Global Displacement in the Twenty-first Century: Towards an Ethical Framework 9781474455992

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GLOBAL DISPLACEMENT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

GLOBAL DISPLACEMENT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Towards an Ethical Framework Phillip Cole

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Phillip Cole, 2022 Cover design: www.deanta.com Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by Manila Typesetting Company, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5597 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5599 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5600 5 (epub) The right of Phillip Cole to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsvi Introduction1   1 Pathologies of Exclusion

26

 2 Necropolitics

40

  3 The World Turned Upside Down

63

  4 The Borders of Refugeehood

79

  5 The Challenge of Climate Displacement

108

  6 The International Containment Regime

127

  7 Internal Displacements

144

  8 Development Displacement

166

  9 Border Zones

188

10 Voice, Speech, Agency

201

11 A Political Conception of Forced Displacement

214

12 Solidarity

229

Bibliography246 Index269

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In one sense writing a single-authored academic book like this one is a solitary process, and only one name appears on the book cover. But any author knows that their book is only made possible with the help, support and encouragement of countless others. I attempt to name as many of those others as I can here, but there are many people who made comments at conferences, or directed me towards sources, or simply inspired me through their work, that I owe a debt to. I am also aware that there are those who worked behind the scenes, as it were, at conferences and workshops, at academic journals and publishing houses, in libraries and universities and other organisations, who have been vital to this project. And so the first people I thank here are all those I have not named – I apologise that your name does not appear here, but you are acknowledged along with everybody else. I was extremely fortunate to receive funding from the British Academy to work on this project, in the form of a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship awarded in 2019–20. I received the ThankOffering to Britain Fellowship, established by a donation made to the Academy by the Association of Jewish Refugees in 1965. I am grateful to the Academy for choosing my project for one of the fellowships that year, and it was a particular honour to receive the Thank-Offering Fellowship given its history, and my awareness of its significance has had an important impact on how I approached the question of forced displacement. Chris Bertram supported my application for the Fellowship, and Sarah Kramer and Thom Oliver in the University of the West of England’s (UWE) Grant and Award team provided invaluable assistance in getting the application submitted. I owe a great deal to Sarah for her patience and advice throughout that process. Samantha Macey in the Finance Department was also instrumental in the success of the application. I also received teaching relief from the Faculty of Health and Applied Sciences at UWE to enable me to complete the book proposal,

Acknowledgementsvii and from the Department of Health and Social Sciences to enable me to complete the manuscript. I would like to thank Olena Doran, Peter Clegg and Charlotte Alderwick for that support. I would also like to thank Jenny Daly, Sarah Foyle, Ersev Ersoy and Joannah Duncan at Edinburgh University Press, and the Press’s committee for accepting the book proposal, and the two anonymous referees for their comments on it, which were helpful in developing it further. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewer of the completed manuscript who made valuable observations about how it could be improved. I am also grateful to Eliza Wright for her thorough work as copyeditor. I presented papers and talks based on the research for the book on a number of occasions, and received a great deal of encouragement and helpful feedback at those events. Especially important was the Postcoloniality and Forced Migration conference at Aalborg University, Denmark, in December 2019, and I would like to thank Martin LembergPedersen and his conference team for inviting me to speak at that event. As well as benefiting from the excellent papers presented at the conference, the comments I received there were very helpful in developing my research, and Lucy Mayblin’s suggestions and advice were a major influence on the direction I subsequently took. This was the last conference I was able to attend in person before the COVID-19 pandemic, and so remains a vivid memory for that reason, but also because of its significance, and it is a prime example of the importance of collective thinking in our field. I also presented work at the Philosophy of Migration and Asylum conference at Universidade Nova de Lisbon in June 2021, and would like to thank Gabriele de Angelis and his team for ensuring that the conference took place during the difficult times of the pandemic. Again I learned a great deal from other people’s papers and received very important feedback from participants, especially Rebecca Buxton and Natasha Saunders, who also sent me material and directed me towards useful resources. My work on solidarity was presented at the Migration and European Cosmopolitanism conference, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, in May 2019, and at the Workshop on the Ethics of Refugee Policy at the University of Edinburgh, in April 2019, hosted by the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and supported by the Just World Institute and the Political Theory Research Group at the University of Edinburgh; and my work on climate displacement was presented at the Refugees and Minority Rights conference, University of Tromsø, Norway, in June 2018. There were many helpful comments at these events and they all contributed to the development of the book, and I would like to thank the conference and workshop organisers for inviting

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me to take part: François Boucher, Sophie Guérard De Latour, Eszter Kollar and Isabelle Aubert at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Ali Emre Benli for the invitation to Edinburgh, and Annamari Vitikainen and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen at Tromsø. I also took part in a workshop on Refugee Voices, organised by Clara Sandelind, in June 2021, with fellow participants including Sarah Fine, Kerri Woods, Ahmad al-Rashid and Ammar Azzouz, which was very important in developing some of the key themes in the book. Work-in-progress was presented at sessions of the Global Migration Network, the Social Science Research Group, and the Global Security and Human Rights Research Theme at UWE, and I would like to thank Kieran McCartan, Artjom Ivlevs, Emma Brännlund, and Suwita Hani Randhawa for organising those sessions and the participants for their contributions. Jeff Crisp and Felix Bender also were a considerable help, Jeff providing me with examples and insights from his vast experience in the field of refugee protection, and Felix for reading and commenting on some of the ideas in the book. Thanks are also due to my colleagues on the Politics and International Relations team at UWE, who have made my work environment a warm and enjoyable place to be, and to the students who chose my modules, who were the testing ground for many of the ideas and arguments in the book. Lyndall Stein also directed me to sources, kept me informed on key developments, and provided political inspiration throughout. Thanks are also due to Bridget Anderson, for her support throughout the project, and her important work on these questions. Some of the work in the book draws on material that has been published elsewhere. The Introduction draws on an article, ‘Global Displacement in the 21st Century: Towards an Ethical Framework’, published in the Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 16, Number 2; Chapter 3 draws on a book chapter ‘Refugees and Political Theorists: The Problem of Complicity’, forthcoming in Postcoloniality and Forced Migration, edited by Martin Lemberg-Pederson, Sharla M. Fett, Lucy Mayblin, Nina Sahraoui and Eva Magdalena Stambøl, and published by Bristol University Press; Chapter 5 draws on ‘Climate Change and Global Displacement: Towards an Ethical Response’, which was published in the Routledge Handbook to Rethinking Ethics in International Relations, edited by Birgit Schippers (Routledge, 2020); and Chapter 12 draws on ‘Exploring the Borderlands of Solidarity: Europe and the Refugee Question’, published in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Europe, edited by Darian Meacham and Nicolas de Warren and published by Routledge in 2021. I would like to thank the editors of

Acknowledgementsix those books and journals and anonymous referees for their helpful comments which shaped how this material appeared in this book. Thanks are also due to friends and colleagues who, in various ways, kept me going through what has been an extraordinary period. While writing a book is not a solitary process, it is often a solitary experience, especially if one is lucky enough to be awarded a research fellowship; but in the past, and for the first few months of this fellowship, going to conferences and workshops, to libraries, sitting in coffee shops, and meeting work colleagues for lunch made me feel connected to a wider world outside of the writing process. Since March 2020 those ways of connecting with others were closed off, but meeting friends in online conferences and workshops, social get-togethers and interactions on social media have been incredibly important in keeping me motivated and energised. I made new friends and kept in touch with old ones through those methods, and am aware that I am not isolated at all, but am connected in a network of scholars working on similar questions for similar reasons and going through similar experiences, and every contact and interaction with that network was crucial in getting me to the point where I have completed this project. I hope I have managed to provide the same support for others during this difficult time. Also, the journey to completing this book did not begin with the award of the Research Fellowship: I am fortunate to have collaborated with excellent people throughout my career, many of whom are now good friends, and their work is present here, underpinning much of what I have written. The greatest thanks are owed to Roshi Naidoo, with whom I shared the locked-down life, and who provided a space of sanctuary and sanity during these perilous times, as she has throughout our life together. At various moments when I thought I had finished the book she pointed out that I had not, despite the fact that it meant yet more reading for her, and her observations and judgements have shaped it in fundamental ways.

INTRODUCTION

A ROOM WITH A VIEW As I write this Introduction I am in my study, in my house, on the outskirts of the city of Bristol in the United Kingdom. From where I’m sitting, I have a view. That view is of a global order of things that, in my experience, is stable and enduring, and which gives me a clear position in the world, as a citizen of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is a nation state in an international order of such states, and it has a territory clearly demarcated by its borders. Those borders are themselves clear, represented by lines on a map, and they are stable; they have been where they are for such a considerable period of time that I have no need to ask how they got there or why. The rest of the world is made up of similar states with similar territories marked by similar borders, and other people, like me, have their position conferred upon them within those states, such that the globe is inscribed with a stable, enduring and legitimate political order of things that I have no reason to question. Sitting here, I am aware, of course, that the global order is not really how it appears to me from my window. In the course of writing this book, however, I have learned just to what extent this view is illusory, and that there are other perspectives which provide a far more realistic understanding of the global ‘order’, from which it is experienced as a violent disorder. What these experiences reveal is that nation states are in fact not stable and enduring things, but violent processes, as those states continually constitute themselves and their inside and outside. Borders are not clear lines on a map but are again processes and practices that take place in border zones, spaces of extreme brutality, which are highly mobile and can erupt anywhere, either on the peripheries of states or deep within them. Within these zones people are constituted as citizens, aliens, immigrants, refugees, as stateless, as wanted or unwanted, again often through extremely violent processes.

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Many millions of people do not have a secure place within this global system but are positionless, displaced, struggling within those border zones, subjected to the sovereign power of states to determined who belongs and who does not, regardless of where people are or how long they have been there. People who have lived all their lives in homelands for countless generations, or who live at the centre of metropolitan cities and again who may have been there for generations, can find themselves unwanted, in the way of ‘development’, the opening up of peripheral spaces for capitalist exploitation. While I have been enjoying the spectacle of the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021, I have not witnessed the spectacle of people being displaced for those Games, superfluous, unwanted people, who were in the way. This is not a global order of stable and legitimate things, but a disorder of violent and exploitative processes. There are ways in which I could save the appearance of the view from my study, despite my awareness of the violent displacement of millions of people from their homes and homelands. For example, I could see their situation as arising from occasional and temporary aberrations in a predominantly stable and legitimate order, such that there is a need for some mechanisms to adjust the system at its margins so that these people can find a place within it. As long as people are not displaced for too long, and have some form of protection during their displacement, and as long as the international community is working to find durable solutions to their situation, then the global order can continue much as it is. However, I could also see their situation as a product of that global order, as a sign that the system is working all too well, and that regimes of international protection are not designed primarily to protect the displaced but rather to protect the global order of states by confining these disruptions to marginal places, to keep placeless people contained within the global order despite their location outside of it. From this latter perspective, there is something fundamentally wrong with the international order, and those millions of displaced people will never find a just solution while we insist on maintaining it more or less as it is. Global justice requires us to witness the reality of the impact of displacement on people’s lives, on their humanity, and so to look beyond sticking-­plaster solutions of international ‘protection’, to look beyond this international order and imagine another one in which justice for the displaced is a possibility. Part of the choice between these responses rests on who we think of as a forcibly displaced person and how we think of them. In terms of who we think of as forcibly displaced, if we restrict that concept to people displaced across borders by persecution or political violence, those we

Introduction3 might consider to fit the category of refugee, then although there may be record numbers of such people, there were still only 26.4 million of them by the end of 2020, which does not seem to be a particularly challenging number. However, the fact is that the 26.4 million figure is not one that represents the realities of forced displacement. For example, it does not include the 48 million people who were in a situation of internal displacement at the end of 2020. Even the total number of 82.4 million people that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated were forcibly displaced by persecution, conflict, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order by the end of 2020 does not capture reality.1 It does not include the millions displaced by disasters, including weather-­related disasters associated with climate change. It does not include the millions displaced by development projects, which some experts think is the largest single form of forced displacement. It does not include the many millions displaced by severe economic deprivation, who have been described as ‘survival migrants’. It does not include the stateless, the millions of people who do not have any officially recognised membership of any nation state in the world. In the end, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to arrive at an accurate estimate of the numbers of people who are living in a condition of placelessness in the world today, but whatever that number is, it is far bigger than any official estimate of the numbers of refugees that the international community is failing to find a solution for. In terms of how we think of the forcibly displaced, there is a tendency in the literature and in policy to see them as helpless victims, in need of rescue. This overlooks the fact that the people crossing the Mediterranean or the English Channel have rescued themselves by escaping from danger; if they need rescue at all, it is from the brutal technologies global North states use to repel them. Many parts of this book record the suffering and deaths of forcibly displaced people, and we need to understand that the reason why these people are being beaten, shot at, tortured, and in many cases killed is that they are exercising agency. If forcibly displaced people were really the helpless, passive, voiceless people they are portrayed as in much discourse, then there would be no need to build walls and fences to keep them out, and nobody would be bothered to beat them or shoot at them. Something else needs to be added to this picture, and this is the impact of forced displacement on people’s lives. It may be that a central element of the viewpoint from my study is that displacement is temporary, and during their displacement people are protected and cared for by the international community, in places such as refugee camps, until

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a solution is found. The reality is that people are displaced by violence, experience violence on their journey, and are faced with violence once they reach ‘safety’. Most displaced people are not in refugee camps, and many of those that are in camps experience danger and violence in and around them. Those who make their own journey in search of safety are confronted by practices of extreme violence by states who do not want them. Many who resist displacement are subjected to brutality and intimidation. At the extreme, thousands die, either because of the conditions they are forced to face on their journeys or at the hands of those who want to keep them out or eject them from their homes through murder and massacre. And their displacement is seldom temporary in any meaningful sense of the word but can last lifetimes, or generations, and for some, such as people displaced by development projects, there is no possibility of return because their home has been destroyed completely and replaced by a coffee plantation or sports stadium accompanied by a shopping mall filled with coffee outlets. The fact that those global North outlets are selling produce grown on the land dispossessed from people in the global South connects these displacements despite their locations in very different and distant places in ways that may tell us more about the global order that we are questioning.2 Displaced people are being subjected to what J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith call domicide, ‘the murder of home’, which is ‘the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in the pursuit of specific goals’ (Porteous and Smith 2001: 3, 12). If this is the reality of the experiences of displacement for many millions of people, then the inability of the international order to deliver justice to them, and the fact that this order is heavily implicated in those experiences of violence and death, means we must look elsewhere for justice. To spend time discussing marginal reforms to that system, or how it could work slightly better to find durable solutions for refugees, seems to be missing the point. That is the position I take in this book. And so I will not be offering proposals for reform but instead, for much of the book, will be exploring the realities of forced displacement in terms of the experiences of people who go through it and its impacts upon them. I will be describing the violent strategies that states take to keep displaced people away from their borders, and to drive people who are inside of their borders out of their homes to make way for ‘development’. Only after these realities have been addressed can I begin to engage in a theoretical discussion about displacement, and what emerges from that discussion is not an ethics of reform but an ethics of solidarity. I do not seek, in this book, to have an ‘impact’ on nation state governments or policy makers, to ‘influence’ them to change their ways, to nudge them towards some form of

Introduction5 humanity. Rather, I seek to move people to mobilise, to act in solidarity alongside oppressed people, whatever their relationship to that oppression, to seek to change the world now, today, in radical ways. WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT In 1985 Andrew E. Shacknove published an influential paper called ‘Who is a Refugee?’ (Shacknove 1985). It is part of a rich field of writing in normative Political Theory about people who are forcibly displaced, and the question of who counts as a refugee is one which many theorists have tried to answer. The definition that exists in international law is embodied in the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, in which a refugee is described as a person who, owing to well-­founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

What is interesting about the answers to the who-­is-­a-­refugee question in normative Political Theory is that few theorists agree with this definition. For example, Shacknove offers a conception of refugees as ‘persons whose basic needs are unprotected by their country of origin, who have no remaining recourse other than to seek international restitution of their needs, and who are so situated that international assistance is possible’ (Shacknove 1985: 277). While the Convention definition identifies people displaced by persecution (for specific reasons) who are outside of their home state, Shacknove’s refugees are people either side of the border whose basic rights are unprotected by their government and who the international community can reach to help. More recently, Serena Parekh, in addressing the question, answers: We should think of refugees as people who have had their human rights severely violated, regardless of the source of the violation, and have been forced to flee their home country and seek international protection. This is an understanding of refugees that is broader than the strict legal definition, though it stops short of including most economic migrants. (Parekh 2020: 29)

David Miller has defined refugees as ‘people whose human rights cannot be protected except by moving across a border’, and this can be the result of ‘state persecution, state incapacity, or prolonged natural

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disasters’ (Miller 2016: 83). The writer who comes closest to endorsing the Refugee Convention’s focus on persecution is Matthew Price (2009), but even then his understanding of how the international community should protect refugees goes beyond what international law requires, arguing that they should receive permanent membership of a sanctuary state. In international law, refugee status is temporary. I will discuss these definitions and others in detail in later chapters, but one thing I need to make clear at the start is that in writing this book I am not attempting to answer Shacknove’s question. At no point in the book will I offer a definition of the refugee. One reason why I do not do this is because in defining the person who counts as a refugee, we at the same time define the person who does not count as a refugee, an act of definition which is often overlooked. This question, of who is not a refugee, is extremely important, because what we are doing when we answer it is saying that those who meet this category do not have the same international protections as the refugee. On the face of it this might look innocent enough, because the concept of the not-­refugee takes in every person in the world who does not meet the definition, including the well protected such as myself. However, what is meant by the category of the not-­refugee here is something much more precise. It identifies people who, through no fault of their own, must leave their homes, but who do not meet the refugee criteria; for example, they have not crossed an international border, or persecution is absent. And so it includes the internally displaced, the economically displaced, and those displaced by climate change and other natural disasters. In identifying the category of the refugee and the rights and obligations that attach to it, we have at the same time created this category of the not-­refugee. For Shacknove, these are people who are displaced for the same reasons as refugees, but who are out of reach of international assistance; for Miller and Parekh, it is the internally displaced; and for Price, both the internally displaced and those displaced externally for reasons other than persecution. This means that in answering the who-­is-­a-­refugee question, we must acknowledge that, in doing so, we have also answered the who-­is-­not-­ a-­refugee question. And that answer cannot be that those not-­refugees, because they are not refugees, have no rights at all. Such a position would be morally and politically catastrophic. That is, of course, not what is being said, and there is an extensive literature that argues that our moral and political concerns cannot end at the border of the refugee definition. However, as far as the international community goes, and a significant part of the academic debate, the conclusion has been that these not-­refugees have no rights to protection at the international level; if their rights are going to be protected, this has to be done at the

Introduction7 national level, either by their home state or by the state they have been displaced into. If the international community does provide support, this is not in terms of protection but some form of humanitarian assistance. And so which side of the boundary the displaced person falls has very important consequences for them. The approach taken in this book is to argue that there are many millions of people who are forcibly displaced from their homes who are being excluded from the boundaries of international moral and political concern or only inhabit its margins, receiving either ‘lesser’ forms of protection or no protection at all. However, it is not part of the argument that the boundaries of the concept of the refugee must be expanded to include all displaced people. There is a tendency in the literature on the ethics of protection to approach it as a boundary problem, such that the task is to locate the boundary of protection in the right place, from a moral point of view. We can then say that the not-­refugees are excluded from this boundary of protection on an ethically justified basis. There are two problems (at least) with this boundary approach. The first is that, as we have seen, most political theorists disagree with where the boundary currently lies according to international law, and the basis for their criticism is that its location is based on morally arbitrary factors, such as a person’s location in relation to a border, or that the factors that are claimed to ground it are possessed by people on both sides of the boundary. For example, if the basis for our conception of the refugee is displacement caused by persecution, there are people internally displaced by persecution who meet all the criteria for being refugees except that they are unable to cross a border. The problem is that if we now argue that the boundary should be expanded to include those cases which we think should count as refugees, we are in danger of running into the same criticism. Shacknove, as we have seen, says the boundary is determined by the international community’s capacity to reach the people in question, which means that people suffering exactly the same kind and degree of human rights deprivations but who are out of that reach do not count as refugees; it is tempting to see this is a pragmatic rather than a moral boundary. It seems as though wherever we locate the boundary, there is always an element of arbitrariness, and we run up against an aporia, an unanswerable blockage to the argument that prevents us making any progress. We might answer it by saying that, in the end, we just have to put a boundary somewhere, and so we are putting it here for a range of pragmatic reasons. The problem with that response is that those defending the position we were criticising from a moral point of view can say exactly the same thing, and the argument is reduced to one about pragmatics not ethics. Some might

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argue that pragmatics is all there is when it comes to politics, but that is not the position I take here. The second problem with the boundary approach is that it places the current model of refugeehood at the centre, and then asks whether that model should be expanded to include others. This takes too much as given in terms of what protection looks like and who is responsible for it, and so has an in-­built tendency towards conservatism. We get into arguments about whether certain categories of forcibly displaced people need refugee-­type protection, with the conclusion that if they do not need that type of international protection, then they do not need international protection at all. If we take international protection to consist of, as Price argues, permanent political membership of another state, then this cannot be applied to Indigenous peoples internally displaced from their traditional homes through landgrabs by mega-­corporations, or people displaced from the centres of global North cities to make way for new housing for people who can pay higher rents. Because our model of international protection for forcibly displaced people does not fit these cases, then they are pushed out of the discussions about the ethics of forced displacement altogether. These two examples certainly do not feature in many discussions of the ethics of protection in normative Political Theory (see Wherry 2015), and, in a sense, they are not seen as political. The argument in this book is that all of these displacements are political and call for a political response. In the end that response may not, in some cases, take the form of international protection as currently understood and practised, but it must nevertheless be one that sees all displacements as equally political issues demanding a response that meets what justice demands. Pragmatism has no place here. And so this book does not start with the refugee as the paradigm case of forcibly displaced people needing international protection, nor does it argue that the refugee concept needs to be expanded. Instead, it takes the opposite strategy, and starts with forced displacement understood in the wide sense to include any person who is forced or obliged to leave their home, whatever the cause and wherever they are forced to move. It then proceeds to seek to understand the nature of these forced displacements in terms of their impacts on people’s lives. The argument is that, if we do this, there is no reason to constitute a certain kind of displacement as somehow core, and other forms as somehow peripheral, and there is no reason to restrict our notion of what international protection should look like to a single model relevant to one form of displacement. An obvious objection here is that if we are taking forced displacement as such as our subject, we cannot avoid the boundary question,

Introduction9 because we still need a boundary around a form of human movement which is going to count as forced displacement –­we need a definition. However, the answer to this objection is that our conception of forced displacement cannot be determined at the start of the argument, but has to emerge through our engagement with it; it is only through that engagement that we can begin to understand what it is and where its boundaries may lie. Certainly we need to have some kind of working definition to get started, and I will say more about the conception of forced displacement at work here in the next section, but that definition needs to be open-­ended and experimental. The book therefore takes forced displacement as a category in the wide sense described above, and works towards an ethical framework without any preconceptions of what that should look like. WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT This book attempts to answer three questions. First, what is forced displacement? Second, what impacts does forced displacement have on people’s lives? And third, given those impacts, what does justice demand for people who have been forcibly displaced? The aim is to widen the scope of normative Political Theory by starting with the wide understanding of forced displacement I suggested above, so that all forms of displacement are included, whatever the cause. There are three reasons for doing this. The first is to do with numbers, the second to do with the impacts of forced displacements on people’s lives, and the third to do with what we can learn about the nature of the international order by bringing these displacements together in one place. Numbers In the section ‘A Room with a View’ at the start of this Introduction, I pointed out that, while international law limits protection to those displaced across borders by persecution, far greater numbers are displaced for reasons to do with disasters, climate events, extreme poverty, and infrastructure development projects. The focus on cross-­border displacement is also undermined by the data. As we saw, of the 82.4 million people UNHCR counted as forcibly displaced by the end of 2020, only 26.4 million met the refugee category compared with 48 million internally displaced people. It may be that the concentration on cross-­ border displacement arises because this is the predominant concern of nation states who see uncontrolled movement into their territories as problematic; but if we as political theorists maintain that focus, we are

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placing an extraordinarily large number of forcibly displaced people outside the limits of political and moral concern. Other organisations have a wider understanding of the causes of displacement than UNHCR and so arrive at larger numbers. For example, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC),3 established by the Norwegian Refugee Council in 1998, estimates that by the end of 2020 there were 55 million people living in internal displacement (IDMC 2021: 2). Of those, 40.5 million were newly displaced in 2020, and disasters triggered three times more displacements during 2020 than conflict and violence. Of the disaster displacements, 98 per cent were caused by weather-­related events, such as intense cyclones, monsoon rains and floods. If we include those people displaced by development projects, this adds many more millions to the total. Hein de Haas and his co-­authors point out that ‘Development-­induced displacement is actually the largest single form of forced migration, predominantly leading to internal displacement of 10–­15 million people a year, mainly affecting disempowered groups such as indigenous peoples, other ethnic minorities and slum-­dwellers’ (de Haas et al. 2019: 39–­40). If we include displacements like these, and also consider the idea of severe economic deprivation causing what Alexander Betts has described as ‘survival migration’ (Betts 2013), then the number of forcibly displaced people in the world becomes difficult to estimate but far bigger than any of the numbers mentioned here so far. Impacts The second reason for taking this broader perspective is that the experiences that cause us to consider refugee displacements to be an urgent issue for global justice are largely shared across the range of displacements. There are three key experiences I would highlight here, of the protracted nature of displacement, of violence, and of the loss of membership of one’s political community. First, the issue of protractedness has long been recognised as a challenge when it comes to refugee displacement. UNHCR defines a Protracted Refugee Situation (PRS) as ‘one in which 25,000 or more refugees from the same nationality have been in exile for at least five consecutive years in a given host country’ (UNHCR 2021a: 20). Using this definition, UNHCR estimated that by the end of 2020, there were 15.7 million refugees in a PRS, 76 per cent of the total number of refugees under its mandate (and so not including the 5.7 million Palestinian refugees who fall under the mandate of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East4). We also need to note that although a PRS is defined as exile for at least

Introduction11 five consecutive years, the average length is now estimated to be between 18 and 26 years and that average length is steadily increasing. However, this experience of protractedness affects other displaced people too. For example, in the IDMC’s 2020 Global Report, Peter de Clercq comments, ‘An ever-­ growing number of internally displaced people (IDPs) remain so for long periods of time, often for many years or even decades. As time passes, returning home becomes less and less relevant as a solution to their displacement’ (IDMC 2020a: ix). The report notes that the total of 5.1 million people living in displacement as a result of disaster includes people who fled their homes in previous years, including at least 33,000 people still displaced ten years after the earthquake in Haiti (IDMC 2020a: 3). In its 2020 Methodology, the IDMC notes 52,000 people in Japan still displaced by the 2011 Tohuku earthquake and tsunami, and 450 families still living in trailers in the USA after Hurricane Michael in October 2018 (IDMC 2020b: 25). In its 2015 report on disaster displacement its research found 715,000 people ‘stuck in limbo’ but estimated that hundreds of thousands more in protracted displacement situations had not been recorded, with some cases lasting for up to twenty-­six years (IDMC 2015: 47). The second impact I would highlight here is the experience of violence. Distinguishing between displacements caused by persecution and violence and other kinds of displacement such as those caused by disasters and development projects implies that these latter kinds are somehow free of violence. Of course, no one would seriously suggest this, and perhaps what is meant is the absence of political violence. But even this distinction is impossible to maintain. As Keith Krause points out, many causes of violence other than direct persecution by the state or its agents, ‘such as weak institutions, gender inequality, governance failure or state corruption, are intensely political, have national and international implications, are interlinked, and demand a holistic approach to understanding and action’ (Krause 2019). This suggests that we need an enriched understanding of the concept of violence to inform how we interpret it in relation to forced displacement. If we apply Johan Galtung’s influential concept of structural violence, then we might conclude that all forms of forced displacement involve the experience of violence. For Galtung, not all violence is direct, acted by one agent against another: much of it is indirect, built into unequal power structures in ways that result as unequal life chances (Galtung 1969: 171). One outcome of structural violence is inequalities in life prospects, for example to do with morbidity and mortality (Galtung 1969: 177). Susanne Buckley-­Zistel and Ulrike Krause argue that structural violence can be experienced by forcibly displaced people. Referring

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to refugees in particular, they point out that widespread discrimination in host countries can prevent them ‘from meeting basic requirements necessary for a stable and secure life’, and that structural violence ‘may be physically harming when it leads to poor nutrition or limited access to health facilities’ (Buckley-­Zistel and Krause 2017: 6). When it comes to internally displaced people, in Chapter 7 we will see that they share these same impacts of structural violence, and in Chapter 8 we will see the evidence that development displacement, even when it does not involve direct violence, still has a strong correlation with structural violence. But this should not deflect us from examining the role of direct, physical violence in people’s experiences of forced displacement. For example, there is a long record of extreme violence associated with relocating people to make way for development projects, and people displaced for any reason experience extreme violence during their journeys and often in places that are supposed to provide sanctuary. One potential reply to this last point is that we can identify a distinct form of violence directed at refugees that distinguishes them from other displaced persons. The form of violence experienced by refugees is one that has a specific impact, the loss of their political membership of a nation state. However, a key argument in the book is that all forms of displacement lead to the experience of loss of membership of one’s political community. In Chapter 7, in relation to internally displaced people in particular, I examine empirical evidence that demonstrates that loss of political membership is a key experience for them. To insist that political membership can only be lost through cross-­border displacement caused by persecution or some other distinctively political form of violence is to insist upon an implausibly thin account of what membership of a political community consists in. And so the third experience that is shared across the range of displacements is the loss of membership. Forced Displacements The third reason for bringing different forms of forced displacement together in one discussion is that, in treating them separately, we may fail to see the connections and similarities between them, and so become trapped in piecemeal ethical and political responses. By treating them together, we may arrive at a very distinctive take on what justice demands here from the international community in terms of protection and assistance. Indeed, we may conclude that we need to move beyond a protection-­and-­assistance framework altogether and look at much more radical responses. This is not to argue that we should arrive at a one-­ size-­fits-­all approach, because there are important differences between

Introduction13 displacements as well as similarities. However, the connections between them may give us ground for thinking that forced displacement as such is a challenge for global justice, rather than different displacements being distinct and separate challenges. And so the aim of this book is to address these displacements together and as equals when it comes to moral and political importance. While I am not suggesting that there is an ethical hierarchy of displacements in the literature, with refugees seen as the most morally important, there is a hierarchy of attention in terms of the amount of literature devoted to different forms of displacement. And in some of that literature I do think that there is at times a suggestion that displacement because of persecution is more ethically urgent because of its political nature, with calls for the strongest protection here, with ‘lesser’ forms of protection for other displaced people. If we look at the actual practice of international law and human rights, we notice the same phenomenon. Refugees have their status defined in international law, and they have international protection embodied in that law, such as the protection against being sent back to a place of danger, protection against being prosecuted or punished for entering the territory of a state without authorisation, and the right to have their case for refugee status fairly considered (see Hathaway 2007b). The 1951 Refugee Convention also outlines the benefits refugees should receive within their state of refuge with regard to access to work, education, social benefits, and so on. Other displaced people do not have a status in international law, nor, because of that, any rights to international protection or to specific treatment in their state of refuge. Many writers have made the case that the legal definition of the refugee in the 1951 Convention no longer seems helpful in the twenty-­first-­ century context of forced displacement. For example, Roger Zetter has pointed out that the global protection system faces a fundamental challenge, ‘the disjuncture between contemporary patterns and processes of forced displacement and the current legal and normative frameworks to protect the displaced’ (Zetter 2015: 2). He says that ‘a substantial and increasing number of forced migrants fall outside the existing protection regime and the legal and normative framework that defines it’, and that ‘the familiar label “refugee” seems both increasingly problematic, when confined to its definition in international law, and inadequate in scope to capture the complex, multivariate factors –­beyond persecution –­ . . . that propel displacement in the contemporary world’ (Zetter 2015: 4, 3). The point is that ‘Not every forcibly displaced person is a refugee, but all forcibly displaced people need some form of protection’ (Zetter 2015: 21). This is to draw attention to what are referred to as ‘protection gaps’ –­‘instances where existing international or national

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normative and legal protection instruments do not adequately cover specific situations or needs’ (Zetter 2015: 5). Of course, one key conclusion of the arguments of this book is that talk of protection ‘gaps’ needs to end; what we are talking about here cannot be understood as gaps in the framework of international protection through which some displaced people fall. If we are in search of metaphors, a more accurate one would be of a small island of international protection in the middle of an ocean of forced displacement. If we were to grade protections for displaced people, the scheme looks something like this: 1. Refugees as defined by the 1951 Convention have refugee rights embodied in international law, and have an international agency, UNHCR, mandated to protect both their human and refugee rights. 2. People displaced internally have no specific rights embodied in international law, and the nation state in whose territory they are displaced is expected to protect their rights, both their citizenship rights as well as their basic human rights. 3. People displaced across international borders by events other than persecution and violence again have no specific rights embodied in international law, and the assumption is that their basic human rights will be protected by the nation state into whose territory they have been displaced. If we sort displaced people and their protections like this, it begins to appear as though refugees are in a privileged position as the only group with access to international protection, with a set of specific rights designed to protect them. If we consider the numbers of displaced people we looked at earlier, and the impacts of displacement on people’s lives, then the question is whether such a scheme can be maintained. Sarah Opitz Stapleton and her co-­authors observe: At the global level, the conceptual framework and organisational architecture around migration and displacement are embedded within an international response machinery developed over seven decades. But this machinery has not yet managed to integrate the complexity of 21st-­century mobility into its politics or institutions. (Stapleton et al. 2017: 8)

Not only that: ‘The subjective and restrictive privileging of refugees –­ and the wider tendency towards category thinking more broadly –­is deeply entrenched in the policies and discourses of displacement and migration, and will be very hard to dislodge’ (Stapleton et al. 2017: 27).

