Abstract
Nothing Personal is a book centrally concerned with the politics and ethics of moral distance, bureaucracy and the political geographies of the contemporary nation-state. As with much work in this field, its geography is very much one of unglamorous locations. We read of the internal workings of the Home Office’s central immigration office in Croydon, the experiences of staff in Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre near Oxford and the work of a regional Home Office base in Portishead. The importance of such places to this book, and to the mode of political geography that it informs, is precisely in their mundane nature. These are the unremarkable spaces in which borders are produced and reproduced. Places like Croydon and Portishead rarely make the headlines. They slip from critical view, part of a bureaucratic system that appears both ubiquitous and evasive at the same time. By foregrounding the work done in such spaces, and the work done to maintain their unremarkable nature, Nothing Personal illustrates how the British asylum system insulates decision-makers from those whose lives are impacted by their decisions.
Ranging across a number of projects, the central thread of Nothing Personal is to unpack how moral distance is established in and through these unremarkable spaces. Gill thus draws on both a lineage of work in political geography that considers the everyday working of the state, and a range of moral philosophy concerned with distance, obligation and the effects of bureaucracy upon moral imaginaries (most notably Bauman, 1989). The result is a highly original account of how asylum is governed through both intentional and unintentional practices of distancing and obfuscation. The distance imagined here is one that runs through a great deal of contemporary immigration control and border enforcement. From offshore detention and migrant ‘push back’ policies, to the extraterritorial processing of asylum claims, the production and maintenance of distance has become a dominant trend in migration management. Yet Gill’s Nothing Personal adds considerable development to such work through both its discussion of distancing within the asylum system, and through the nuanced account of moral distance it develops. It is this account that I want to focus on here as it offers fertile ground for further geographical exploration.
Gill describes moral distance as ‘the human tendency to care more for people close to us than for those far away’ (p. 4). Moral distance might thus be seen as a prominent concern within moral geography, alongside allied debates over proximity, partiality and the care for distant strangers. To such discussions, Nothing Personal offers a sustained account of how moral distancing works as an emotional politics of managing interactions, expectations and opportunities for discretion. In doing so, Gill carefully explores the critical role that ‘mediation’ plays in the process of moral distancing – turning our attention not just to distance as a moral arbiter, but also to the actors and technologies that stand between a decision and its consequences. He rejects any easy account of proximity and co-presence as uniquely able to offer morally demanding encounters and openings for dialogue. The response to moral distance should not be to romanticize and validate proximity. This is carefully illustrated through the proximate relations of immigration detention and the co-opted role of third sector support organizations in the book. In this sense, the book calls to mind a relational politics of responsibility that eschews easy answers to the question of how one should respond to moral demands (Massey, 2004).
Perhaps most productive for discussions of moral distance and their application to geography, Gill argues that moral distance is not about indifference or the absence of emotion, but rather that emotion is fed into this process as part of the politics of governing; ‘bureaucracy and sensitivity are woven together in subtle and insipid ways in the area of asylum seeker management, which ultimately leads to the strengthening of bureaucratic modes of rule’ (p. 8). It is here that practices of care are interwoven into a seemingly amoral system of governing asylum, such that care becomes a way to orientate, justify and excuse exclusionary practices. In some ways, this insight reflects a broader concern in political geography to unpack the limits and closures of migrant support, humanitarianism and activism, amidst ever more coercive attempts to co-opt ‘humanitarian reason’ for purposes of security and containment (Fassin, 2011).
In this vein, Gill argues that ‘bureaucratic modern administrations seek neither immoral or moral bureaucrats, but amoral ones, driven by technical considerations that systematically evacuate personal ethical considerations from the business of carrying out bureaucratic work’ (p. 35). Nothing Personal shows that where such an evacuation of the ethical is not possible, where moral orientations remain, these too can be modelled, harnessed and managed so as to justify ‘the business of carrying out bureaucratic work’ (p. 35). As Gill is careful to show in unpacking relations between refugee support organizations and bureaucrats, this is not simply a case of individuals repressing moral sentiments or swallowing their reservations. Rather, those very moral sentiments of care may be mobilized to maintain that the asylum system itself is ‘doing the right thing’. Nothing Personal thus contributes a sustained and detailed account of how moral distancing is anything but impersonal, amoral and emotionless.
