Abstract
An examination of the figure of the slave and the figure of migrant make visible important historical interconnections that sustain past and present elaborations of the human and ‘the international’. These interconnections have always been racialised and they have structurally constituted the making of an interdependent world community. A series of instrumentalised discourses, at times turned into rationalities that govern policies towards migrants, particularly in a post 9/11 context, increasingly normalises the idea that there are people that can be justifiably expelled from the civic/civil, and increasingly human sphere. The slave was forcefully removed, both physically from attachment to kin and land, and morally from the history of humankind. The migrant is pushed out of the bounds of the livable as well as the moral category of rights-bearer. The commonalities that configure both phenomena are rooted in an extractive supply economy and a hierarchised ordering of humans. The article uses the history of Frederick Douglas to show that the absence of ‘care’ as methodology of relationality limits the valence of interdependence as a marker of a globalised world. In doing so, it challenges the unexamined assumptions of new/posthumanism that advocates radical interdependence without interrogating the modalities of ‘humanity’ among different categories of humans.
‘Our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligations to one another. When we strike at one another, we strike at that very bond’. Judith Butler
The idea that the historical foundation of the modern-colonial world in the sixteenth century 1 coincided with the beginning of the making of ‘the international’ is an important recognition of the constitutive nature of a geopolitics of difference. If the world came together through encounters, if ‘the international’ was constituted through relations and connections, how do we account for the implications of these connections for a notion of interdependence? This article attempts a reflection on continuity and connection in relation to the status of the human in International Relations (IR) – as object, possibility and heuristic horizon. It is therefore a commentary on both IR epistemology and methodology, namely on ideas of the human that emerge in our various deliberations on ‘relations’ and connections.
The possibility of an international-as-community has to confront a historical contradiction. There is the need to expel categories of humans from the body politic. At the same time, there is an attempt to sustain a rhetoric of care as essential to community. However, one of the most striking markers of our times is the widespread destitution, of spaces of living, of the possibility of circulation – or its opposite, that is forced circulation without aim or end. This enduring politics of our times affects most singularly postcolonial, racialised populations and it beckons for enquiries into the expanding realm of the margins.
In relation to this, the limited interest amongst IR scholars in addressing the question of the human in common deliberations about ‘the international’ walls off an important horizon of the present. Specifically, out of ignorance, inability or unwillingness to think about the history and aftermath of slavery emerges abstract orders of citizen, community and international. Each one of these orders not only has an inbuilt racialised notion of the human at its heart but also conveys an inability to examine the implications of interdependence in terms of a requirement of mutual care and mutual vulnerability where vulnerability is unevenly distributed and experienced. In fact, since Sassoon’s review work on interdependence in 1981, 2 the subject has fallen into disuse in the study of global politics outside of discussions about trade.
The article examines how the connection between two different figures, namely the slave and the migrant, is mediated by past and on-going processes of racialisation, what these enable and exclude, and how they define the social contours of the international. The question that thus motivates the article is the following: what do the figures of the slave and the migrant tell us about the uneven historical contours of ‘the international’?
The slave was forcefully removed, both physically from attachment to kin and land, and morally from the history of humankind. The migrant is pushed out and forced out of the bounds of the livable – the bounds of physical and moral tenability – as well as the moral category of rights-bearer. There are sure commonalities, most strikingly manifest, in a supply economy whereby Africa, a major common point of origin for the two figures, continues to export its valuable people and resources. The commonalities that configure both phenomena are (1) race/racism and (2) political economy. However, whereas slave labour was the energy that fuelled the nascent capitalist machine, the migrant is part of a superfluous, wandering category. The point is not to suggest that present day migrants have replaced former slaves. It is rather to explore what Paul Gilroy calls ‘the geopolitical imperatives of racialized hierarchy’. 3 If permutations of race permeate dominant IR perspectives, the discipline is yet to reckon with the implications of these for thinking about the-international-as-relations.
The key argument of the article is that by drawing the slave-migrant link out on the international sphere, we are able to show that certain interconnections lie deep and are not recognised. This interconnection has always been racialised and it has structurally constituted the relationship between the West and the non-Western world. 4 In doing so, this essay also challenges the unexamined assumptions of new/posthumanism in IR that advocates radical interdependence without questioning the modalities of ‘humanity’ among different categories of the human. In the past two decades, philosophies of new humanism (including post and critical humanism) have emerged to offer counterpoints to classical humanism to salvage and/or offer an alternative humanist paradigm. IR’s posthuman turn is articulated on the basis of the intersection and the embeddedness of the human in the non-human world. 5 The posthuman turn builds upon earlier attempts to apply complexity theory to the study of International Relations. 6 In so far as the posthumanist turn seeks to integrate networks of relationality across the human-non-human divide, it seems to be an apt endeavour for thinking and rethinking connections and interdependence in IR. Some therefore see it as radical promise in furthering a practice of interdependence. However, there is an overarching concern to break with the anthropocentric focus of the discipline over and above interrogating internal hierarchies within the humanist tradition. The new humanism, like many previous humanist theories, has become an equaliser of historiographical differentiations (for a discussion see also Pasha in this issue 7 ). Some of the new scholarship, particularly transhumanism, has developed a jargonic register that closes off possibilities for deeper understanding of discontinuity within the much-criticised humanist outlook.
