, refugee camps contain and manage populations through measures of mise à l’écart. Such a twist towards the humanitarianisation of refugee lives has direct implications on ‘the moral economy of asylum’ strengthening a substantial ‘discrediting of asylum seekers’ (Fassin, 2016) and, I want to add, a criminalisation of refugees as refugees.
However, by positing refugees’ autonomy as a goal to pursue against the shrinking of asylum, how do Betts and Collier conceive autonomy? And what is the relationship between autonomy and freedom (of movement)? It is first in terms of ‘restoring autonomy’ to a ‘pre-refuge status’ that Betts and Collier frame their programmatic text; and such a pre-refuge status is not associated only with a self-sufficient economic condition and a good education level but with the ‘country of origin’ as the unquestioned place of ‘spatial fixation’ (Foucault, 2016) of all people across the world.
Therefore, in Betts and Collier’s view, the nation-state – namely, the refugee’s country of origin – turns out to be the yardstick and at the same time the geopolitical norm for thinking autonomy. In this sense, autonomy is carefully distinguished from freedom: the authors do in fact object to scholars who claim that an equal right to mobility should be granted to everyone, that ‘migration is incidental to refuge’ and that states should build ‘safe havens’ and not freedom of movement nor freedom of choice: ‘There is nothing inherent to being a refugee that necessitates unrestricted global mobility or the ability to choose a destination country. The salient feature of being a refugee is the need of protection, not the need to migrate.’ Hence, on the one hand Refuge underscores the necessity of rethinking asylum by broadening the definition of ‘refugee’ enshrined in the Geneva Convention. On the other, refugees’ freedom – of movement and of choice about where to go and settle – is evacuated since the start, as a right to struggle for. On the contrary, it is precisely such a freedom that the authors ultimately associate with unruly mobility, that the book considers one of the main causes of the ungovernability of the ‘Syrian crisis’.
The Biopolitics of Rescue
Rethinking the asylum regime requires, according to Betts and Collier, raising a fundamental ethical question, about our moral duty towards people seeking asylum. The ethical ground for supporting and hosting refugees is, they argue, ‘the duty of rescue’ in front of people in need of protection due to ‘serious harm’ they experienced in their country of origin. By referring to the current scholarly debate on the ethics of refuge, the authors posit common humanity as the moral norm which should lead our decisions about if and up to what point we have the obligation of granting hospitality and refuge to asylum seekers. Although autonomy and rescue could appear as an antinomic couplet, the book traces a connection between the two categories by marking quite sharp boundaries between people’s right to free movement and the right to asylum. As far as rescue is concerned, what matters, from a political and ethical standpoint, is the striving for granting ‘safe havens’ with the ultimate goal of returning refugees home ‘once order has been restored’. Once again, the country of origin as the natural ‘legitimate’ space re-emerges as the normative yardstick which sustains the whole analysis. In this regard, I want to bring attention here to the biopolitical predicaments that implicitly sustain a conceptualisation of (granting) refuge in terms of rescue. By framing asylum obligations in terms of rescue, I suggest, people in seek of refuge are presented as shipwrecked lives to be fished out – of the water as well as of dangerous contexts. Such a ‘biopolitics of rescue’ (Tazzioli, 2018), enacted both upon singular individuals and upon displaced populations, reinstantiates in the end the asymmetries and inequalities among lives that are the very core of the ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin, 2011).
Rethinking Asylum through Freedom?
Betts and Collier’s convincing argument of the anachronism of the definition of ‘refugee’ included in the Geneva Convention represents a fundamental starting point for rethinking the asylum regime in a time in which refugees as refugees, and, together solidarity practices in support of migrant safe passages, are increasingly objects of criminalisation.
The main ethical question that Refuge addressed to the readers – ‘what is our moral duty towards refugees?’ – can no longer be avoided nowadays, and it has been asked from a different angle by authors who have recently debated on how to rethink ‘hospitality’ by challenging at the same time the methodological nationalism that surreptitiously underpins migration studies literature. Nevertheless, what remains fundamentally missing from these works that aim to rethink asylum within the present and beyond the historical coordinates that gave rise to the Geneva Convention, are refugees themselves. In fact, the foreclosure of the ‘incorrigibility’ of migration (De Genova, 2010), is in the end elided from the narrative: there is no state’s refugee programme that, in fact, can totally discipline and contain migrants’ desires, needs and determinacy to move. Instead of taking for granted the script of a ‘refugee crisis’ affecting Europe and in the place of considering refuge in disjunction from freedom of movement and equal access to mobility, I gesture towards an analysis that takes migrants’ ‘unbearable’ practices of freedom as the ground for rethinking asylum beyond its exclusionary historical conditions.
Freedom multiplication of individual and collective migrants’ refusals to be fingerprinted in the first EU country they enter, bring to the fore migrants’ practices of freedom as undetectable from their claim to asylum. As I suggested in a recent collective work with Nicholas De Genova and Glenda Garelli, it is precisely around the impossibility to disjoin autonomy and freedom that a reconceptualisation of asylum should be done (De Genova et al., 2018). Such a work cannot be carried on other than by undoing the supposedly sharp division between ‘us’ and ‘them’; that is, between a fictitious ‘we’ in charge of establishing the exclusionary criteria of hospitality and a likewise generic ‘refugee population’ as a potential beneficiary. In order to rethink asylum beyond the humanitarian frame that Betts and Collier rightly challenge, an active refusal to enforce unequal access to mobility is today essential to a critical politics of knowledge. Indeed, as Claudia Aradau (2008: 187) has observed, ‘the unthinkability and absence of freedom or liberty is linked with the absence of equality’, and it leads to reproduce the same hierarchies of humanity that are at the core of humanitarianism.