Abstract
The article addresses the issue of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe from the perspective of ignorance studies and seeks to establish the mechanisms whereby ignorance is created through categorizations. We depart from the proposal of Proctor and view ignorance as either “native state,” “lost realm,” or “strategic ploy.” In all three, ignorance is an unalienable part of social action. The case of Polish academic research on refugees before and after 2015 is explored in order to establish who ignores what, when, and why, when categorizing, and to analyze the relationship between ignorance and social action. In the Polish refugee field, the crisis of 2015 was the moment when the refugee issue stepped out of the shadows and attracted the attention of the public and policymakers. The analysis of the category “refugee” in Polish scholarship before 2015 demonstrates that the category was based on culturalization and idealization; thus, the socio-political and pragmatic aspects of the group’s characteristics and actions were systematically ignored, and the ignorance worked as a “lost realm.” After 2015, a new body of scholarship emerges in which the category “refugee” acquires negative connotations with security threat or fakeness. In the new scholarship, ignorance is a strategic framing that sets the category of “refugee” outside the humanitarian issues. We claim that the new categorizations follow the logic of culturalization and moralization typical of the previous period. Strategic ignorance inherent in the categorizations that dichotomize “good” and “bad” refugees, or “refugees” and “migrants,” unlocks the potential for political action.
The major crises of the last decade have been intrinsically connected to ignorance. Although diverse terms and framings of ignorance have been employed to describe them, 1 an overarching ignorance framework stands out: the major recent crises have been conceptualized as episodes of ignorance, and the latter has been linked to categorizations. The so-called migration crisis of 2015, which will be the empirical axis of this article, has been associated with deliberately neglecting, overlooking, or disregarding something or someone as well as with abstaining from taking action. In the so-called refugee crisis, ignorance has taken the form of a “strategic” 2 stand that facilitates the management of the crisis by overruling the activities of selected actors or turning a blind eye to some developments. Importantly, the deliberate neglecting of something or someone seems to be contingent on the process of categorization. When political elites and international actors operate on the categories of “refugee,” “migrant,” “country,” “program,” and the like, these categorizations result in ignorance. What is more, the powerful actors’ agency reproduces and institutionalizes these categories. The questions are, What are the mechanisms whereby ignorance is created through categorizations? Who ignores what, how, and why, when categorizing? How much and what kind of ignorance is produced by categorizations? What are the effects of ignorance as an outcome of categorization in terms of power relations? The article aims to explore the instances when categorizations bring ignorance as their outcome, and to discuss the mechanisms and implications of this process.
The choice of the so-called refugee crisis as an empirical case is guided by several considerations. First, migration as a social process has a recognized potential for the advancement of sociological knowledge due to the “high concentration” of social and cultural changes that accompany migration. For instance, Portes claimed that migration “can provide a strategic field site for theoretical development in economic sociology.” 3 In this article, we hope to better understand the role of categorizations in the ignorance-related processes. This is an issue that goes beyond the so-called refugee crisis and contributes to the growing literature on the research–policy nexus. 4 Second, the application of the emerging ignorance studies framework to the so-called refugee crisis will allow us “to link migration research issues with social theory in general,” as Dahinden 5 suggests; that is, it will facilitate viewing the migratory processes, including crises, as a part of broader social phenomena and not as reality sui generis. Third, the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 and its effects continue to be a vital societal issue, in which human lives as well as the socio-political identity of the EU are at stake, and therefore studying this issue is sensible from the perspective of social practice.
The particular focus of this paper is the Polish academic discourse about refugees (we use this phrase and the term “Polish refugee studies” interchangeably in the text) 6 that has been an important part of a paradoxical phenomenon that accompanied the crisis. Despite the fact that, as a result of the crisis, the fragility of the common EU asylum policy could not be ignored any longer, the ignorance about some important aspects of the refugees’ problem (e.g., human rights violation by selected asylum policies) seemed to be reproduced, though in another form and with other stakes. Of particular interest is how the academic field participated in this paradoxical development. Specifically, we are interested in the role that scholarly categorizations played in the production of ignorance.
The article consists of five sections. First, the theoretical underpinnings of ignorance are outlined on the basis of ignorance studies that provide the analytical framework for this article. Second, the relation between categorizations and ignorance is discussed. Third, the socio-demographic and political background and the specifics of the refugee field in Poland are briefly presented. Fourth, the evolution of the category of “refugee” in Polish migration studies is outlined. This section is divided in two parts: the reconstruction of the categorizations of refugees in the Polish academic discourse before 2015 and the indication of new categorizations that emerge in Polish refugee studies subsequent to the so-called refugee crisis. The article ends with a discussion of ignorance as an outcome of scientific and policy categorizations of forced migrants. We make a step further to suggest that ignorance is not only an outcome but also an intrinsic component of categorizations.