This article is a contribution to a growing effort among some critical IR scholars to show that the boundaries of the discipline are not ‘territorial’ but rather racial, ethical and ideological. It proceeds in four parts. The first part briefly discusses a number of recent works within and outside of IR that demonstrate that race is not just an important dimension but that it is foundational in the making of the international. In the second section, I examine Achille Mbembe’s contention that the figure of the nègre has historically epitomised the dehumanised other of European imaginaries and thus aligns past and present marginalisation transhistorically.
The article next expands upon and contextualises Mbembe’s argument by showing how slavery cuts people from kin and community while denying them the benefit of ‘care’. Frederick Douglas is a famous pioneer of the struggle for civil rights in the United States. Reduced to nothing through enslavement, Douglas acquired a consciousness of his humanity through love and care, both of which are ruefully absent in analyses of interdependence and interconnection in IR. The third part is a reflection on debates and policies on the ongoing ‘migration crisis’. It challenges a juridical citizenship argument, often made in relation to migration, for its limited account of the sociology of the circulation of racialised others. The fourth section draws key implications for thinking about the historical construction of the international through racialisation, first observed with slavery, then with migrant.
Race and the constitution of the international
A number of critical perspectives in International Relations have underscored the effects of excessive attention paid to a limited number of concepts (sovereign statehood; security; power; order) in the discipline in restricting the possibilities of ‘the international’ as a field of knowledge. The significance of widening these possibilities partly resides in a constant questioning of what the international is, what the referent object of the discipline is, and what the epistemic conditions of theorising the international are. Are the latter, as many would contend, still colonised by notions of race and civilisation, therefore a single temporal perspective whereby time remains a category of normative classification? 8
The bedrock assumptions that underlay the development of intellectual currents in early studies of international relations in Britain and the US were fundamental differences across race, culture, and civilisation as defining of relations across jural nations. Robert Vitalis’ work for instance shows that race was not just a concern for the founding figures of the discipline of IR. It was also a methodology of containment. It has particularly been instrumental in exposing the fundamentally racial character of the foundations of the discipline of American IR. 9 For Vitalis and an increasing number of critical scholars, race is not just an axis of difference but a signifier; it is a crucible that produces and pervades core assumptions about the anarchical nature of the international. 10 Alexander Barder makes the argument that the nineteenth and twentieth century world order is best understood from the perspective of a global racial imaginary in which civilisation holds central importance as exemplified in the writings of the most prominent IR scholars of the time. 11 More generally the study of black life was coterminous with the emergence of the humanities in nineteenth century USA, particularly history and anthropology.
Thus more than the projection of the foreign policy of great powers, the international has more densely been woven through human connections. But if this is the case, the methodologies we deploy to account for the making of said international are utterly inadequate. The international, if not fully formed or constant, still appears as a moral field of exchange; theories of ‘the international’ cannot therefore be abstracted from historical context without restricting potentially valuable insights. Neither can a neglect of canonical power over different modern subjectivities be without consequences for how we can theorise the international. A division however between ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ scholarship enables the elision of racial tropes and perpetuates a ‘racial aphasia’ in the former. 12
What Anibal Quijano calls the coloniality of power should be taken seriously if we are to break from what appear as increasingly inadequate perspectives of ‘the international’, namely, the idea that the current international order bears a strong imprint of continuity of colonial ideologies and structures. The relations that produced the international were articulated by a language, a moral economy and an ethos of power. If capitalist rationality is often the point of anchoring of such conceptual elaborations for a number of historical reasons, it is also possible to examine the ethical implications of theorising ‘the international’ from the perspective of the human, specifically the human migrant and the human slave, two figures distinctly caught up in colonial modernity as loci of enunciation.
If ‘race and racism [are] fundamental organising principles of international politics; axes of hierarchy and oppression structuring the logics of world politics as we know it’, 13 how can we write race and racism without fundamentally restructuring the ontological, epistemological imaginaries and methodological traditions in the discipline? Despite the now substantial contributions of a number critical scholars whose combined insights show that race was not only an integral dimension of the founding of the discipline, but that racialisation continues to produce genres of fundamental difference across a ‘global color line’, 14 race remains the blind spot of the discipline’s ontological imaginary and it is strangely absent from dominant accounts, as indeed Anievas et al. note. For Anievas et al., a research agenda for IR from the perspective of the global colour line would require seeing how ‘[the] world order is constitutively – and not derivatively – structured, restructured and contested along lines of race’. 15
In the past 20 years, dominant IR scholarship has been challenged with a narrative shift to do with a treatment of ‘difference’, notably race, as a feature that has not been sufficiently confronted. As a result, there is now a relatively large literature that has addressed disciplinary myopia with regards to the invisibilised status of race in IR theorising. A small but growing number of IR scholars have indeed examined slavery from the perspective of a rereading of self-determination and anti-colonial politics beyond the Atlantic, 16 or a hermeneutical critique of dominant IR perspectives. 17 Despite the growing importance of this literature, IR does not sufficiently take account of the implication of slavery in thinking about ‘the international’, ‘community’ and ‘connections’. The international order remains a moral space that cumulates the effects of the various ideologies that have established European hegemony over non-European populations from enslavement, colonialism, trusteeship, to humanitarian intervention. 18
By and large, it is outside the discipline of IR than one finds sustained engagements with the history of race and its avatars, its variations and its incarnations. Paul Gilroy, Lewis Gordon, Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter Mignolo 19 and others have variously conceived the making of the world in terms of a hierarchical human order. For Gilroy in particular, processes of ordering can be made more salient for global history when we stop assigning the history of slavery to black people and start conceiving it as ‘part of the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West as a whole’. 20 One important lesson for IR is that there has never been a uniform order of sovereignty across time and space. 21
In all this, ‘the international’ is a historical structure that rests upon the internalising of a set of ontological discourses pertaining to difference, more crucially to racial difference. In other words, ‘the international’ can be seen as the substantiation of historically unstable but deeply engrained views of an object of knowledge, an ontological field that is framed in structures of difference. But ‘race’ can be too uneven a perspective, too contested a source of knowledge, too complex a paradigm, and perhaps too broad a framework to command consensus. Such complexity also provides a fertile prospect for examining its operations in context. The article thus examines two figures that embody racial amnesia and whose (re)writing into IR accounts can decidedly shift the ontological coordinates of the discipline.