Introduction15 And so the book starts with the wide conception of forced displacement I described in the previous section, ‘What This Book is Not About’: people displaced internally or externally by political oppression, disasters, environmental events, development projects –­including those displaced by what is described as ‘gentrification’ in major cities around the world –­and by extreme deprivation. However, rather than define the scope of forced displacement in terms of a long list of causes, which may grow as the book progresses, we could summarise this as displacement that has political, social, cultural, economic or disaster-­related dimensions, allowing that more than one of these dimensions can be in play for any particular displacement. For example, disaster displacements often have economic dimensions as it is the poor who are predominantly displaced; and development displacements often have cultural dimensions as it is most often those who do not ‘fit’ the dominant culture of the nation state who need to be removed for that state to continue its development. Indeed, Jane McAdam makes the suggestion that we should focus ‘on the needs and rights of the displaced irrespective of the cause’ (McAdam 2012: 240), and I have a great deal of sympathy for this proposal. And so, while discussion of causes of displacement remains important, the overall approach taken will build on McAdam’s idea. I commented earlier that bringing these different displacements into one discussion may transform our understanding of what forced displacement is and what global justice demands in response to it. It may also have a transformative impact on our understanding of global justice itself and its theoretical foundations. This is because the discourse of global justice that dominates is based in a particular conception of the global order, one that I described in the section ‘A Room with a View’ above, of an order of sovereign states governed within a bounded territory with responsibility for those who live within its boundaries; an order with a certain level of stability and legitimacy such that solutions to displacement can be found within the context of that order; and one that is not implicated in the forced displacement of people. If we examine forced displacement as such, in all its forms and in all its detail, we may come to question this conception in radical ways. We may arrive at a conception of a global order that seeks to legitimise and sustain itself through violent processes and see displacement as an inevitable outcome of these processes. The bodies and the experiences of displaced people and communities then become the map upon which we can read all that is corrupt, illegitimate and vampiric about this global ‘order’.

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THE ARGUMENT In one sense this book can be read as a survey and exploration of different forms of displacement and international frameworks of protection and assistance, but at the same time there is an argument running through it, which I outline here. Within the general landscape of the literature and practice on displacement, there are two responses to people forced to leave their homes and lands. The first is political and the second is humanitarian. Painting broad brushstrokes for now, the first approach sees displacement as primarily a political problem calling for a political solution, and what makes that solution political is that it restores, as it were, the political order of things, an order that has been disturbed by this particular displacement. Importantly, a political solution has the element of permanence –­ people expelled from the political order are re-­established within it on a permanent basis. The second approach sees displacement as primarily a humanitarian problem calling for humanitarian solutions, and what makes a solution humanitarian is that it makes no attempt to restore the political order (it is apolitical), but rather it aims to support people during their displacement until a solution can be found. The important element here is that such measures are temporary; for example, the provision of shelters and food to people displaced by a natural disaster, provided until they can return home. We can, therefore, sort displacements into those that are political, which need permanent political solutions, and those that are humanitarian, calling for temporary humanitarian assistance. An example of the former would be displacement caused by persecution by one’s government, and an example of the second would be displacement caused by severe weather conditions. What we might notice here is that, while the granting of refugee status in a sanctuary state is normally seen as a political response to a political problem, certain states only grant this status as a temporary measure, pushing it towards the humanitarian rather than the political. Indeed, under the 1951 Refugee Convention, international law only requires refugee status to be temporary, which, again, undermines the status of the centrepiece of international refugee law as a political response to forced displacement. This has led some theorists to propose what is known as the political conception of refugeehood, arguing that refugee status, in order to be a properly political response, has to be granted as a permanent status from the beginning. They also tend to reserve this response to cases of external displacement caused by persecution, or political violence more generally, as it is this that makes it a political, rather than humanitarian, problem (see Price 2009).

Introduction17 Other theorists have pointed out that limiting this kind of political protection to those externally displaced by persecution is arbitrary from a moral point of view. Some have also argued that, given the numbers of people being displaced in the world, it is not viable to extend this protection to all displaced people, despite their moral equivalence. They have therefore developed what is known as the humanitarian conception of refugeehood, such that the humanitarian response is extended across all displacements, in the form of temporary protection and assistance until it is safe for displaced people to go home (see Betts and Collier 2018). While global North states are morally obliged to rescue displaced people from danger, they are not obliged to offer them permanent membership as a solution but only to keep them safe on a temporary basis. And so we have a division between the political conception of refugeehood, with a rich notion of protection reserved for a narrow group of displaced people, and the humanitarian conception, with a thin notion of ‘protection’ but provided to all externally displaced people. My approach is to argue that the humanitarian critics of the political conception are right that confining political responses to a narrow range of displaced people is morally arbitrary and cannot be sustained. But they are wrong to argue that the humanitarian response should therefore be applied to all displaced people. Instead, I argue that all forced displacements are political, and all call for a political response, and therefore what we need is a political conception of forced displacement as such. But why should we see all instances for forced displacement as political? I suggest a number of reasons. The first is that the humanitarian response is only ever relevant if displacements are temporary, but the temporary/permanent binary does not make sense here. All kinds of displacement can be extremely protracted, lasting for decades, in some cases for lifetimes, and in others for generations. In the course of developing the argument I will present evidence that people displaced by disaster, or weather-­related events, or internally displaced, can remain in that situation for such long periods of time that the notion of the ‘temporary’ ceases to have meaning. What we should also notice is that the political conception of refugeehood has a fundamentally humanitarian element at its centre, because it allows that, while in the time and space of displacement, humanitarian support of basic rights is sufficient; the political response only comes when a permanent solution is available. But if displacement is protracted, this condemns displaced people to a basic life of semi-­permanent temporariness for extended periods of time. The central conclusion of this book is that it is this space-­time of displacement that needs to be politicised.

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A second reason is to do with the idea of membership of the community. The political conception of refugeehood, in some of its versions, focuses on persecution because it holds that this cause of displacement destroys membership of the political community, such that the only adequate response is permanent surrogate membership in a sanctuary state. People displaced for other reasons retain membership of their community. However, I argue that displacements of any kind can have such an immense impact on people’s lives that it is deeply implausible to claim that they remain members of that community. This is even more so when we recognise the protracted nature of these displacements. While it may be true that the political response advocated by the political conception of refugeehood –­permanent membership of another state –­is not always going to be a relevant solution for some kinds of displacement, such as that of Indigenous peoples from their traditional homelands, this is still a deeply political issue which calls for a political response. We need to be more imaginative about what a political response to these kinds of displacement can look like, rather than depending only on the refugee model of surrogate membership. There is a third reason why we should see all these kinds of displacement as political challenges, and that is to do with how we conceive of the international order. If we see displacements as isolated, disconnected and temporary aberrations of that order, then the limited approaches of the political and humanitarian conceptions look reasonable. But if we see them as systemic, connected and enduring, as permanent features of an international disorder, then they start to look like a profoundly political issue. From this perspective, we do not need to see every individual case of displacement as political, but we do need to see the phenomenon of forced displacement in all its forms is an important political feature of the global order, and see every individual case of displacement as evidence of that feature. And so I argue that the conception of the international order as a more-­or-­less stable system of more-­or-­less legitimate nation states, with displacements occurring at the margins of that system as correctable faults, does not match the evidence, and we need to radically revise our understanding of what is happening. In one sense, the point of the book is to do with what we can learn about the international order from studying the realities of forced displacements. One thing we learn is that states are processes, not things, and as such are in a constant process of self-­constitution, of constituting their inside and outside, of people as members or aliens, wanted or unwanted, refugees or illegal migrants, and so on. Borders themselves are violent processes that are part of this constitution, and can erupt anywhere, not only on the margins of states

Introduction19 but at their centres. Such an international order cannot offer a solution that meets what justice demands for forcibly displaced people. They are a systematic, structural outcome of that order, and if we want to find a just solution, we have to look beyond it, and again use our imagination to think of what a just global order might look like, one that is capable of delivering justice for the forcibly displaced and other oppressed people. What is needed, then, is a political conception of forced displacement. Throughout the course of the book I will develop arguments and offer evidence to show that forced displacement as such is a political challenge, and one that cannot be met by the international ‘community’ as it is currently constituted. And while I do not, in the end, outline a detailed picture of what a just political response to forced displacement would look like, I do argue that it will be based not on protection or assistance but on agency and solidarity. The book can be seen as an intervention in a particular moment, because if Daniel Bertrand Monk and Andrew Herscher are right in their analysis, the political response to forced displacement is being eroded (Monk and Herscher 2021). They identify ‘a political process whereby the protection of refugees and the displaced has been abandoned in favour of a generalized preoccupation with relief logistics’ (xv). They argue that the three recent international developments of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants in 2016, the Global Compact on Refugees in 2018, and the first meeting of the Global Refugee Forum in 2019 mark a shift from protection under international law to questions of ‘burden sharing’, and third country solutions to ‘ease pressure on host countries’ (xvi). As a result of this, ‘an established language of “protection” gives way to new pronouncements regarding refugee “dignity” and “self-­reliance”’ (xvi). What this amounts to is ‘a progressive abandonment and effacement of the dispossessed precisely as this order advances a new and nominally progressive jargon of care’ (xvi). This is sentimental humanitarianism, aimed at mobilising compassion rather than justice, and part of it is an emerging vision of assistance, which Monk and Herscher call the Global Shelter Imaginary. This is a shift to ‘technocratic responses to humanitarian problems’, and ‘constitutes an evasion of the political’ (xviii). Rather than needing a permanent political solution to their displacement, the displaced are in need of temporary shelter, quite literally, captured by the partnership between UNHCR and IKEA in the design and mass production of refugee shelters, a form of ‘rightless relief’ (xviii). This book aims to focus the arguments clearly on the political, on the question of justice for the forcibly displaced, as an urgent antidote to this move towards rightless relief. The space-­time of displacement must be politicised rather than become a space dominated by sentimental humanitarianism.

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Finally, I would like to end this section with three points. First, I refer throughout the book to a field I call normative Political Theory, and what I mean by that term is that body of Political Theory which has a specific focus on making practical but ethically informed proposals for action directed as specific issues, and in this case issues to do with forced displacement. Second, I also refer to what I describe as the ‘dominant’ or ‘standard’ or ‘accepted’ approaches to forced displacement in normative Political Theory and in the practices of the international community. Inevitably, my descriptions of these are crude portraits of a varied literature and a wide range of policies and practices. However, despite the shortcomings of offering these portraits, they are a useful shorthand for developing key ideas and criticisms, and in the course of the book more nuanced, and perhaps fairer, accounts of these views and positions will be developed. Third, many of the ideas and proposals I make in the book have been made by others, and some of them are drawn from the work of others. In the end, there may be little that is entirely original here. However, given the state of the world, I see this book as adding a voice alongside others, and this seems to me to be something worth doing. The academic quest for originality sometimes gets in the way of seeing it as a field of cooperation, where we work towards the same goal of global justice and the end of oppression, and where a number of people all saying the same thing, albeit from different perspectives or locations or through different theoretical or empirical lenses, makes it more likely that someone will listen. WRITING IN THE TIME OF COVID-­19 I began the research for this book in September 2019. Six months later the COVID-­19 pandemic spread to the United Kingdom, and I found myself living under lockdown. At the height of that lockdown I was permitted to leave the house once a day for exercise, and was expected to stay in my local area to do that. Visits to academic libraries to find and read books and journal articles came to an end, and although I could access some books and journal articles over the Internet, others I could not. The search for accessible sources led me to reports by NGOs and activist organisations, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Transnational Institute, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, and the International Water Institute, and others by international organisations like UNHCR, the World Bank, and the International Organization for Migration. I also drew on blogs and other forms of writing on the Internet. In addition, my isolation drew me in a more interdisciplinary direction, as searches on university library catalogues

Introduction21 took me into places I might otherwise not have explored. As a result, this may be a very different book than it would have been if the pandemic had not come. The situation also led me towards a form of writing that focused on events happening around me, because at the same time as the pandemic struck, issues relating to forced displacement unfolded on a dramatic scale, and I found myself reporting what was happening as I wrote. As a result, throughout the book there are passages that begin, ‘As I write’, relating to a specific event on a specific date. There is no coherent time order to these reports, as they happened during different versions of the book –­the same chapter may contain different points of reference as I witnessed these events from my study while writing different drafts. For example, as I write this version of the Introduction on 16 August 2021, Kabul has fallen to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and there are predictions of massive numbers of people who will be forcibly displaced from that country as they seek to escape the oppression expected to follow;5 Greece has been beset by enormous wildfires, which have forced people to flee their homes;6 and Haiti has been hit by a 7.2-­magnitude earthquake which has left more than 30,000 people homeless.7 Rather than try to rewrite these passages into a final draft giving a historical overview at the point of finishing the book, as it were, I have left them as they are and where they are. I have no justification for this, except that it captures the experience of writing about forced displacement, especially its emotional dimension. Part of the experience of writing this book consisted of bearing witness to what was happening to people around me as I wrote it. The pandemic itself has had an impact on the issues I explore in the book. There were reports from UNHCR that, at its height, 168 countries fully or partially closed their borders, with around 90 of those making no exceptions for asylum seekers, ‘seriously limiting access to international protection’ according to that organisation’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, Gillian Triggs.8 There were also concerns about the safety of forcibly displaced people being held in refugee camps and detention centres (see Cole 2020). It is still, at present, difficult to access reliable data on cases of COVID-­19 in these places, although we do know about outbreaks at the Napier Barracks facility in the United Kingdom.9 Writing in the Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine in July 2021, Elias Kondilis and his co-­authors studied the pandemic’s impact on refugees and asylum seekers in ‘reception facilities’ in Greece, and found that during the first nine months of the pandemic they were at a significantly higher risk of infection than the general population, ‘with the highest risk in migrant populations in reception facilities on the Greek islands

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and at the Greek–­Turkish border, where living conditions are considerably worse’ (Kondilis et al. 2021: 1). They identified three outbreaks in reception facilities on the Greek mainland between March and April 2020, involving 228 people. However, during the second wave of the pandemic, between August and October 2020, there were 22 outbreaks involving 878 people. From the start of the pandemic, medical experts, refugee agencies and activists sounded the warning that this was inevitable, and that the consequences could be catastrophic, and called for urgent action to protect displaced people wherever they are and whatever their status. For example, Lancet Migration, a global collaboration between The Lancet and researchers, implementers and others working in the field of migration and health, issued a global statement on COVID-­19 and people on the move, arguing that all ‘should be explicitly included in the responses to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic’.10 It called for migrants and refugees to be transferred from overcrowded reception, transit and detention facilities to safer living conditions; the suspension of deportations; relocation and reunification for unaccompanied minors; clear and transparent communication including for migrant populations; and strategies to counter racism, xenophobia and discrimination. These measures are still urgently required, but the extent of political hostility to unauthorised migrants –­and, in many countries, the public hostility –­means that even such basic steps remain a remote possibility. The fact is that, despite their modesty, they represent a fundamental transformation of the politics of displacement. Natalia Cintra and her co-­authors point out that the concerns around the impact of COVID-­19 on displaced people in terms of their health reveal how difficult their situation already is. ‘COVID-­19 is not disrupting their otherwise “normal” lives, so much as increasing their dehumanization still further’ (Cintra et al. 2020). The fact is that the world is locked into an international system of confinement of refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants that reinforces this dehumanisation, a system in which they are identified as a problem which must be contained, even repulsed. For many of them, that system is not only oppressive but also highly dangerous and often fatal. The COVID-­19 pandemic adds a new level of precarity to their already extremely precarious lives, in an international system that refuses to recognise their full humanity. CONCLUSION In the section ‘A Room with a View’ at the start of this Introduction, I described a conception of the international order that saw it as a system

Introduction23 of sovereign nation states with clearly defined borders and membership rules, a system which is stable and more or less legitimate, sometimes needing an adjustment here or there. In such a system there are three kinds of people who seek to enter a state’s territory, roughly speaking: first, there are those who have authorisation to do so, for example returning citizens, legal permanent residents, tourists and, most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, refugees who have been granted sanctuary through recognised resettlement schemes; second, there are those who have no such authorisation and so no right to enter; and third, there are refugees who have not been granted sanctuary through resettlement schemes. Refugees of this latter kind are a distinct class because while they may not have authorisation to enter, they still have the right to do so under the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention, as long as they ‘present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence’ (Article 31 (1)). What happens, according to the view from my study, is that nation states have rational and reasonable systems for sorting out these three kinds of potential migrants at their borders, so that no great harm is being done to those in the second category who are refused entry: they simply have to find somewhere else to go or return to their home state, and given that they are not refugees fleeing that state, their return is a reasonable requirement. My own experience of standing in orderly queues in airports waiting to have my passport checked is that everyone is having more or less the same, slightly tedious, experience, except that some are being turned away, on reasonable and rational grounds and in a civilised manner. Again, there is an enormous gap between this imagined order and the reality facing migrants of all kinds, and in Chapter 2 I will describe that reality, in which nation states employ violent and brutal measures to repel those they consider to be ‘irregular’ migrants, framing them as a security threat to justify those measures. Refugees who do not have an authorised resettlement place are caught up in this category, and are being repelled with the same indiscriminate violence as everyone else, and there is increasingly no pretence that anything other than this is happening. Indeed, the United Kingdom is seeking to formally abolish the third category –­the unauthorised refugee –­altogether. Under the proposed United Kingdom Nationality and Borders Bill –­which at the time of writing has been approved by the House of Commons in the UK Parliament and is being considered by the House of Lords –­only refugees entering through authorised schemes will receive protection: the distinction now is simply between the authorised and the unauthorised, regardless of why the unauthorised migrant is seeking to enter.11 Only

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those entering through legal routes will be entitled to refugee protection; those who claim asylum after entering the country illegally will only be eligible for temporary protection status, with restricted rights to support.12 What we will see in the next chapter are the connections between what is happening now in terms of such measures, and what took place during one of the darkest times in history, when Jewish refugees were attempting to flee mass extermination by the Nazi government in Germany. I said earlier in this Introduction that any ethics of forced displacement must be grounded upon a realistic conception of the global order of things, and the next two chapters are the first steps towards that conception. NOTES 1. UNHCR, (accessed 25 June 2021). 2. I use the global South/global North distinction, and refer to the developing world and developing nations throughout the book, but recognise that all these terms are problematic in their own ways. I discuss the global South/ global North distinction in the section ‘On the Structure of Exclusion’ in Chapter 3. For a discussion of the problems with the notion of the ‘developing world’, see Khokhar and Serajuddin 2015. 3. (accessed 4 April 2022). 4. (accessed 4 April 2022). 5. ‘Afghanistan Life News: Desperate Crowds at Kabul Airport as Afghans Try to Escape Taliban’, Guardian newspaper, 16 August 2021, (accessed 16 August 2021). 6. ‘Greece Wildfires: Evia Island Residents Forced to Evacuate’, BBC News, 9 August 2021, (accessed 16 August 2021). 7. ‘Haiti Earthquake: Death Toll Climbs to 1,297 as Storm Nears’, BBC News, 16 August 2021,  (accessed 16 August 2021). 8. ‘UNHCR’s Gillian Triggs Warns COVID-­19 Severely Testing Refugee Pro­­ tection’, UNHCR, 7 October 2020, (accessed 16 August 2021). 9. ‘Napier Barracks –­Further Cases of Covid-­19 Among Asylum Seekers’, BBC News, 12 August 2021, (accessed 16 August 2021).

Introduction25 10. (accessed 4 April 2022). 11. ‘“Do Not Travel Here Illegally”: Afghan Refugees Crossing Channel Will Not Be Resettled in UK, Says Minister’, Independent newspaper, 1 Septem­­ ber 2021,   (accessed  2  September 2021). 12. See the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants briefing, (accessed 12 January 2022.

Chapter 1 PATHOLOGIES OF EXCLUSION

SUPERFLUOUS PEOPLE As I started to write this chapter on 23 April 2021, newspapers were reporting that at least 120 asylum seekers were feared drowned after their rubber boat capsized in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya.1 According to the Guardian newspaper report on 22 April, a humanitarian group named SOS Méditerranée was alerted by Alarm Phone, a volunteer-­run rescue hotline, that three boats were in distress, with waves reaching 6 metres in height. SOS Méditerranée’s rescue boat Ocean Viking went to the area but found ten bodies and no survivors. Alarm Phone told the newspaper that it was in contact with one boat in distress for over 10 hours, and alerted European and Libyan authorities, reporting the boat’s GPS position, but they refused to intervene.2 It was thought around 130 people were on that boat, and on 22 April the Ocean Viking searched for another boat in distress, reported to have 40 people on board, but without any success. SOS Méditerranée told the Guardian newspaper that more than 350 people had died on that stretch of the Mediterranean up to that date in 2021. The week before, UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that a boat had capsized off Tunisia, with at least 41 people on board. When I rewrote this chapter on 5 July 2021, there were reports of 43 people dead and 9 missing after a boat capsized off Tunisia –­the boat was carrying people from Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Bangladesh, and capsized after its engine broke down;3 and the Missing Migrants Project, established by the IOM, recorded 2,021 migrant deaths in the Mediterranean during 2021, adding to a total of 23,360 missing migrants in that sea since 2014.4 The Guardian headline for the 22 April story reads ‘More than 100 asylum seekers feared dead after shipwreck off Libya’. Those discounted in the rounding down to a headline number are not only nameless but also numberless, the ‘more than’ representing an excess that has been lost 26

Pathologies of Exclusion27 in every possible way: they were superfluous deaths. But these people did not come out of the blue –­they had names and stories, stories interlinked in complex ways to the European powers that refused to help them, and interlinked by a history of European colonialism. The organisation United Against Refugee Deaths keeps track of not only numbers but, where possible, names. For example, it names Nohom Mehari, Kidus Yohannes, Filmon Habtu, Filmon Desale, Debasay Rusom, Filmon Mengstab, Mogos Tesfamichael, Hdru Yemane, Huruy Yohannes, Omer Seid, Teklay Kinfe and Kidhus Yohannes as those who died on a migrant boat on 14 April 2020, when Malta and Italy failed to launch rescue efforts.5 Similarly, Maël Galisson, in the 2020 report Deadly Crossings and the Militarisation of Britain’s Borders, looks at the numbers of people who have died attempting to travel from France to the United Kingdom since 1999. He reports that the border between the UK and France has become ‘a deadly zone for people in exile’ (Galisson 2020: 6). Although there are no official statistics, at least 296 people died in that period: ‘European agreements, bilateral treaties and their implications in terms of militarisation have turned Calais into a murderous border zone. Migrants are left with no choice but to take ever more risks to cross it, often paying with their lives’ (Galisson 2020: 6). Some of those who died have names, which are recorded in the report: on 27 October 2020, seven people, including five from one Iranian Kurdish family, Rasul Iran Nezhad and Shiva Mohammad Panahi, both 35, and their children Anita (9) and Armin (6), and two more adults, died of drowning or cardiac arrest after a small boat carrying twenty migrants capsized off the French coast. Rasul and Shiva’s 15-­month-­old son Artin was missing, until his body was found on New Year’s Day 2021 on a beach in Norway.6 On 19 August 2020, the body of 22-­year-­old Abdulfatah Hamdallah was found on Sangatte beach. He drowned after trying to cross the Strait of Pas-­de-­Calais on a makeshift boat. A native of west Kordofan, Sudan, Abdulfatah fled his country in 2014. He spent at least two years in Libya before reaching Europe. Abdulfatah asked for asylum in France in 2018 but his application was rejected. On 9 March 2020, Baqer Muslem Abdulaneer Al-­Haddad, a 15-­year-­old from Iraq, died after being hit by a train near Metz, north-­east France. Before his death he had lived in the Grande-­Synthe camp for a year. He had tried many times to reach the United Kingdom without success, and probably ended up in Metz in an attempt to find an alternative route. The list of names, and their stories, goes on for twenty-­nine pages. While much focus in the media and elsewhere is on the Mediterranean Sea, UNHCR considers the journey overland through Africa to the coast to be much more dangerous, and refers to this combined with the sea

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crossing as the Central Mediterranean Route (UNHCR/MMC 2020: 10). Interviews collected by the Mixed Migration Centre in 2018 and 2019 ‘most frequently reported deaths, sexual violence, and kidnappings’ (UNHCR/MMC 2020: 7). Refugees and other migrants ‘reported being subjected to brutal violence, including being burnt with hot oil, melted plastic, or heated metal objects, being electrocuted, tied in stress positions, and experiencing and witnessing repeated sexual violence, often in the context of ransom demands’ (UNHCR/MMC 2020: 7). While there is no way of knowing exactly how many people die on the Central Mediterranean route, the Mixed Migration Centre estimates at least 72 each month, with an estimate of 1,750 deaths along the land section of the route between 2018 and 2019 (UNHCR/MMC 2020: 14; for narrative accounts of these journeys and their dangers, see Kermani 2017; Kingsley 2017; McDonald-­Gibson 2017; Trilling 2018). The border zone between Mexico and the United States is another deadly space. The Migration Data Portal records more than 3,600 people reported dead or missing during migration since 2014, with 60 per cent of these documented on the Mexico–­USA border.7 The Missing Migrants Project records the main direct cause of death to be drowning, mainly in the Rio Grande and Río Bravo rivers, and the harsh environmental conditions of the Sonoran Desert, although the cause of death is unknown in more than a third of the cases.8 The number of casualties is increasing dramatically: according to CNN, the Border Patrol recorded 557 deaths during the fiscal year 2021, compared with 254 in fiscal year 2020.9 Migrants transiting through Mexico and Central America to reach the United States are also forced to face dangers, both of the terrain and ‘systematic abuse, injury and extortion’.10 While the main recorded cause of death for migrant routes through Central America is vehicle accidents, mostly freight trains, the second most common cause is violence, ‘ranging from murder to physical abuse and sexual violence’.11 (For narrative accounts of these journeys, see Urrea 2006; Martínez 2014; Mayers and Freedman 2019). In Chapter 2 I examine another account of the causes of these deaths, in terms of the restrictive border practices of global North states designed to keep ‘irregular’ migrants, including refugees and asylum seekers, outside of their jurisdictions: the use of walls and fences to keep them out at the border, and other practices to exclude them, such as pushbacks at global North borders and externalisation, where those global North borders are moved deep into the global South. It is these practices that force migrants to take ever more dangerous routes with ever more drastic consequences for them. But first, in this chapter, I look at the measures taken by states to keep out Jewish refugees before and during the

Pathologies of Exclusion29 Second World War, and point to continuities with what is happening to forcibly displaced people today. LESSONS FROM HISTORY As I acknowledged earlier, I received a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship for 2019–­20 to support the writing of this book. The specific award is the Thank-­Offering to Britain Fellowship, and there is a story behind it which is highly relevant. In 1963 the Association of Jewish Refugees in the United Kingdom, which represents Jewish refugees who escaped from Nazism and found sanctuary in the United Kingdom, launched an appeal to raise funds for a project to show their gratitude to Britain. The appeal raised £96,000, which the AJR decided to donate to the British Academy in November 1965 to finance a research fellowship. Anthony Grenville comments: The generosity of this gesture was striking, given that most of the donors had arrived in Britain in the late 1930s as penniless refugees from Nazi terror and had had little more than fifteen years of peacetime conditions, since the end of the war in 1945, to achieve some level of prosperity. (Grenville 2015)

The Thank-­ Offering to Britain Fellowship was established and first awarded in 1967. The prevailing attitude of Jewish refugees is one of gratitude for the provision of shelter in the face of the Holocaust, but the story behind their struggle to find sanctuary from the Nazi terror is one that still has resonance with what is happening today, as many of them found themselves unwanted, and indeed ended up in detention camps. Susanne Heim describes the challenges they faced in the 1930s as they tried to leave Germany (Heim 2018). The British government granted refugees transitional leave to remain for no longer than two years, if they could prove that they had guaranteed means of livelihood and reported to police on a regular basis. ‘Apart from the difficult economic situation and the high unemployment rate, the main reason for these measures was the appeasement policy towards Germany’ (Heim 2018: 56). Once it became obvious that the refugee movement was long-­term, with little prospect of refugees returning to Germany, restrictive measures were introduced. Heim comments: The internal responses of the European countries can be summarized as follows: As is the case today, most reacted according to what they considered to be their national interests: protecting the internal labor market and economy against newcomers. The measures introduced had one over-­arching

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rationale: to stop, or at least to curb, undesired immigration as quickly as possible. (Heim 2018: 57)

Eventually, in the face of the growing crisis, a High Commissioner of the League of Nations was established for refugees from Germany. Initially there was a reluctance to establish such a position in case the German government was offended, and that desire not to confront Hitler’s regime ‘debilitated the High Commissioner’s Office from the outset’ (Heim 2018: 58). The United States was not a member of the League of Nations but sent a representative to the governing body of the Office, and the Commissioner himself, James McDonald, was an American citizen. ‘Nevertheless, the US administration missed no opportunity to make clear that it did not back McDonald in his efforts to find settlement opportunities for the refugees, thus weakening his position’ (Heim 2018: 58). With the annexation of Austria in March 1938 refugee numbers increased rapidly, with Poland, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia starting to put strong pressure on their Jewish minorities to leave. The Evian Conference was organised in France in July 1938 to respond to the crisis, but it ‘turned out to be a complete failure’ (Heim 2018: 58). Of the thirty-­two countries that took part, only the Dominican Republic expressed any willingness to take in Jewish refugees (Patt 2018: 99). Indeed, says Heim, ‘The Evian conference triggered a chain reaction of closing borders, strengthening border police, and inventing a variety of restrictions for refugees living in the various participating countries’ (Heim 2018: 60). At the same time Germany was ensuring that if Jewish people did manage to leave the country, they could not take their possessions, and this ‘turned the Jews into the unwanted minority they had always declared them to be’ (Heim 2018: 60). In the run-­up to the Evian conference, the British government’s position was that it would not be possible to grant unlimited entry (Packer 2017: 42). The emphasis was on ‘the deterrence of offering any encouragement to other countries wishing to dispose of their Jewish communities’, limiting entry of professional people because of high unemployment levels, and on ‘insisting that all financial aid for the refugees must be provided by private organisations’ (Packer 2017: 44–­5). Louise London points out that the United Kingdom government was more generous in accepting Jewish refugees than other countries, but also that efforts were made to place obstacles in their way. She writes that the head of the Home Office’s Refugee Department from 1942 to 1944 ‘devoted zeal and ingenuity in out manoeuvring the rescue campaigners’ (London 2000: 246).