Ignorance
Ignorance can be understood in a number of ways, and what is even more important for this study, different theoretical understandings are closely inter-related with practical applications of the concept. Proctor, 7 for instance, identified three modalities of understanding what ignorance stands for: (1) ignorance as a “native state,” (2) ignorance as a “lost realm,” and (3) ignorance as a “strategic ploy.” In the “native state,” ignorance is a “resource”; in the “lost realm,” a “selective choice”; while in the “strategic ploy,” an “active construct.”
Ignorance as a “resource” occurs as the most common understanding that has been articulated in both classical and contemporary discussions on the role of ignorance in social action. Hirschman, 8 for instance, emphasized the positive aspects of ignorance in planning. From his perspective, when not all complexities are considered (i.e., when some of them are ignored), it is more likely that one will prefer action over inaction. For Hirschman, ignorance has a clear pro-action dimension. Gross 9 suggested that in policy making, irregularities must be treated as a norm, since surprises always occur. Gross sees the positive side of the overall phenomenon, because irregularities and surprises are conceptualized by him not as failures but as opportunities to learn from mistakes, thus a source of new knowledge. Other researchers 10 have pointed out that for policy makers the uncertainty in which they act is so high that only by ignoring some of the risks can they fulfil the task of public policy making. What Simmel 11 called “Nichtwissen” becomes an impulse for action. These proposals shift the normative perspective from ignorance understood as “what can and should be known but is not” 12 to ignorance seen as a force that is generative of new knowledge and conducive to (positively valued) action.
When ignorance is understood as a “selective choice,” the underlying assumption is that an inquiry or a framing is always selective and “ignorance is a product of inattention.” 13 By focusing on one object, we lose sight of other objects. This mechanism, however, is not limited solely to ignorance and it constitutes a more substantive issue. Campbell, 14 for instance, discussed a similar issue in relation to the role of the unintended in agency. He stated that “unintentionality is of significance as it constitutes a natural limitation for the power of agency. Actors cannot do whatever they like because all action is accompanied by unintentionality; so agency is not simply constrained by structure, or indeed by culture, but by the very nature of agency itself.” 15
The third in Proctor’s 16 taxonomy of ignorance is the meaning of ignorance as an “active construct”; in this case, ignorance is a willful or intentional state. It actualizes in censorship or classifications, in purposeful and strategic attempts to create ignorance through preventing knowledge, misinformation, or averting attention. Ignorance can be seen as a power game, a view that has been recently developed by Graeber, who suggested that “those who rely on fear or force” do not engage in “interpretive labor.” 17 Referring to the notion of “compassion fatigue,” the phrase of Adam Smith aimed to explain why the rich ignore the suffering of the poor, Graeber stated that actors in dominant positions could afford to ignore, or to “blot,” the problems, the features, and sometimes the very existence of their subordinates. When describing ignorance as a purposeful act, Proctor warns, however, about the temptation to give in to the paranoia “that certain people don’t want you to know certain things, or will actively work to organize doubt or uncertainty or misinformation to help maintain (your) ignorance.” 18 It is also worthwhile to question the assumption that people are inherently “epistemophilic” 19 —that they want to know by all means. There is a body of ethnographic evidence 20 that secrecy can be as normal and conductive to “good life” as knowledge.
Therefore, placing the sources of ignorance in powerful and mischievous actors does not exhaust all the nuances of the concept, and might even obscure some of its crucial characteristics. This is why it is important to understand ignorance as an active construct, as Proctor 21 advocates by calling for the “need to think about the conscious, unconscious, and structural production of ignorance, its diverse causes and conformations, whether brought about by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction, secrecy, or suppression.” 22 We subscribe to his contention and suggest to engage more seriously with Popper’s original question 23 about the sources of ignorance. Our suggestion is that categorizations can be one of these sources.
Categorizations
Categorizations are a recognized source of a particular type of knowledge that is linked to power. 24 According to this reading, the purpose of categorizations is to make subjects or groups knowable and therefore manageable and controllable by powerful social actors. 25 We claim that the emphasis that this interpretation places on knowledge is excessive. It assumes that knowledge is the only outcome of categorizations than can be relevant or related to power and action. Yet, as demonstrated in the burgeoning field of ignorance studies, “the twins of knowledge,” 26 such as ignorance, masking, and disregard, are also potent tools used for managing social processes and controlling social actors. 27 Therefore, not only knowing but also ignoring (e.g., social actors’ features or capacities, or their very existence) plays its role in power relations, and categorizations are an important link that can enlighten us on how ignorance is manufactured.