Race and slavery
Atomised subjectivities
This section traces a consistent pattern of slavery in the spectre of the nègre identified by Mbembe as an enduring embodiment of abjection, a persistent figure of other in past and contemporary demarcations of sociality. In his Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe examines the figure of le nègre as the product of a long sedimentation of ideologies of race, and the outcome of European obsession with a racialised other. 22
Of the successive phases that have marked the history of Africa’s integration into global processes, racial enslavement was arguably the most significant and most formidable moment. 23 The transatlantic slave trade in particular, but also Arab-Islamic slavery turned people of African origin into commodities and objects traded at ports and exchanged amongst men who stripped off their names and languages, who rendered their existence vacant and would not recognise them as co-humans. From this history, ‘the term “Black” signaled a series of devastating historical experiences, the reality of a vacant life, the fear felt by the millions trapped in the ruts of racial domination, the anguish at seeing their bodies and minds controlled from the outside, at being transformed into spectators watching something that was, but also was not, their true existence’. 24 The African subject that emerges out of the history of slavery is crucified, if not atomised. The dispersion of subjectivity in question, and concomitant characteristics, challenge the temporality of life and living for those whose means of existence have been seriously compromised in the process.
The slave was assigned a mode of being in history; this was an immutable station that benchmarked humanity’s moral threshold. He was not decimated at once but his energies were extracted and his physiological being slowly obliterated. His is a slow form of death, both social and physical. However, there was a (putative) horizon for the slave, in the midst of the most alienating circumstances, that is, the possibility of a freedom to come. The capitalist machine today has pulverised the political horizon of citizenship (the nation-state), the economic horizon of citizenship (the providence state) and the ideological horizon of political freedom (liberal democracy). In fact, it has disintegrated all horizons. Moreover, we are caught in the same paradox whereby citizenship restricts the world to the nation while the economy – and now increasingly militarisation and other transnational developments – expand the world to the international.
In Mbembe’s genealogy, blackness – a category of being neither fully a subject nor exactly an object – emerged as a historical and material conception. Three successive phases cumulated in the elaboration of a differentiated structure of subjectivities. Firstly, European slavers turned enslaved Africans into property. Secondly, there is overlap between the racial codification that was articulated during this phase and the representations that solidified discourses on black people as their history. Thirdly, in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, these discourses were emboldened by the combined effects of market-based liberal economy and the reach of globalisation in the form of extended privatisation and commodification of services and rights. For Mbembe, the political economy of capitalism can be traced back to the articulation of a philosophy of extraction from black bodies. 25 Capitalism is thus inherently linked to slavery.
Mbembe contends that Black reason is precisely what constitutes reason itself, of the state and of capital, of history tout court. Blackness condenses fragments of multifold experiences and expressions of oppression, exploitation, demonisation as well as responses to these. 26 For the nègre was never a passive actor, but a historical agent. Their subalterneity is what enables people assigned this status to cultivate other subalternerised identities across and beyond elemental definitions of race/religion/class/ethnicity and other particularities.
Mbembe’s conception of le nègre as emblematic of black reason is not just for effect. The various permutations of le nègre indicate a necessary reckoning, with regards to the importance of location in the elaboration of epistemes. In relation to this, there is great interest to study Africa and its diasporic varieties in order to better understand IR: not just the Africa of slaves and migrants, but Africa as a benchmark for comparisons and analogies (civilisation), for theoretical elaborations (constitution of subjects) and legal considerations (constitution of legal regimes).
For Mbembe, the enslavement of Africans was such a uniquely dehumanising and monstrous practice that entire theories of justification had to be mounted, on the intellectual and cultural inferiority of black people, on the achieved civilisation of white people, on the natural destiny of the one to serve the other. The slave is the place where wounds were inflicted and crimes perpetrated. The special salience of the figure of the nègre in current privative injunctions owes much to colonial conceptions of human-spatial relations across the globe.
How can the notion of the nègre as theorised by Mbembe help us to think about the dialectical axes that articulate categories of humans assigned to different moral stations? For my argument, I take Mbembe’s analysis of blackness to be ethical and not ontological, that is the question is not whether ‘black’ as a category exists or not but how race constantly haunts deliberations over community, the distribution of privileges, immunities and security, the circulation of people through migration and displacement and so on. In this sense, all refugees and migrants, black, white, dark and fair, are constituted ‘racial kin’. 27 Mbembe’s work is important because it acknowledges the historical, the epistemological and the global import of a new politics of difference crystallised in the body of the nègre. Mbembe’s nègre thus serves an illustration of how the two figures of slave and migrant can concomitantly be folded into the operation of racialisation.