Pathologies of Exclusion31 Even as late as 1943, at the so-­called Bermuda Conference between the American and British governments to discuss the refugee situation, the main objective of both countries was to maintain legal limits on immigration (Packer 2017: 183). There was still a fear that Nazi Germany and its allies would be encouraged to expel large numbers of Jewish refugees if restrictions were relaxed. A memorandum to a delegation about to meet with the US State Department in January 1943 prior to the Bermuda meeting expressed this view: ‘There is a possibility that the Germans or their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination to one of extrusion, and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants’ (Packer 2017: 187).12 Little was achieved by the conference, and London comments that ‘During the Holocaust, Britain’s policy –­much of it made in conjunction with the United States government –­continued to put self-­interest first, leaving minimal scope for humanitarian action’ (London 2000: 1). Throughout, the British government’s approach was that ‘the problem of what to do with the Jews took precedence over saving them, whether from Nazi persecution or mass murder’ (London 2000: 2). In November 1938 Kristallnacht prompted the Kindertransport to be organised for Jewish children: 9,354 travelled to the United Kingdom, 1,500 to the Netherlands, 1,000 to Belgium, 600 to France, 300 to Switzerland and 450 to Sweden. However, as Heim comments, this was an exceptional measure and their parents were not permitted to travel. Meanwhile, after November 1938 ‘escape became more difficult and more chaotic, forcing refugees to take illegal and often dangerous routes out of the country or to pay huge sums of money to traffickers’ (Heim 2018: 61). In countries of potential refuge, border guards and consuls were instructed to do whatever they could to keep the refugees out. United States consuls in Germany and Austria were ordered to discourage potential applicants, and it was left to voluntary refugee organisations to shelter refugees. ‘Increasingly, refugees were confined to camps –­partly due to lack of housing, and partly to keep “unwanted” newcomers away from the public sphere and render them invisible’ (Heim 2018: 61). There were a few principled diplomats who defied the travel bans (Patt 2018: 109). Chiune Sugihara, vice consul of Japan in the city of Kovno in Lithuania, where many Jewish refugees fled from Poland after the German invasion in 1939, is an example: ‘Risking his professional career he granted Japanese transit visas to Jewish refugees stranded in Lithuania against the rules set by the Japanese government, thereby saving thousands’ (Patt 2018: 109). With the German invasion

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of western Europe in May 1939, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees aimed to leave France and get to neutral Portugal. However, they needed Portuguese entry or transit visas to cross from France into Spain, and the Portuguese government instructed its consular representatives in France not to issue such visas, and especially not to Jewish refugees. Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, decided to issue visas to all who needed them, and issued thousands to Jewish refugees before the German military reached Bordeaux. He was dismissed from the diplomatic service on his return to Lisbon and died in poverty in 1954 (Patt 2018: 110). Portugal reinstated him posthumously in 1986, and in June 2020 the Portuguese parliament decided to recognise him with a monument bearing his name in the National Pantheon.13 But these were rare exceptions; ‘millions more Jews caught in the Nazi net were unable to escape’ (Patt 2018: 110). The United States remained reluctant to take in Jewish refugees even after Kristallnacht. The German transatlantic liner the SS St Louis now infamously represents the fate of many millions. The ship sailed from Hamburg with 937 passengers on 13 May 1939, almost all of them German Jewish refugees, planning to seek asylum in Cuba. The captain was Gustav Schroeder, who instructed the crew to treat all passengers with courtesy, and had one of the staterooms converted into a temporary synagogue, and those passengers who survived the Second World War told of how they enjoyed what was in effect a luxury cruise liner for the voyage to America.14 However, when the ship docked in Havana on 27 May, the Cuban government refused to allow 908 of those onboard to disembark. Photographs of the St Louis at Havana show that it was surrounded by small boats. These were filled with family and friends of those on board who had been waiting for them in Cuba. Five days later, once it became apparent that the Cuban authorities would not allow any more disembarkations, Captain Schroeder took the ship to Miami in the hope that the United States would offer sanctuary. However, the US State Department insisted that the remainder would have to wait their turn in the United States’ quota system for immigration, effectively shutting them out. Canada and some Latin American countries were also approached for help, but refused. Captain Schroeder had no choice but to sail back to Europe on 6 June 1939, but assured the passengers that he would avoid returning them to Germany, and even planned to scuttle the ship off the coast of the United Kingdom, forcing the authorities to rescue them.15 The American Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish relief organisation, negotiated with four European countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, to secure entry visas. The ship docked at Antwerp

Pathologies of Exclusion33 on 17 July, and 228 passengers travelled on to the United Kingdom, 181 to the Netherlands and 214 to Belgium, and France granted temporary sanctuary to 224. Avinoam Patt records that of the 620 people returned to Continental Europe, 532 were trapped once Germany occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and only 278 of those survived the war, the rest being murdered. Of those admitted to the United Kingdom, one person died during the war, killed in an air raid in 1940 (Patt 2018: 106). Around 80,000 Jewish refugees came to the United Kingdom in the lead-­up to the Second World War. On the outbreak of war, concern arose about ‘enemy aliens’, and in 1940 tribunals were established to try to separate genuine refugees from potentially hostile foreigners. Rachel Pistol describes the classifications the tribunals worked with: A: a threat to national security and to be immediately detained; B: the tribunal was unsure and so such persons had their movements restricted and could not possess cameras, bicycles and other items; and C: genuine refugees (Pistol 2015: 37). However, with the fall of France, Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, issued the order ‘Collar the lot’, and ‘a policy of wholesale internment was instituted, regardless of tribunal classification’ (Pistol 2015: 38, 37). On Italy’s entry into the war Italian residents were interned without tribunals (Pistol 2015: 37). The majority of internees were male, but there were several hundred women and children also arrested. The arrests were themselves traumatic for the Jewish and other refugees who had begun to settle in the United Kingdom, as they were rounded up and transported to transit camps on their way to more permanent detention centres. ‘Transit camps varied from vacant land where tents and barbed wire were hastily erected, to derelict mills, housing estates, and even prisons’ (Pistol 2015: 38). Women, for example, were sent to Holloway Prison, a move which meant separation from their children as it was considered too traumatic for the latter to be kept there. Other temporary transit camps were schools and barracks, with Warth Mills near Bury being considered to be notorious for its poor conditions (Pistol 2015: 39). When it was turned into a prisoner-­of-­war camp in late 1940, conditions improved in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. The destination after the transit camps was mostly the Isle of Man. Food and accommodation were considered to be poor (Pistol 2015: 51), but for the majority internment was over within eighteen months, when it became possible to serve in the military forces or help the war effort by working in specific professions (Pistol 2015: 49). The most unpleasant memories for the internees were the initial arrests and the poor conditions in transit camps, but also the anxiety of not knowing how the war would turn out. ‘Had Britain

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been invaded the internees would have been unable to escape’ (Pistol 2015: 50). Not only did Jewish refugees and others face detention, many faced deportation. Pistol reports that just over 11,000 male detainees were deported to Canada and Australia. The intention was to deport those who presented the highest risk, and the first ship to Canada, The Duchess of York, contained category A detainees and prisoners of war. However, eleven category C youths, some as young as 16, were also on board (Brinson and Kaczynski 2011). ‘Thereafter, unable to find the required number of “dangerous” internees required to fill the ships in time for tight departure dates, human cargoes constituted whichever internees were at hand’ (Pistol 2015: 47). The Ettrick, from Liverpool to Canada, carried 2,600 Germans and Austrians, half of whom were B and C category internees, and Charmian Brinson and William Kaczynski point out that ‘many of those designated “B” or “C” would also have been classified as “Refugee from Nazi Oppression” –­though this designation offered no protection against the British deportation policy’ (Brinson and Kaczynski 2011: 45). On the ship Dunera to Australia, 90 per cent of the passengers were B and C category Germans and Italians, many of the former being Jewish refugees. Pistol reports, ‘One thing in common on all ships was the lack of adequate sleeping quarters and sanitary arrangements for the internees, who were crammed into spaces designed for a much smaller number of passengers’ (Pistol 2015: 47). The Dunera was considered the worst of these, and those being deported had the added stress of British soldiers ‘pilfering everything of value from their passengers including 1,200 watches and hundreds of gold rings’ (Pistol 2015: 47). These minimal possessions were of immense sentimental value. ‘To have these lost to the avarice of these soldiers added to the grief of the situation’ (Pistol 2015: 48). Known as the ‘Dunera Boys’, the deportees did not know where they were going –­many thought it would be Canada or South Africa –­and the voyage to Australia on the overcrowded ship took fifty-­seven days (Philpot 2018). They were forced to sleep on floors and benches and kept below deck, except for thirty minutes a day, with portholes fastened shut. There were ten toilets on board and fresh water was provided two or three times a week. When the ship arrived in Sydney on 6 September, an Australian medical officer, Alan Frost, went on board and reported the conditions, which led to an apology from Churchill and some court martials of military personnel (Ludewig 2012: 88). After the Dunera, there were no more deportations, after a total of around 7,350 internees had been sent to Canada or Australia (Brinson and Kaczynski 2011: 45).

Pathologies of Exclusion35 Some of the Italians on the Dunera were survivors of the SS Anadora Star, which sailed from Liverpool on 1 July 1940 with 1,678 passengers on a ship designed to take 500. There were 734 Italians on board compared with fewer than 500 category A German internees or prisoners of war. The Anadora Star sailed without an escort, with no International Red Cross symbol to indicate that its passengers were civilians, and access to lifeboats was obstructed by heavy wire mesh. The ship was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland on 2 July 1940, and 486 Italians and 143 Germans died, the impact of the torpedo killing many below deck immediately, and others being dragged under water by wire mesh or drowning after diving overboard. The Kindertransport remains a symbol of the United Kingdom’s humanity towards the oppressed who needed sanctuary, and it is represented in that way on anniversary celebrations. However, as Tony Kushner notes, it was a voluntary scheme where the British government’s role was merely announcing it and setting out its legal parameters (Kushner 2018). Rebekka Gopfert and Andrew Hammel point out that ‘one condition attached to the agreement of the action was that absolutely no state resources should be drawn upon, the whole operation had to be financed by donations’ (Gopfert and Hammel 2004: 24). A delegation of prominent Jewish figures had seen Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in November 1938 following the Kristallnacht pogroms, to urge him to admit Jewish children from Nazi Germany, but, says Grenville, they received ‘what can only be called a polite brush off’ (Grenville 2017: 1). The issue was discussed in the Cabinet meeting the next day, where the decision was that children under the age of 17 could be admitted without documentation, but this did not extend to their parents. ‘The provision made for the children was inadequate; they were mostly left to fend for themselves, dependent in many cases on the British adults to whose care they had been entrusted –­which proved to be something of a lottery’ (Grenville 2017: 1). The initial organisation in the United Kingdom was done by the Council for German Jewry, with the Refugee Children’s Movement, founded soon after the arrival of the first children, taking over responsibility for their needs subsequently. In Germany individual Jewish communities took charge of coordination (Gopfert and Hammel 2004: 23). After the BBC Home Service aired a public appeal for foster homes, 500 offers were made. ‘The RCM did not insist that prospective homes for Jewish children be Jewish homes nor did they probe too deeply into the motives or character of the foster families’ (Jewish Virtual Library n.d.). The RCM sent representatives to Germany and Austria to set up systems for choosing and eventually transporting the children, and a

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network of volunteer organisers was established to make a priority list. These consisted of: the most imperilled teenagers who were in concentration camps or in danger of arrest, Polish children or teenagers threatened with deportation, children in Jewish orphanages, those whose parents were too impoverished to keep them or those whose parents had already been sent to a concentration camp. (Jewish Virtual Library n.d.)

At first the number of visas to be issued was unlimited but after some criticism the British government mentioned figures anywhere between 5,000 and 50,000. According to Gopfert and Hammel, ‘That fact it was in the end around 10,000 children and not more is largely attributable to the start of the war. Great Britain would probably have accepted more children had the war not broken out on September 1, 1939’ (Gopfert and Hammel 2004: 23). Those who came to the United Kingdom without foster families already arranged were held in summer holiday camps, Dovercourt near Harwich and Pakefield near Lowestoft. At first families who wished to foster could choose their children, but older boys were disadvantaged by this humiliating process, and the RCM subsequently took over matching children to families (Gopfert and Hammel 2004: 23). Finding a foster family was not necessarily the end of the challenges these children faced: Some families took on teenage girls as a way of acquiring a maidservant. There was little sensitivity toward the cultural and religious needs of the children, and, for some, their heritage was all but erased. A few, mainly the youngest, were given new names, new identities and even a new religion. In the end, many of the children for whom no home could be found were placed on farms or in hostels run by the RCM. (Jewish Virtual Library n.d.)

Grenville argues that contemporary accounts gloss over the conditions experienced by the children in the reception camps. ‘The inadequate nature of the accommodation –­the huts designed for summer holiday-­makers were virtually unheated in winter –­the poor food and, above all the lack of emotional support for children separated from their families are factors well known from many accounts’; even children taken in by households ‘often experienced insensitive or cruel treatment’ (Grenville 2017: 1). Gopfert and Hammell, although drawing attention to the rapid nature of the operation and the difficulties surrounding it, say that ‘Psychological and education aspects were hardly considered, and the list of psychological damages among the Kinder resulting from unsuitable family hosts is long’ (Gopfert and Hammel 2004: 24).

Pathologies of Exclusion37 Grenville argues that even though the Kindertransports were ‘a remarkable humanitarian initiative’, they were ‘also the products of the conflicted politics of their day. British immigration policy in the 1930s was often less than generous in its treatment of Jews seeking refuge from Nazi persecution, influenced as it was by public hostility to mass immigration and by widespread distaste for Jews’ (Grenville 2017: 1). When the British government began the internment of ‘enemy aliens’ in 1940, around 1,000 of the Kindertransport children aged 16 or over were detained. What is also not widely reported when the Kindertransport is celebrated is that many of the older children ‘became victims of the government’s indiscriminate mass internment of “aliens” and some were deported to Canada and Australia’ (Kushner 2018). Around 400 were transported to Canada or Australia, including on the scandalous Dunera voyage. CONCLUSION The reason for recounting this history in some detail is to pose a question: how far have developed countries like the United Kingdom, United States and Canada progressed in their attitudes and policies towards people seeking sanctuary? Joseph Carens makes the fundamental point that ‘the legacy of the widespread failure to admit Jewish refugees in the 1930s should shape our thinking on this topic’ (Carens 2017: 15). He observes, beyond anti-­Semitism, among the objections to admitting Jewish refugees was that there were too many, so that admitting them would disrupt social cohesion at a time of economic depression. These objections, he argues, could not justify their exclusion, given its consequences, and this should provide us with a shared foundation for discussions about refuge: ‘any principle that would have justified the decision by many states not to admit very large numbers of Jewish refugees in the 1930s should be seen as morally problematic’ (Carens 2017: 15). In the next chapter we will notice common themes which, if Carens is right, should give us cause for deep concern. These are themes of strict immigration controls to keep out ‘unwanted’ people, controls that do not distinguish between refugees or other migrants as they travel together in ‘irregular’ ways, of detention and deportations, of fences, walls and, effectively, prison camps, of states acting with impunity without regard for their obligations under international law. But we must not think of these as parallels; rather, they are continuities. They are constantly present in European ideologies and practices, coming to prominence whenever people are displaced in significant numbers.

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NOTES 1. ‘More Than 100 Asylum Seekers Feared Dead After Shipwreck Off Libya’, Guardian newspaper, 22 April 2021, (accessed 23 April 2021). 2. ‘Coordinating a Maritime Disasters: Up to 130 People Drown Off Libya’, Alarm Phone, 22 April 2021, (accessed 23 April 2021). 3. ‘Europe Migrant Crisis: Boat Sinks Off Tunisia Drowning 43’, BBC News, 3  July  2021,    (ac­­­­ cessed 5 July 2021). 4. Missing Migrants Project, (accessed 18 January 2022). 5. (accessed 4 April 2022). 6. ‘The Short Life and Long Journey of Artin, Found Dead on Norway Beach’, Guardian newspaper, 8 June 2021, (accessed 1 July 2021). 7. (accessed 12 January 2022). 8. (accessed 12 January 2022). 9. ‘Border Patrol Tallies Record 557 Migrant Deaths on US–­Mexico Bor­­ der in 2021 Fiscal Year’, CNN, 29 October 2021, (accessed 12 January 2022). 10. (accessed 12 January 2022). 11. (accessed 12 January 2022). Thanks to the anonymous Edinburgh University Press reviewer for drawing my attention to the importance of this region and to Óscar Martínez’s work. 12. See    (ac­­­ cessed 4 April 2022). 13. ‘Portugal Finally Recognises Consul Who Saved Thousands from Holocaust’, BBC News, 17 June 2020, (accessed 2 August 2021). 14. On 13 May 2021, I attended an event organised by the Association of Jewish Refugees to mark the 83rd anniversary of the departure of the St Louis from Hamburg, which was attended by some of those who survived, who were children on that voyage, and who spoke of their experiences then and since.

Pathologies of Exclusion39 15. In 1993 the World Holocaust Remembrance Center made Gustav Schroeder one of the Righteous Among Nations for his efforts to save his passengers from the Holocaust.

Chapter 2 NECROPOLITICS

CONTINUITIES In the previous chapter I examined the policies and practices used by states to prevent Jewish refugees from reaching safety from persecution and extermination in Nazi Germany, and identified what we might call the Carens test, that any policy or practice of exclusion pursued by states today that would have excluded those Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s must be a cause for deep concern. In this chapter we will find many causes for that concern, because we will see continuities with what happened in one of the darkest moments in European history. We can see such continuities in many policies and practices of contemporary global North states in relation to ‘irregular’ migration, policies and practices within which forcibly displaced people, including refugees, become caught as they have little choice but to follow ‘irregular’ routes to gain access to the territory of these states. But some policies are directly aimed at limiting access for refugees in particular, often under the guise of ‘protecting’ them from the illegal activity of people smugglers. One example is the United Kingdom Nationality and Borders Bill, currently going through the Houses of Parliament. At its centre is a distinction between those who arrive within the territory legally and those who arrive through ‘illegal’ routes, those who are ‘victims’ of people smuggling (UK Government 2021: 36). The latter will only be entitled to temporary protection, not full protection status, and ‘will be regularly reassessed for removal from the UK, will have limited family reunion rights and will have no recourse to public funds except in cases of destitution’ (UK Government 2021: 4). As we will see in Chapter 4, according to international law people are refugees from the moment they are displaced across borders, and so this proposal clearly involves refusing full refugee protection in the United Kingdom for people who are in fact refugees. Indeed, the proposed legislation criminalises refugees themselves, making it a criminal offence 40

Necropolitics41 to knowingly arrive in the United Kingdom without permission, with a maximum sentence of four years. A clause in the proposed legislation would broaden the offence of arriving unlawfully, so that people intercepted at sea and brought into the United Kingdom can be prosecuted. The United Kingdom is also proposing to send asylum seekers to ‘offshore’ immigration centres where their claims would be processed, with initial proposals for processing centres in Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, Gibraltar and, again a continuity with Jewish refugees, the Isle of Man. The most recent reports suggest that the United Kingdom is seeking to cooperate with Denmark, which is pursuing a policy of ensuring that no asylum seekers are processed within its territory, to establish a processing centre in Rwanda. The New Plan for Immigration states that the government will explore the option ‘to develop the capacity for offshore asylum processing’ (UK Government 2021: 19; for a discussion for Denmark’s proposals to externalise all applications for asylum, see Lemberg-­Pedersen et al. 2021). In response to these proposals, UNHCR issued a statement in October 2021, arguing that many of the reforms in the Bill rested on the ‘first safe country’ concept, that people should claim asylum in the first safe country they arrive in. The agency pointed out that this principle is not in the 1951 Refugee Convention and could undermine global cooperation on refugees. The creation of different classes of recognised refugees ‘is inconsistent with the Refugee Convention and has no basis in international law’ (UNHCR 2021c: 17). The Convention defines refugees ‘solely according to their need for international protection’, and anyone who meets the Convention definition ‘is a refugee and entitled to the protections of the Refugee Convention’ (UNHCR 2021c: 17). The entitlement to protection is not affected by ‘route of travel, choice of country of asylum, or the timing of their asylum claim’ (UNHCR 2021c: 17). As well as misapplying the Refugee Convention, says the agency, the Bill will ‘impermissibly externalise the UK’s obligations to refugees and asylum-­seekers within its jurisdiction’ (UNHCR 2021c: 9). The offshoring of asylum processing often results in forced transfers to countries with inadequate asylum systems, lower standards of protection and fewer resources. UNHCR also criticised the proposals for criminal penalties for illegal entry: Given that there is no possibility under UK law for applying for entry clearance in order to claim asylum, no one from a country whose citizens normally need a visa would be able to come to the UK to seek asylum without potentially committing a criminal offence. (UNHCR 2021c: 66)

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The agency points out that around 90 per cent of people currently granted asylum in the United Kingdom would fall into this criminal category. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a similar statement in January 2022, citing UN human rights experts: The right to seek and to enjoy asylum is a fundamental human right. If passed, the Bill could penalise asylum-­seekers and refugees, violating the principle of non-­punishment in international law and discriminating between categories of asylum seekers, contrary to international law.1

Given the focus on the Kindertransport in the previous chapter, it is also worth pointing to continuities over the treatment of refugee children. On 29 July 2021 the Guardian newspaper reported concerns about ‘shocking conditions’ at holding facilities for asylum seekers in Kent, including children.2 Member of Parliament Yvette Cooper visited the facilities as part of an inspection by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, and reported finding fifty-­six people crammed into small, unventilated waiting rooms with no COVID-­safety measures, including women with babies and very young children. The Guardian also reported that dozens of unaccompanied asylum seeker children had been put up in a hotel in Brighton with just 24 hours’ notice and without consultation, leading children’s and refugee charities to write a letter to the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson warning that the UK government was placing these children in ‘inappropriate’ holding facilities with little supervision and care. The chief executive of the Children’s Society, Mark Russell, told the newspaper: Many of these children and young people have fled war and persecution and witnessed often unimaginable scenes. They arrive on our shores frightened and traumatised. For them to then be moved into hotels and holding facilities and left without the care, accommodation and health checks they need is beyond shocking.