In a recent article, Crawley and Skleparis 28 offer a critique of categorizations in academic research on migration that gracefully renders itself to interpretations from the perspective of ignorance studies. First, they point out that some scholarship uses politicized concepts that conceal rather than reveal migratory processes, that is, they limit and not expand the understanding thereof. Among such categorizations, the dichotomy of forced versus voluntary migration has been mentioned. 29 Categories such as “forced” and “voluntary” have been called “cookie-cutter” categories that homogenize a group and fail to reflect on its complexity and change. This resonates with several meanings of ignorance. For one, it allows action (acting upon human subjects). What is more, it has the meaning of purposefully masking the understanding of the complexity of human geographic mobilities as well as of the thorny issue of free will. The remedy, arguably, would be the creation of new categories such as “mixed flow,” “transit migration,” etc., or alternatively, “people in distress” and “survival migrants.” Yet, this is not a panacea and it observably has its limitations, such as the petrification of new categories. Thus, we suggest that the very production of new knowledge appears unachievable without ignoring something: a framing that allows us to notice important aspects of reality is not feasible without leaving some other aspects out of sight. Categories coerce us and at the same time they allow us to communicate.
Yet another problem with categories that Crawley and Skleparis 30 point out is they are not well suited to account for the movement of subjects between categories, while people can and do shift between them. This can partly be explained by the prevalence of the “slotting” cognitive mechanisms: “The categories in a set are not treated as points on a continuum: they are portrayed and treated as if they were distinct, discrete, and discontinuous,” 31 as Yanow suggested. The solution Crawley and Skleparis 32 propose is that categories are inevitable. However, given their role in masking and misinterpreting social reality, critical awareness of how they operate is much needed. While we subscribe to the call for higher critical awareness, from the perspective of ignorance studies this contention can be corrected by adding that the masking and misinterpreting should not necessarily be understood as a failure, but rather as an indispensable part of the process of categorization. We use the case of the category of “refugee” in the Polish academic research to the end of demonstrating if and how such critical awareness can be exercised.
By focusing on the academic field from the perspective of ignorance studies, we also hope to contribute to the conceptualization of the relations between expert knowledge production, on the one hand, and the democratic polity and/or information society, on the other. 33 The literature on the research–policy nexus in the field of migration shows that more often academic knowledge is used symbolically in order to legitimize the decisions of policy makers than instrumentally to actually inform the policies. 34 There is also evidence that the design of institutional relations between researchers and policy makers influences the policy frames. 35 In the case of Poland, the research–policy nexus is characterized by the divergence between the field of policy making and the field of research, institutionalized symbolic use of expertise, and indirect mode of influencing the policy makers by scholars through scandalizing and dramatizing certain policy issues. 36
More generally, scholars, or intellectuals, 37 can be seen as elite actors and thus treated from the vantage point of elite research 38 that suggests elites are (or should be) purposeful and responsible actors. 39 A body of research on expert knowledge, on the other hand, points at the limitations of the expert, including academic, authority that cannot “offer definitive or even true statements . . . for practical purposes, but only more or less plausible and typically constrained assumptions, scenarios and probabilities.” 40 In this article, we lay out a third possibility that ignorance is an unintended, yet unalienable, consequence of the scholars’ agency, which nevertheless can and often does trigger change. Scholars “build” both categorizations and ignorance 41 that interact with other forms of knowledge in a highly unpredictable and unexpected manner. Their endeavors result in revealing some truths about the studied phenomena and simultaneously offering misinterpretations thereof, 42 thus opening up venues for new research. Reflexivity and the ability to critically address the earlier categorizations is scholars’ professional and moral 43 responsibility. By fulfilling this responsibility, social sciences contribute to making change possible.