Erased subjectivities
Through the practice of forced separation of children from their mother and father, the slave’s familial and kinship relations, names and genealogy, totems and entitlements were severed. Yet, there is a correlation between a capacity to form family and a capacity to create culture, therefore a capacity to develop civilisations. Slaves could only form community on dislocated terms.
Racial slavery thus marked the history of black people over 400 years as a history of people rendered abject. It set the world on a path of differentiation. It spurred a complex legacy, normalised over such a long history that explains why migration too is heavily marked by the coercion of racialised bodies. Many scholars (Wynter, Gilroy, Glissant, Spillers, Mbembe, Weheliye) 28 have noted certain continuity, contiguity and resonance in practices of enslavement, colonialism, repressive immigration policies, structural racism and genocidal politics. For Paul Gilroy in particular, racial slavery is integral to Western civilisation and that means that cultural, intellectual, ideological and policy traditions have always had the effect of confining the black subject as the sub-human other of Western modernity. 29
Slaves were thrust into the global world as deprived, dispossessed and stripped of autonomous existence. In the twenty-first century, the condition of visible, racialised migrants speaks of a new kind of dispossession. The ‘African migrant’ and black and brown refugees are thus sociological constructs that emerged from both imperial histories and decolonial processes. 30 The distinction between ‘Africans’ and ‘migrants’ is immaterial for ‘slaves’, ‘Africans’ and ‘migrants’ are vague categories that are caught in the same ontological, temporal lapse. Africans and other black and brown migrants carry their colonial condition, thus their former subject position as a liability that stands in the way of the recognition of a legal subjecthood. They are permanent outsiders, if not reliquaries of the human category.
One hardly needs to abstract slavery from literal reality, that is, the enslavement of millions of Africans forcibly taken into the Americas to till the plantations of coffee and sugar cane, and work in mines. In the political economy of slavery, the slave does not exist as a person; s/he becomes human, therefore visible, through recognition and love. The history of Frederick Douglas best exemplifies this process.
Slavery and human connections
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery around the year 1818. He was separated from his mother Harriet Bailey as an infant. This practice was common in plantations and its aim was to break the natural bond of affection between a mother and her child. Frederick Douglas’ mother used to walk the 12 mile journey that separated her plantation from that of her son at the end of her workday as a field hand to go lie next to him for a while. The knowledge of his mother’s dedication remained with Douglas his entire life and profoundly marked his commitment and struggle for the freedom and rights of black people. 31
Frederick Douglas came into existence, literally, from a moment of recognition. But the moment of recognition was also a coming into consciousness, of self and of one’s humanity, of the fact of one’s existence as a continuation of other existences. 32 The moment of recognition was thus so to speak a second birth for Douglas. There is a fascinating passage in the Life and Times of Frederick Douglas where the Douglas recounts his amazement at learning that he was ‘not only a child, but somebody’s child’ and that ‘[he] was grander upon [his] mother’s knee than a king upon his throne’. 33 Douglas felt not only noticed and recognised; he also felt cared for, hence his sense of aggrandisement. Beyond the blood connection, the impulse that makes a mother care for a child and to go to such extent to seek to connect to and show her care, has to be seen as operating at a greater level of substantive humanity.
Frederick Douglas’ phenomenological experience of care, love and its effects, his first-person gaze – more than any analysis of the social history or the structural conditions of slavery, and more than any disquisitions on slavery – affords insights that do not necessarily conform to dominant accounts or ‘highly visible modes of resistance, breakdown, or transgression’. 34 The historical node here is both Douglas’s body-experience and his subjective consciousness. While the former is disposable commodity, the latter developed through the knowledge that to be human is to be connected to others in a humane way, thus in meaningful relationalities. To exist is to be loved. The implications for thinking about self, community and the world are too important to be left untreated.
Slavery is a social framework that seeks to erase the moral disposition of the human slave: incapable of love or care and incapable of receiving or responding to love and care. Under a slave regime, the separation of a child from his mother was informed by the belief that one could wean people off the zest for life, the quest for connection and communion with others. Slavery seeks to wedge a line, firmly, between a human being and her humanity.
In a context of slavery characterised by bare life, a life unhinged, the idea that emotion and care can restore a sense of dignity might not be most obvious. Where slavery has closed off all possibilities for the constitution of a normal self, the capacity of Douglas, here, to conceive of a framework of intersubjectivity from a mother-son connection validates the virtue of thought as more paramount, and more relevant than any form of formal framework for thought. An ethos of care is thus most relevant in understanding a people that has experienced so much violence and uncare.
Douglas began his existence as a human being and a human subject (from latin ex sistere, ‘stand forth’ ‘emerge’, ‘come out’, ‘come to light’, ‘appear’, ‘be visible’, ‘arise’, ‘turn into’) 35 ; that is he was made to come out of indistinction by the love and dedication of his mother. Only then was Douglas able ‘to problematize the moral ordinary’. 36 From then on, he could envisage life as if it mattered – as if it was worth living from the perspective of a slave. This emergence is necessarily a coming into consciousness, therefore a coming into knowledge, of one’s condition of isolation, uncare and invisibility.