Beyond this account of moral distance, Nothing Personal displays a commitment to breaking down and challenging the state as an institution, a facet of much of Gill’s previous work. Gill is careful to avoid a condition of ‘state phobia’ in which faceless bureaucrats make unthinking and unfeeling decisions, and the state stands accused of using its authority to pursue conspiracies against those seeking asylum. Nothing Personal draws attention to the unintended chains of decisions, tendencies and often outside influence, which come to shape bureaucratic practice and decision-making – from the scrutiny of the press to the positioning of seats in an interview room. Importantly, these factors are argued to accumulate not in a conspiracy of intentional exclusion, orchestrated and controlled from a government ministry or a White Hall office, but rather in a ‘bureaucratic tendency’ that runs through policy, its practice and its effects. Intentional or not, the effects are just as devastating for those on the sharp end of migration control. Yet this lack of a conspiratorial adversary to confront makes the task of critically responding to exclusion all the more difficult. It is perhaps fair to suggest that here Gill suspects a slight desire for such a conspiratorial adversary in some migrant rights groups – the desire for a ‘big other’ to oppose in Žižek’s (1999) terms. Nothing Personal rejects such a desire, and exposes how seeking this coherent and intentional state serves merely to reinforce the authority of what does exist, incoherent, contradictory and problematic as it may be. In this vein, Nothing Personal contributes an understanding of bureaucratic distancing that, while influenced by Bauman, resonates with work unpacking the ‘banality’ of evil (Arendt, 1963).
It is here, in considering responses to moral distance, that Nothing Personal poses a number of questions for critical scholarship. Just as Gill is careful to avoid an uncritical ‘state phobia’, he is also careful to avoid what we might call an ‘activist romance’, in which the state is unproblematically opposed by politically progressive groups who seek to bridge the moral distance between decision-makers and asylum seekers. The final chapters of Nothing Personal focus on such groups, and on the value of compassion as a tool for activism in response to moral distancing, but they are clear that compassion should be a last resort rather than an initial orientation point. Here I think it is worth asking whether the ‘bureaucratic tendency’ that Gill explores in relation to immigration control might also come to shape and constrain the actions of activists, third sector groups and migrants rights campaigners too? Of course, activist groups and migrants rights movements are far from homogenous or cohesive, but a question to emerge is whether part of the failure to effectively challenge and evade moral distancing on the part of social movements is due to the success of a ‘bureaucratic tendency’ beyond the state and its institutions? If this tendency does indeed infuse the activism that Gill discusses, then what alternative can such activism offer?
A second, and related, concern is in the conclusion Gill reaches in proposing an alternative. For him, this is to follow a path of dismantling borders and supporting the radical proclamation that ‘No One is Illegal’. As Gill asserts in concluding, ‘[m]y prescription to Western governments who are busy building ever-taller barriers to international immigration is to abandon this activity and begin to undertake the (admittedly complex) process of dismantling them’ (p 187). By the end of Nothing Personal, Gill is not interested in reform but instead strives for ‘the courage and political skill to lead the way towards a different global future without international immigration controls’ (p. 187). This is an ambitious and laudable aspiration. But it is also poses significant problems. In closing with such a systemic, even revolutionary call there is a danger that Gill reproduces the desire for a ‘big other’ to oppose. The careful exploration of the state and its tensions, fragilities and certainties that marks the rest of Nothing Personal risks being a little lost in these final pages, where borders themselves, in all their manifestations, become the problem to be radically addressed. This is not to dismiss this political desire, but while Gill recognizes that the process of dismantling borders is ‘admittedly complex’, it would be useful to hear more about how this process intersects with the bureaucratic tendencies and imaginaries that have shaped so much of Nothing Personal. Is the dismantling of borders itself beholden to a different form of bureaucratic tendency and practice? Relatedly, we might ask whether it is the border itself that is at issue, the uses to which it is put, or the contemporary manifestation of the border as a particular modality of a historically contested set of processes, infrastructures and legal conditions.
Finally, Nothing Personal must be situated within debates over the value of ethics within progressive politics. Strident critiques of a turn to the ethical in thinking about responsibility, have proposed that it is a concern with ethics that precisely detracts from the kind of emancipatory political project that might be forged around a No Borders position (the work of Alain Badiou is perhaps most notable here). It is therefore interesting that Nothing Personal draws on Levinas’ work on responsibility to explore moral distance. With this in mind, Nothing Personal might be seen as ambiguously positioned within critiques of a ‘moral’ turn within Left politics. On the one hand, this turn to morality has been argued to depoliticize (Badiou, 2001; Rancière, 2004) and may be detected in the bureaucratic modes of managing emotions, dispositions and sensibilities that are charted across the text. On the other hand, the consideration of moral distance we see here is one that takes seriously the need to contest mechanisms of distancing wherever possible, and one that draws on a moral and pragmatic use of compassion in order to do so.
Nothing Personal is, then, an engaging and insightful text, which opens possibilities for further research in and beyond asylum and refugee geographies. It illustrates that while the political is very much personal in the context of asylum, it is also always interpersonal.