Refugee Field in Poland
In this section, we provide a cursory outline of the main turns in the refugee related policies in Poland in order to contextualize our analysis. In 1990, as a result of the systemic transformation, Poland was recognized by the international community as a safe country. In 1991, the country ratified the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. 44 This also required amendments to the Constitution 45 and the national Act on Foreigners. 46 In 1997, the new Act on Foreigners was introduced, the provisions of which are considered to be the first step in the adaptation of Polish law to the European law in this area. Among the further steps toward bringing the Polish legal regulations in line with European ones, the introduction of a specific law regulating the issues of forced migration in 2003 is noteworthy—the Act on granting protection to foreigners within the territory of the Republic of Poland. 47 According to Weinar, 48 who studied the Europeanization of policies aimed at foreigners in Poland, the legal regulations provided by the EU in acquis communautaire were not questioned, as their acceptance had strong legitimacy. 49 The consecutive changes in the Polish law in this area have been the implementation of particular provisions of the European law, such as the Qualification Directive, the Reception Conditions Directive, and the Dublin II Regulations. 50 With the implementation of the EU law provisions for forced migrants’ protection, the Polish authorities have imported legal categories that had themselves been a subject of criticism in international refugee studies, for instance, the treatment of a refugee as a client, who has an obligation to conform to bureaucratic rules, while her or his situation is treated not as a “story” but as a “case.” 51
Overall, in Poland up until 2015 the refugee policy was carried out in the sphere of public ignorance and was not an issue of public debate. The fact that the number of applications for refugee status, let alone the positive decision of granting refugee status, was relatively negligible compared with that of other European countries 52 contributed to keeping the issue away from the public agenda (see Table 1). This promoted the technocratic management and implementation of the EU policy.
The Dynamic of International Protection in Poland
Note: NA = not applicable.
Source: Office for Foreigners (http://udsc.gov.pl/statystyki/raporty-okresowe/zestawienia-roczne/ [accessed 24 July 2019]).
The refugee crisis of 2015 that coincided with the parliamentary elections in Poland resulted in the issue stepping out of the shadows. 53 The most heated public debates erupted in September and October 2015 when refugee relocation policy was being discussed in the EU and accepted by the Citizen’s Platform government—a step that Law and Justice, the main opposition party at the time, vehemently criticized. The party that won the election of 2015 heavily relied on fear of refugees and resistance to the EU relocation policy in its successful election campaign. Under the influence of European coverage and the unfolding political rivalry surrounding the election campaign, Polish media has rapidly become highly interested in the refugee crisis, despite the fact that the inflow of asylum seekers into Poland has not significantly changed. 54 As Table 1 demonstrates, the actual number of asylum seekers in Poland is not relevant for the exposure of the forced migration issue in the public discourse. The highest number of asylum seekers arrived in Poland in 2013, the year when it was a non-issue in the national debate. Since 2016, the number of asylum seekers decreased because of the new policy of refusing to accept applications at the border of Poland. While the numbers have been decreasing in the last several years, the issue has received disproportionately high attention. What is more, from a lack of interest and no precise public image of refugees, the media swiftly turned to highly politicized and stereotypical representations loaded with high emotional value. The word refugee started to be used interchangeably with economic migrant or juxtaposed to this word, and in some media outlets the conflations of the categories “refugee,” “Muslim,” and even “Islamist” and “terrorist” occurred. 55
The ensuing interest of public opinion led to the construction of exile as a social problem that calls for urgent policy-making efforts. After 2015, policy making in the area of forced migrant protection stopped being technocratic. It began to look increasingly like a power game. The emergent Polish refugee policy framed its subject matter in terms of security, 56 while humanitarian concerns have been backgrounded. According to Jaskułowski, the government of the first Law and Justice prime minister Beata Szydło presented Muslim refugees as dangerous others who pose a threat to the Polish nation. This was a political calculation aimed at stirring up a moral panic and thus mobilizing and consolidating political support for Szydło’s cabinet. 57 Stepping out of the ignorance sphere facilitated active reform, yet it also made some dimensions of the policy subject (its humanitarian dimension, in particular) fall into the sphere of ignorance.
The following part of the article relies on the analysis of Polish academic discourse about asylum seekers and refugees. We have sought to uncover the categorizations used in scholarly texts. We used selected tools of critical discourse analysis, chiefly nominalization and argumentation strategies analysis. 58 The procedure for the building of the corpus of data used in the study was slightly different for the period before and after the year 2015. For the first period, we could use the publications that present the state of the art in this sub-field of migration studies and contain rich literature review sections or even publication databases, as in the case of the recent report by the Committee for Migration Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. 59 For the pre-2015 analysis, we have primarily relied on the findings by Pawlak 60 who carried out an in-depth research into refugee studies in Poland from 1991 to 2012, and analyzed more than 90 scholarly texts from social sciences and humanities related to refugee issues. For the years 2013–2015, we supplemented this corpus with the 24 items from the above-mentioned report. For the period after 2015, the Polish National Library “Bibliografia Zawartości Czasopism” (The Bibliography of Journal Content) for the years 2016–2018 has been used as a source of information on academic publications. We looked for the articles in humanities and social sciences with the keyword “refugee” (reviews, articles referring to historic forced migrations, essays, and literary texts were excluded from the corpus). The search yielded 245 items that met the criteria. Additionally, we have included several collected volumes and monographs in the corpus of analyzed texts. In the following step of the analysis, the articles’ abstracts and the monographs’ descriptions and tables of contents were analyzed in order to establish the patterns of refugee representations at the level of nominalization and argumentation strategies (when these contained insufficient information, we recurred to the full texts). Then, the full texts of the selected items (about one-tenth of the whole corpus) representative of these patterns were analyzed in more detail in order to gain a nuanced understanding of the research methodologies and approaches used by the authors. Below, we present our interpretation of the insights that this analysis has brought.