The gesture of Douglas’ mother raises for us a number of questions, not least what makes us human? When do we matter as humans? What does an awareness of our humanity predisposes us to know and do? Freedom and humanity are in fact themes that are central to Frederick Douglas’ work. They are also preponderant themes in the works of Black existentialist theorists. 37
Migration: on stranded bodies
Migration is a dynamic terrain for examining how people who are pressed by economic deprivation, violence and other predicaments seek to exercise a consciousness of being part of the world. More often than not, emigration is forced exile, rarely a ‘choice’, and migrants are increasingly becoming ‘one of the fastest growing groups of disenfranchised people in the world’. 38 Migration also complicates to a great extent established and emerging paths of subjectivity in a postcolonial world. In fact, critical security and postcolonial scholars reject a presumed contradiction between a promised ‘borderless world’ and the policing of the circulation of the bodies of racialised communities across the world. 39 Even when these bodies are provided shelter and care, they remain sheer bodies on the move and not critical political actors per se (see also a discussion by Squires in this issue 40 ).
Even as paradoxically there are relatively less migrants settling in Europe than in the 1990s, the aversion for this ‘la misère du monde’ has intensified as anti-immigration hysteria in Europe has congealed in increasingly creative policies of repression, devolution of repression to neighbouring African states and outright abandonment of aspiring migrants to drown in the ocean. This aversion is fed by a ‘racialized commonsense about people and places’. 41
As great powers continue to fight proxy wars, as consumption cultures in many parts of the world continue to jeopardise the very sustainability of entire ecosystems and the livelihoods of societies on the way to extinction, as global population grows at the current pace in the context of uneven distribution of resources, as environmental, political and cultural insecurity continue to produce a new precariat, the macro-economics of a profit-driven system and the microeconomics of precariousness are bound to come to a head.
The ‘migrant crisis’ in question has had tragic consequences in the past few years. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), about 2275 migrants died in the Mediterranean in 2018 alone; this is an estimate of one death for every 51 arrivals. 42 Between 2000 and 2018, the Mediterranean claimed 35,000 lives. The rise in death tolls is partly the result of cuts in rescue operations and the banning of NGOs doing rescue work in the Mediterranean, the ocean common to Africa, Europe and the Middle East. A study by the Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI), an Italian think-tank, reveals that seven out of 10 intercepted migrants and refugees are sent back to Libya by the EU-supported Libyan coastguards, and that only one in 10 makes it to Europe. 43 Policy responses from European countries vary. Denmark for instance has decided to confine in an island migrants who have been denied asylum, residency or have committed crimes and wait there for a decision on their case. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has decided to detain and starve rejected asylum seekers. The former Prime Minister of Italy, Matteo Salvini and Austrian Herbert Kickl, normalised the once unthinkable: to turn away boatloads of refugees and migrants to sure death. The message to migrants and aspiring migrants is that they have to be made aware that on their journey to Europe and beyond, they have no human rights; in fact no humanity that matters.
What the recent series of ‘crises’, of criminalised migration, of spiralling conflicts partially orchestrated in deterritorialised battlefields reveal is that a revered division between a domestic space of politics and freedom and an international field of impossibility of the attainment of these was never tenable. 44 RBJ Walker has in fact extensively critiqued a form of determinism implicit in the dialectics of internal/external politics. 45
Furthermore, the discourse on toughening up on migration hides a singular paradox to do with the imbrication of economic exploitation, racist exclusion, reconstitutions of citizenship in so far as mainstream global economies have become an intricate web of supply chains organised in subcontracting schemes that sustain virtually the entire productive cycle. Extractive logics and predatory practices carried by internal and external actors in the developing world produce a regular movement of young people looking for better life conditions in the Western world. For instance, the cocoa industry generates about $120 billion annually. Africa produces 77 per cent of global cocoa, yet only gets back 3 to 8 per cent of that value. 46 A large proportion of Senegalese youth candidates for migration come from fishing villages where fishing is no longer possible because the coast has been depleted of its fish by large fishing boats little respectful of fishing rules. Many years ago, Cedric Robinson coined the term ‘racial capitalism’ to challenge traditional analyses of Political Economy by showing the racialising practices of successive systems of exploitation/extraction (enslavement, colonialism, apartheid). 47
The current economic structure organises a ‘[form of] dehumanization that throws people in a frightening no-man’s land’. Juridical categories confine people to places. But neither the destiny of people in migration nor their identity is to be a migrant. For Alain Badiou, in fact, migrants are ‘proletarian nomads’ 48 at the mercy of an economic model that requires a constant flow of new migrants ever more desperate and ever more willing to accept ‘jobs that are inhuman, and incompatible with any normal settled existence’. 49
From a legalist perspective, the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ (a crisis for whom?) puts in perspective the implications, for knowledge and practice, of the fundamental division between citizen and subject. Such perspective however often ends in narrow distinctions between rights accrued to citizens and rights accrued to non-citizens in a framework of rights under a nation-state. 50 But even from a narrow legal framework, a structural inequality confines undocumented migrants and refugees in a state of limbo. Refugees are those that have to demonstrate that theirs is not self-imposed, but a legitimate plight, a humanitarian, and not an ‘economic’ case.
The international law of refugees, humanitarian law under the Geneva Conventions (particularly the Fourth of 1949 and the second additional protocol of 1977), and the Universal Declaration to name only these, were enacted in order to provide a civil space and a protective framework to people who were persecuted and/or forced to flee their homes for reasons outside of their individual control. This very civil space has become criminalised. 51 In order to understand how, one needs to go beyond a discussion of the limits of the liberal rights framework. 52
The treatment of refugees – arguably the most stranded and most vulnerable amongst migrants – constitute a challenge to our practices of humanity; on who we are; on who we pretend to be; on who we want to become and who we have become; in other words a human community that denies humanity to others. If the contours of ‘the international’ are not easily demarcated by competing schools of thought, its ontological boundaries seem to follow sustained practices of othering that are most starkly embodied by the figure of the migrant. These boundaries in fact neatly fit dominant IR theories, particularly classical realist perspectives: the migrant would be the outside-other that threatens the security and identity of the inside-self. Under question is less the constitution of the resident-migrant or self-other dynamics but the possibility – or not – of relations or connections as the stuff of the international.
