Abstract
Norman’s Review of Stel’s Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty (2020)
In Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty: Refugee Governance in Lebanon, Nora Stel explains how institutional ambiguity within the field of refugee governance is created and reproduced in Lebanon, a country that hosts approximately 200,000 Palestinian refugees and approximately 1.5 million Syrian refugees. While the precarity and uncertainty that governs the lives of Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Lebanon is typically blamed on the magnitude of the country's refugee “crises,” the lasting devastation of Lebanon's civil war, its ongoing economic difficulties, or a paralyzed political system, Stel argues that these explanations mask the durability and – she asserts – the strategic nature of institutional ambiguity. She theorizes institutional ambiguity as revolving around three key aspects – informality, liminality and exceptionalism – that are produced through inaction and ambiguous action. Importantly, Stel notes that ambiguity need not result from limited state capacity; rather, institutional ambiguity serves specific purposes and benefits particular actors.
Stel situates her argument in a detailed history of Lebanon's hybrid political order and the twilight nature of Lebanese state institutions, arguing that these aspects of Lebanese governance work to produce and reinforce institutional ambiguity. The book begins by examining the precarity that institutional ambiguity has manufactured for Syrian refugees residing in Lebanon over the last decade, but then turns to a careful analysis of how institutional ambiguity has also governed the lives of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon since the end of the country's civil war in 1990. Focusing in particular on camps and informal settlements in Lebanon's south and the policy realms of legal status, access to formal or informal shelter, and political representation, Stel uses the juxtaposition of this historical case with the more recent arrival of Syrians to demonstrate that “formal informalities do not just historically emerge but are actively produced” (p.216) and also that Lebanon's determination to avoid another Palestinian “conundrum” with regard to Syrian refugees ultimately ended up replicating it.
Innovative in its approach, the book draws on interviews with political authorities, state representatives, political and communal refugee representatives and humanitarian and civil society organizations, in addition to several years of participant observation within bureaucratic organizations and among refugees themselves. Stel utilizes this deep knowledge of the particularities of the Lebanese case to expand our understanding of the field of ignorance studies, or the political functionality of “not knowing.” For example, in Chapter 4 Stel examines the Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee's attempt to carry out the first census of Palestinians in Lebanon in 2017, resulting in a highly-contested figure. As Stel argues, the continued ambiguity around the issue of Palestinian demography benefits Lebanese politicians who are permitted to “simultaneously downplay and magnify the Palestinian presence depending on the issue at stake” (p.143). Demographic statistics in general – not just as they pertain to refugees – are highly contested in Lebanon, which speaks to another of Stel's central arguments: Institutional ambiguity does not only apply within the realm of refugee governance; rather, it reflects Lebanese authorities’ engagement with and power over Lebanese citizens.
In this vein, Stel asks us to consider how insights from refugee governance can aid in understanding other facets of governmentality as they pertain to refugees and citizens alike. Stel also calls on us to consider how institutional ambiguity can apply within the field of refugee studies across broad geographies, including how this theoretical approach might help to bridge the Global North/Global South divide. As the field of migration studies continues to expand geographically and also in its consideration of informal, ad hoc or ambiguous migration and asylum policies, scholars and students will find Stel's book to be an invaluable resource.
Stel’s Review of Norman’s Reluctant Reception (2021)
Reluctant Reception is an empirically comprehensive, conceptually bold, and politically critical book about migration governance dynamics in 21st century Morocco, Egypt and Turkey. It moves the field of migration studies forward by pushing against dominant perspectives that paint migration states in the Global South as transit rather than host states; put a premium on encampment rather than self-settlement; and take state capacity as the main indicator for migration policy and governance.
Studies of “international” migration still tend to take a Northern perspective, epistemologically reflecting and reinforcing power hierarchies that shape the migration regime they investigate. Despite advancements by more critical scholars in the field, countries in the Global South that host the majority of the world’s migrants (including refugees) often continue to be analyzed as being on the receiving end of Northern externalization policies that seek to shift responsibility for migration control to their Southern neighbors. How these countries subsequently govern the migrant populations they host has long been neglected in migration studies. The research that did look into this until recently either bought into the façade of formal policy that host countries in the Global South seek to project or characterized ‘Southern’ migration governance as haphazard and wanting, echoing policy narratives of state weakness.
Drawing on the cases of Egypt, Morocco and Turkey, Reluctant Reception firmly goes beyond such routine replication of notions of state failure and convincingly prioritizes the agency of the authorities governing migration states in the South. The book develops the concept of ‘strategic indifference’ to help theorize the reception of migrants and refugees in the Global South, arguing that states’ lack of direct engagement with migrant populations and their outsourcing of administrative and welfare tasks to international organizations is not simply a contingency of capacity but a strategic choice to generate international goodwill and economic benefits while minimizing their own investments in migration governance. This makes “indifference” a more appealing strategy for state authorities than the options of either liberal or repressive migration governance dominating current debates in international migration studies.