“Refugee” as a Category of Polish Academic Discourse
Prior to 2015
Most of the scholarship devoted to refugees—from the moment The 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention was adopted in Poland in 1991 till the emergence of the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015—has been partially developing as applied research aimed at equipping policy makers with adequate knowledge. The by and large liberal views of academics involved in research were also an important formative feature of the resulting scholarship, which was devoted to the issues of cultural pluralism, tolerance, and human rights protection.
In his work devoted to institutional reactions to the new phenomenon of forced migrants’ protection, Pawlak 61 has pointed out at a paradox typical of the early Polish refugee studies. Scholars who conducted research among refugees (the projects set at the refugee reception centers included) took an empathetic approach toward one category of research subjects while ignoring the feelings of other categories of actors. In particular, they treated people categorized as refugees with empathy, while other social actors—doctors, teachers, policemen, and local and central government officials—received none of the empathy. At the same time, these actors were expected to be empathetic and understanding toward the refugees. 62 The epistemological outcome of the imbalance in the treatment of various groups was that the refugees’ statements were considered to be facts (the truth), while the statements of other groups were treated as stereotypes and prejudice. The scholars were interested in the motivations and rationalizations of the refugees, while the motivations and rationalizations of the groups that interacted with the refugees institutionally were by and large discharged from the domain of attention, that is, ignored. In this context, ignorance appeared as “lost realm” 63 and was the result of focusing on one dimension of the issue at the cost of the others. The refugees were at the center of attention, while other actors’ motivations and aspirations dropped out of sight. There was one exception to this rule. As Pawlak 64 demonstrated, most of researchers have been sympathetic toward the NGOs as actors in the refugee field. Pawlak explains this by the fact that the researchers and NGO activists shared values of tolerance and refugee protection, and in fact many of them came practically from the same companionate circles.
Another feature of the Polish research on refugees has been its concentration on instances of failure and not success, for example, regarding forced migrant protection or refugee integration. 65 This feature of the early Polish refugee studies parallels a more general tendency to obscure the successfully integrating refugees. 66 (We leave aside the thorny issue of what integration, including successful integration, might mean, and what is the oppressive potential of the very category “integration.” 67 )
Yet another ignorance-related cognitive mechanism within this body of research has been idealization. Pointing at an incoherence of argumentation in a scholarly article on Tamil refugees, Pawlak 68 concludes that the idealization of forced migrants has led to foregrounding the positive features of the cultural identity of this group and to ignoring the negative characteristics or events constituting their history (such as a record of violence). Here, ignorance as “lost realm” is combined with ignorance as “strategic ploy” 69 : guided by the imperative to help, the researchers sometimes willfully overlook the aspects of reality that would complicate the image of refugees and deter from constructing them as subjects in need of public assistance.
We consider that the idealization mechanism also pushed Polish refugee studies toward constructing the figure of the “good refugee,” although this formulation is our own reconstruction—such a term has not been straightforwardly used in the scholarship under review. The figure of the “good refugee” was unlike its public discourse counterpart that acts primarily as an element of the opposition between “good refugee” meaning “real” refugee and “bad refugee” standing for “bogus” refugee. In its scholarly version, the category of the “good refugee” ascribed exceptionally positive features to refugees (such as courage, openness to Polish culture, and the like). As a result, the category became moralized, being a prescriptive rather than a descriptive or explanatory tool. Following Yanow, 70 we can regard it as a “slotting category” that directs social cognition to a dichotomizing view in which the categories are seen not as a continuum with blurred and negotiable boundaries, but as discrete oppositional entities. The possibility of similarity between the categories, or the shift from one category to another, is thereby ignored. In this sense, “good refugee” also inadvertently became a disciplining tool. 71 As with most moral categories, the “good refugee” ignored the aspirations, desires, and motivations of the variety of people who were seeking international protection and put them into a straitjacket of morally acceptable scenarios of actions and attitudes. For instance, taking a more independent stance toward aid institutions or being self-sufficient did not exactly fit such scenarios. We will return to the potential consequences of the moralization of the category further on in our article.