On 30 July 2021 the Times newspaper published a leading article, stating about the measures, ‘This is a shameful expedient that will damage young lives and enduringly tarnish this country’s reputation for humanitarian treatment of vulnerable children seeking sanctuary’, and attacking the Home Office’s ‘insouciant disregard for the welfare of children who arrive on this country’s shores’.3 Anthony Grenville, in writing about the Kindertransport, draws attention to section 67 of the 2016 Immigration Act in the United Kingdom, known as the Dubs amendment, named after Member of Parliament Alf Dubs, now Lord Dubs, who was one of the Kindertransport children from Czechoslovakia. That amendment committed the United Kingdom

Necropolitics43 to bring 480 unaccompanied asylum-­seeking children to the UK from elsewhere in Europe. As of 21 May 2020 a total of 478 children had been brought to the UK from France, Greece and Italy. Lord Dubs inserted a similar amendment into the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill, seeking to require the government to negotiate with the EU to continue the scheme after the United Kingdom left the Union. The government initially agreed to this amendment, but after winning a significant majority in the General Election in December 2019 it changed its position and the amendment was rejected. WALLS AND FENCES On 21 August 2021 Greece announced that it would complete a 40 kilometre wall along its border with Turkey, with a surveillance system, to stop refugees reaching its territory following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan earlier that month.4 Although walls and fences have been built in and around Europe purportedly to stop irregular migration, this extension of the Greek fence with Turkey is explicitly aimed at keeping out refugees. In their report on A Walled World, Ainhoa Ruiz Benedicto and her co-­authors observe that no border walls were built between 1968 and 1973 (Benedicto et al. 2020: 17). In 1973 Israel built a wall at the Golan Heights in Syria, and in 1974 Turkey built one in Cyprus. Both of these marked territorial conquest. However, since then the total number of border walls has steadily increased, so that it reached 42 in 2014, 56 in 2015 and 63 by the time their report was written (note that this is the cumulative total, not the total built each year). They comment, ‘the world has progressively been moving towards what could be defined as “global apartheid”’ (Benedicto et al. 2020: 17). Most of the border walls are in Asia (56 per cent), followed by Europe (26 per cent) while 16 per cent are in Africa. There is only one border wall in the Americas, between the United States and Mexico. These walls, they say, are ‘the visible and palpable form of underlying violence’ (Benedicto et al. 2020: 22). The European Agency for Fundamental Rights, the FRA, reports on the increased use of fences along the European Union’s land borders, and internally to mark out the Schengen free movement area. Before 2015 Spain, Greece and Bulgaria had fences at part of their external land borders. However, by 2020 nine EU member states had erected border fences: Bulgaria and Greece along their borders with Turkey; Estonia and Latvia along their borders with Russia; France around the Eurotunnel with the United Kingdom; Hungary along its borders with Serbia and Croatia; Lithuania to mark its borders with Belarus and the Russian

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enclave of Kaliningrad; Spain at its enclaves in Morocco at Ceuta and Melilla; and Slovenia at its border with Croatia (FRA 2020: 15). While states have the right to erect such barriers, the FRA comments that these fences must have points where people can safely apply for international protection. If there are no such points, ‘this raises serious issues’, including for obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention (FRA 2020: 15). It also comments that features which put people’s lives at risk or risk disproportionate harm ‘do not appear to be a proportionate measure’ (FRA 2020: 15). The Missing Migrants Project recorded 248 deaths at EU external land borders between January 2018 and October 2020, although the FRA observes that the real number may be higher (FRA 2020: 16). The most common cause of death was drowning in border rivers (102), then vehicle accidents (56), violence (20), train-­related (18), and exposure to hardship, for example hypothermia and exhaustion (14) (FRA 2020: 17). Most deaths occurred on the Greece–­Turkey land border: 86 people drowned in the Evros River and 47 died of other causes. There were 31 deaths on Spanish–­Morocco border (FRA 2020: 17). The most publicised border wall has been, of course, that between the United States and Mexico. The wall, constructed by the United States government to control migration from the south, began in the early 1990s, along with increased border controls, air and coastal patrols and surveillance technologies. When I first wrote about it in 2010, there was 106 miles of fencing along the 2,000 mile border (see Cole 2010: 38–­9). When Donald Trump took office there was 654 miles of border fencing, according to the United States Government Accountability Office (2017). By the time his presidency ended, there was 701 miles of fence (Murdza 2021). The impact of the wall on migration from the south is difficult to assess, because it came with a package of other measures against migrants and refugees which we will examine below. However, Chris Zepeda-­Millán comments that the most devastating impact was increased migrant deaths, ‘as they get pushed further and further into dangerous deserts and isolated mountain areas’. He estimates that an average of 460 migrants died during the first three years of the Trump presidency, roughly 100 more than the average for the last twenty years, and the actual numbers would have been much higher.5 Some of the other measures were taken directly against people from the south seeking asylum in the United States. In early 2019 the USA implemented the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, under which asylum seekers were returned to Mexico to await the outcome of their immigration proceedings, and pressure was put in the Mexican government to end the granting of humanitarian visas (Pijnenburg 2020: 313–­14). Another measure was the United States–­Guatemala Asylum Cooperative

Necropolitics45 Agreement (ACA), which enabled the US to transfer non-­Guatemalan asylum seekers to Guatemala without allowing them to lodge asylum claims in the US, a measure which, according to Rachel Schmidtke and her co-­authors, ‘leaves them without access to effective protection in Guatemala’ (Schmidtke et al. 2020: 4). Guatemala does not meet the standards for a safe third country under US law, which includes the ability to provide ‘access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection’ (Schmidtke et al. 2020: 4). The asylum system in Guatemala only allows high-­level officials to approve claims, which leads to massive bottlenecks (at the end of March 2020 there was a backlog of 713 cases), and the committee that decides cases had not met at the time the report was written because of the COVID-­19 pandemic. Refugees International and Human Rights Watch interviewed thirty ACA transferees originally from El Salvador and Honduras in Guatemala in February 2020, before the transfers were suspended because of the pandemic. All described abusive conditions at the US border, which included receiving inedible frozen food, no access to showers for several days at a time, the inability to sleep because lights were kept on, being subjected to insults and degrading treatment. They were denied meaningful access to an attorney, and were only allowed to make between one and three non-­private and rushed phone calls (Schmidtke et al. 2020: 5). ‘Transferees under the ACA were thrust into a high-­pressure situation in which they lacked adequate time and resources to make truly informed, voluntary choices about what to do’ (Schmidtke et al. 2020: 5). Once the transferees were at the airport in Guatemala, after they had waited on the tarmac for hours without food or water or medical attention, or information, the registration process took two or three minutes, after which they had 72 hours to decide whether they would remain in Guatemala, return to the country they had fled from, or seek refuge elsewhere. One out of the thirty interviewed said they were applying for asylum in Guatemala, while others said they had no family or support networks there and feared for their safety, and many said they would rather return to El Salvador or Honduras despite their continued fear of persecution (Schmidtke et al. 2020: 6). Between 21 November 2019 and 16 March 2020 the US transferred 939 Honduran and Salvadorian asylum seekers to Guatemala, the vast majority of whom were women and children. Of those only twenty applied for asylum in Guatemala despite the fact that they still had well-­founded fears of persecution in their home states. Schmidtke et al. comment, ‘Our interviews indicate that the ACA has been implemented in a way that effectively compels transferees to

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abandon their claims’ (Schmidtke et al. 2020: 6). Once in Guatemala, transferees had an unreasonably short time to make a decision, the asylum system was cumbersome and ineffective, there was little social support while claims were pending, and many had concerns about their safety in Guatemala. The overall effect of the ACA was that ‘some people who have a well-­founded fear of persecution appear to be abandoning their claims and returning to their home countries where they are at risk of serious harm’ (Schmidtke et al. 2020: 6). Schmidtke et al. conclude that ‘the United States violates its domestic and international nonrefoulement obligations by not examining the asylum claims of asylum seekers it is forcibly sending to Guatemala’ (Schmidtke et al. 2020: 6). Once the Trump presidency ended so did some of these measures, as the Biden administration ended ACA arrangements, which were also in place with Honduras and El Salvador, and halted further construction of the border wall. It attempted to end the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, but the US Supreme Court ordered that the policy be revived because of legal questions concerning ending a previous administration’s policies.6 The Biden administration’s approach to migration from the south is to work with the so-­called northern triangle states of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to address the ‘root causes’ of migration to the north. This involved Vice President Kamala Harris visiting Guatemala City in June 2021, and stating in a press conference, ‘I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States–­Mexico border: do not come. Do not come.’7 Her message, and the ‘root causes’ discourse, caused concern for those who hoped to see a more progressive approach taken on irregular migration by the Biden administration. Susanne Ramírez de Arellano comments that this is to ignore ‘the intimate role the United States played in developing those root causes’ (Ramírez de Arellano 2021). And at the time of writing this chapter, while unaccompanied children are now permitted to cross the border into the United States, border agents are still under orders to expel all other undocumented migrants under an emergency rule introduced under the previous administration, a rule known as Title 42.8 Although there were suggestions that this could be lifted in August 2021, it was renewed indefinitely on 4 August. James C. Hathaway, a leading authority on international refugee law, commented in his Twitter account that ‘this is simply an illegal action’.9 ITALY, THE EUROPEAN UNION AND LIBYA European states have also pursued strategies to repel irregular migrants from their territories, and the European Union itself has played a role

Necropolitics47 here. Barbara Joannon and her fellow authors, in their report for Refugee Rights Europe and End Pushbacks Partnership, state: EU Member States have for years unlawfully prevented displaced individuals from entering their territory and forcibly returned them to neighbouring or third countries, in violation of the right to seek asylum and the principle of non-­refoulement. The EU institutions contribute to these ‘pushbacks’, firstly by continuously failing to hold Member States accountable for them. Secondly, by financially, operationally, and politically supporting third states who perpetrate human rights violations to stop individuals from reaching EU territory. (Joannon et al. 2020: 8)

One key relationship here has been between Italy, the European Union and the Libyan Coast Guard and the policing of the Mediterranean. The Libyan Coast Guard has been receiving funding and operational assistance from the EU and Italy since 2015. Two EU military missions in the Mediterranean –­Operation Sophia and EUNAVFOR MED –­included capacity building and training for the Libyan Coast Guard and Navy. In a report presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2021, the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, Felipe González Morales, estimated that more than 60,000 migrants had been disembarked in Libya following interception at sea, ‘despite the fact that Libya is not considered to be a safe port for disembarkation for migrants due to well-­documented risks of human rights violations, including arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearance, sexual and gender-­ based violence, exploitation and trafficking’ (Morales 2021: 13–­14). Annick Pijnenburg identifies the relationship between Libya and Italy as an example of the increasing practice of cooperation between destination states and transit countries to reduce migration arrivals. ‘Such policies raise the suspicion that they are designed, at least in part, to circumvent the prohibition of refoulement, which is widely seen as the cornerstone of international refugee law’ (Pijnenburg 2020: 306). The Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation on Development, Combating Illegal Migration, Human Trafficking and Smuggling and on Strengthening Border Security was signed between Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni and Fayez al-­Sarraj, leader of the UN-­recognised regime in Libya, in February 2017. It provided for cooperation on efforts to prevent irregular migration, and included funding for Libya’s migration control measures, and technical support for Libyan Border and Coast Guards (Pijnenburg 2020: 310). Amnesty International reports that, overall, European Union states and institutions have provided the Libyan Coast Guard with at last sixteen speedboats, and assisted in the training of at least 477 personnel

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(Amnesty International 2020: 16). As well as this material assistance, there is active cooperation between the Libyan Coast Guard and the European Union’s missions in the Mediterranean run by Frontex, founded in 2004 as the EU’s border enforcement agency,10 and the EUNAVFOR MED Sophia operation. The latter are actively monitoring the situation at sea, including well into the Libyan Search and Rescue region, and communicating the presence of refugee and migrant vessels at sea to the Libyan authorities; meanwhile the few remaining ships of European navies have been kept well away from the areas where refugee and migrant boats often encounter problems. (Amnesty International 2020: 20)

This activity ‘has the evident aim of ensuring that the Libyan Coast Guard can intercept people at sea and return them to Libya, not withstanding the fact that Libya cannot be considered a place of safety’ (Amnesty International 2020: 20). This fact that Libya is not considered a place of safety for refugees and migrants is one that European states, and the European Union itself, have consistently chosen to overlook despite the evidence of what happens to migrants once they are returned there. In a report written in 2020 by UNHCR and the Mixed Migration Centre called On This Journey, No One Cares if You Live or Die (UNHCR/MMC 2020), they state: Despite the multitude of risks refugees and migrants face, people rescued or intercepted at sea continue to be disembarked in Libya, which UNHCR and others have repeatedly stated is not a port of safety. From there, most are transferred to detention centres, where many suffer dire conditions and some are at risk of again falling prey to smugglers and traffickers. (UNHCR/ MMC 2020: 7)

The report says that 17,700 people departed the Libyan coast for Europe during 2019, and 54 per cent of those were intercepted and taken back to Libya. By the end of June 2020, 11,300 had attempted the crossing and 50 per cent were intercepted and returned. For those returned, there were reports of ‘multiple human rights violations’ (UNHCR/MMC 2020: 10). Some refugees and migrants interviewed by the Mixed Migration Centre reported ‘spending more than a year in warehouses where traffickers subject people to severe physical abuse in order to extract payments’ (UNHCR/MMC 2020: 10–­11). Those held in ‘official’ detention centres by Libyan authorities reported overcrowding, food shortages, very poor hygiene conditions,

Necropolitics49 lack of access to medical attention, abuse, forced labour, and people going missing (UNHCR/MMC 2020: 16). Risks increased due to conflict in Libya, and in July 2019, fifty-­three people were killed when a detention centre was targeted by air strikes. Some refugees reported being conscripted into the conflict, or made to load or clean weapons, repair and clean military vehicles, or remove bodies from the battlefield (UNHCR/MMC 2020: 16). Mat Nashed, writing in August 2020, reported that it is unclear what happens to people once they have been returned to Libya (Nashed 2020). More than half of the people returned remain unaccounted for, according to the IOM. There is no official database, and while there are ‘official’ detention centres there are others that neither the IOM and UNHCR has access to, and also makeshift compounds run by different militia. Amnesty International found that many of those returned to Libya were detained in arbitrary and indefinite detention in inhumane conditions and thousands more ‘remain subject to enforced disappearance, after their transfer to unofficial detention centres’ (Amnesty International 2020: 7). Libyan officials, militia members and armed groups ‘subjected refugees and migrants to inhumane conditions of detention, torture and other ill-­treatment, forced labour and other acts of violence’ (Amnesty International 2020: 7). They also received reports of multiple deaths in detention centres and other places of captivity. On 27 May 2020, at Mazda, 180 kilometres south of Tripoli, traffickers shot at a group of around 200 refugees and migrants, killing 30 of them (Amnesty International 2020: 8). In eastern Libya there were reports of forced returns to neighbouring countries without due process or the opportunity to seek international protection. At least 5,065 people were forcibly expelled across Libya’s land borders during 2020 (Amnesty International 2020: 8). Another tactic used by European states in order to prevent refugees and other migrants from reaching their jurisdiction has been the criminalisation of those who engage in the rescue of people in need of help, whether at sea or on land, in response to the lack of effort to rescue them by European governments. The situation in the Central Mediterranean deteriorated in October 2014, when the Italian government withdrew its Search and Rescue operation Mare Nostrum (Cusumano and Villa 2020: 25). This was replaced by the Frontex operation Triton, but this had a narrower mandate and smaller operational area, and, say Eugenio Cusumano and Matteo Villa, ‘fourteen different aid organizations have attempted to fill this gap by conducting their own SAR operations’ (Cusumano and Villa 2020: 25).

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Writing in April 2021, Deanna Dadusc and Chiara Denaro reported on the Italian government’s actions against activists for the NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans, whose homes were raided in March 2021 and computers and phones confiscated. They were accused of ‘facilitating the illegal immigration’ of twenty-­seven people in September 2020, when they transferred them from a merchant vessel, which had been kept on a thirty-­seven-­day standoff outside of Maltese territorial waters, to their own rescue vessel and disembarked them in Pozzallo, Italy. The Public Prosecutor accused the NGO of coordinating a financial agreement with the merchant vessel, something it strongly denies, but which allows an aggravating factor of aiding immigration for financial gain (Dadusc and Denaro 2021). Lawyers and journalists reporting on the situation in Libya and the Mediterranean were also informed that they had been extensively wiretapped since 2017, as part of surveillance of the NGO Iuventa SAR, also accused of ‘facilitating illegal immigration’ with its rescue of 14,000 people at sea. Dadusc and Denaro point out that such actions are not new. Since 2017 NGO rescue ships have been either seized or prevented from carrying out their rescue activities, and there are more than fifty criminal and administrative proceedings being taken against activists, as well as prolonged denial of disembarkation for ships carrying rescued people, leading to lengthy standoffs outside of territorial waters. According to Cusumano and Villa, policy restrictions and criminal investigations from late 2016 led several NGOs to suspend their operations, and others had their ships confiscated by the Italian and Maltese authorities (Cusumano and Villa 2020: 27). As a result, ‘far fewer NGOs are now present at sea than in 2016 and 2017’ (Cusumano and Villa 2020: 28). In June 2019 the Italian government gave the interior minister the power to restrict or prohibit access to its territorial waters to any private vessel for reasons of national security or public order, with potential fines of between 150,000 and 1 million euros and confiscation of vessels for ships masters who disobeyed (Cusumano and Villa 2020: 31). Dadusc and Denaro argue that the activities of the NGOs and others is not only a humanitarian attempt to prevent deaths at sea but also a practice of ‘sousveillance’, surveillance from below, as they monitor and document EU border violence in the Mediterranean Sea, thereby constituting a critical, disobedient gaze in the otherwise black hole that the Mediterranean has become. They bring evidence that it is not the sea that is killing people, but the EU border regime. (Dadusc and Denaro 2021)

Necropolitics51 And equally the criminalisation of their activity is not only an attempt to prevent humanitarian rescue but ‘operates as a tool to reinforce selective invisibility on border violence, to hold the monopoly of what is visible, by whom and under what conditions’ (Dadusc and Denaro 2021). PUSHBACKS This practice of ‘sousveillance’ can also be seen in the activities of NGOs and activist groups monitoring pushbacks at the borders of European states. Marco Stefan and Roberto Cortinovis define pushbacks as: practices of refusal of entry at the border as well as expulsions of individuals from a state territory without an assessment of their personal protection needs and with disregard for basic procedural guarantees. The term also encompasses hostile and violent actions by states’ authorities against individuals that are often associated with those practices. (Stefan and Cortinovis 2021: 180)

Amnesty International uses the term to describe ‘the summary, unlawful, forcible, and sometimes violent transfer of refugees and migrants back across an international border without consideration of their individual circumstances, often, but not exclusively, upon or shortly after they have crossed it’ (Amnesty International 2021: 11). Amnesty considers the practice to be unlawful ‘because it deprives people of the right to challenge the decision to return them as required by law making it impossible to determine whether they would be at risk of refoulement’ (Amnesty International 2021: 11), and because it most often involves collective expulsions, which are prohibited under EU and international law. ‘Pushbacks and collective expulsions are illegal irrespective of when they happened or whether returnees are undocumented’ (Amnesty International 2021: 11). In his report to the Human Rights Council, Felipe González Morales emphasises this aspect of pushbacks, and reiterates that collective expulsions ‘are prohibited as a principle of general international law’ (Morales 2021: 6). Joannon and her co-­authors record pushbacks carried out by European states, many of which take place within the European Union itself, at its Schengen borders. The EU has failed to hold these member states to account, and they are operating with ‘a sense of impunity’ (Joannon et al. 2020: 10). For example, they record that French border police sent more than 9,000 displaced people back over the border with Spain between January and October 2018, with SOS Racismo estimating a similar total in 2019, with around 7,000 of these taking place ‘outside of any procedure’ (Joannon et al. 2020: 17). Similar actions were taken at

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the French border with Italy (Joannon et al. 2020: 19), with pushbacks estimated at around 170 a day. ‘These pushbacks typically involve physical and psychological violence and abuse, as well as illegal detention and a denial of human rights’ (Joannon et al. 2020: 20). Italy has carried out pushbacks into Slovenia under an agreement that people arrested within 10 kilometres of the border or within 24 hours of crossing can be sent back. The Italian Ministry of the Interior confirmed in July 2020 that this rule applied to people seeking asylum. This has led to the phenomenon of chain refoulement, as Slovenia then sends people back into Croatia, Bosnia-­Herzegovina and Serbia (Joannon et al. 2020: 24). Slovenia is recorded as expelling 4,653 people into Croatia in 2018, a figure that doubled in the first ten months of 2019 (Joannon et al. 2020: 26). Pushbacks also take place at sea, for example between Italy and Greece. A bilateral readmissions agreement that came into force in 2001 allows Italian authorities to carry out forced returns of undocumented individuals who arrive at Italian Adriatic ports to Greece (Joannon et al. 2020: 29). There are also reports of the Hellenic Coast Guard carrying out ‘pullbacks’ as they intercept boats attempting to reach Italy (Joannon et al. 2020: 30). Some of the most violent pushbacks are carried out by Greek authorities. Joannon et al. report that the Greece–­Turkey land border has become a militarised zone around the Evros River, with 12.5 kilometres of barbed wire and concrete fence built in 2012, and detention centres and border guard stations. There were violent pushbacks in March 2020 when Turkey reopened its land border with Greece to put pressure on the European Union in relation to Syria (Joannon et al. 2020: 34).11 This resulted in up to 20,000 people being trapped at the Pazarkule–­ Kastanies crossing, forced to camp in inhumane conditions without food or water (Joannon et al. 2020: 35). There was daily violence from Greek military and police, with water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and ammunition being used, resulting in one Syrian refugee being killed and several wounded. In May 2020 Greece sent military vehicles and 400 additional border guards to the area and the EU increased its border control support, deploying 674 Frontex officers. Joannon et al. cite consistent reports of violent methods used at various stages of the pushbacks: ‘beatings, psychological violence, theft of property, kicking, electrical shocks, water immersions, arms broken by security forces, serious baton attacks’ (Joannon et al. 2020: 36). Once people were pushed back into Turkey, there were reports of chain refoulements as they faced being sent back to their country of origin even if they were at serious risk of persecution (Joannon et al. 2020: 36).

Necropolitics53 Amnesty International published a report on the situation in July 2021, Greece: Violence, Lies, and Pushbacks (Amnesty International 2021). The report states: The findings of the present research, together with the comprehensive body of evidence on the subject, show that the use of pushbacks by Greece cannot be considered as a response to exceptional events or the actions of rogue actors. Rather, it is a de facto policy of border management that relies on the coordinated efforts of multiple authorities in Greece. (Amnesty International 2021: 5)

The use of violence, some of which could amount to torture according to Amnesty, features prominently in the report, with the most brutal occurring largely at the final phase of a pushback, at the Evros River: ‘Severe injuries, some requiring immediate medical intervention such as a broken spine, hands, and extensive bruises were reported by those being pushed back’ (Amnesty International 2021: 6). The report comments on the lack of accountability here, given the failure of the Greek authorities to investigate evidence of the pushbacks, and the EU’s failure to hold Greece to account: ‘Victims are effectively prevented from seeking justice or reporting violations for many reasons, among them a lack of effective or accessible remedies in Greece and beyond’ (Amnesty International 2021: 7). The EU, says Amnesty, ‘has so far failed to resolutely condemn pushbacks and other violent practices at its borders’ (Amnesty International 2021: 7). In September 2021, the IOM and UNHCR expressed their ‘shock and dismay’ about pushbacks at the Poland–­Belarus border, which resulted in the deaths of four people. They reported that groups of ‘asylum-­ seekers and migrants’ were travelling through Belarus to EU states such as Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, but were being pushed back. ‘Groups of people have become stranded for weeks, unable to access any form of assistance, asylum or basic services. Many were left in dire situations, exposed to the elements, suffering from hypothermia. Some were rescued from swamps.’ The two agencies called for immediate access to those affected to provide food, water and shelter as well as lifesaving medical help.12 The EU accused Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko of a ‘hybrid attack’, luring thousands of migrants to Belarus by promising help to get them into the EU, with the aim of destabilising the Union in retaliation for sanctions against his regime. According to Amnesty International, those who followed this route were escorted by Belarus military to a fenced-­off exclusion zone at the border with Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, and violently forced into Poland, beaten with batons and

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chased by dogs across freezing rivers. Those who made it across the border were immediately caught and pushed back by the Polish authorities without due process, despite some expressing their intention to apply for asylum. On the Belarus side of the border they were held in collection sites for days or weeks without adequate food or sanitation, and had their phones and money stolen by Belarusian forces.13 A United Nations Human Rights team visited Poland from 29 November to 3 December 2021, but were not permitted access to the border area, and Belarus did not allow them to enter its territory. Their interviews with those migrants they had contact with reported ‘dire conditions’ either side of the border, with no or limited access to food, water or shelter, and freezing temperatures. They said they had been beaten or threatened by security forces in Belarus, and alleged that those forces had forced them to cross the border, and prevented people from leaving the area to return to Minsk. There were also reports of people being ‘immediately and automatically’ returned to Belarus from Poland, including people who had requested international protection. In a press briefing note on 21 December 2021, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights noted that current legislation in Poland allows people who enter through unofficial border crossings to be returned immediately, and that this is not consistent with international law. What was also deeply concerning was the lack of access to the border area for human rights agencies and humanitarian organisations.14 The NGO Médecins Sans Frontières announced its withdrawal from the area in January 2022, after being blocked by Polish authorities from accessing the region.15 This problem of state sovereignty, that international agencies do not have unrestricted access to displaced people, including those displaced over borders and so who count as refugees, is often overlooked in the theoretical literature. For example, Alexander Betts says, ‘When people cross an international border, they have access to the international community, and the international community has access to them’ (Betts 2013: 26). This is an issue I will return to in Chapter 4. EXTERNALISATION Another strategy used by global North states to keep refugees, asylum seekers and irregular migrants out of their jurisdictions is to export border controls into other regions, far away from their own borders. This strategy has become known as ‘externalisation’, defined by Violeta Moreno-­Lax and Martin Lemberg-­Pedersen as ‘the range of processes whereby European actors and Member States complement policies to

Necropolitics55 control migration across their territorial boundaries with initiatives that realize such control extra-­territorially and through countries and organs other than their own’ (Moreno-­Lax and Lemberg-­Pedersen 2019: 5). According to Pijnenburg, externalisation shifts control from destination states in the global North to transit states –­those states refugees and migrants have to cross in order to reach global North states –­in the global South. These controls result in containment policies, ‘whereby migrants and refugees are “contained” in transit States rather than returned from a destination State to a transit State’ (Pijnenburg 2020: 307). This saves the global North state from the legal processes of having to hear asylum claims and having to deport those whose claims are considered to have failed –­deportation, in particular, is legally difficult and politically costly. Felipe González Morales, in his 2021 report to the Human Rights Council, comments on Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders, under which any asylum seekers arriving by sea are forcibly transferred to ‘offshore processing’ facilities in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, ‘in circumstances and conditions that have had severe impacts on health, and particularly the mental health, of asylum seekers’ (Morales 2021: 12). Pijnenburg describes Australia’s agreement with Indonesia, the Regional Cooperation Arrangement established in 2000 which also involves the IOM (Pijnenburg 2020: 312). Under the agreement, Indonesian authorities intercept migrants and refugees suspected of attempting to reach Australia, with the IOM offering ‘repatriation assistance’ to those migrants who want to return to their country of origin. Australia has provided Indonesia with funding, training and equipment, Australian police have worked closely with Indonesian counterparts, and Australia has funded the accommodation of asylum seekers in Indonesia through the IOM (Pijnenburg 2020: 312). The United States has pursued an externalisation policy with Mexico with the Merida Initiative, a bilateral partnership launched in 2017 which ‘deepened and institutionalised security assistance from the US to Mexico’ (Vorobyeva and Berg 2021). While the initiative had a general focus on improving security in Mexico, one of its ‘pillars’ was to create a twenty-­first-­century structure on its southern border with Guatemala and Belize. Mexico launched its Southern Borders Programme in 2014, with the support of the US in the form of finance but also equipment such as helicopters and patrol boats, technical assistance, training of migration, police and judicial officials, and equipment for biometric data sharing and communications (Pijnenburg 2020: 313). In 2017 it was reported that the US had provided $24 million in training and equipment for Mexico’s National Migration Institute and committed $75 million more. During the first two years of the Southern Border Programme

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the number of migrant interceptions in Mexico doubled, with around 110,000 migrants from Central America detained between October 2014 and May 2015 (Pijnenburg 2020: 313). Externalisation practices have been central to migration management strategies pursued by European states and the European Union. Following the EU’s ‘Refugee Crisis’ of 2015, the focus was on establishing agreements with thirty-­five African countries. A meeting between the EU and those countries, held at Valletta, Malta, in November 2015, produced an Action Plan consisting of ‘measures to step up military and security cooperation and assistance, information and intelligence sharing and the developments of communication networks for maritime surveillance’ (Akkerman 2018: 15). The Migration Partnership Framework, launched in June 2016, aimed at cooperation on migration with African states, with Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal identified as priorities. The Framework included ‘assistance for capacity building on border and migration management in third countries’ (Akkerman 2018: 16). Externalisation remains part of the EU’s vision for migration management within its proposed Pact on Migration and Asylum published in September 2020. Sergio Carrera argues that ‘the Pact relies heavily on international cooperation instruments focused on “externalisation”’ (Carrera 2021: 13). At the heart of the strategy are Migration Partnerships, non-­legally binding arrangements with non-­EU countries. These arrangements ‘often come along with crisis-­led funding instruments . . . and give clear priority to expulsions, border management, countering human smuggling, and the facilitation of readmissions and returns’ (Carrera 2021: 14). Mark Akkerman, in a 2018 report for The Transnational Institute, points out that the vast majority of the thirty-­five African countries that the EU has prioritised for border externalisation efforts since 2015 ‘are authoritarian, known for human rights abuses and with poor human development indicators’ (Akkerman 2018: 3; see also 28–­9). Of those countries, 17 have authoritarian governments; 12 pose extreme human rights risks and the other 23 pose high risks to human rights; 18 fall into the category of low human development; and 25 are in the bottom tercile worldwide for women’s wellbeing in terms of inclusion, justice and security (Akkerman 2018: 3). Akkerman reports that EU criticism of human rights abuses has been toned down in relation to these countries in order to reach externalised border agreements (Akkerman 2018: 5). He argues that these externalisation practices impose a Euro­ pean agenda on African states. ‘The ways the EU puts pressure on African countries to guard its border outposts and to accept returned deportees, revive a long history of colonialism and neocolonialism and

Necropolitics57 solidifies an unequal relationship between the continents’ (Akkerman 2018: 38). THE INTERNAL FLIGHT ALTERNATIVE What we can see, then, is that global North states are seeking to repel the forcibly displaced, including refugees, through fences, walls and guns, or by helping proxy states to do this for them. But these practices of exclusion come in other forms, in the shape of not only border guards but also law and policy makers, as those states seek to prevent access through self-­serving interpretations of international law and policies, and exploitation of gaps in the protection framework. One example is the interpretation of the scope of the protection of refugees against refoulement, being sent back to places of danger once they reach safety. I will discuss this in more depth in Chapter 4 when I discuss international protection for refugees in more detail. Another example of the ways in which global North states have sought to narrow the entitlement to protection is the concept of the Internal Flight or Relocation Alternative (IFA), sometimes known as the Internal Protection Alternative (IPA). The basic idea behind the use of IFA is that if the person seeking protection could find safety within their home state, they are not entitled to international protection –­in such cases asylum seekers can be deported back to their home state as long as certain conditions are met, and this will not count as refoulement. This is despite there being no mention of the IFA in the 1951 Refugee Convention. Chloe Sydney, writing in March 2020, reports the increasing use of IFA in Europe. Norway denied asylum to more than 2,000 applicants from Afghanistan between 2010 and 2016 on this ground, and at least fifteen member states of the European Union have used IFA to deny protection to Iraqi asylum seekers (Sydney 2020). The European Union’s Qualification Directive embodies it: applicants are held to not need international protection if there is a part of their country of origin where they have no well-­founded fear of persecution or are not at risk of suffering from serious harm, if they will receive protection there, if they can safely and legally travel to that region, and if they can reasonably be expected to settle there. Penelope Mathew comments that IFA is now ‘so well accepted in state practice, that despite questions as to whether this development is a legitimate part of refugee law, it may now be too late to resile from it’ (Mathew 2016: 191). Mathew uses the terminology of ‘internal protection alternative’ on the grounds that what matters is an alternative site

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of protection within the state of origin. However, she argues, there is argument over whether it is only relevant to ask if protection is available in the IPA, or whether other factors need to be taken into account; it is mostly accepted that states must consider whether the proposed relocation is ‘reasonable’. It has been pointed out by jurists that ‘refugees are endangered by an approach that begins and ends with protection from persecution’ (Mathew 2016: 192). UNHCR issued guidelines on IFA in 2003 in an attempt to offer a ‘structured approach’ to its use, arguing that ‘International law does not require threatened individuals to exhaust all options within their own country first before seeking asylum; that is, it does not consider asylum to be the last resort’ (UNHCR 2003: 2). And so the concept of IFA ‘should . . . not be invoked in a manner that would undermine important human rights tenets underlying the international protection regime, namely the right to leave one’s country, the right to seek asylum and protection against refoulement’ (UNHCR 2003: 2). It can only arise in the context of assessing a refugee claim on its merits, and so ‘it cannot be used to deny access to refugee status determination procedures’ (UNHCR 2003: 2). UNHCR also notes that the OAU Convention Article I (2) rules out the relevance of IFA by defining refugees as people compelled to seek refuge in another country because of events ‘in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality’. The 1984 Cartagena Declaration refers specifically to this Article in its own definition of the refugee, therefore ruling out IFA as a ground for refusing protection. This is an example of how global South states take a far wider view of who should be protected than global North states, a theme we will return to in Chapter 4 when we look at definitions of refugeehood. Writing in August 2021, shortly before the Taliban took control of Kabul, Jamie Bell tells of the history of Afghan refugees seeking sanctuary in the United Kingdom, since the ending of a brief amnesty in the early 2000s when claims were generally accepted as genuine. Since then, ‘those seeking refuge from the warzone of their country have faced a lengthy uphill battle to be recognised as refugees’, with claimants being ‘removed en masse by monthly charter flights’ (Bell 2021). One of the strategies used to reject claims was the option of escaping threats of torture and persecution by relocating to Kabul, considered to be a safe IFA. Despite the deteriorating situation, and the recognition that Afghanistan’s security services could not protect people from the risk of persecution, ‘the relocation alternative to Kabul was enthusiastically maintained’ (Bell 2021). Country guidance at the time Bell was writing remained that ‘it will not, in general, be unreasonable or unduly harsh for a single adult male in good health to relocate to Kabul even if he

Necropolitics59 does not have any specific connections or support network in Kabul’ (Bell 2021). That guidance was removed on Friday, 16 August 2021. On 28 August 2021 the government suspended all decisions on Afghan protection claims for those already seeking protection in the United Kingdom, and requested immigration tribunals to stop hearing Afghan protection claims. A Home Office spokesperson said, ‘We have temporarily suspended our guidance on in-­country asylum claims because of the situation in Afghanistan and are working at pace to update it based on the quickly changing situation. In the meantime, all enforced returns in Afghanistan have stopped.’16 At the time of writing this chapter on 3 September 2021, the in-­country guidance on Afghanistan simply observes that all returns have been paused. CONCLUSION Joseph-­Achille Mbembe writes of ‘necropolitics’, by which he means ‘politics as the work of death’ (Mbembe 2003: 16). Sovereignty, he says, ‘means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not’ (Mbembe 2003: 27). The exercise of sovereignty creates ‘death worlds’ where ‘vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe 2003: 40). In their examination of the politics of immigration, Hannah Jones and her co-­authors apply Mbembe’s notion of death worlds to the harsh new border regimes explored in this chapter, including the fortification of land-­based borders by building walls and fences, and the outsourcing of border controls (Jones et al. 2017: 4). Earlier I referred to superfluous deaths, those not even counted, as numbers are rounded down to headline figures such as ‘at least 150’. Charlotte Boitiaux writes about the town of Zarzis in southern Tunisia, where two migrant cemeteries have been inaugurated ‘to honor the many people who have lost their lives while attempting the dangerous Mediterranean crossing to Europe’ (Boitiaux 2021). The first ‘Cemetery of the Unknown’ was created by Chamseddine Marzoug, an ex-­fisherman. He started burying the bodies he discovered at sea or on beaches in 2005, utilising a portion of a trash dump on the outskirts of the town, and using his earnings for the upkeep of the cemetery. Marzoug told the Washington Post, ‘These are people who were oppressed in their countries, went to Libya where they were oppressed even more. When I see the graves, I feel the discrimination and hate.’17 The second cemetery is very different, a project by Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi, called Le Jardin d’Afrique (Africa’s Garden), which was inaugurated on 9 June 2021 by UNESCO Director Audrey Azoulay.