These patterns provide epistemological markers and normative registers for contemporary accounts of the migrant other. Thus emerges a peculiar perspective on connections grounded in a repertoire devoid of references to the human.
Migration and the afterlives of the colonial
The migrant question puts in perspective the current American president’s comment about Haiti and African countries as ‘shitholes’. This is not an isolated comment of an obnoxious individual who speaks out of utter ignorance – even though this might be the case – but reveals a particular perception of threat that powers the aspiration for an international community based on the distinction between citizens and subjects to which we can now add a third category of ‘shitholes’. The comment can be read not so much as a delimitation of the framework of rights for citizens and others, but rather about a category of humans.
One point that flows from the discussion above is that there are categories of humans that fall outside of both the national and the international. In the specific case of migrants, care for people on the move has fallen into undefined, unregulated, uncertain and obscure spaces where NGOs fight states to save lives and human traffickers perforate boats filled with migrants in order to maximise profits. Saskia Sassen has theorised the notion of ‘third spaces’ between the national and the global governed by ‘transnational assemblages’. 53 The latter cover a range of activities and processes, from sweatshops and illicit chains of production of drugs and sexual tourism to transnational movements to the global human-rights regime. Transnational assemblages also convey the precarious and benevolent nature of care for migrants.
I want to reflect on migration as a terrain where the distinction between how the citizen/subject distinctions as an embodiment of a discourse on the human has become the starkest. An abstract understanding of the idea of a Community of (equal) humans has for a long time dehistoricised and depoliticised neo-colonial transactions that articulate the experience of, say, French citizens of Algerian or Sub-Saharan African origin from other French citizens. Equally, references to a generic human community is a conceptual strategy ‘that attends to some ways of knowing while repelling and refusing others’. 54 Traces of the colonial in the contemporary European experience permeate the experience of Afro-Europeans as much as they inform policies towards non-White migrants in Europe. 55 Thus for Grosfoguel ‘the old racial/colonial hierarchies that were put in place on a world scale during the European colonial expansion are now reproduced inside the metropolitan global cities’. 56 Grosfoguel contends that these colonial subjects, despite being formal citizens, are often subjected to massive policing, massive incarceration, low levels of education and access to the job market and housing, all of which is facilitated by racial hierarchy. 57 For racism is a radical, exacerbated form of reject because based on a biological reading/interpretation of the social. 58 The Afro-European ‘stranger’ other is not a cultural other but a racial/human other.
Michel Agier suggests that the ‘Mediterranean, the Sahara, the Mexican desert, the Gulf of Bengal have become graveyards of the universal, the physical proof of a global anthropological malfunction’. For Agier, ‘it is this malfunction that must [pre]occupy us, worry us and yes frighten us for a portion of humanity is negligible, forgettable, sacrificed without being sacred (as designated by Agamben in the concept of homo sacer). . .’. 59 In fact, the idea of the Atlantic as a graveyard – the idea that the ocean eats African children – is pervasive in historical and literary imaginaries of African diasporas. 60
In media rhetoric, Africa and the West are two dissonant worlds. The former exists outside of the international community. The latter, constituted as a geopolitical convergence of values 61 is an entity that elaborates a framework of subjectivity for the world, that possesses a superior understanding of the greater collective goodness, a subject endowed with an intrinsic, legitimate capacity to act, that commands authority as something entirely accepted and desired. Note that in the mind of President Trump as in the mind of many others, Africa and Haiti belong to the same ontological stock. Such discourse constitutes the citizen as white liberal subject while black subjects are always raw material for thinking about or occluding the issue of the human. But this only becomes apparent when we stop thinking about migration and citizenship ‘within national frames, [. . .and] more appropriately, within the frames of imperialism and empire’. 62 Beyond modalities of access to citizenship and associated legal rights, the issue at hand is that of humanity. For the discourse of putative scarcity hides a fundamental fallacy, namely the fact that racial constructions that sustained colonial, imperial and apartheid ideologies still hold sway on imaginaries on migrants.
If we follow Mbembe’s argument above carefully, the modern day migrant might not be the new slave but very much a product of the thinking that relegated the enslaved to the antechamber of humanity. In other words, if formal slavery has been abolished, its habitus continues to regiment the circulation and the treatment of black and brown bodies. The point of Mbembe’s thought experiment is to show that the slave, but also the migrant, in fact the precariat produced by the combined violence of inequity and indifference is the site of sedimentation of racial ideologies. In this very sense, the slave and the migrant together concentrate a ‘dense complex of experience’. 63
For Gilroy, colonial societies provided Europe the space of experimentation with forms of repressive politics – instantiated into regimes of administration of the body – that have now fully matured into normalised politics of exclusion in which the law becomes the very weapon that is deployed in order to exclude, perhaps not as much in its formulation than in its implementation. 64 Further, both the slave and the migrant are figures locked in a body with limited, or no access to a clear subjectivity. This is the first step to dehumanisation, that is, an incapacity to exist as anything other than a figure, the incapacity, in fact, to exist as a political being/agent.