The idealization of forced migrants in early Polish refugee studies also led to the reification of the refugees’ “culture.” Their culture was perceived as a monolith, an impermeable box that at the same time was expected to explain and define refugees’ actions and motivations. Concomitantly, the researchers’ own culture, the culture of the receiving society (including the culture of the groups who interact with refugees), was backgrounded and made irrelevant—it became a sphere of ignorance or nonknowledge. Here again ignorance worked as a “lost realm.” 72 Similar argumentation has been pursued by Wikan, 73 who criticized the Norwegian model of multiculturalism and specifically what she perceived as a forged dichotomy between “individualized natives” (i.e., Norwegians) versus “culturalized immigrants.” The anthropologist has pointed out that such dichotomies petrify culture as unchangeable, while it is neither static in itself nor passively received at birth by individuals. It is worthwhile noting that Wikan’s own work has been criticized for being blind to the diversity of the Norwegian mainstream and for treating it as a (cultural) monolith of sorts. 74
In Polish academic discourse, there have been critical voices too, coming from sociology and anthropology, stating that much of the research on refugees foregrounds culture and backgrounds class, interactional contingencies, age, gender, aspirations, and the like. 75 The studies considering these aspects were however by far outnumbered by research that privileged culturalized interpretations of the category of “refugee.” We claim that this feature as well as the default identification of refugee with “good refuge” in the sense described above has determined certain developments in the period following the so-called refugee crisis in Europe in 2015. These developments can be interpreted as unintended consequences of ignorance as a “lost realm” and—to a lesser extent—as strategic ignorance that has been part and parcel of Polish refugee studies, the framings of the category of “refugee” in particular. We suggest that the mechanisms of ignoring that formed the category of “refugee” in Polish academic discourse prior to 2015 contribute to the shape of the current wider debate on refugees in Poland.
After 2015
Since 2015, the Polish academic research on refugees has been developing dynamically because the phenomenon of forced migration has stepped out of the shadows subsequent to the so-called refugee crisis in Europe, 76 and the volume of academic publications in this field has grown significantly. Alongside the previously pursued lines of inquiry, for example, on refugees in institutional settings, 77 scholarship has begun addressing the issues of refugees’ and asylum seekers’ representations in the media and in political discourse, 78 the attitudes toward refugees in the broader society, 79 the legal framework of refugees’ reception and protection 80 and the international or global contexts of the refugee crisis. 81 In other words, some of the issues that were ignored by early refugee studies in Poland cannot be ignored anymore (e.g., the weaknesses or incoherence of the EU asylum policies 82 ). The post-2015 scholarship sets the new directions of research and expands to a broader range of disciplines. Yet, the growth of the refugee studies field does not automatically lead to a greater complexity of conceptualizations. Instead, refugee studies have become polarized. Most of the publications fall within the interpretative framework set in the early Polish refugee studies (i.e. they focus on refugee discrimination and position refugees as a group that needs protection 83 ), while a minor yet noticeable part of the scholarship assumes a radically different perspective. We suggest that apart from political filiations and ideological preferences, the reasons for this development can be sought in the workings of ignorance in the processes of categorization at the earlier stages of the academic field consolidation. The category “refugee” has already been petrified to a certain extent, and the shape that this category had taken in Polish scholarship prior to 2015—that is, moralized (ignorance of the pragmatic dimension of mobility) and culturalized (ignorance of class, age, situational grounding of action)—is partly responsible for the polarization of the academic discourse devoted to this issue in the situation of crisis.