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Koraïchi started the project in 2018 when Marzoug’s cemetery was full, with more than 500 graves. He says he expects Africa’s Garden to fill up quickly too, and is already considering extending his cemetery (Boitiaux 2021). Only one grave in Marzoug’s cemetery has a name, Rose-­Marie, from Nigeria, who died on 27 May 2017, when her boat capsized off Zarzis –­the other graves remain anonymous. All those lost in the Mediterranean Sea have names and stories. The Guardian newspaper reports that Cristina Cattaneo, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Milan, has been working since 2013 to identify those who have died, ‘committed to putting a name to every man, woman and child who has drowned at sea’. According to the Guardian, ‘There is no official death toll but about half of the thousands of asylum seekers who have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean lie in unmarked graves in Italy’s cemeteries.’ Professor Cattaneo told the Guardian, ‘Identifying the corpses is not just a question of restoring dignity to the dead, it is also necessary for the health of the living.’ Families of people who left Syria, Eritrea and elsewhere but never arrived contact the International Committee of the Red Cross wanting to know how to find their bodies, and the work of Cattaneo and others is a small step in meeting that need.18 As I wrote a draft of this chapter in early July 2021, the Ocean Viking had nearly 600 people on board that it has rescued, and was unable to find a safe port in Europe so that they could disembark. Food supplies were reported to be running low when it was finally allowed to dock in Italy.19 This has echoes with the story of the SS St Louis and the refusal to allow its passengers safe harbour in Cuba and the United States. In Chapter 1, I cited Joseph Carens’s point that ‘the legacy of the widespread failure to admit Jewish refugees in the 1930s should shape our thinking on this topic’ (Carens 2017: 15). But what we have seen are continuities of attitudes, policies and practices, of detention camps, of barbed wire fences, of extremes of violence and brutality, of keeping forcibly displaced people as far from our territory as possible, of the concealment of death worlds beyond our horizon. The practices I have described in this chapter clearly show, I believe, that global North states are failing Carens’s test. NOTES 1. ‘United Kingdom Nationality and Borders Bill Undermines the Rights of Victims of Trafficking and Modern Slavery, UN Experts Say’, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, (accessed 26 August 2022). 2. ‘MPs Decry “Shocking Conditions” at Facilities for Asylum Seekers’, Guardian newspaper, 29 July 2021, (accessed 21 July 2021). 3. ‘The Times View on Accommodation for Child Migrants: Duty of Care’, The Times newspaper, 30 July 2021, (accessed 20 July 2021). 4. ‘Greece Extends Border Wall to Deter Afghans Trying to Reach Europe’, Guardian newspaper, 21 August 2021, (accessed 23 August 2021). 5. Chris Zepeda-­Millán, quoted in ‘Death Debt and Degradation: Trump’s Border Wall After Four Years’, Independent newspaper, 30 October 2020, (accessed 5 July 2021). 6. ‘Supreme Court Orders Biden to Revive Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” Policy’, Guardian newspaper, 25 August 2021, (accessed 25 August 2021). 7. ‘Kamala Harris Issues Stern Warning to Migrants in Guatemala: “Do Not Come”’, Independent newspaper, 8 June 2021, (accessed 5 July 2021). 8. ‘Under Biden, Crossing the Border Has Become Like a Lottery for Migrants. Timing is Everything’, NBC News, 2 June 2020, (accessed 5 July 2021). 9. (accessed 29 April 2022). 10. (accessed 4 April 2022). 11. ‘EU and Turkey Hold “Frank” Talks Over Border Opening for Refugees’, Guardian newspaper, (accessed 21 September 2021). 12. ‘IOM and UNHCR Shocked and Dismayed by Deaths Near Belarus–­ Poland Border’, International Organization for Migration, 21 September 2021, (accessed 22 September 2021). 13. (accessed 12 Janu­­­ary 2022). (accessed 12 January 2022). (accessed 12 January 2022). ‘Afghan Who Arrived in UK at 14 “Left in Limbo” Under Home Office Policy’, Guardian newspaper, 28 August 2021, (accessed 3 September 2021). Chamseddine Marzoug, quoted in ‘A Tunisian Gravedigger Gives Migrants What They Were Deprived of in Life: Dignity’, Washington Post newspaper, 10 September 2018, (accessed 8 July 2021). ‘“A Question of Dignity”: The Pathologist Identifying Migrants Drowned in the Med’, Guardian newspaper, 3 June 2021, (accessed 8 July 2021). ‘NGO Sea-­Rescue Mission Exposes Reality of EU “Values”’, EUobserver newspaper, 14 July 2021, .

Chapter 3 THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? The Preamble of the 1951 Refugee Convention refers to the ‘problem of refugees’, and expresses the wish that states ‘will do everything within their power to prevent this problem from becoming a cause of tension between States’. UNHCR’s Statute also identifies one of its functions as ‘seeking permanent solutions for the problem of refugees’ (UNHCR Statute Chapter 1.1). In a 2019 document on guidance for partner organisations, UNHCR describes this function as seeking ‘permanent solutions to the problems of refugees’, which changes its meaning in significant ways (UNHCR 2019a: 8; my emphasis). However, the phrase ‘the refugee problem’ runs deep throughout media, political and academic discourse on displacement. Kelly Staples refers to this as ‘the construction of . . . people as a problem in need of solution’ (Staples 2019: 161). She points out, drawing on the work of Peter Lawler, that ‘problems are not fixed, but rather “named and framed in the process of responding to them”, which implies “a constitutive relationship between problems and solutions”’ (Staples 2019: 159; Lawler 2008: 386). This opens up the possibility that what counts as a problem depends on what solution you want. In other words, while we may normally understand the problem as coming first and the solution second, the real relationship in some cases may be that the solution comes first, and the problem is then defined by that solution. For example, if your preferred solution is the maintenance of the status quo when it comes to the international order of nation states, then certain groups of people become constituted as problems that must be solved in ways that maintain that order. While we may have thought that the purpose of the international refugee regime is to protect refugees, what the discourse of the ‘refugee problem’ suggests is that its purpose is predominantly to preserve and protect the nation-­state system, and even then to protect the interests of a powerful group of states within that system. To put the point in what 63

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might seem a provocative way, the international protection system’s primary purpose is to protect the global order of things, not to protect the displaced. The dominant view, then, is that displaced people are a problem for the international order, and the problem must be solved in ways that preserve that order. What I want to suggest here is that we turn this conception on its head and see the international order as a problem that needs to be solved in the interests of displaced people. This reversal of accepted ideas and frameworks around displacement, turning the world upside down, is a repeated strategy throughout the book. Indeed, this may not be merely a strategy but a methodology, where we repeatedly test key concepts and arguments to see if there is any reason to prefer them to their ‘upside-­ down’ versions, or whether these latter versions give us more insight into understanding what is actually happening in the world. It is a strategy for escaping locked-­down, unexamined assumptions about the order of things, and it opens up space for radical questions about arrangements which are assumed to be fixed in place. Turning the world upside down and shaking it vigorously can yield interesting results. However, the upside-­down method may have radical implications for normative Political Theory itself, and so this chapter turns away from events taking place in the world and towards the theoretical dimension, and specifically the question of method. ON THE STRUCTURE OF EXCLUSION One central issue in the study of migration in general has been the relationship between the global South and the global North, and many scholars argue that there is a strong case here for turning the world upside down. Even putting the global South first in the global South/global North binary is an act of reversal, as in most texts the global North has the primary position. Of course, the global South/global North is itself a binary that needs to be problematised, as Elena Fiddian-­Qasmiyeh points out (Fiddian-­Qasmiyeh 2020: 8–­9). However, I take Francesco Carella’s point that the terms act ‘as handy shortcuts to convey complex concepts, as long as one is aware that these shortcuts inevitably constitute oversimplifications and that, strictly speaking, they are semantically inaccurate’ (Fiddian-­Qasmiyeh with Carella 2020: 205; also see Mohanty 2003: 226–­7). Fiddian-­ Qasmiyeh observes that ‘studies of migration have often closely paralleled the interests of states that are the main funding sources for many academics in North America and Europe, and that often both explicitly and implicitly direct research agendas’ (Fiddian-­ Qasmiyeh

The World Turned Upside Down65 2020: 2). This has led, she argues, to a predominance of particular research questions and themes –­the ‘classic’ questions –­such as the integration of migrants in global North states, and how to manage migration into those states from the global South. Those she describes as decolonial and postcolonial scholars ‘have . . . been critiquing the ways that particular directionalities and modalities of migration, and specific groups of migrants, have been constituted as “problems to be solved”, including through processes that are deeply inflected by gender, class, and race’ (Fiddian-­Qasmiyeh 2020: 5). The proper response to this, she argues, cannot be the exercise of filling in gaps: ‘gap-­filling studies are open to similar critiques as those developed in response to studies of women in development that merely adopted an “add women and stir” approach . . ., thereby failing to challenge the systems that excluded women in the first place’ (Fiddian-­ Qasmiyeh 2020: 6). Rather, we need to ‘critique the processes through which certain people, spaces, and structures constitute themselves as the centre/inside, and the processes that can reinscribe the power of that “centre”’ by aiming to “add and stir” that which has been (kept) outside’ (Fiddian-­Qasmiyeh 2020: 8). And so, although the argument of this book is that normative Political Theory has left out significant forms of displacement, the method employed cannot be one of simply filling in the gaps. The inclusion of that which has been excluded has radical implications for theory and practice, such that it cannot be a matter of business as usual after a few tweaks and reforms. As a framework for thinking about the implications of this for Political Theory, I want to introduce the contrasting views of global poverty in international development theory, the residual and the relational. The residual view sees the global poor as a leftover –­a residue –­ from the international economic system. This residue is not created by the economic system: instead, there is something about that residue that prevents it from being absorbed. Either that residue has to be reformed so that it can be absorbed, or the international system can be tweaked a little so that it can be absorbed as it is. Hazel Johnson and Masuma Farooki comment that ‘the poor are seen as a residual category, and need to be integrated better into markets’ (Johnson and Farooki 2013: 187–­8). The residual view of poverty normally accompanies neoliberalism, ‘as neoliberals might argue, if markets worked better and were more efficient, everyone would be included in them in productive ways and would be able to make a living’ (Johnson and Farooki 2013: 188). The relational view sees the global poor as a product of the relationships between people in the international economic order: some people are poor because others are rich. This relational view is connected with

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structuralist (Marxist) approaches to international development, as it is the structure of the international economic order that creates the relationships that determine who is poor and who is rich. That order produces an inside and an outside, and indeed depends on it: the ‘order’ of the economic order depends on the active exclusion of the global poor. More accurately, the global poor are inside the economic order but confined to its margins in a space where political agency is absent: they are on the outside in the sense that they are excluded from processes of power, but remain an essential part of that order as it cannot be maintained without their participation. The solution to global poverty from this structural perspective is the overthrow of that economic order. This residual/structural contrast can be applied to many issues of exclusion, political and social as well as economic, such as the position of women, ethnic minorities and the physically disabled. Either these groups lie outside the political or social order because of factors inherent to them or because of a minor inefficiency in that order that can be adjusted so they are included, or that order structures itself around the oppression and exploitation of certain others who must be excluded from political agency. The forcibly displaced can also be seen this way. They are a residual leftover outside the international system of sovereign nation states, but their exclusion has nothing to do with that system, or is due to some minor problem that can be tweaked. Or they represent a structural failure, caught up in relations of oppression and exploitation such that finding an answer means asking radical questions about the international political order itself. The argument of this book is that the structural view is correct, but in this chapter the discussion is to do with method at the level of theory, and so the question is not so much how the global order of things produces an inside and an outside, but how Political Theory itself produces an inside and an outside. My main contention is that these two approaches –­the residual and the structural –­are embodied at the level of theory itself; certain groups –­such as women, non-­white ‘ethnic’ groups, migrants, and the forcibly displaced –­are excluded not only from economic, cultural, political and social systems but also from theory. This, of course, is not a new point to make: political theorists have been aware of this for many decades and many have addressed some of these exclusions. For now, I want to point to the fact that we can understand these exclusions from theory as either residual or structural. If residual, all we need to do is adjust our theory slightly to include them, and then carry on more or less as before –­a liberal reformist response. If structural, then we have to radically rethink Political Theory from its foundations; everything, even core concepts and assumptions, must be questioned. We can see this

The World Turned Upside Down67 liberal/radical divide in many debates throughout Political Theory about specific exclusions, and it applies to the Political Theory of displacement. My own position is that the exclusion of the displaced from Political Theory is structural: theory itself produces an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ and confines the displaced to a theoretical border zone, such that business as usual, after a bit of gap-­filling, is not an option. I first noticed this kind of exclusion at the level of theory in the work of John Rawls, who explicitly acknowledges that his theory of justice only applies to those people who fall within what he describes as the ‘normal range’ (see Cole 1998: 45). He says that for the purposes of his theory, ‘it is reasonable to assume that everyone has physical needs and physiological capacities within some normal range’, and acknowledges that this means that his theory is for ‘those who are full and active participants in society, and directly or indirectly associated over the course of a whole life’ (Rawls 1978: 70 n.9). It explicitly excludes those who are not full and active participants in society; therefore, although Rawls suggests that he may be able to “attempt to handle these other cases later” (Rawls 1978: 70 n.9), his theory of justice is not for everybody. What we are faced with here is a double exclusion, from practice and from theory. Rawls obviously takes the residual view, with the assumption that we can ignore these ‘difficult subjects’ for now, but once we have worked out the theory for the ‘normal’ we can bring the ‘abnormal’ in later, with a minor adjustment to our theory here and there, and then go on much as before. However, the problem is that when we come to include those who have been excluded up to now, we are attempting to include them in a theory which has been structured around their exclusion. They were actually present all the time, hidden, but an essential part of the structure of theory, as the ‘normal’ person at the centre of that theory is constituted by that which is considered ‘abnormal’. For example, if we engage in defining what ‘citizenship’ means –­defining the citizen and their rights and responsibilities –­what we are doing at the same time, although we may not be conscious of it, is defining the non-­citizen, the outsider, and their lack of rights and responsibilities. We have created two figures, and although our whole theoretical structure of citizenship depends on how we constitute the non-­citizen, that figure, very often, remains invisible within our theory. This can also work the other way around: when theory focuses on certain ‘outsider’ figures such as, for example, the ‘physically disabled’ or ‘ethnic minorities’, the figure of the ‘normal’ citizen is now invisible, even though what constitutes being a ‘physically disabled’ person or a member of an ‘ethnic minority’ can only be arrived at through the construction of the ‘normal’ figure who is not one of these (for a discussion of the former issue, see Cole 2007;

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for a discussion of the latter, see Naidoo 2016). Through theorising these figures, we are always constructing a boundary between that figure and the ‘other’ against which it is constituted, even though that boundary and what lies on the other side of it is often invisible, and perhaps sometimes even unconscious. And what is also crucial to understand is that although this boundary creates an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, the ‘outside’ is included within the structure of theory, and what that boundary also creates is a relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’; it specifies how they are connected within a single structure. This means that the ‘outside’ is always inside the limits of theory but confined to a border zone, sometimes invisible, but always in the process of being constituted in marginalising and excluding ways so that it remains ‘outside’. Theory has its own bordering practices, practices that are the exercise of power and which, in their own way, embody a kind of violence. To be constituted in forms one would not recognise, would not accept, and would resist is to be subjected to a form of violence, and those of us who engage in normative Political Theory on questions of membership, migration and displacement have to recognise that in constituting others at the level of theory –­defining the refugee, the forcibly displaced person, and so on –­we are exercising a form of power, and may be participating in theory in a way that is doing violence to the self-­understandings of people, confining and marginalising them to a specific theoretical space. This is to recognise that power and violence are issues at the level of the theory of forced displacement as well as its political practice. THE PROBLEM OF COMPLICITY Another important challenge raised by Fiddian-­Qasmiyeh is that of location. Given that the global South/global North dynamic is problematic, I need to address the question of my own location as a global North political theorist. Indeed, the challenge goes deeper in my case, in that it is not simply that I am currently located in the global North, but that I always have been, and so am deeply embedded in ways of seeing the world and theorising it which she and other decolonial and postcolonial scholars have critiqued. To what extent can I then theorise about the injustices done to those whose experience of oppression I have not shared? In what sense can I represent forcibly displaced people? The point is that ‘representation’ here is ambiguous between describing displaced people as an object of study and speaking for them as a normative political theorist seeking to come up with ethically informed proposals for action. Both are relevant here, because in the process of seeking to speak for displaced people, I at the same time constitute them as objects

The World Turned Upside Down69 of study, whether or not I am conscious of doing so, and as we saw in the previous section this could be understood as an act of power and even violence. Linda Alcoff points out that in speaking for others we are at the same time speaking about them, and if the former is problematic so is the latter: I am engaging in the act of representing the other’s needs, goals, situation, and in fact, who they are, based on my own situated interpretation. In post-­ structuralist terms, I am participating in the construction of their subject-­ positions rather than simply discovering their true selves. (Alcoff 1991: 120)

Given the embeddedness of my location, I do need to address the question about the extent to which I can theorise about the injustices done to others. Alcoff asks, ‘it is ever valid to speak for others who are unlike me or who are less privileged than me?’ (Alcoff 1991: 119). One quick answer to the question is that I must be able to do this, because I must do it; rather than ought implying can, ought, sometimes at least, necessitates can: I am morally obliged to find a way of doing the right thing. I have a deep ethical obligation to pay close attention to certain injustices and put them at the centre of Political Theory and action. It cannot be the case that only those who have suffered a form of oppression should oppose it, and equally it cannot be the case that only they can normatively theorise about the injustice of it. The ideal of solidarity enters here and tells me that I must act and speak with the oppressed. However, in spite of this, the question still remains: how can someone with no experience of a specific form of oppression, and who occupies a privileged and powerful position because of the system that causes and perpetuates that oppression, legitimately speak about it? To the previous reply that I must, the disturbing response is that the way I speak about it may, despite my good intentions, perpetuate the oppression I seek to criticise, because the structures of ‘knowledge’ I deploy in my critique are built upon the ideology of oppression. The challenge here is that of complicity, that the conceptual framework I am working with may be in some sense complicit in the oppressive systems I am working to overthrow, and that, however benign my intentions, I may be contributing to that oppression. This challenge has been articulated strongly within Postcolonial Theory. As Cheryl McEwan points out, Postcolonial Theory constitutes a radical challenge to the ‘power to name, represent and theorize’ (McEwan 2019: 34). For Postcolonial Theory, says McEwan: Knowledge is never impartial, removed, or objective, but is always situated, produced by actors who are positioned in specific locations and shaped by

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numerous cultural and other influences. This determines what counts as knowledge, who creates it, where it is generated and how and for whom it is disseminated. (McEwan 2019: 46–­7)

One aspect of this is the privileging of theory: ‘subalterns tell stories and researchers theorize for them’ (McEwan 2019: 261; see Spivak 1988a). In the context of international development, Ilan Kapoor points out that this ‘superiority’ of theory means that we see the global South as a repository of data and the global North as the place of value-­added theory. This involves a twin denial: first, that the subaltern can do theory; and second, that the production of theory is itself a political practice (Kapoor 2004). McEwan says: Even when the subaltern does speak, her voice is relayed, filtered, reinterpreted, appropriated and even hijacked by intervening institutional structures. Some attempts have been made to circumvent this by using direct testimonials, but there is no avoiding who edits and translates the stories, how they are presented, for what purposes and so on . . . The subaltern voice is always being mediated. (McEwan 2019: 309)

Michelle Lokot and Caitlin Wake note ‘the challenges for research when communities are merely sources of information rather than having a stake in research conducted about them’, and observe that in humanitarian settings ‘research may be extractive, focused on obtaining data from communities in the most efficient way possible’ (Lokot and Wake 2021: 7). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that the Western-­located academic must speak, but at the same time must understand their responsibilities and the limitations of their position. So how are we to do this? While I refer to ‘we’ in what follows, there are still different experiences of being able to exercise power and different relationships with the experience of forced displacement amongst Western-­located academics, and so I acknowledge the problematics of using the term here and elsewhere in the book. First, we can engage in critique from within. For Spivak, we can change and transform discourses from the inside, ‘transforming conditions of impossibility into possibility’ (Spivak 1988b: 201; see Kapoor 2004: 640); we must be aware of the ways in which the theoretical framework within which we are embedded is complicit in the systems of oppression we seek to critique, and seek to transform that framework into a genuinely egalitarian and emancipatory discourse. Second, we must be prepared to acknowledge our complicity, not only the complicity of the dominant

The World Turned Upside Down71 framework: the theorist is located within a discourse of power, which includes our locations in institutions, and we must be hyper-­self-­ reflexive about our complicities in maintaining particular relations of power within and through that discourse and within and outside of those institutions. Third, we have to experience the unlearning of privilege as loss, through recognising the limits of our knowledge: there are parts of the world and of people’s lives and experience that we cannot know and so cannot represent in any straightforward way, and some of those parts of the world may be located in our own neighbourhoods;1 in seeking to speak about oppression, we must nevertheless remain aware of that about which we cannot speak. Fourth, we must learn how to learn from below. This means that we cannot simply ‘listen’ to the voices of refugees and other displaced groups; rather, we need to learn how to listen without constraining the meaning of what we are listening to within the confines of an ‘old’ framework. In other words, if displaced people say things which contradict our theoretical framework, we cannot assume that they have got things wrong. Fifth, we need to learn how to work without guarantees. ‘Working without guarantees means being aware of the blind spots of one’s power and representational systems, and either accepting failure or learning to see it as success’ (McEwan 2019: 352). Those we need to listen to and learn from may not wish to speak to us; those we want to enter into partnership with may not wish to enter into partnership with us. And so even though, as Lokot and Wake observe, there has been a shift to an emphasis on ‘co-­production’ of knowledge (Lokot and Wake 2021), we have to accept that those we wish to ‘co-­produce’ knowledge with may have no wish to get involved. And so the conclusion is that the political theorist must speak, has a moral responsibility to speak (and act), but must be aware of the effects their position (whatever that is) has on how they can speak in order to contribute to an answer to the issue of forced displacement. As McEwan says, this moral responsibility has to be ‘reformulated in ways that do not replicate neo-­colonial power relations’ (McEwan 2019: 316). Rather than the exclusive owners of questions concerning forced displacement in Political Theory, we must understand ourselves as making a specific kind of contribution to answering those questions in partnership with others. Rather than only speaking for, we must learn how to speak with, and recognise that a genuine and constructive partnership may involve giving up some of the authority we believe we have in arriving at answers to questions of forced displacement.