Norman’s notion of strategic indifference reflects similar, recent conceptualizations of migration and refugee governance in the Global South that point towards the strategic nature of inaction and laissez-faire on the one hand and ambiguity and ambivalence on the other (Biehl 2015; Mourad 2017; Stel 2020). Where these theorizations tend to study local governmentalities and institutional ethnographies of domestic migration authorities, Reluctant Reception offers a complementary Political Science perspective that brings in the geopolitics and migration diplomacies that co-constitute such disciplinary governmentalities – shedding light on, for instance, the balancing acts between international reputation and domestic tensions and the complex relations between host states, International Organizations, and national NGOs.
An important question raised by the book’s main thesis on governance through strategic indifference regards the extent to which such indifference is reserved for the Global South. Norman rightfully notes that denying the agency of host states in the South reflects colonial thinking. Linking indifference as strategy specifically to the Global South, however, could inadvertently entrench dominant discourses that juxtapose assumptions on opportunistic and amoral governance by/in the South with imaginaries of normative and rights-based migration governance in/by the North. An exciting contribution of the book, then, might be the implicit invitation to rethink Northern approaches of “throwing money at the situation and subsequently turning a blind eye” (p. 200) as forms of strategic indifference as well, thereby further contributing to breaking down the “epistemic segregation” that upholds North/South distinctions in the field of migration studies (Stel 2021).
References
Stel’s Response to Norman’s Review of Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty (2020)
In reviewing Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty, Kelsey P. Norman picks up on my call to explore how governance through strategic institutional ambiguity resonates beyond the confines of my specific case-study. The benefit of an in-depth case study as presented in my book is, of course, the contextuality that allows for teasing out the precise practices, processes, incentives, and motivations that (re-)produce informality, liminality and exceptionalism and pinpoint their consequences for refugee communities. This case-study approach has thus shaped the scope conditions of my book, in which Lebanon – hosting the highest number of refugees per capita in the world and infamous for its extreme institutional “hybridity” – has featured as a de facto extreme case study. As such, as Norman notes, there is reason to hope that some of my findings will be further explored in other settings. Indeed, the book’s final chapter is dedicated to outlining the two ways in which my findings on institutional ambiguity might resonate beyond the Lebanese context: beyond the confines of refugee studies and beyond the focus on “fragile” states in the “Global South.”
First, the study of (forced) migration governance has long been recognized as providing key insights into how political power operates more broadly. The emerging body of scholarship on the disciplinary repercussions of ambiguity, inaction, and ambivalence in governing displaced people – of which my book is part = reminds us that to understand practices and imaginations of stateness we need to pay attention to the way in which power operates not simply through laws, decrees, and statements but also through decisions that are not made, policies that are kept ambivalent, and stakeholders that are rendered informal.
Second, as Norman also argues in her review, if we are to do justice to the significant role of institutional ambiguity in governance – whether of refugees, other marginalized groups or even citizens in general – disciplinary or epistemic divides between “fragile” states in the Global South and “capable” states in the Global North may obscure more than they reveal. In studying the interplay between the agential and structural dimensions of institutional ambiguity, therefore, my book offers new analytical tools to question what Jaffe and Koster (2019) have called “the myth of Northern formality:” that poses ambiguity as pragmatic innovation in the Global North and dangerous chaos in the Global South. This is important to sophisticate the study of migration governance and to highlight the interconnectedness of different scales of governance within transnational migration regimes.
Reference
Norman’s Response to Stel’s Review of Reluctant Reception (2021)
In her review of Reluctant Reception, Nora Stel generously offers that the concept of strategic indifference could present a means of further breaking down the constructed Global North/South binary in the field of migration studies. At the time of working on this project – first as a dissertation and later as a book – the political science literature on refugee reception in the Global South was extremely limited. In order to expand the field beyond its Euro-centric focus, there was a pressing need to ask whether and how Global South states engage with migrants and refugees, and whether the reasons for different types of engagement aligned with understandings in the extant literature. A year and a half after Reluctant Reception’s publication, the field has expanded, and differentiating between Global North and South states’ migration policies may actually do more harm than good. As Stel rightly points out, a growing focus within the field of migration and refugee studies needs instead to focus on breaking down the epistemic divide between Global North and South. The problematic assumption that Global North states welcome and receive migrants and asylum seekers through democratic, welcoming and fair policies – imaginaries of normative and rights-based governance as Stel terms it – was always a façade but has been further laid bare after the so-called European “crisis” of 2015.
In the final chapter of Reluctant Reception I am careful with my scope conditions, arguing that the generalizability of my study is limited to other migrant and refugee-receiving host states that can be classified as semi-authoritarian and that are influenced by powerful neighboring states with strong migration control preferences. Nonetheless, I also propose that strategic indifference may indeed be applicable to Global North countries where there is little done to prevent or control informal work by undocumented migrants – countries such as Italy, Spain, or the United States – or where, as Stel articulates, turning a blind eye to the atrocities and death caused by the North’s border externalization policies may very well be a form of strategic indifference projected internationally. Thinking through the commonalities and differences between my concept of strategic indifference, Nora Stel’s concept of institutional ambiguity, as well as concepts used by other scholars to describe similar phenomena across geographies will help to further complicate and question the Global North/South demarcation in the field of migration studies.