The new line of scholarship that emerges in Poland after 2015 links the issue of refugees to national security. 84 The securitization of the phenomenon proceeds most speedily in the fields of political sciences and international relations 85 that have previously paid limited attention to the issue altogether. 86 A separate discipline of security studies also encroaches upon the field. 87 Linking refugees to a security threat and the criminalization of forced migrants (even if these associations stem from the research on some aspects of human trafficking that places the main blame on traffickers 88 ) is a new development in the scholarship on refugees in Poland. In this manner, by giving up the interpretative framework of humanitarianism, some of the new academic research breaks with the previous research on refugees in Poland. New scholarship also relies to a significantly lesser extent on firsthand empirical studies of asylum seekers and refugees; for example, “it is doubtful that the individuals posing a potential threat (connected to terrorist organizations) can be identified, as the attacks in Paris and Brussels have demonstrated, in which the attackers entered the EU with the wave of the newcomers from Syria.” 89 The weak anchoring in the actual refugees’ experience allows the new scholarship to largely ignore the fact that the framings of the alleged threat to security that it puts forward are speculative and imported from the rather different historical, political, social, cultural, and economic context of Western Europe and might have little resonance with the situation in Poland. The new research creates a curious combination of strategic ignorance, 90 that is, willful disregard of important elements of the context in which the research problem is situated, and another mechanism of ignoring that may be termed “strategic framing.” The latter is achieved by willfully placing a focus on some elements of the context and rendering them more salient than they really are. As an outcome of the combination of strategic ignorance and strategic framing, a new way of describing the refugee phenomenon emerges. First, it is less grounded in reality than it claims to be. Second, it takes interpretative cues from socio-political circumstances other than the Polish ones. At the same time, the new scholarship is in synergy with the new policy developments that are outlined in part three of this article, and with a significant share of the media reactions to the crisis. 91 Since it ignores the earlier framing that was based on humanitarianism, the new scholarship is useful for the migration-related policy-making of the Law and Justice government. 92 However, unlike the earlier academic research, whose primary ambition was to shape policy making, the new scholarship acts as a legitimization thereof.
The other new development in refugee scholarship in Poland is the emergence of the issue of “bogus” refugees, that is, the attempt to distinguish between “true” refugees and ones who aspire for the status without actual entitlement, guided by economic reasons. 93 Some scholarly texts deliberately use the categories of “migrants” or “illegal migrants” to describe the current situation in Europe. 94 The categorization in this case becomes a tool to distinguish “the deserving” and “the undeserving” subjects of public assistance. What according to the law is yet to be established (i.e., whether or not an asylum seeker’s application has sufficient grounds to grant this person some form of international protection), becomes a negative fact taken for granted at the outset—migrants are constructed as a priori “undeserving.” 95 In this case too, strategic ignorance is at work. In a way, this development could be seen as a mirror image of the earlier scholarship, which also took the answer to this question for granted—yet at that time the question was answered positively.
The third feature of the new line of research is the departure from the premise that humanitarian values are universally shared, which was typical of the early Polish refugee studies. For instance, Cieślińska 96 uses the hospitality framework to address the issue of assistance to refugees. She argues that hospitality rules are different in Christian and Muslim cultures: allegedly, in the former these rules are universal and apply to everyone, while in the latter they apply exclusively to Muslims. The author implies that refugees from Muslim countries might not be “good” guests and cautiously warns against excessive openness that disregards cultural differences. In another article, references to the theories of Huntington and Koneczny that reify the differences in ethics between “civilizations” are used in order to explain the negative perceptions of refugees by Internet users. 97 These and similar academic publications resonate with the more general concern with difference that has been found typical of Polish society in the aftermath of the 2015 crisis. 98 This line of research decisively departs from the stance of embracing difference, typical for the early refugee scholarship in Poland. At the same time, it also reproduces the culturalization of refugees that was an intrinsic element of refugee scholarship before 2015. Observably, ignorance works as a “lost realm”; for example, the focus on cultural difference “automatically” results in the disregard of other aspects of the refugees’ situation.
So far, the exposure of the new approach is not so strong in mainstream scholarship (understood as major publications within the disciplines that are recognized as key to the refugee studies academic field, such as sociology). Its visibility, nevertheless, is increasing because of publicity gained through conference papers 99 or academically based public debates, 100 despite the fact that the dominant reaction of the academic community to the crisis has been the one of opposing anti-refugee sentiment, as Bazuń and Kwiatkowski demonstrate. 101 We therefore consider that this line of research has fair chances of developing under the pressure of polarization in the Polish political scene—the fear of refugees being one of the tools of the affective politics that is used in the populist rhetoric of the governing party Law and Justice.
Discussion and Conclusions
Our contention is that, paradoxically, the emergence of new meanings of the category of “refugee” (e.g., as a threat for security) and the accentuation of the clear-cut dichotomy between “bogus” refugees (or economic migrants) and “true” refugees is not completely exogenous to Polish refugee studies. The earlier conceptualizations involving an idealized image of the refugee (the figure we called “good refugee” in the restricted sense explicated above) set this category as a stiff mold into which the lived experience of people seeking protection has been cast. As a result, the knowledge and experience that were in some ways overflowing the mold were simply cut off. The “cookie-cutter” categorization worked toward the homogenization of the group described by the category. It naturalized the perception of this category as “discrete and distinct” 102 from others in a set. As has been already demonstrated for other contexts, the category of the “refugee” worked like a straitjacket that accounted for a minor part of the actual individuals’ identities and life experiences. Also, the possibility of switching between categories was not included as a part of the category’s “script.” It has been ignored that refugees differ from one another in a number of ways as well as that they can be and usually are interested not only in safety but also in living a normal life, which includes economic stability. So, when the multiplicity of the refugees’ situations has come into the limelight as a result of the emergence of the refugee crisis in Europe and the soaring media interest in the issue, the turn to the category of “bogus” refugee was an almost automatic, that is, categorical, reaction, since the new image of reality no longer fit the established theoretical construction.