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RADICAL REALISM What emerges from these critiques of the role of Political Theory in relation to forced displacement is the need for an explicit method that takes them seriously, beyond simply saying that key ideas need to be turned upside down. There is a set of questions raised in this chapter about the Political Theory of displacement that this method needs to address. These are: 1. Is the understanding of displacement that underpins this work sufficiently realistic such that any principles and normative recommendations that emerge from this field are engaged with its realities? 2. What can normative Political Theory learn about its relationship with displacement from other disciplines which also engage with it from different perspectives? 3. What can that theory learn from bodies of writing that radically break with disciplinary traditions such as Postcolonial Theory which place the voices of the displaced at the centre of their discourse? 4. How can the Political Theory of displacement engage with criticisms emerging from Postcolonial Theory that it is a body of work that remains focused on migration from the limited perspective of ‘inside’ the liberal state, located in the global North? The first question concerns our understanding of ‘Realism’ in Political Theory in relation to the ethics of displacement. Political Realism is an approach has had a significant impact on contemporary Political Theory, contrasting itself with ‘political moralism’, and arguing that normative Political Theory has had a tendency to simply be applied moral philosophy (see Rossi and Sleat 2014 for an introduction to Political Realism). What is claimed to be realistic about Political Realism is that it takes issues of power and legitimisation seriously, and also the psychological elements of political life which may well be beyond the kind of rational critique and justification expected in ‘political moralism’. Approaches that apply ethical principles to political practice are characterised as ‘liberal idealism’, failing to propose anything of practical relevance (see Galston 2010). However, there is another kind of Realism that can be opposed to this version, which I would describe as ‘Radical Realism’: it differs from Political Realism both in terms of the role of theory and in terms of what counts as being realistic. First, Radical Realism defends the role and relevance of theory at times of profound political crisis; these are the

The World Turned Upside Down73 moments when the use of the imagination is more important than ever. As Hannah Arendt so forcefully points out: Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair. . . . Without this kind of imagination, which is actually understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world. It is the only inner compass we have. (Arendt 1953: 392)

Second, for all its claims to be realistic, Political Realism has a tendency to abstract out crucial details, such as the role of history in shaping the global order and distributions of power. There is a failure to acknowledge the role of a global neoliberal system which determines who enjoys security and who lives under conditions of extreme precarity, and a failure to acknowledge the history of colonialism and enslavement and postcolonial relations of oppression, exploitation and exclusion in shaping that global order. Radical Realism takes a very different view of what reality actually consists of. The challenge Radical Realism must meet is to place the experiences and voices of the displaced at the centre of theory, rather than at the margins, if they are included at all. It aims to position the displaced not as passive objects of political practice or Political Theory but as subjects with agency, including being agents of theory. Radical Realism is not only multi-­vocal but also interdisciplinary, drawing on a range of resources to make sure that the discussion is embedded in the realities of people’s lives. But it remains radical, both with its emphasis on the importance of theory and imagination and with its commitment to transformation of the global order in the name of global justice. The next three questions raise other challenges that Radical Realism must meet in order to achieve these goals. The second question engages with the challenges of interdisciplinarity. The study of displacement is highly multidisciplinary (although not necessarily interdisciplinary), with contributions from History, Sociology, Anthropology, Economics, Geography and Law, for example, as well as the more recent fields of Critical Border and Migration Studies. Political Theory is part of this field, but in order to have a more realistic understanding of displacement, it needs to engage with other disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches more closely than it has done, perhaps, up to now. There are challenges here, however. First, the political theorist cannot become an expert on the sociology or economics of displacement or generate their own sociological or economic data. We need to draw on

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evidence provided by other fields that can deepen our understanding, but that selection needs to be based on a critical and well-­rounded grasp of the context of that evidence, and the selection must not be self-­serving –­ we cannot simply ‘cherry-­pick’ data which backs up the argument we want to make (see Mihai 2019). None of this is straightforward. Second, different disciplines will have different conceptions of, for example, the figure of the refugee, because they take different perspectives of the phenomenon. For example, the anthropologist Liisa Malkki comments: International relations as a field tends to assume a vantage point that anthropologists, in particular, are unaccustomed to taking. Seeing large, worldwide patterns and adopting, in many cases, an administrator’s gaze on the phenomena under study, international relations produces very different kinds of knowledge than, say, long-­term ethnographic research. (Malkki 1995: 505)

We may not be able to fix upon a conception that will be shared across all disciplines that study the figure of the forcibly displaced person, nor should we expect all conceptions to be in harmony with each other. This means that criticisms of different conceptions from the perspective of different disciplines may be helpful to an extent, but may also miss the point. From the perspective of Political Theory, while we should be open to re-­examining the figure of the displaced person which plays a role in our disciplinary field in the light of how other disciplines understand that figure, we may still, at the end of that process, conclude that we have a conception that works within our context. But we must at least be aware that there are different conceptions in different disciplinary fields, and consider how they might impact on our own. Third, we cannot assume that an interdisciplinary approach will deliver something worthwhile; there has to be a point to interdisciplinarity, but we may not know in advance what that is. We have to be prepared to make space for experimentation and, indeed, for failure. Fourth, in drawing on other disciplinary sources and engaging in interdisciplinarity, what has to emerge is something recognisable as normative Political Theory with its focus on ethical categories and recommendations for action; its distinctive contribution must not be lost in the effort to take a genuinely interdisciplinary approach and its search for ‘realism’, however radical that realism might be. While I am arguing that normative Political Theory needs to be grounded more firmly in empirical research so that it can be more realistic in what it puts forward as normative solutions to displacement, I am not arguing that political theorists need to do this in order to make their work more relevant to political leaders and policy makers. There is a sense in which I am

The World Turned Upside Down75 arguing for a ‘pure Political Theory’, free of the need to come up with policy proposals that those in power will take seriously. I agree with Wendy Brown when she says that ‘we must . . . beware of capitulating to a certain pressure on theory itself today –­to apply, to be true, or to solve immediate real-­world problems’ (Brown 2002: 573). Rather, I am suggesting that what Political Theory provides –­and this is perhaps its singular contribution to an interdisciplinary project –­is a framework for radical imagination in which anything is possible. This is not a contradiction. My argument is that these acts of ‘pure’ radical imagination have to be grounded in a realistic understanding of what it is to be a displaced person, not constrained by a ‘realistic’ understanding of what political leaders and policy makers take to be ‘feasible’ in relation to what they present as a refugee ‘crisis’. The reality we need to be engaged with is the reality of the experiences of the displaced, their motivations, their desires, their hopes and fears, and the reality of the impact of displacement on their lives. Sarah Fine has pointed to how listening to and engaging with voices of refugees and other migrants might contribute to a more nuanced understanding of refugee and other migrant experiences and thus help inform a ‘realistic’ (in the straightforward sense of ‘in touch with reality’) and sympathetic approach to refugee movements. (Fine 2019: 29)

This is a radical realism, not a pragmatic one. This means our discussion cannot be limited by states, citizens and nations as we find them in the world, nor by the ‘political will’ attributed to what are taken to be the key agents of change –­liberal nation states and their citizens. The third question I identified above follows on from the second: how is the political theorist to engage with the reality of the experiences of the displaced? If Radical Realism is to place the voices and experiences of migrants at the centre of its discourse, how is it to do so? This raises difficult challenges of methodology. The proposal, though, is not necessarily that political theorists do field work (although some do), but that they engage with a body of writing that is not confined by academic disciplinary limits, and that has emerged from those who have, in some form or other, lived experience of displacement. Of course, many scholars, past and present, have had a refugee background: Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Ernest Gellner, Judith Shklar and Isaac Deutscher are famous examples in Political Theory, and Arendt, of course, wrote extensively about refugees and displacement. Shahram Khosravi and Behrouz Boochani are among contemporary examples, and personally I have worked with students with refugee backgrounds at all levels of study who are entering academic careers, including Ali Zalme, whose

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doctorate on Kurdish refugees living in the United Kingdom was published recently (Zalme 2021). And so the voices of displaced people are already present in much academic writing. What is distinctive about many of these writings is a central element of autobiography. While we need to be careful not to essentialise a unique experience of displacement, the experiences of being displaced may enable these writers to arrive at important theoretical insights, such that their inclusion within normative theory on displacement may shift the meanings and roles of fundamental concepts, and introduce new ones. For example, more complex understandings of ‘home’ and a more sophisticated grasp of the experience of exile are elements that have emerged from my readings of such texts. Khosravi writes eloquently of his experience of exile (Khosravi 2010: 73–­4), and other texts include Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains (Boochani 2018). There are other writings that are not strictly ‘academic’ but which constitute story-­ telling by people with refugee backgrounds, such as Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), Gulwali Passarlay’s The Lightless Sky (2015) and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Displaced (2018). This takes us to the fourth question: how can normative Political Theory engage with criticisms emerging from Postcolonial Theory, namely that it is a body of work that remains focused on migration from the limited perspective of inside the liberal state, located in the global North? As we saw in the section ‘The Problem of Complicity’ above, even though we may seek to critique global systems of power, we may be working in theoretical frameworks, and academic institutions that are complicit in forms of power and oppression that work through those systems, a location which undermines and subverts our critical efforts. Certainly, if we engage seriously with the previous question, this will go some way to addressing this concern, and it is part of the programme of Radical Realism to acknowledge the history of colonialism and enslavement and postcolonial relationships of oppression, exploitation and exclusion in shaping the global order. But we still need to be self-­reflexive about our own location and our own voice and our power to silence others. All of this requires a series of radical and disruptive displacements. The first is that of the citizen of the liberal democratic state from the centre of the picture, a position they dominate at present so that displaced people are constructed as a ‘problem’ that must be solved on behalf of that central figure. The power of the liberal citizen to determine the answer to questions of displacement at the exclusion of the displaced themselves must be problematised. Equally, the safety and security of the displaced has to be put at an equal level with that of the liberal

The World Turned Upside Down77 citizen, and we need to move beyond seeing this as a zero-­sum game in which increasing the safety and security of the displaced is understood as requiring a sacrifice to the safety and security of the citizen. We must also, of course, displace the liberal democratic state from the centre, such that the interest of such states in ‘managing migration’ no longer determines what counts as a just solution for displaced people. The second displacement is that of the political theorist as the exclusive owner of the process of arriving at normative answers to these questions. We must problematise our own power to determine and answer those questions –­ask by what right we believe we can make normative recommendations for policies that determine the life-­prospects of displaced people, however ‘progressive’ we believe those recommendations to be. And we must problematise our own complicity in the silencing and disempowerment of the voices of the displaced and their agency, through hyper-­self-­reflexivity about our role in constituting displaced people as objects of our theory. We can no longer go about our normative task without working in partnership with other disciplines; nor without advocating that the displaced must be agents with a role to play in arriving at those answers; that they themselves are agents of theory, part of the ‘we’, and that experiences of being displaced may support crucial theoretical insights that would otherwise be missed. We must learn how to speak with, rather than to only speak for, and we must also learn when to remain silent. CONCLUSION I will end this chapter with three comments. First, I have outlined what an approach called Radical Realism might look like, but I do not claim that this book succeeds in being an exemplar of such an approach. It may fail to meet all the requirements I have described above in key respects. As an experiment in Political Theory it is, as are all experiments, open to failure. Second, I do not claim to have invented the term ‘Radical Realism’ –­others have used it although not in the same way (see Brinn 2019; Rossi 2019) –­but the version I have described here goes some way, I hope, to countering some versions of Political Realism that have come to the fore in Political Theory. Third, the previous section may read like a manifesto, and indeed, in the end, the entire book may also appear to be a work of polemic rather than Political Theory. I remember as a Philosophy undergraduate writing an essay in which I criticised Book 1 of John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, his attack on the theory of innate ideas, for being a polemic rather than a work of philosophy. My Philosophy tutor asked me, ‘What’s wrong with a polemic?’

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This book, then, may be understood as a polemic about displacement and protection, but also as a manifesto for normative Political Theory, and should be read with this in mind. I can make no apology for this. Both polemics and manifestos have their place in political thought, and, at certain moments, they are key forms of writing. This is certainly one of those moments. NOTE 1. Thanks to Kerri Woods for pointing this out to me.

Chapter 4 THE BORDERS OF REFUGEEHOOD

A SMALL ISLAND In the Introduction I said I would not offer a definition of the refugee in this book. Having said that, I do need to discuss definitions of the concept of refugeehood, for two reasons. The first is that I have argued that the vast majority of people forcibly displaced from their homes are left outside of international protection, because they do not fall within the category of ‘refugee’ in international law, and so I need to map out its boundaries to demonstrate the narrowness of its limits. I have argued that we need to stop talking about protection gaps, as this gives the impression of an expansive system of refugee protection with some gaps in it through which some displaced people fall. Rather, I suggested we conceive of a small island of refugee protection within an ocean of forced displacement. In Chapter 2 we saw the struggles people face to reach that island and the efforts global North states make to repel them, with refugees caught up in violent and sometimes fatal practices of exclusion as much as any other migrants. In this chapter I aim to explore the island of protection more closely. What we will find is that it is guarded not only by physical walls, fences and guns but also by laws and policies which aim to restrict access. The second reason is that the vast majority of normative political theorists who discuss forced displacement would agree with this point, and offer more expansive definitions of ‘refugeehood’. But I have argued that the whole process of trying to arrive at a definition of the refugee which is more inclusive is a mistake, and pushes the argument in a conservative direction because of a narrow conception of what international protection should look like. While surrogate membership of a sanctuary state is an important form of protection for refugees, it cannot be applied in other cases of forced displacement, which subsequently get categorised as not political, when in reality they look profoundly political. Also, because of the boundary problem, many of these attempts to redefine 79

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refugeehood are undermined by issues of arbitrariness and incoherence; they still seem to leave people outside of international protection for no good moral reason. The second focus of this chapter, therefore, is on theoretical conceptions of refugeehood, in particular on the political and humanitarian conceptions that have come to dominate the literature, to draw out these challenges. THE DEFINITION OF THE ‘REFUGEE’ The first place to look for a definition of the refugee is the 1951 Refugee Convention. Adopted by a diplomatic conference convened by the United Nations General Assembly in Geneva in July 1951, the Convention came into force in April 1954. The only ‘amendment’ since then has been the 1967 Protocol, which removed the geographical and temporal limits written into the Convention limiting its scope to people fleeing events occurring before 1 January 1951, within Europe. Guy Goodwin-­Gill points out that the 1967 Protocol did not amend the 1951 Convention but stands as a separate instrument (Goodwin-­Gill 2014: 38). States can be party to one or the other. For example, the United States is party to the 1967 Protocol and not the 1951 Convention. However, Article 1 of the Protocol states that countries that ratify it agree to abide by the 1951 Convention as well, and so in effect the United States is also bound by the earlier instrument. States who have only signed up to the 1951 Convention and not the 1967 Protocol still operate within its temporal and geographical limits. At present, only Madagascar and St Kitts and Nevis are in this position. Turkey, one of the major refugee-­hosting countries, has ratified the 1951 Convention, but acceded to the 1967 Protocol with reservations that maintained the geographical limit to events in Europe. Bangladesh, Barbados, India, Jordan, Kiribati, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan and Thailand are not parties to either the 1951 Convention or the 1967 Protocol, and some of these states host very large numbers of forcibly displaced people. The 1951 Convention makes two key contributions to the international protection regime for refugees. First, it defines who refugees are; and second, it outlines the protections refugees are entitled to. We should note Goodwin-­Gill’s point, however, that while the Convention is the source of protection for refugees, ‘it is styled a convention relating to the status of refugees, rather than one on the rights of refugees’ (Goodwin-­Gill 2014: 44). It is, in the end, state-­centric: ‘it represents undertakings and obligations accepted between the parties, to respect, protect, or accord certain rights and benefits’ (Goodwin-­Gill 2014: 44).

The Borders of Refugeehood81 In this section I outline the key definitions of who is a refugee under the 1951 Convention and other regional instruments. The ‘classic’ definition of a refugee is contained in Article 1 (A) 2 of the Convention, and includes any person who, owing to well-­founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

Goodwin-­Gill points out that it is not necessary to have fled by reason of fear of persecution, or even to have been persecuted. The fear of persecution looks to the future, and can emerge during an individual’s absence from their home country, for example, as a result of intervening political change. (Goodwin-­Gill 2014: 38)

There is also no necessary link here between persecution and government authority; persecution by non-­state actors counts, if the person is unable to receive protection from that persecution by their state, and that persecution, or the state’s failure to protect them from it, is based on one or more of the Convention grounds. Also, importantly, in international law a person does not have to be legally recognised as a refugee in order to be one. UNHCR states: A person is a refugee as soon as the criteria contained in this definition are fulfilled. In other words, a person does not become a refugee because of a positive decision on an application for protection. Recognition of refugee status is declaratory: it confirms that the person is indeed a refugee. (UNHCR 2017a:18)

This means that significant numbers of the people attempting to reach Europe and being repelled through the strategies we saw in Chapter 2 are refugees under international law. The 1951 Convention does not define ‘persecution’, although Articles 31 and 33 refer to threats to life or freedom (Goodwin-­Gill 2014: 38). UNHCR comments that ‘There is no universally accepted definition of “persecution”, and various attempts to formulate such a definition have met with little success’ (UNHCR 2011: 13). However, it argues that it can be inferred from Article 31 ‘that a threat to life or freedom on account of race, religion, nationality, political membership of a

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particular social group is always persecution’, and ‘serious violations of human rights –­for the same reasons –­would also constitute persecution’ (UNHCR 2011: 13). In guidelines issued on claims to refugee status based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity in 2012, UNHCR goes further: The term ‘persecution’, though not expressly defined in the 1951 Convention, can be considered to involve serious human rights violations, including threat to life or freedom as well as other kinds of serious harm. In addition, lesser forms of harm may cumulatively constitute persecution. . . . discrimination will amount to persecution where measures of discrimination, individually or cumulatively, lead to consequences of a substantially prejudicial nature for the person concerned. (UNHCR 2012: 5)

UNHCR therefore operates with a wide understanding of persecution, such that it need not involve threats to life, freedom or other kinds of serious harm. UNHCR’s Statute, determined by the UN General Assembly in 1950, also contains definitions of persons to whom the High Commissioner’s competence extends in Chapter II paragraph 6. This includes people considered to be refugees under previous treaties and arrangements, including the constitution of the International Refugee Organization which operated from 1946 to 1952, and Any other person who is outside the country of his nationality, or if he has no nationality, the country of his former habitual residence, because he has or had well-­founded fear of persecution by reason of his race, religion, nationality or political opinion and is unable or, because of such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of the government of the country of his nationality, or, if he has no nationality, to return to the country of his former habitual residence. (UNHCR Statute Chapter II paragraph 6)

People who meet this definition are usually referred to as ‘mandate refugees’, as opposed to what we might call ‘Convention refugees’. This means that ‘a person can simultaneously be both a mandate refugee and a refugee under the 1951 Convention or 1967 Protocol’ (UNHCR 2011: 7), but that may not always be the case. Although the definitions are the same, the idea of the ‘mandate refugee’ allows that a person may be in a country not bound by the 1951 Convention or 1967 Protocol (for example, Bangladesh) but still qualify for protection under UNHCR’s Statute. Two other important definitions of who counts as a refugee are found in the Organisation of African Unity’s 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, and the 1984 Cartagena

The Borders of Refugeehood83 Declaration in South America (although the latter is non-­binding). Both embody the 1951 Convention definition, but the OAU Convention Article I (2) expands it to include every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality.

The Cartagena Declaration, adopted by the Colloquium on the International Protection of Refugees in Latin America, Mexico and Panama, held at Cartagena, Colombia, and endorsed by the Organization of American States, adds people who flee their countries ‘because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order’. These regional instruments take on a global significance, as UNHCR takes the position that ‘Individuals who meet the refugee definition under international, regional, or domestic laws, or under UNHCR’s mandate, are entitled to international protection’ (UNHCR 2017b: 2). Also, ‘it must be borne in mind that, whether or not one of these regional definitions applies to a particular situation or person, a person fleeing such circumstances is considered a refugee under UNHCR’s mandate’ (UNHCR 2017b: 3). This means that if a person is fleeing one of the additional circumstances mentioned in the regional instruments, they qualify as a refugee under UNHCR’s mandate whether or not the regional instrument applies to them –­the mandate is not limited ‘by virtue of their geographical location or the State under whose jurisdiction they find themselves’ (UNHCR 2017b: 3 n.23). UNHCR, therefore, considers that its mandate covers anyone fleeing any of the circumstances mentioned in any of these instruments anywhere in the world. What we can see, then, is that there are actually three definitions of who counts as a refugee in operation at the global level. The first is that contained in the 1951 Convention (Convention refugees), the second contained in UNHCR’s mandate (mandate refugees), and the third embodied in UNHCR practice based on its interpretation of international, regional and domestic legislation. This means there is a problematic gap between UNHCR’s view of who should be protected and the obligations of protection accepted by global North states who only recognise the 1951 Convention definition or minor variations of it. Overall, then, if we are looking for a clear definition of the refugee at the level of international law and practice, we face a degree of disappointment.

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THE RIGHTS OF REFUGEES Once refugees have reached safety in a sanctuary state, they have certain rights which states must protect. Those rights come in two forms. First, they hold the human rights embodied in international instruments such as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Such rights extend to anybody within a state’s territory or under its jurisdiction, regardless of their status. Second, they hold rights specific to their refugee status, contained within the 1951 Refugee Convention. The key protection here is that against refoulement. Article 33 (1) states: No Contracting State shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

Importantly, this right is held prior to the conferment of refugee status by the sanctuary state, such that anyone who seeks asylum in that state cannot be subjected to refoulement until their status is decided. The Convention is also held to embody the right to family reunification and the right not to be prosecuted or punished for illegal entry as long as refugees ‘present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence’ (Article 31 (1)). Once they have their status confirmed, refugees have other entitlements in their country of refuge, although these are referred to as ‘standards of treatment’ in the Convention rather than ‘rights’, which confirms Goodwin-­Gill’s comments above. These can be of three different standards: (1) the same treatment as nationals of that country; (2) the most favourable treatment accorded to a national of a foreign country in the same circumstances; and (3) the most favourable treatment possible but no less favourable than that accorded to aliens generally in the same circumstances. Examples where refugees should receive treatment equal to nationals are access to courts (Article 16), labour legislation and social security (Article 24), elementary education (Article 22) and taxation (Article 29). Examples of the second type are the right of association with regard to trade union membership and non-­ political associations (Article 15), and wage-­earning employment until they have three years’ residence or are married to a national or have children who are nationals (Article 17). Examples of the weakest entitlement, treatment no worse than any other alien, are acquisition of property (Article 13), self-­employment (Article 18), the practice of ‘liberal

The Borders of Refugeehood85 professions’ (Article 19), access to social housing (Article 21), and access to education beyond the elementary level (Article 22). Permanent residence in the state of refuge is not part of the protection under the 1951 Convention: a person can cease to be a refugee when the conditions that caused them to become one no longer exist, and there is an expectation that they will return to their state of origin. Refugee status, so far as the Convention is concerned, is temporary. The most important protection for refugees under the 1951 Convention is that of non-­refoulement. Refugees and asylum seekers cannot be returned to the country of former residence or to any other place where they have reason to fear threats to their life or freedom on one of the Convention grounds, and the threat they may face on return need not be the same as the threat they fled from. There are exceptions: Article 2 (F) of the 1951 Refugee Convention excludes those who have ‘committed a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity’; those who have ‘committed a serious non-­political crime outside the country of refuge prior to . . . admission to that country as a refugee’; and those ‘guilty of acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations’. The principle does not give people a right to be granted asylum in a particular state. However, according to UNHCR, ‘As a general rule, in order to give effect to their obligations under the 1951 Convention and/or 1967 Protocol, States will be required to grant individuals seeking international protection access to the territory and to fair and efficient asylum procedures’ (UNHCR 2007: 3). Neither the Convention nor the Protocol sets out what such procedures should look like. ‘Yet is it generally recognised that fair and efficient procedures are an essential element in the full and inclusive application of the 1951 Convention outside the context of mass influx situations’ (UNHCR 2007: 3–­4 n.14). The non-­refoulement principle is now considered to be part of customary international law, binding on all states, and to be non-­derogable –­in other words, it cannot be set aside under any circumstances: In UNHCR’s experience, States have overwhelmingly indicated that they accept the principle of non-­refoulement as binding, as demonstrated . . . in numerous instances where States have responded to UNHCR’s representations by providing explanations or justifications of cases of actual or intended refoulement, thus implicitly confirming their acceptance of the principle. (UNHCR 2007: 7)

The non-­refoulement principle, however, extends beyond the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol. It can be found in various international human rights treaties, such as the ICCPR, in Article 6 on the

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right to life, and in Article 7 on the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; and in Article 1 of the 1984 Convention Against Torture (CAT). The CAT forbids the transfer of a person to another country if they would be at risk of torture, and the ICCPR has been interpreted to say that an individual cannot be transferred to another country if they would be exposed to serious human rights violations, in particular arbitrary deprivation of life, or torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Indeed, the non-­refoulement principle embodied in these international instruments is stronger than that in the 1951 Refugee Convention, as there are no exceptions to its application. In a recent judgment the UN Human Rights Committee dismissed Ioane Teitiota’s appeal against New Zealand’s rejection of his application for refugee status on the grounds that climate change was making return to Kiribati, his original home, too dangerous. Nevertheless, the Committee made it clear that the principle of non-­refoulement is applicable to issues of climate change, accepting in principle ‘that it is unlawful for states to send people to places where the impacts of climate change expose them to life-­threatening risks or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ (McAdam 2020: 2). The decision is not legally binding on states but, says Jane McAdam, is grounded on international legal obligations that are binding. This was, she says, a ‘landmark determination’; for the first time a quasi-­judicial body has stated that ‘without robust national and international efforts, effects of climate change could expose people to life-­threatening risks or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and so trigger non-­refoulement obligations’ (McAdam 2020: 3). The non-­refoulement obligations the Committee based its view on arise not from the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol but from Articles 6 and 7 of the ICCPR. THE SCOPE OF NON-­REFOULEMENT Those who meet the definition of the refugee in international law (taking into account the indeterminacy of that definition that we looked at in ‘The Definition of the “Refugee”’ section above) should have the rights and protections we have explored so far in this chapter. However, at the same time as they seek to exclude people from these rights and protection by force, global North states also seek to narrow these rights and protections as much as possible, through interpretations of them that UNHCR and other international agencies have found disturbing. One such limit concerns the protection of non-­refoulement and the question

The Borders of Refugeehood87 of its scope. Does it apply only at the border or in the territory of the state, or does it apply elsewhere? This is the issue of the ‘extraterritoriality’ of the principle. Robert L. Newmark identifies three positions taken on this question. The first is that the non-­refoulement principle only applies to refugees who are legally present within the territory (Newmark 1993: 846). Examples include Thailand’s turning back boats from Vietnam in the late 1970s even though they were at harbour and so within territorial limits (Newmark 1993: 847); and Italy’s sending back of thousands of Albanians in August 1991 (Newmark 1993: 848). Also in 1991 Turkey blocked Iraqi Kurds fleeing government forces from crossing the border, and sent back those who managed to enter (Newmark 1993: 848–­9). The second position is to restrict the non-­refoulement principle to those who are physically present within the territory. This was Italy’s practice in early 1991 regarding arrivals from Albania, when all Albanian’s within Italian territory were properly screened for refugee status. ‘At the same time, however, Italy instituted an interdiction program in the Adriatic. Italian vessels tracked ships headed for its shores and escorted them back to Albania’ (Newmark 1993: 849). The United States pursued a similar policy towards people fleeing the oppressive regime in Haiti from 1992. Prior to this, from 1981 when the situation in Haiti started, the US Coast Guard screened Haitians at sea. ‘The original US policy thus accepted a non-­refoulement obligation extending into international waters and not requiring any sort of presence in the United States’ (Newmark 1993: 850). When the situation in Haiti deteriorated, the policy was changed to require physical presence in the United States. The US Supreme Court upheld this policy in 1993. A third example is Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders, pushing boats back to Indonesia before they enter territorial waters. The third position is that non-­refoulement can apply outside a state’s territory, a position Newmark says generally applies in African states, for example, and Azadeh Dastyari and Daniel Ghezelbash argue that it is the third approach that is embodied in international law: ‘A State owes human rights and non-­refoulement obligations to anyone in its effective de facto or de jure control. . . . It is sufficient for persons owed international protection to be within the effective control of a State’ (Dastyari and Ghezelbash 2020: 5–­6). This view is strongly held by UNHCR. In its Advisory Opinion issued in 2007, it states: the purpose, intent and meaning of Article 33 (1) of the 1951 Convention are unambiguous and establish an obligation not to return a refugee or

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asylum-­seeker to a country where he or she would be at risk of persecution or other serious harm, which applies wherever a State exercises jurisdiction, including at the frontier, on the high seas or on the territory of another State. (UNHCR 2007: 12)

Here it is appealing to the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which states that ‘the meaning of a provision in an international treaty must be established by examining the ordinary meaning of the terms employed, in light of their context and the object and purpose of the treaty’ (UNHCR 2007: 12). The Article in the Convention is a simple prohibition: ‘No Contracting State shall expel or return . . . a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his [or her] life or freedom would be threatened.’ For UNHCR: The ordinary meaning of the terms ‘return’ and ‘refouler’ does not support an interpretation which would restrict its scope to conduct within the territory of the State concerned, nor is there any indication that these terms were understood by the drafters of the 1951 Convention to be limited in this way. (UNHCR 2007: 13)

The crucial question, then, is not whether a refugee is within the state’s territory but whether they are under that state’s jurisdiction  –­ which amounts to asking ‘whether or not he or she is subject to the State’s effective authority and control’ (UNHCR 2007: 16). This also applies to the non-­refoulement dimension of the ICCPR. The Human Rights Committee, which oversees the application of the ICCPR, issued General Comment 31, which holds that states must respect and ensure the Covenant rights to all persons within their territory or subject to their jurisdiction, a position confirmed by the International Court of Justice. The Committee Against Torture has also stated that the non-­ refoulement requirement of the Convention Against Torture ‘applies to any territory under a State party’s jurisdiction’ (UNHCR 2007: 17). UNHCR concludes that ‘the decisive criterion is not whether such persons are on the State’s territory, but rather, whether they come within the effective control and authority of that State’ (UNHCR 2007: 19). Such an approach opens up the possibility of the non-­refoulement principle being extended to internally displaced persons. Caelin Briggs argues that protection is against refoulement to any territory or authority where there are reasonable grounds for believing a person might be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (Briggs 2017: 6). She argues that under this understanding of international law, protection from refoulement would . . . apply equally to all persons, regardless of their status, location, or country of origin. Internally displaced persons

The Borders of Refugeehood89 would benefit from this protection as much as any other civilian group, provided they are in a location that is outside the control or jurisdiction of the government (for example, in a diplomatic mission or other premise with inviolable status). (Briggs 2017: 6)

Another case would be where an individual is under the protection of the armed forces of another state undertaking peacekeeping or other roles within the territory of the home state (Briggs 2017: 12). ‘Protection from refoulement would then relate to transfers from one authority or jurisdiction to another, rather than being linked to specific geographical boundaries’ (Briggs 2017: 13). THE POLITICAL THEORY OF REFUGEEHOOD Few political theorists would defend international refugee law as it stands, and many offer different definitions of refugeehood which are more generous either in their scope or the protection they offer, or both. However, while they argue that the boundaries of refugeehood need to be wider, they still argue for limits. On the face of it this looks inevitable since the whole point of offering a definition of a concept is to set its boundaries. However, I have always found the activity of boundary-­ setting in normative Political Theory to be puzzling and problematic. There are two basic problems. The first is that very often we fail to notice that a property taken to ground moral status inside the boundary can be found on the outside. The second is that identifying a moral category of person and the rights and obligations owed to them tells us nothing about what rights and obligations are owed to those who fall outside of the category; the same rights and obligations may be owed for other reasons. For example, when it comes to national membership, some political theorists have argued that there can be a coherent moral boundary between members and non-­members such that certain rights and obligations are owed only to co-­members. In Philosophies of Exclusion (Cole 2000), I put forward a set of arguments to show that all attempts to ground the boundary between members and non-­members on an ethical basis fail. The fact of membership alone is insufficient from a moral point of view, and any other ground extends beyond the membership boundary. I have made similar points about other boundary proposals, such as that between humans and other animals when it comes to the moral wrongness of being killed (Cole 1997). While there may be good moral reasons why it is wrong to kill a human being, we cannot assume that killing non-­humans is therefore not a moral concern; there may

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be other good moral reasons against killing non-­humans. The fact that certain others fall outside of this moral category tells us nothing helpful about what rights and obligations we may nevertheless have towards them. Boundary-­setting is therefore fraught with difficulties, especially when those boundaries are supposed to have an ethical status. My argument here is that both these boundary problems arise in relation to forced displacement to such an extent that we need a completely different approach. First, while ‘refugeehood’ is a moral category, we have to be aware that identifying what moral conduct is appropriate towards refugees says nothing about what moral conduct is appropriate in other cases of forced displacement; the boundary for political responses to forced displacement may not coincide with the boundary of refugeehood. We must take care that in denying people the status of refugeehood, we do not at the same time deny them the moral value they may nevertheless carry, and overlook the rights and duties they are owed. Second, the features that are taken to ground the moral category of refugeehood, for example loss of membership of a political community, are also shared by people who fall outside of that boundary (an argument I will make in Chapter 7), raising the question of arbitrariness. This is why we need to start with the broadest possible conception of forced displacement, and then find reasons, if there are any, why a political response may not be appropriate in specific cases, rather than starting with the refugee as the paradigm case for a political response and working outwards from there, as it were. My aim here is to demonstrate why I think the boundary problem leads us to this conclusion in the case of forced displacement, and I do so by examining the dominant conceptions of refugeehood in the literature, the political and the humanitarian, as set out by Matthew Price (2009) and Alexander Betts (2013). There are other theoretical approaches to refugeehood, such as Serena Parekh’s structural injustice approach (Parekh 2017, 2020), Michael Blake’s mercy-­ based approach (Blake 2020), and David Owen’s legitimacy-­based approach (Owen 2020), but I do not discuss them here, because although they are all valuable contributions to the debate, the focus on Price and Betts better illustrates the challenges raised by the boundary problem. The humanitarian picture of refugees is of ‘forcibly displaced persons who have typically crossed an international border –­that is, people who have a compelling reason to flee, or not to return to, their home state on the grounds that return would pose a threat to their basic needs’ (Owen 2020: 4). There is, according to this approach, a duty of rescue, as there would be if we were faced by a drowning child in a river and we had the capacity to carry out that rescue (Betts and Collier 2018: 99; and see

The Borders of Refugeehood91 99–­126 for their account of the duty of rescue). For the political picture, the main factors are persecution and the loss of political membership (Owen 2020: 6). We can see here that the two key features that make a difference between the positions are persecution and alienage (being outside of one’s home state). The political conception requires both, while the humanitarian conception only requires the latter. What emerges from the political and humanitarian approaches are different conceptions of what international protection should look like. For the political conception, protection should itself be political, and that has to be permanent surrogate political membership of another state. For the humanitarian conception, protection should be humanitarian, in the sense of caring for the displaced person while they are displaced, and therefore essentially temporary; permanent surrogate membership of another state is not required. The political conception, then, has a narrow view of who should be protected but a rich view of what protection should be, while the humanitarian conception has a wide view of who should be protected but a thin view of what protection should be. Taking persecution and alienage as the two key features of refugeehood, my argument is that the moral boundary between refugees and other displaced people cannot be sustained. The features appealed to maintain it, such as loss of political membership or severe human rights deprivation, extend beyond the boundaries of both conceptions. THE POLITICAL CONCEPTION AND PERSECUTION Matthew Price puts forward one of the most detailed versions of the political conception of asylum, ‘one focused on helping persecuted people, expressive of value judgments about the conduct of persecuting states, and connected to a broader political program to reform those states’ (Price 2009: 7). Since the Cold War, when the persecution approach ‘seemed natural’, according to Price (Price 2009: 4), there has been a shift towards the humanitarian view –­‘focused on helping people exposed to harm regardless of whether that harm stems from persecution or some other cause’ (Price 2009: 7) –­in both theory and practice. This shift from the political to the humanitarian view of asylum has had three effects, argues Price. First, it has decoupled asylum from foreign policy, such that it has lost its ideological significance. Second, the humanitarian approach expands eligibility for asylum, but the fact is that asylum is a scarce resource. Third, the humanitarian approach actually has the effect of eroding standards of humane treatment, leading to practices of temporary protection rather than permanent settlement (Price 2009: 10–­11).