However, the mechanisms of exclusion and the modes of alienation that stigmatise the migrant and the refugee as ‘la misère du monde’ are such that migrants are not seen as fully-fledged human beings, as lives that count and can be counted but rather as a threat to be contained. Butler and others write about this in relation to mass violence on individuated bodies and the recognition of the humanity of distant others. Yet, there is emerging recognition, in public debates, of the necessity to think of ‘migrants’ as humans first: The basic humanity of those who perish has been so routinely denied that the evidence that they are not ‘cockroaches’, ‘animals’, ‘aliens’, ‘illegals’, rats or vermin but actual people feels genuinely novel – it provides an empathic injection into the morally sclerotic vein of a dehumanised political culture.
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From the perspective of the human, IR is a thick field of social relations and cultural flows mediated by hierarchy. The international in this sense emerges not as enabler of interdependence and mutual constitution of the non-West and the West, but as a sociological history that enables and sustains the international relations of the state system and its high geopolitics 66 alongside the expansion of transnational corporations. 67
Back to IR: a community without connections?
For Aristotle, slaves and barbarians exceed, respectively, geographical and human/ontological limits of the political. In his classification, there are two kinds of slaves: slaves by accident and slaves by nature. Slaves by nature, or, barbarians, reside outside of the confines of civility. For Aristotle, the barbarian is the one who belongs outside of the geographical and political confines of the polis, the centre of culture and civilisation. The barbarian does not have polis; he is politically unhinged and irrelevant. The figure of the barbarian as the outside other served to justify the enslavement of internal others. 68
On the other hand, Kant’s notion of an obligation in relation to every human being is not universal axiom. In Kant’s cosmopolitan hospitality, migrants are to be welcomed as temporary visitors and not long-term residents. Migrants are not allowed to stay beyond a temporary period and are therefore ‘expelled from political history itself’. 69 This exclusion can only be understood when one examines Kant’s radical take on time as ‘an a priori transcendental condition’ for movement. According to Nail, ‘Just as time is the inner form that provides the unity of the subject in Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, so political time (history) provides the unity and progress of reason’, 70 for migrants, as movement subordinated to time and space, are ahistorical. The larger point is that neither Kant’s cosmopolitanism, nor Aristotle’s definition of political boundaries are humanist in the sense of embracing humanity without distinctions. 71
I am not so much interested in the discussion of citizenship in relation to nationality as the framework of rights envisaged in relation to the nation, but rather in a notion of life and the human. In other words, how the idea of the human in conceptions of the international is made salient in various perspectives – as many injunctions that have coalesced into a rhetorical concern. Theories of ‘epistemological relationalities’ 72 have recently emerged as a reconstructive perspective in this regard but they too often suffer from an overreliance on the potential virtues of an abstract ‘relationality’ as framework. However, the forms of life that remain possible under unprecedented levels of global inequality make the idea of relationality seem like an unreasonable expectation. What is left is a politics of non-relations which make the notion of international relations itself a misnomer.
In thinking interconnection with regards to the constitution of the international, three orders of possibility are here activated: (1) an order of the condition of existence, (2) an order of the possibility of the human and (3) an order of coexistence. In order to grapple with these orders, we need to go back to a sociology of the international, to connect disciplinary imaginaries with the ‘real world’. This article argues that the politics of non-relations that are constructed against certain bodies on the move provide such an opportunity.
The refusal to welcome migrants asking for hospitality can be seen as a rejection of interdependence as a framework of exchange, therefore of relations as a framework of interdependence. The framework of relations that governs current intentional relations is an impermeable body: neighbours do not have to look out for, nor care for each other; they have been exempted from responsibility towards each other. The belief that more militarised borders, physical walls, sharper razors, systematic deportations, the mistreatment of asylum seekers, the detention of children as criminals and general indifference will stem the flow of migrants entrenches such rejection, and denies (the possibility of) shared responsibility and the right to humanity (personhood) of a large portion of the world population. It further reflects a rejection of recognition, and participation in the ‘state of the world’, and more crucially an adoption of community as a methodology of a ‘prise en charge’ (care) for the world. It is not that the welcome mat has frayed because Europe has no space or resources to devote to strangers; it was never fully deployed.
One recalls Walter Benjamin’s conception of time as a force that carries the past it supposedly leaves behind. 73 The racialised migrant embodies this temporal thickness as s/he carries the charge of abjection of the figure of the slave and its associated economies of life. More than their African counterparts or any other group of intellectuals – Black intellectuals from the Americas have always shown a keen, ardent interest for the question of humanity, humanism and ‘of being human’. 74 For ‘black Africans since the sixteenth century came to be equated with slavery and slaves’ lives became also expandable, both as commodities and as labor force’. 75 This pervasive concern feeds Sylvia Wynter’s confrontation of the assignations to a (limited) epistemic space to the black body through a reappropriation of ‘the humanity of being, dwelling, and thinking in the location of the anthropos’. 76
IR exists on precarious epistemological grounds because it rests too firmly on disciplinary imaginaries that cannot quite factor interdependence beyond a nominal notion. There is a blind spot when it comes to confronting an ‘international community’ of people. In fact, one could go further to say that under the current framework of knowledge, IR is unable to develop a true theory of humanism as long as IR scholarship maintains an unsustainable gap between disciplinary narratives and historical reality. If posthumanist scholars recognise that ‘the application of the seemingly universal label of humanity has coincided with all sorts of gendered, racial, and class-related exclusions from that category’, 77 the posthuman imperative of inclusive care does not yet explicitly or convincingly extend to everybody.