Another noted feature of the early Polish refugee studies has been the culturalization of “refugee” as a category. The forced migrants’ actions and attitudes were explained in terms of culture by the researchers studying this topic. It appears that the culturalization of the category in early scholarship causes another unintended consequence today. Refugees are presented as rather culturally homogenous or as differentiated into culturally acceptable (e.g., Ukrainian refugees, Christian refugees) and culturally unacceptable (e.g., Muslims) groups. The issues of the secondary role of cultural values in the idea of international protection of forced migrants is largely backgrounded if not ignored altogether in such categorizations.
Although some shifts between categories are considered impossible or held in the sphere of ignorance, other changes occur very swiftly and pass almost unnoticed, rather distant categories being conflated, or collapse into the other. This is usually the case with the categories of “Muslim,” “terrorist,” and “refugee” in the media and political discourse in Poland (and elsewhere). 103 With the rise of islamophobia worldwide—notably in the aftermath of 9/11, the Arab spring, the war in Syria and the rise of ISIS— political and economic developments in the Middle East are often translated in cultural terms. At least in certain outlets of public and political discourse, Islam is held responsible for much of the violence and suffering occurring in the region. The rise of radical nationalism and populism in Europe is fueled by the figure of the Islamic threat, and also by the fear of migrants (as Brexit has demonstrated). It is not accidental that in the Polish media as well as in the expert and academic discourse in Poland, the construction of refugees as a threat occurs concomitantly with the conflation, in the media discourse, of the meaning of “Muslim” and “terrorist” in the category of “refugee.” 104
In the early scholarship, there was no room to include class, social inequality, life stage and life history, gender, and interaction in the picture. Even more so today, culture (understood as religion-cum-ideology) easily becomes an all-explaining factor. In this sense, both those who write in defense of Islam and attempt to demonstrate its humanitarian values and those who associate it with the most threatening features rely on the culturalist logic. When categorized in culturalist terms, the migrants are stripped of all other aspects of their identity and values. Or at least these identities and values are rendered socio-politically—and theoretically—irrelevant. The refugees also seem to possess none of the social characteristics usually employed to describe a group—such as socio-economic status, social class, education, agency, and the like. In the early academic research on refugees, explanations other than culture were backgrounded to promote the value of cultural diversity. Currently, however, the petrified version of the culturalist interpretation of the refugee phenomenon prevents the pursuit of other explanations even if they would be more fruitful. Fruitfulness itself, however, can be understood in a number of ways, and the new line of research that securitizes and negatively culturalizes the refugees acts in synergy with the policy makers’ goals of conducting active policy in this field, as part of regaining political agency vis-à-vis EU institutions and politics. Strategic ignorance inherent in categorizations that dichotomize “good” and “bad” refugees, or “refugees” and “migrants,” unlocks the potential for political action.
Ignorance is part and parcel of categorizations. In fact, it can be seen as the aim of categorization in that ignorance allows one to turn to action from inaction, or to guide social action in a given direction, especially in policy-oriented research. Our interest in ignorance is not self-centered and self-explanatory, though. Our end-goal is to understand how the categorizations produced by the academic and policy discourses are related. Being an inherent element of categorizations, ignorance might start posing a challenge, as it is the case of the current situation in Poland. The theoretical problem is whether one can predict when and how ignorance gets out of control and starts having negative consequences, such as the halting of the production of new knowledge. We believe that the empirical findings on the dynamics of ignorance in the Polish academic discourse have broader theoretical repercussions and can be applied for the interpretation of other levels and dimensions of the so-called refugee crisis as well as understanding other crisis situations.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The research and publishing of this paper was undertaken as part of the project “Zarządzanie europejskim kryzysem uchodźców w sytuacji braku konsensusu. Pojawienie się strategii w Polsce, na Węgrzech i w Rumunii” [Managing the European Refugee Crisis When There Is Lack of Consensus: Emergence of Strategies in Poland, Hungary and Romania] (DEC-2015/19/B/HS6/00080), supported by National Science Center, Poland.