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The problem is, argues Price, that the humanitarian approach makes a conceptual error: ‘it treats persecution as simply another kind of harm, and asylum as one of several more or less interchangeable forms of relief’ (Price 2009: 13). He expresses his key argument thus: persecuted people face a distinctive kind of harm that sets them apart from other people who need protection abroad. They do not merely experience insecurity; they are targeted for harm in a manner that repudiates their claim to political membership. They are thus not only refugees, but also exiles –­ people who have been expelled from their own political communities. Asylum responds to that distinctive kind of harm by providing a distinctive remedy. It communicates condemnation of the persecutory regime responsible for the persecuted refugee’s plight, and, in recognition of the unique harm that persecuted people have suffered, offers them surrogate political membership (not just protection) in the state of refuge. (Price 2009: 13)

Price offers an expansive conception of the refugee which includes ‘all people who are forced to leave their homes because of a threat to their well-­being or freedom, whether due to persecution, famine, extreme poverty, generalized violence, or any other number of reasons’ (Price 2009: 17). However, he uses the term ‘Convention refugee’ to refer specifically to those displaced people covered by the 1951 Convention, and ‘persecution refugee’ as another way of describing them. His argument is that, while lesser forms of protection might be appropriate in some cases, permanent asylum is the only appropriate protection for persecution refugees. This is because, while other policy tools for helping refugees are palliative –­‘focused solely on addressing refugees’ urgent needs’ –­asylum has a distinctive expressive character, as it entails ‘the evaluation and condemnation of other states’ internal practices’ (Price 2009: 69). Persecution describes a particular kind of harm, ‘one inflicted maliciously and unjustifiably, usually by the state or with official sanction’ (Price 2009: 70). This means that an important element of asylum is the goal of reforming oppressive regimes: ‘A decision to grant asylum rests on a judgment that another state has persecuted; such a judgment is by definition critical; granting asylum, therefore, entails the expression of condemnation; and that condemnation aims at reforming the abusive state’ (Price 2009: 71). In the end, then, what Price advocates is a two-­ tier system, where Convention refugees get surrogate membership in the form of asylum, while non-­Convention refugees get other forms of assistance such as temporary protection. Price builds on John Rawls’s distinction between burdened societies and outlaw states (Price 2009: 72–­3; see Rawls 2001). Burdened societies are those that aspire to meet the basic needs of their citizens, but

The Borders of Refugeehood93 circumstances make this difficult. The appropriate response here is assistance, not condemnation, as the state does recognise that its citizens are entitled to adequate protection. This means that asylum is ‘an inappropriate tool for addressing the needs of those fleeing burdened societies’ (Price 2009: 73); such people are not in need of protection. Outlaw states, on the other hand, are capable of protecting the basic needs of their members, but deliberately flout international standards of human rights protection, and so asylum expresses the appropriate condemnation (Price 2009: 73). For Price, persecution has three elements: (1) serious harm; (2) it is inflicted or tolerated by official agents of the state; and (3) it is inflicted for illegitimate reasons (Price 2009: 106–­7). ‘Serious harm’ marks a threshold between ‘threats to life and freedom’ and ‘mere annoyance’ (Price 2009: 107). And so persecution, for Price, is defined as ‘serious harm inflicted or condoned by official agents for illegitimate reasons’, and illegitimate reasons are those that ‘belie the principle of communal self-­determination that justifies the ordinary presumption of legitimacy given to state policies’ (Price 2009: 135). This harm need not be inflicted or threatened directly by the state; the source of the danger can be from non-­state actors (Price 2009: 146). A crucial distinction here is between cases where the state is unwilling to protect citizens from violence from non-­state actors and cases where it is unable to do so. For Price, asylum is appropriate in the first case but not the second; a lesser form of protection can be provided here. The point is that asylum expresses a moral judgement of a state’s conduct, and ‘a state can and should be held to account for violence by non-­state agents that it condones, tolerates, or encourages’ (Price 2009: 146). Price has a distinct view of what form protection should take when it comes to asylum: it should be surrogate membership in another state on a permanent basis. He is not arguing that in cases where asylum is not appropriate there should be no form of protection at all. Again, it is important to recall that he distinguishes between Convention refugees and non-­Convention refugees, with asylum being the appropriate form of protection for the former but a range of other forms of protection for the latter. This is a two-­tier system, reserving asylum for victims of persecution (Price 2009: 166–­7), because persecution is a distinctive kind of harm, ‘political harm that effectively expels victims from their political communities’ (Price 2009: 167). That response has two elements, the first of which is condemnation of the state, and the second of which is surrogate membership. ‘When a state of refuge welcomes persecuted people as members, it gives effect to the condemnation expressed by asylum by treating them as political orphans in need of adoption by a new political community’ (Price 2009: 167).

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Behind this position lies what Price calls the Membership Principle (Price 2009: 168). Recipients of asylum should receive protection and surrogate membership in a state of refuge, because they have lost their standing as members of their own state. In contrast, ‘non-­ persecuted people retain standing as members in their home states even when they are exposed to serious harm’ (Price 2009: 168); temporary protection is appropriate in their case, because membership of a new state is not needed. Price’s political conception of asylum is therefore closely tied to this Membership Principle, expressed in the two categories of refugees: Convention refugees need surrogate membership because they have lost political standing in their home state –­persecution has made them political orphans in need of adoption; and non-­Convention refugees only need temporary protection, as, even in cases of exposure to serious harm, they retain political standing in their home state. However, there is a category of refugees who have lost political membership who seem to have no place in Price’s system: those displaced by total state breakdown. They are displaced by violence and they have lost membership of their state because there is no state they can be members of, so why do they not qualify for first-­tier protection? Price acknowledges that in these cases there is no effective state these displaced people can be members of, but nevertheless argues that asylum is not appropriate because there is, in effect, no state to condemn through the granting of asylum. The expressive element of asylum is so central to his conception that, in its absence, surrogate membership is ruled out. And yet, under the Membership Principle, victims of violent anarchy in cases of complete state breakdown have clearly lost their political standing; leaving aside stateless persons, they are surely the most deserving candidates for the description as ‘political orphans’. They have no standing as members of a state because that state has collapsed, and so their exclusion from the scope of asylum is based purely on the fact that the expressive component of asylum cannot be applied. There are two problems here. The first is that the exclusion of these cases from the protection of asylum looks like it is necessary for the coherence of Price’s political conception of asylum, but some may consider it to be too heavy a moral cost to pay, such that the theory is morally compromised. The second is that Price’s position here starts to look incoherent, in that the political conception and the Membership Principle do not fit with each other. The Membership Principle says that people who have lost political membership of their home state should receive surrogate membership of another state, while the political conception says asylum is only appropriate where it is possible to express political condemnation of that home state –­and so there are refugees whom the Membership

The Borders of Refugeehood95 Principle would protect but whom the political conception rejects: those who have had to flee total state breakdown. The core problem, then, is the expressive element of the political conception: it both exerts too high a moral cost and creates incoherence. Price’s boundary here begins to look internally incoherent as well as externally contentious. Price considers an objection to his version of the Membership Principle, that lack of protection of basic rights is a denial of membership, whatever the motivation for that lack: ‘those fleeing burdened societies and those fleeing outlaw states equally lack membership and should, therefore, equally enjoy access to asylum’ (Price 2009: 171–­2). For example, Andrew Shacknove argues that ‘the absence of state protection of a citizen’s basic needs . . . constitutes the full and complete negation of society’ (Shacknove 1985: 277–­8). Price’s reply is that it is a mistake to equate the absence of state protection with the full and complete negation of society. This is ‘to miss the special horror of violence organized and exploited for political ends’ (Price 2009: 172). In the case of unwillingness to protect, then there is no social contract between the state and the victims of violence, but in cases where the state lacks the ability to protect certain citizens, ‘a social contract continues to exist, though the state may be in default’ (Price 2009: 173). Price does allow one exception to his position that only those displaced by wilful persecution are entitled to permanent surrogate membership, the case of non-­persecution refugees who are unable to return to their state of origin for a long period of time. ‘When refugees from burdened societies are unable to return home after years of “temporary” protection abroad, they should be able to adjust their status and receive permanent residence, lest the notion of temporary protection become a cruel fiction’ (Price 2009: 176). He suggests a five-­year period for temporary protection to become permanent. This, he says, is consistent with his overall account: Granting permanent residence to recipients of temporary protection who have been resident for five years will not dilute the expressive meaning of asylum, because the adjustment of status stems from an internal commitment to an anti-­caste norm, not from a critical judgment about another state’s practices. (Price 2009: 176)

The anti-­caste norm states that ‘liberal democratic norms of states of refuge . . . cannot tolerate a permanent under-­caste’ (Price 2009: 174), and, therefore, allows us to set aside the expressive element of asylum. Price’s argument here seems to be that we must not dilute the political meaning of asylum by extending asylum to refugees from burdened rather than outlaw societies, for to do so would be expressive of criticism

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of those societies when it is inappropriate; they cannot reform their conduct in the face of that criticism. However, we can extend asylum to this sub-­class of refugees –­non-­persecution refugees displaced for five years or more –­because the basis of this extension is not political condemnation of burdened societies but the application of the anti-­caste norm of liberal democracies. In other words, we can grant asylum to refugees from burdened states under these circumstances, and we can do this without any criticism of those states because our reason for granting asylum is not to criticise them but to apply a distinct political norm; the expressive element of asylum must be set aside in this case because of the ‘cruel fiction’ of claiming these refugees still have political standing in their state of origin. However, if we can set aside the expressive element of asylum in this case because it would be simply immoral to insist on applying it, why can we not do so in other cases? I suggested above that there is something morally cruel in insisting that those who flee total state collapse cannot be considered for asylum because we cannot apply an expressive element here, and so why not set it aside in this case? What matters is the reason why asylum is offered in specific cases, and if it can made clear that the reason we grant asylum to long-­term non-­persecution refugees is not to condemn their state of origin, then surely we can make that clear in other cases too. I offered two criticisms of Price’s position on that question: the first was to do with moral cruelty, and the second was the inconsistency between the expressive element of the political conception of asylum and the Membership Principle. Here we have a third reason to think Price is wrong about people displaced by state breakdown, in that if our concern is to avoid communicating condemnation of state conduct where that is undeserved, there can be no undeserved condemnation here because there is no state to condemn. Price cannot object that the granting of asylum always and necessarily contains the expressive element of condemnation, because he has allowed that it does not in the case of long-­term displaced non-­persecution refugees. If we can find good reasons to include non-­persecution refugees within the boundaries of asylum, for example on grounds of the moral cost of not including them, then Price’s boundary begins to move significantly. THE MEMBERSHIP QUESTION Overall, then, Price’s boundary is internally unstable to a significant extent, and so if his approach is supposed to find a clear ethical boundary between refugees and other displaced people which justifies restricting political protection to the former, then it appears to fail. But there

The Borders of Refugeehood97 is another challenge for his account, which is to do with its reliance on the idea of political membership. As we have seen, his core argument is that displacement through persecution means people have lost political membership of their home state and so need surrogate membership elsewhere; people displaced for other reasons retain their membership and so can be offered a ‘lesser’, temporary, form of protection. But it is difficult to find an explanation for this distinction because what is missing is a substantial account of political membership. Without such a theory, it is hard to resist Shacknove’s claim that membership can be lost because of other forms of forced displacement. Rebecca Buxton makes a similar criticism (Buxton 2021: 32) and notes that ‘the lack of a shared conception of membership is endemic in the literature on displacement’, pointing out that this ‘is problematic, given that the idea of membership is often central to many understandings of refugeehood’ (Buxton 2021: 33). We do, however, get some details of Price’s conception of membership when he discusses one potential objection to his position. That objection is that persecuted people do not have a very strong claim to surrogate membership of a sanctuary state, because what they have been deprived of in terms of ‘membership’ in their home state is very different. Surrogate membership would consist of rights to political participation and access to social rights, but what they have lost in their state of origin is membership in terms of ‘civic standing in the most minimal sense: freedom from persecution’ (Price 2009: 173). Therefore all they should receive is basic membership in this sense; they have no right of access to the full range of rights that make up political membership of a liberal democracy with a welfare state. Price’s reply is that membership of a ‘Western’ society just is of this kind, and to offer refugees anything less would be to create an under-­class, which would violate the anti-­caste norm of liberal democracies we discussed earlier. This tells us that the membership the refugee has lost need only be a civic standing defined by the absence of persecution. In one sense, this is very generous: refugees do not have to demonstrate that they have lost a membership equivalent to that of a liberal democratic state in order to be granted surrogate membership. But on the other hand, there are costs. One is that the stateless now get counted as members with civic standing as long as they are not being persecuted, which is a morally odd position to take. It could be replied that the deliberate removal of national citizenship from a group of people counts as persecution, and I would strongly agree with such a position. But a great many cases of statelessness arise for reasons other than deliberate acts of deprivation, such that, from Price’s position, they have to be counted as possessing

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membership of their home state. Membership here is not even basic legal national citizenship (for a fuller discussion of statelessness, see Bloom et al. 2017). Also notice that Price here has allowed that political membership can come in different forms; he is not defining it in terms of merely the absence of persecution. This allows that a refugee displaced from a totalitarian state with no political rights can be understood as having lost their political membership and so standing in need of a surrogate one elsewhere. But it also allows that a refugee displaced from a liberal democratic state has lost political membership in a much wider sense, ‘rights of political participation; access to social insurance; and in some countries, access to advanced health care’ (Price 2009: 173). What political membership consists of depends on what conditions the state in question provides for it, and so the membership lost through persecution can range widely in its content. This can be seen as a strength in Price’s position as it allows us to see the totalitarian-­state refugee as having lost political membership, while if we insist on seeing political membership in a wider sense of the possession of a set of political, civil and social rights, that would be a hard argument to make. However, at the same time, it opens up space for a much wider conception of political displacement, in that this wider set of rights can be lost, not just because of displacement through persecution but because of other forms of displacement too. What is at stake in these cases is what Buxton describes as effective membership (Buxton 2021: 89–­99). She argues that membership cannot be understood as only formal citizenship: membership has to be effective, which means that someone can ‘securely and consistently claim the rights and goods that formal citizenship is meant to guarantee’ (Buxton 2021: 99). My argument is that forced displacements across the range, including internal displacement, have severe impacts on people’s lives and humanity, and significant impacts are shared in common, which is why we need a political conception of forced displacement as such, seeing all these forms of displacement as political problems in need of political response. Those impacts are the experiences of violence, of protracted displacement, and of the loss of membership of one’s political community, with the first two factors significantly contributing to the experience of the third. In Chapters 6, 7 and 8 I provide evidence for this argument, but in order to proceed I need to supply a theory of membership. While my version takes a different form to that provided by Buxton, I think it rests on much the same principle, that membership has to be effective. The theory I outline here is not particularly novel nor radical, in that it draws heavily on ideas and approaches embedded in liberal theory,

The Borders of Refugeehood99 and specifically on the ideas of T. H. Marshall. He builds a conception of what it is to be a member of a political community –­what he calls citizenship –­around three frameworks of rights. The first is a civil framework: ‘The civil element is composed of the rights necessary for individual freedom’, such as freedom of speech and the right to justice (Marshall 1950: 10). The second framework is political, which consists of ‘the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body’ (Marshall 1950: 11). And finally there is the social framework, which includes ‘the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being, according to the standard prevailing in the society’ (Marshall 1950: 11). These three frameworks are interconnected: one needs the civil framework in order to have space to exercise control over one’s own life; the political framework in order to have some control over the constitution of that space and the constitution of the wider community, and control of the scope and content of the rights that make up the social framework; and the social framework in order to ensure that one has the powers and resources needed to make full use of political and civil rights. Marshall’s crucial contribution is the recognition that poverty undermines people’s ability to use their civil and political rights, and so undermines political membership itself, and rights to welfare are therefore essential for a participatory democracy, or, in Buxton’s terms, effective membership. This view has been developed by poverty campaigners and theorists. Peter Golding, for example, talks of ‘the right to full and adequately supported membership of the community, of citizenship’ (Lister 1990: vii), and comments, ‘Poverty excludes, for not least it excludes from power and influence’ (Golding 1986: x). Ruth Lister says: membership of a community is understood in terms of participation in that community. This participation is an expression both of the formal political, legal and social rights and duties of citizenship, and of the social and economic conditions under which they are exercised. (Lister 1990: 2; also see Cole 1998, 1999)

Peter Townsend argues that poverty has a dual nature, material deprivation and political powerlessness. People need resources which not merely allow them to meet basic needs but also allow them to ‘fulfil what is expected of them in the workplace, in the home, the family and the community, and as local as well as national citizens’ (Golding 1986: v-­vi). Meghnad Desai writes that ‘economic entitlement to an adequate standard of living should be such that citizens can take full part in the

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political community. Not to give this is tantamount to a denial of political rights’ (Golding 1986: 3). The significance of this for our account is that in some cases forced displacement may not have a direct impact on people’s political standing in their community –­in that they are not formally deprived of political rights to participation made up of Marshall’s civil and political frameworks of membership –­but it can nevertheless have very severe impacts on their social standing, in that it can deprive them of the social and economic resources needed to be active participants in the political life of their community, and so indirectly, but effectively, deprive them of their membership. I would add an extra element to this account, in terms of life chances. The frameworks of membership act as the foundation for life chances, a range of meaningful options from which an individual can choose as author, to some degree, of their own life story. Ralf Dahrendorf argues that life chances need to be understood as embedded in societies and communities (Dahrendorf 1979: 11), and that we need to understand them not only in terms of options but also in terms of what he calls ligatures, linkages which give the individual a position in society, which anchor them and their actions; these constitute the ‘foundations of action’ (Dahrendorf 1979: 31). Richard E. Flathman says something similar, that meaningful action is always situated in a structure which is a necessary condition of that action (Flathman 1987: 180). A free person has a range of options from which to choose, and those options are embedded within the structures of a community which makes them meaningful. People who lose their position within that community lack the powers and resources that act as the foundation for meaningful action. Whatever the cause of the loss of context, its result is the loss of membership of society. The argument of this book is that forced displacement renders people positionless, forcing them out of their context within their community, such that they have lost the position from which they can exercise their membership. Even someone displaced from or within a totalitarian state experiences this loss of position, which can have a severe impact upon their lives. Forced displacement of any kind, therefore, has the potential to remove people’s membership of their political communities. We cannot limit the scope of our political conception by insisting that only external displacement through persecution can have this impact. I will return to this argument and its significance later in the book, but for now will continue to explore the boundary problem and the difficulties it presents for normative Political Theory.

The Borders of Refugeehood101 THE HUMANITARIAN CONCEPTION AND ALIENAGE The argument for the humanitarian perspective is that the refugee, as current international law stands, appears to be in an arbitrarily ‘privileged’ position when it comes to protection, compared with other displaced people. Alexander Betts says that this system embodies the ‘arbitrary privileging of particular causes of rights deprivation and displacement’, and argues that ‘the allocation of asylum should be based not on privileging particular causes of displacement . . . but rather on the underlying threshold of human rights, which when not available in the country of origin are available only through crossing an international border’ (Betts 2013: 19). From the perspective of the individual fleeing, ‘distinguishing between persecution and other causes is normatively meaningless’ (Betts 2013: 20), and against Price he argues: if one conceives of asylum more broadly than Price, not as a form of political membership relating to citizenship but simply as access to territory and juridical status on human rights grounds, then the privileged status of persecution over deprivations begins to look rather arbitrary. (Betts 2013: 20)

The only thing that matters from the humanitarian point of view is ‘that a particular threshold of human rights is unavailable in the country of origin and the only means to access them is to cross an international border and seek territorial asylum’ (Betts 2013: 21). A state may fail to provide the relevant threshold of rights deliberately or through inability, but this distinction, which has a central moral status for Price, is arbitrary for Betts, as different kinds of failure can undermine the relationship between state and citizen such that ‘territorial asylum’, as Betts calls it, is appropriate. We can see that Betts’s version of the humanitarian conception embraces the alienage condition, with its focus on territorial rather than political asylum, and it is this insistence on the importance of alienage that I want to explore here. The reason for doing so is that, while Betts has rejected Price’s boundary argument based on persecution, he is still asserting a boundary condition for protection based on alienage. If Price’s persecution boundary collapses under the weight of argument, then international protection begins to flow outwards, as it were, reaching other displaced people, until it meets Betts’s alienage boundary and comes to a halt. However, if Betts’s alienage argument is equally vulnerable to the charge of arbitrariness he aims at Price’s persecution boundary, then it too collapses, and international protection flows much further, now reaching people who are forcibly displaced but remain in

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the territory of their home state. The rest of this chapter, therefore, considers the coherence of the alienage boundary. First, though, we need to consider Betts’s critique of the political conception in more detail, as it adds force to the criticisms I have raised and foregrounds the problem of arbitrariness when it comes to Price’s proposed boundary. For Betts, ‘The gap in rights and entitlements available to refugees compared with survival migrants fleeing serious deprivations is arbitrary’ (Betts 2013: 5). The inconsistency in protection provided to those fleeing political persecution and those fleeing a state’s inability or unwillingness to provide basic rights is based on ‘an arbitrary –­and historically anachronistic –­distinction’ (Betts 2013: 174). Against Price he argues that both of these ‘entail a severance of the assumed state–­ citizen relationship and require a surrogate provider of basic rights until such time as the country of origin is able to ensure such rights’ (Betts 2013: 174). Both kinds of displaced person have lost their political membership of their state of origin; they are both, in Price’s term, political orphans. However, as we can see, Betts does not embrace a political conception of forced displacement but instead argues that the appropriate response is the provision of basic rights until the displaced person can return to their state of origin, temporary humanitarian, rather than permanent political, protection. Betts places the issue of protection for the displaced in the context of the functioning of the international system of nation states. ‘By ensuring that everyone in the world has membership in a state that guarantees his or her access to [human] rights, the state system represents a legitimate and valid way of ensuring human welfare’, and ideally, there should be a ‘seamless nexus between state, citizen, and territory in which people can live in dignity and get access to their fundamental rights’ (Betts 2013: 11). Sometimes, though, this breaks down when, for some reason, states cannot or will not provide that guarantee. ‘International protection is intended to ensure that even when this kind of malfunction takes place, people can have their fundamental human rights respected’ (Betts 2013: 11). Asylum is an element in this international protection, such that ‘the refugee regime has evolved in a dialectical relationship with the state system’ (Betts 2013: 12). However, the regime as it stands was created for a particular moment in global history, in the heat of the Cold War, to ‘discredit Communist regimes by enabling those fleeing from East to West to “vote with their feet”’ (Betts 2013: 13). Although the 1951 Convention was always intended by its authors to be a ‘living’ regime, adapting to changed circumstances through national jurisprudence and

The Borders of Refugeehood103 supplementary international agreements, in fact the definition of the refugee has ‘adapted conservatively and slowly’, and the focus has remained upon persecution. ‘As a result, access to asylum has been decided primarily on whether or not a person has been actively pursued by a malevolent or persecuting government’ (Betts 2013: 13). This is a problem given the complex interaction between environmental change, disasters, state fragility and other factors that are threating people’s fundamental rights and has major implications for human rights (Betts 2013: 13–­14). Betts proposes the term ‘survival migration’ to fill an analytic gap here. The standard distinction between refugees and voluntary economic migrants does not help us to ‘clearly identify people who should have an entitlement not to be returned to their country of origin on human rights grounds’ (Betts 2013: 4). He defines survival migrants as ‘people who are outside of their country of origin because of an existential threat for which they have no access to a domestic remedy or resolution’ (Betts 2013: 4–­5). There are three elements to this definition: 1. The migrant is outside of their country of origin, and so has access to the international community and the international community has access to them. 2. They face an existential threat, not necessarily literally a threat to life but to the ‘core elements of human dignity’ (Betts 2013: 23). 3. Border crossing is the only viable source of protection. The key part of the definition is a threshold of fundamental rights which, when it cannot be met, triggers the right to cross an international border and have access to sanctuary in the form of international protection on either a temporary or permanent basis. Betts draws on Henry Shue’s concept of ‘basic rights’. For Shue, a basic right is one without which no other right can be enjoyed; such rights are the minimum conditions for human dignity and self-­respect (Betts 2013: 23–­34; Shue 1980: 18–­19). There are three kinds of basic rights: basic liberty, basic security and basic subsistence. For Betts, the classic refugee definition in the 1951 Convention focuses on basic security and liberty, but neglects basic subsistence. He cites Shue’s rejection of the standard way of making a clear moral distinction between security and subsistence, that the former requires negative rights to non-­ interference by the state, while the latter would create positive rights to assistance from the state. This division rests significance on a morally questionable distinction between acts and omissions, and if that distinction cannot be made then the division between positive and negative

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rights, and therefore subsistence and security, is arbitrary. There is, therefore, no good moral reason why international protection should not focus on rights to basic subsistence. We can see that the key element of Betts’s critique of the political conception of refugeehood is based on the problem of moral arbitrariness: The refugee regime was created to ensure that when the state is unable or unwilling to provide protection, and there is no other means to access those rights within the state, people can seek surrogate protection in another country. At the moment, the refugee regime fails to adequately fulfil this function because it arbitrarily excludes many people who are in need of surrogate protection due to the omissions rather than the targeted acts of their own state. (Betts 2013: 185)

People can be deprived of political membership of their home state, not only through persecution but also through deprivation of basic rights, and so the key feature underlying the political conception –­the removal of political membership –­is not confined within the moral boundary it proposes for refugeehood but extends beyond it to other displaced people. However, Betts faces his own boundary challenge here, and that is to show that his conception of ‘territorial asylum’ for survival migrants does not similarly rest on some degree of moral arbitrariness. The first component of his definition is the alienage condition, such that the survival migrant is outside of their country of origin, but why is this so central to his account? Betts gives two answers here, the first conceptual and the second institutional. The conceptual answer is that borders matter: ‘When people cross an international border, they have access to the international community, and the international community has access to them’ (Betts 2013: 26). The institutional answer is that internally displaced persons already have a framework in place in the form of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. ‘The institutional gap is for groups of people who cross borders’ (Betts 2013: 26). Betts needs the alienage condition as without it he faces the same challenge as Price. The destruction of political membership underpins the moral argument for territorial asylum for survival migrants as well as refugees: people flee their home state because there is no remedy available to oppose this destruction if they stay. However, this means that there will be people who suffer the same degree of deprivation of basic rights, and so the same loss of political membership, who do not leave the territory of their home state –­internally displaced people. Therefore, just as this feature exists outside of the moral boundary of refugeehood as defined by Price’s political approach, it also exists outside of the moral boundary of survival migration as defined by Betts. Betts counters this

The Borders of Refugeehood105 through the claim that those displaced within the territory of the state have no access to the international community and it has no access to them because of what we might call the Sovereignty Problem. The international community does not have access to displaced people within their home state even if their political membership has been destroyed by lack of basic rights, because the sovereignty of that state stands as an insurmountable obstruction. Those who manage to leave do have this access, and the international community does have access to them. This is a good practical reason for a distinction between internally and externally displaced survival migrants, and it is sufficiently important to justify a moral boundary and therefore a limit to the scope of international protection. However, I would argue that this is a mistake. It is not necessarily the case that a displaced person who has crossed the border out of their home state into another has access to the international community nor that the international community has access to them. The state they have crossed into may not permit the international community access, and may consider the presence of displaced people within their territory to be a sovereign, and therefore strictly internal, matter –­Poland’s refusal to give UNHCR or other agencies access to people who crossed its border from Belarus, which was explored in Chapter 2, is a stark and current illustration of the challenge here. The state of ‘refuge’ retains its own sovereignty, and this sovereignty may cause the international community, and refugees, a problem. The Sovereignty Problem persists even when displaced people have left their home state, and Betts’s insistence that alienage means they have access to the international community and the international community has access to them seems to overlook this awkward fact. If it is replied that states have signed up to international obligations when it comes to people displaced into their territory and therefore the international community does have such access, this answer will not do for a number of reasons. First, some states have not signed up to those obligations, and some of those states host enormous numbers of displaced people. Second, even where states have signed up to those obligations, such as Poland, state sovereignty is such a powerful principle in the international order that it seems to trump all else, so that if states do not honour those obligations, there is nothing the international community can do apart from express its concerns, and even then in terms that do not provoke that state. Overall, Betts’s use of alienage as an essential part of the definition of the survival migrant begins to look arbitrary; there seems to be no good reason why the concept, and its argument for international protection, should not extend to all people who are

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displaced, whether or not they cross an international border. I will discuss the Sovereignty Problem in more fully in Chapter 7, when I look at the distinction between refugees and internally displaced people. CONCLUSION In this chapter I have explored the boundaries of the concept of refugeehood in international law to discover how small the island of protection is and how few rights those who gain access to it actually enjoy. I remarked earlier that very few political theorists, if any, actually agree with how refugees are defined and what protections they receive in practice, and instead offer different definitions and programmes for reform. They would most likely all agree that what I have described here and elsewhere so far in the book is morally horrific and should not be taking place. And yet this book takes a different direction to most others in normative Political Theory, in that I do not offer a definition of the refugee to replace the one contained in the 1951 Convention, nor do I propose any reforms of the international protection framework. But why would I decline to do either of these tasks when all the evidence points to their urgency? There are two reasons for this refusal, the first of which I have set out in this chapter, relating to the severity of the boundary problem. This challenge prevents normative Political Theory from coming up with any definition that is not plagued with ambiguities and contradictions and moral concerns about who is left out. We need to take a different approach. My strategy is to start with forced displacement as such and seek to understand it and how it impacts upon people. The argument is that, when we do this, there is no reason to place any particular form of forced displacement at the core of the discussion, or treat it as a paradigm for what protection should look like. The second reason for my refusal to propose reform is to do with the scale of displacements, and the role of the global order. Reform is rejected, not because nation states will not accept any significant changes to the current system, but because the scale and impact of displacements is so great that there is no reform of that system which will meet what global justice demands for the forcibly displaced. This second argument is developed in Chapters 6, 7 and 8, where I explore evidence of the scale of displacement and of the severe impacts it has on people’s lives and humanity. In the next chapter, though, I look specifically at the challenge of climate displacement. In one sense the importance of discussing it is obvious, as many would identify it as the most urgent issue of forced displacement the international order faces, with predictions of enormous

The Borders of Refugeehood107 numbers of people forced to move because of climate change in the future. But in another sense it is important to the structure of the argument of this book, in that the idea of the ‘climate refugee’ gives us a very practical examination of the impact of the boundary problem. I have argued here that, in looking for ways forward, we should not start with the category of the refugee and work outwards from this centre, as this effectively biases the argument and pushes us towards specific answers. Instead, we should start with the widest conception of forced displacement we can find, seeing it all as a political issue calling for political responses. Arguments about whether there should be a distinct category of the ‘climate refugee’ morally or legally, are, therefore, unhelpful; but not because, as some have argued, nation states are reluctant to take additional legal obligations for displacement (although that is clearly true), but because it inevitably leads us to hardening categories of protection at the expense of people who clearly need it.