For many, posthumanism, holds the promise for conceptual and theoretical innovations in the study of interdependence given an ethical commitment to understanding sustainable living among species, between the physical and non-physical world. The agenda of the posthuman turn in IR is in fact rather ambitious. It is to ‘demonstrat[e] the “radical interdependence,” mutual co-constitution, and embeddedness of human within nonhuman figurations of relations, the interlocutors of the posthuman dialogues in IR seek to blur the distinctions between humans, animals, machines, and objects in the study of world affairs’. 78
Among a number of recent works that have sought to ground the idea of a nature-human – continuum, two in particular are worth mentioning here. The first is an edited collection that brings together perspectives from philosophers, sociologists and IR scholars to bear on a renewed aspiration to move ‘beyond the human’. 79 The second one is a special collection that features the work of anthropologists and philosophers on a similar question. 80 In both collections, a critique of the centrality of the human is the point of posthumanism. The posthumanist project however neither addresses nor recognises a fundamental discontinuity (with)in the human spectrum. Thus, while recognising social and ecological interdependence as the condition of life, none of the new humanist propositions explains how such interdependence is to mediate the recovery of humanity for categories of humans that had been excluded from the humanist project. In other words, there are significant gaps between the ambition of new/post humanism and the enduring temporality/time problem, that is, the question of coevalness between Western subjects and non-Western others.
Among topics covered in the two collections on new/posthumanism mentioned above are the incompatibility of policy predictions with ecological uncertainty, a call to consider worm life as a sovereign domain best left alone, the use of non-human animals in times of war, the creativity and the agency of genes and other non-human things and so on. In all these critical discussions, the advocacy for a new humanist scholarship and politics reproduces a silence on race that is as important as the implications of what is made explicit. The elision of real life experience from theorising – and the repercussions of various political strategies – deactivate what Susan Buck-Morse calls ‘connective pathways’ in the humanities and social sciences. 81
Once one moves out of the Hegelian notion of the subject defined by time/history, the question of race greatly complicates ethical deliberations on ‘community’ based on an ontology of relations. Weheliye proposes to conceive of race as ‘an assemblage of forces that must continuously articulate non-white subjects as not-quite-human’. 82 But for this conception not to lock us in a cul-de-sac, that is, for the possibility of interdependence with migrant-subjects not to be forestalled from the very beginning, the idea of ‘citizens of humanity’ has to be more than an oxymoron or a hollow incantation of a humanist politics that ignores a vast majority of the world’s population. This idea strongly resonates with Efstathopoulos, Kurki and Shepherd’s call to rethink ‘human interconnections as a concept around which both established and newer IR theoretical ventures, and the study of multiple different and novel empirical focal points, might productively cohere’. 83 The proposition leaves open the possibility of various permutations of relationality among humans, and between humans and non-human subjects.
Conclusion: interdependence as restrictive practice
Implied in the discussion above is that there is a valuable lesson of generosity, humanity and interconnection to draw from the relationship between Douglas and his mother. I’m not saying that Douglas’ mother’s type of love should be the condition for the restoration of the damaged politics of non-relations that characterises the current configuration of interdependence in international politics. It is to say that humanity is a scarce value that is missing from both dominant IR accounts under criticism and in new/posthumanist accounts at least when it comes to marginalised, racialised people. There is striking sameness in the portrayal of bodies circulating in indifference, only attracting attention where they create value and profit, cause exasperation by their presence or pity when they wind up, lifeless, on the shores of the ocean. But the untutored insights coming out of the marches of slave plantations, migration trails across the Sahara and in boats capsizing in the Mediterranean, in other words the value of knowledge from the experience of people whose lives traverse the world without making a dent, as if thin air, are revealing about the inadequacies of a community of non-relations. This non-canonical fund of knowledge may have much to tell us about humanism as universal (im)possibility.
The two figures examined here constitute two moments of interest in global history, namely the slave trade that turned the African subject into a figure that evolved outside of Western modernity, and the constitution of black and brown migrants and refugees into the new nègre in a world dominated by finance capitalism. In the sixteenth century, the enslaved African body was ontological residue, a figure excluded from European humanity. In the twenty-first century, African and other migrants drowning in the Mediterranean have become a familial item in daily media reports.
The figure of the migrant both embodies and continues a line where the making of ‘the international’ coincides with the making of the international order and thus points to the ordering of virtually everything; feelings, rights, values, values and above all people. Further, the article suggests that the epistemological contours of IR correspond with the ontological contours partially mapped by the two figures examined. More specifically, there is an argument to be made about the global order as the translation of a worldview informed by racial difference.
The ontological premises of the discipline have to do with global dynamics and the relations that emerge out of them. Yet, its knowledge framework produces anti-universalist possibilities because it is based on a narrow conception of universalism, essentially European, encompassing and definitive. It is not just that humanism, universalism and morality are associated with Europe, Europe becomes amalgamated as symbol of these. I am not advocating some decolonial cosmopolitanism, but rather calling attention to the possibility of reviving a humanist philosophy for International Relations, to ensure that the alienated in classic humanism does not remain alienated in the nature-human-technology continuum conceptualised in the new/posthumanist perspective. This philosophy would have to be sustained through a basic politics of relations, and a politics of respectability in favour of human dignity; such a possibility exists in the propositions of uBuntu as a philosophy of radical interdependence. 84
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Milja Kurki for being such a generous and inspiring colleague, the editors of International Relations and anonymous reviewers for very helpful feedback.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