Chapter 5 THE CHALLENGE OF CLIMATE DISPLACEMENT

THE CLIMATE REFUGEE The climate refugee is an enormously controversial and disruptive figure, in both the political and theoretical landscapes. I have attended conferences where international legal scholars sigh and leave the room if anyone even mentions them, muttering that ‘there is no such thing’. At the political level the numbers of people displaced by climate events now and in the future are so large that it is recognised as one of the major challenges facing the international community, but there is little agreement about how to respond to it. Proposals include reform of the 1951 Refugee Convention to cover climate-­displaced people, or that there should be a distinct legal category of the climate refugee separate from the Convention. Others have argued that both of these moves would be a mistake because nation states will not accept new legal obligations, especially if the predictions of how many people would qualify for them are right, and that the way forward is through ‘soft law’ strategies which rely on the good will of those states. I discuss these debates in some detail in this chapter. But the main aim here is to show how the issue of climate displacement disrupts the theoretical landscape, as it raises the boundary problem in a very vivid way. The question is whether international protection should be extended to include those displaced by climate change related events. However, if we do this, we draw a limit which leaves people outside the scope of that protection who seem to be in much the same position as those who would receive it. If we say that those displaced across international borders because of climate change related events should be protected, we are excluding those displaced because of the same events who do not cross an international border. And if we say protection here is limited to those displaced by disasters that are clearly related to climate change, we are saying that those displaced by disasters that are not clearly related to climate change are not protected, when 108

The Challenge of Climate Displacement109 they are in exactly the same condition. Climate displacement, then, is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed in normative Political Theory, but addressing it illustrates the need to take a different approach to the ethics of forced displacement. NUMBERS AND CAUSES In examining different forms of displacement, we will very often consider numbers, how many people are estimated to fall within the given category, and I have cited such numbers at various places in this book. However, when entering into the debate about climate displacement, we have to be aware that the question of numbers is highly controversial. Jane McAdam makes a contrast between what she calls the maximalist/alarmist and minimalist/sceptical approaches (McAdam 2012: 25). She says: the maximalist, or alarmist, approach has gained considerable public attention. It is typified by organizations and scholars from an environmental studies background. Its proponents see climate change-­related movement as part of a bigger discourse that highlights the dangers of climate change generally. Emphasizing that very large numbers of people will be displaced by climate change (and sometimes linking this with security concerns) is a way of demonstrating just how destructive climate change will be. (McAdam 2012: 26)

Against this is posed the minimalist/sceptical position, which McAdam identifies with. However, this ‘sceptical’ position is not one that necessarily arrives at a lower estimate of the numbers displaced –­although it does reject the high-­end projections in the billions –­rather, it is sceptical about how accurately we can predict future numbers. The number that seems to have come to dominate the literature is the prediction that there will be around 200 million people displaced by climate change by 2050. For example, Syed Munir Khasru and John Thwaites write that ‘The United Nations (UN) International Organization for Migration (IOM) predicts that climate change will likely generate at least 200 million to 1 billion migrants by 2050’ (Khasru and Thwaites 2020: 3). They source this prediction to a blog by Francesco Bassetti written in 2019, and Bassetti sources it to the IOM itself (Bassetti 2019). Similarly, Joanna Apap, in a briefing paper for the European Parliament written in 2019, says, ‘the International Organization for Migration estimates that there could be as many as 200 million such refugees by 2050’ (Apap 2019: 3). In fact, the IOM does say this is the most widely repeated prediction, but it goes on to state that ‘repetition does not make the figure any more accurate’ and proceeds to highlight the difficulties

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in making predictions such as this (Brown 2009: 9). In another briefing document, the IOM says, ‘There is great uncertainty about the figures. Forecasts for the number of environmental migrants by 2050 vary by a factor of 40 (between 25 million and 1 billion)’, and because of the complexities involved in arriving at a predicted figure, ‘the International Organization for Migration (IOM) does not advance an estimated figure’ (IOM 2014: 38). Somehow, then, the 200-­million-­by-­2050 prediction (and even the 1 billion number mentioned here by the IOM as an example of the problems of arriving at an accurate figure) has crept into the literature, including the academic literature, as IOM-­endorsed. The source of the number is in fact Norman Myers, who has stated that 200 million people could be ‘overtaken’ by climate events by 2050 in a number of papers (for example, see Myers 2005). His predictions are widely contested by others in the research field but have somehow become an ‘official’ prediction. Another controversial figure is contained in a Christian Aid report in 2007, which predicted 1 billion people would be forcibly displaced by 2050 (Christian Aid 2007). To be clear, this was a prediction for all kinds of forced displacement –­when it comes to climate displacement it predicted 250 million people by 2050, and cites an interview with Norman Myers as the source (Christian Aid 2007: 5–­6) –­but one wonders if this could be the source of the ‘between 200 million and 1 billion prediction’ for climate displacement. The story behind these figures and others is told in detail by François Gemenne. He points out that Myers’s prediction was never included in the authoritative Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but did get into the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change produced by the United Kingdom government in 2006, although it is referred to there as ‘one estimate’.1 The figure ‘is largely based on speculative common sense rather than on actual figures and estimates’, and, ‘Through frequent repetitions, and despite its highly speculative nature and questionable scientific accuracy, this latest figure . . . has been taken as empirical evidence, and has been frequently cited in media reports and other studies’ (Gemenne 2011: 544). The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre is recognised as a respected source of data on internal displacement, and has recently started to collect data on those displaced by disasters, including weather-­ related events. Its 2021 report estimated that of the 40.5 million people newly displaced during 2020, 30.7 million were displaced by disasters, 30 million of which (98 per cent) were weather-­related (IDMC 2021). Weather-­related causes of displacement include storms, cyclones and hurricanes, which were the major contributors (14.6 million), and floods

The Challenge of Climate Displacement111 (14 million), as well as wildfires, droughts, landslides and extreme temperatures (this last factor displaced 46,000 people in 2020). The number of people displaced by disaster each year has outstripped conflict and violence for the last decade. There are regional variations. In the East Asia and Pacific, South Asia, the Americas, and Europe and Central Asia regions, displacement by disaster was larger than that caused by conflict and violence. For example, in the East Asia and Pacific Region, 186,000 people were displaced by violence, and 12 million by disaster. In the Sub-­Saharan Africa and North Africa and Middle East regions, displacement by violence and conflict was more significant. In the Middle East and North Africa Region, 341,000 people were displaced by disaster, and 2 million by conflict and violence. The relationship between the increasing frequency of disasters and climate change is complex. The IDMC states: The role that climate change plays in driving disaster displacement is . . . often seen as a direct one, but evidence does not support this hypothesis. Climate change has been proven to make certain hazards in some regions more frequent and intense. Extreme weather events such as floods, storms and drought account for more than 89 per cent of all disaster displacement. However, not all weather-­related disasters and their associated displacement are directly related to climate change, and non-­extreme events can also trigger disasters and displacement. It is certainly plausible that climate is driving increased displacement, but it has not been convincingly quantified yet. (IDMC 2021: 88)

Disaster displacement happens because of a complex process made up of many drivers, and climate change can interact with any of them, ‘not necessarily triggering displacement directly, but as an additional stressor when natural and social resources and the capacities of humans and systems are already stretched’; however, there is ‘broad agreement’ that climate change, combined with other factors, is ‘likely to increase future displacement’ (IDMC 2021: 88). Also, climate change ‘can be understood as a displacement trigger in its own right, when coastal land is lost to sea level rise and coastal erosion’ (IDMC 2021: 90). Part of the caution on the sceptical side of the debate about climate displacement is therefore based on the difficulty in connecting human mobility directly to climate change. Roger Zetter and James Morrisey state, ‘Conceptually, it is . . . difficult to disaggregate environmental factors from the nexus of socio-­political and economic processes and contexts which condition mobility decisions. Empirical evidence also points towards complex and non-­ linear processes and interactions’ (Zetter and Morrisey 2014: 343). They do not deny the significance of

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‘environmental change and stressed environments on people’s decisions to migrate’, but say, ‘the impacts of changing environmental conditions must be set within a wider context of social, economic, and political factors that induce or constrain people’s decisions to migrate’ (Zetter and Morrisey 2014: 343–­4; also see Stapleton et al. 2017). DEFINITIONS The difficulties in assigning climate change as the specific cause of displacement has led to differences over whether it is appropriate to use the concept of the ‘climate refugee’. Agencies like the IOM and UNHCR avoid the term. The IOM says, ‘There is consensus among concerned agencies, including IOM and UNHCR, to avoid terms such as climate change refugee and environmental refugee as they could potentially undermine the international legal regime for the protection of refugees’ (IOM 2014: 22). It argues that those displaced by climate events could not fall under the 1951 Convention as those impacts do not differentiate between people in terms of the five Convention grounds (IOM 2014: 23). The main challenge to having any kind of protection in international law is the need for a clear-­cut category of those who would be protected, based on the cause of their displacement, but ‘the causes behind a decision to move are seldom clear-­cut’ (IOM 2014: 27). Factors such as poverty, conflict and demography can all influence a decision to move, and so ‘A clear categorization by cause would . . . be difficult to make in most of the cases’ (IOM 2014: 28). The IOM, instead, refers to ‘environmental migrants’, and defines them as: persons or groups of persons who, for compelling reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their homes or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad. (IOM 2014: 22)

Crucially, it points out that this ‘definition’ is not meant to serve any legal or normative purpose or have any implications about human rights. It is a working definition that ‘attempts to capture the complexity of the issue’ (IOM 2014: 22). However, others have attempted to define the ‘climate refugee’. For example, the Environmental Justice Foundation defines climate refugees as: persons or groups of persons who, for reasons of sudden or progressive climate-­related change in the environment that adversely effects their lives

The Challenge of Climate Displacement113 or living conditions, are obliged to leave their habitual homes either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad. (Environmental Justice Foundation 2017a: 6)

The term ‘environmental refugee’ was first ‘officially’ used by Essam El-­Hinnawi in 1985 in a United Nations Environment Paper. He was not arguing for an extension of the Refugee Convention but rather using the term to highlight the impacts of pollution and unchecked development on populations. His definition was: those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardised their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life. (El-­Hinnawi 1985: 4, quoted in Boano et al. 2008: 7)

McAdam is clear that the term ‘climate refugee’ is ‘both legally and conceptually flawed’ (McAdam 2012: 39). She says: While the concept of ‘environmental’ or ‘climate change’ refugees may provide a useful advocacy tool to generate attention and mobilize civil society around the dangers of global warming, it can also contribute to misunderstandings about the likely patterns, timescale, and nature of climate-­related movement. (McAdam 2012: 40)

She agrees with the IOM that there are obstacles that ‘make it very difficult to argue that people displaced by the impact of climate change are refugees within the meaning of the Refugee Convention’ (McAdam 2012: 42). First, much of the movement in response to climate change will be internal, and a person must cross an international border to qualify as a refugee. Second, characterising climate change as ‘persecution’ is extremely problematic (McAdam 2012: 43). However, while this works as a critique of proposals to include the climate displaced within the 1951 Refugee Convention as it stands, it has limited application when it comes to proposals to reform the Convention such that climate-­displaced people would be included, or for a separate legal instrument to provide international protection. For example, Matthew Lister has argued for the first strategy, and I will consider his proposal in detail in the next section of this chapter. Many others arguing for the concept of the climate refugee are not seeking reform of the Refugee Convention. The Environmental Justice Foundation explicitly rejects it, stating, ‘EJF believes that refugee law is not a suitable avenue through which to pursue responses to climate-­induced displacement. It is vital that existing instruments are not amended or opened up to

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renegotiation’ (Environmental Justice Foundation 2017a: 41). Instead, what is needed is a distinct set of legally binding rights and responsibilities based around a distinct understanding of the climate refugee. This conception of the climate refugee, then, need not be parasitic in any way upon the concept of the refugee in the 1951 Convention, except that international protection is appropriate. In a separate briefing paper, the Environmental Justice Foundation argues that refugee law is of very little use in relation to climate displacement, mostly for the reasons McAdam identifies above, and observes that amending existing international refugee law by widening its interpretation risks undermining existing refugee protection (Environmental Justice Foundation 2017b: 7). Frank Biermann and Ingrid Boas put forward the most thorough case for a binding treaty obligation to protect climate refugees separate from the 1951 Refugee Convention, and argue that the concept of the ‘climate refugee’ is essential for two reasons. First, there is a need for a global governance regime that will protect displaced people whether or not they cross a national boundary; reserving the term ‘refugee’ for those who do cross such a boundary is difficult to defend. Second: we see no convincing reason to reserve the stronger term ‘refugee’ for a category of people that stood at the centre of attention after 1945, and to invent less appropriate terms . . . for new categories of people who are forced to leave their homes now, with similar grim consequences. The term refugee has strong moral connotations of societal protection in most world cultures and religions. By using this term, the protection of climate refugees will receive the legitimacy and urgency it deserves. (Biermann and Boas 2010: 66–­7)

However, while they do not distinguish between internal and trans-­ border movement, nor between temporary and permanent migration, they still offer a restrictive notion of the climate refugee in the sense of cause: ‘we propose to restrict the notion of climate refugees to the victims of a set of three direct, largely undisputed climate change impacts: sea-­level rise, extreme weather events, and drought and water scarcity’ (Biermann and Boas 2010: 64). And so while they include the internally displaced within their definition of the climate refugee, they exclude those displaced by environmental events that are not clearly related to climate change, such as volcanic eruptions. Given that the impacts of non-­climate change related events like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes can be severe and long-­term, we have a boundary problem here and it is not clear how Biermann and Boas propose to solve it, other than saying that the boundary has to go somewhere. However, for them the key argument for the use of the term ‘refugee’ for some forms of climate displacement is its moral force, its

The Challenge of Climate Displacement115 connotations of protection, legitimacy and urgency. We should note, though, the dangers of academics engaging in the definition of others without asking those others their opinion; this can be, as I have observed earlier in this book, an act of power which can do violence to people’s understanding of who they are. The inhabitants of the low-­lying island nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu are seen as key examples of climate displacement due to sea level rise, and so people displaced here would fit Biermann and Boas’s definition of climate change refugee. But Jane McAdam reports that, in her experience, the islanders would not accept the definition. This is based on her and Maryanne Loughry’s fieldwork on the islands in 2009 (McAdam and Loughry 2009). McAdam writes, ‘Even as a merely descriptive term, the “climate change refugee” label is at best pre-­emptive, and at worst offensive to those to whom it is ascribed.’ She says that the refugee label is ‘resoundingly rejected at both the official and personal levels’ (McAdam 2012: 40), because it is seen as ‘invoking a sense of helplessness and a lack of dignity which contradicts the very strong sense of Pacific pride’ (McAdam 2012: 40–­1). Kiribati President Anote Tong told her, ‘when you talk about refugees –­ climate refugees –­you’re putting the stigma on the victims, not the offenders’ (McAdam 2012: 41). The danger is loss of dignity: ‘the last thing we want to be called is “refugee”. We’re going to be given as a matter of right something we deserve, because they’ve taken away what we have’ (McAdam 2012: 41). McAdam observes that refugees ‘are perceived as passive victims, waiting helplessly in camps and relying on handouts, with no prospects for the future’, rather than ‘as people with resilience, who have actively fled violence or conflict’ (McAdam 2012: 41). McAdam points out that there is something highly problematic about this discourse of the refugee as a helpless and passive victim. Rather, refugees can be seen as active agents getting themselves out of danger and to places of safety. But at the same time the conception of refugees as being ‘warehoused’ in camps and urban settings for long periods of time, sometimes lifetimes, with the developed states seeing their confinement in their region of origin as a preferred solution –­an issue I will explore in Chapter 6 –­has a great deal of credibility. And so the islanders, and others, may have a legitimate investment in not being brought under the ‘refugee’ concept and so part of a problem which developed states –­who are largely responsible for climate displacement itself –­will not address. Indeed, the evidence is that when it comes to refugee protection, those developed states enact policies of exclusion which are clearly at odds with international law, and do so with impunity. This is not a good model for addressing issues of climate justice.

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In the end, we may not need the concept of the refugee for this specific strategy of a separate legal instrument for climate-­displaced people, and it is interesting to note that McAdam and Loughry report that a Kiribati government official ‘conceded that a framework akin to that of the Refugee Convention, minus the refugee tag, would be welcomed’ (McAdam and Loughry 2009). While the argument for the exclusion of the ‘refugee’ concept from the debate on climate displacement is largely pragmatic, in that its inclusion may weaken international protection for refugees, the argument for its inclusion in that debate rests on its moral force rather than anything else, and, as we have seen, that moral force is ambiguous. FRAMEWORKS OF PROTECTION Although we have seen that arriving at precise numbers for climate displacement is controversial, the international community has recognised that it is an urgent problem. According to a United Nations Human Rights Council report published in 2018, the best data indicates that sudden-­onset climate and weather-­related disasters have displaced an average of 22.5 million people a year since 2008. To this needs to be added those who leave their homes due to slow-­onset climate changes, such as sea-­level rise, salinisation, drought and desertification (Human Rights Council 2018: 4). The report’s key concern is slow-­onset displacement, and this is one area where predictions can be fraught. For example, looking at sea-­level rise as it will impact Bangladesh –­with predictions of 10–­15 centimetres by 2020 and 2050, and 1 metre by 2100 –­the report suggests that anywhere between 1.5 million and 17 million people could have to leave their homes by the end of the century (Human Rights Council 2018: 27). The Human Rights Council report observes that ‘There is no universal legal definition or agreed terminology that describes people who move in the context of climate change’ (Human Rights Council 2018: 8). One of the key issues is that a significant amount of movement in response to climate effects is anticipatory: ‘much movement –­and indeed most movement related to environmental factors –­is not entirely forced or voluntary, but rather falls somewhere on a continuum between the two, with multiple factors contributing to whether a person moves, where they move, and how’ (Human Rights Council 2018: 7). Under those circumstances, ‘There is no . . . affirmative international right to enter a country or stay’ under the 1951 Refugee Convention (Human Rights Council 2018: 5). While the 1951 Refugee Convention offers protection for those threatened by persecution on the five grounds, we saw in Chapter 4 that regional agreements are more expansive in their scope.

The Challenge of Climate Displacement117 The Organisation of African Unity’s 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration in South America both offer scope for including those displaced by climate change. However, the Human Rights Council observes that there is a prevailing view among the states that signed up to these agreements that environmental disasters do not give rise to protection obligations (Human Rights Council 2018: 3). When we come to climate change agreements themselves, there is no protection for those displaced by climate events (Human Rights Council 2018: 25). Matthew Lister has argued for the reform of the 1951 Refugee Convention to address this ‘gap’, claiming that the category of the climate change refugee ‘can be made to fit within the logic (though not the current legal language) of the UN Refugee convention’ (Lister 2014: 619). For Lister, the normative logic underlying the Convention is that it picks out displaced people who need the protection of non-­refoulement and the right to remain in a safe country indefinitely, with eventual full membership. This means that there is a disjuncture between the Convention’s logic and the limits imposed by its persecution requirement, such that this requirement needs to be dropped (Lister 2014: 620; also see Lister 2013). The current terms of the Convention would need to be modified or added to, but ‘the normative basis for refugee protection . . . can be extended to include the most relevant groups affected by climate change’ (Lister 2014: 619). While his subject is ‘climate change-­related environmental problems’ and his paper is about ‘climate refugees’, he extends his argument to cover environmental problems not caused by climate change, such as volcanic eruptions (Lister 2014: 630 n.15). This suggests that the boundary problem arises for Lister here in ways he does not directly address. It could be replied that the boundary problem is not serious for Lister, because, despite the title of his paper, he does mean ‘environmentally displaced refugees’, and so he does offer a clear normative boundary. He says refugee status would be owed, under the reformulated Convention, to the subset of those displaced by climate change or other environmental disruptions of expected indefinite duration, where international movement is necessitated, and where the threat is not just to a favoured or traditional way of life, but to the possibility of a decent life at all. (Lister 2014: 621; my emphasis)

Some level of humanitarian aid is appropriate to other groups. The point is, says Lister: If an environmental problem is of temporary duration, such as the typical damage from a hurricane, earthquake, or flood, it is reasonable to

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expect people to return to their homes once the danger has passed, at least if help in restoring communities to functioning levels is granted. Because of this, some form of temporary protection will usually suffice for those forced from their homes because of environmental problems. (Lister 2014: 622)

Here we see the distinction I made in the Introduction between political and humanitarian responses to displacement. The political response offers permanent solutions to more-­or-­less permanent displacements, while the humanitarian response offers temporary assistance to what are assumed to be temporary displacements. Lister’s point, then, is that some environmental displacements are political in this sense. However, what Lister seems to overlook here is the fact that an environmental event which is itself temporary, such as a hurricane, can cause displacements which are extremely long-­lasting. In its 2021 report, the IDMC points out that the protracted dimension of disaster displacement is often overlooked, and at the end of 2020, ‘Around 250,000 people in Japan, Mexico and Indonesia were still living in displacement years or even decades after devastating disasters’ (IDMC 2021: 15). In its 2015 report on disaster displacement it found 715,000 people ‘stuck in limbo’, but estimated hundreds of thousands more were in protracted displacement situations that had not been recorded, with some lasting up to twenty-­six years (IDMC 2015: 47). It reports on the Manam islanders of Papua New Guinea, who were evacuated from their homes following a volcanic eruption in 2004. As I point out in Chapter 7, where I discuss the issue of protracted displacement in more detail, significant numbers of the islanders were still displaced in 2020, and may still be so at the time of writing this chapter. Of course, Lister has included the qualification ‘at least if help in restoring communities to functioning levels is granted’, and in many of these cases it has not been delivered to sufficient levels. This demonstrates the connection between natural events and social, political and economic contexts in producing displacement. The point is that if this qualification is going to play a role in determining who falls within Lister’s boundary of protection –­which, given the large numbers involved, it must –­ then that boundary has become problematically ‘fuzzy’. Who is to judge whether help to restore people’s communities to ‘functioning levels’ has been delivered, and who is responsible for delivering it? Another condition for Lister’s boundary is that the displacement must be international. Again, in Chapter 7 I will question the coherence of this boundary condition, but note here that for Lister, ‘if people are able to relocate safely in their own country, there is no, or at least significantly less, reason to provide protection in another country’ (Lister 2014: 622).

The Challenge of Climate Displacement119 There are two telling qualifications here. First, there is the assumption that people can relocate safely in their own country; what if they cannot, but remain unable to cross the international border? Second, notice Lister’s move from saying that there is no reason to provide protection here to saying that there is at least significantly less reason to do so. This latter phrase suggests that there can be a reason to provide protection to internally displaced people, and one wonders what that reason could be. Again, Lister’s boundary for protection is less clear than it appears. His final condition is that the threat people flee from ‘must be to the possibility of living a decent life at all, not merely to a favoured or traditional way of life’ (Lister 2014: 623). He says that even in the domestic case, ‘there is no obligation for the state to ensure that any particular way of life is able to flourish or survive’ (Lister 2014: 624). He considers the example of the Yup’ik people in Alaska whose traditional way of life is under significant threat from climate change and asks if Russia or Canada would be obliged to grant them refuge if they could continue that way of life there. He concludes that there would be no obligation to grant admission to people ‘merely because they face difficulties, even severe difficulties, in continuing a favoured or traditional way of life’ (Lister 2014: 623). However, this reading (especially note the use of the word ‘merely’) seriously underestimates the violence people experience in being displaced from traditional ways of life and the homelands needed to lead them, and the severe impact it has, an issue I will explore in Chapter 8. To be clear, it is not part of my argument that the severity of that experience and its impact should lead to the reform of the Refugee Convention, but rather that it should be seen as political displacement and so calls for a strong political response. Note that Lister thinks that their home state is under no moral obligation to protect them either, a claim which in itself is highly contestable in the face of the evidence. Lister says he is arguing within the framework of ‘progressive conservatism’, the view that theory should build on the moral principles of the existing international legal system (Lister 2014: 629 n.9). This is because ‘on topics such as refugees in general, feasibility and likelihood of successful adoption of a proposed change are fundamental, and of crucial importance’ (Lister 2014: 619). The goals proposed need to be ‘plausibly achievable’, and radical proposals ‘will often lead to inaction, inertia, and greater injustice’ (Lister 2014: 619). However, my argument throughout this book has been, and will continue to be, that such an approach rests on a problematically unrealistic understanding of what forced displacement is, the violence it embodies, and its impacts on people’s lives and humanity.

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In contrast to Lister, Biermann and Boas argue that what is needed is international protection for the climate displaced separate from the refugee regime in the form of a distinct legal instrument. They identify the need for ‘systems of global governance that will cope with the global impacts of climate change’ (Biermann and Boas 2010: 60). We cannot assume, they argue, that the system of global governance now in place will be able to do this; rather, we need ‘global adaptation governance’, which will affect most areas of world politics. One of the most crucial areas where this is needed is for ‘systems of global governance for the recognition, protection and resettlement of climate refugees . . . as a major building block of the emerging global governance architecture on adaptation to climate change’ (Biermann and Boas 2010: 61). The problem is that the current legal refugee regime offers ‘marginal protection, with no specific mandate, to climate refugees’ (Biermann and Boas 2010: 74). Their preferred strategy is not the distinct treaty as proposed by the Environmental Justice Foundation, but a Protocol on Recognition, Protection and Resettlement of Climate Refugees added to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Biermann and Boas 2010: 75). Rather than a new agency, the Protocol would be upheld by a network of agencies implementing strategies under the authority of parties to the Protocol. This network would probably include the World Bank, the United Nations Environmental Programme, the United Nations Development Programme and UNHCR. Their activities would require funding from the international community, in the form, perhaps, of a Climate Refugee Protection and Resettlement Fund (Biermann and Boas 2010: 81). However, McAdam argues that advocacy for a new treaty or protocol is misplaced. She provides five grounds for thinking this. First, there is the difficulty in identifying climate change as the primary cause of movement, given the multi-­causal nature of displacement. Second, it is not clear people displaced by climate change should have protection while other forced migrants receive none. Third, people displaced by climate events usually move as a group, while protection under international law is usually on the basis of individual status determination. Fourth, defining ‘climate refugees’ may simply harden that category at the expense of others in need of assistance. And fifth, there is a lack of political will or interest from states in moving in any direction that would involve more legal obligations to displaced people (McAdam 2012: 187–­8). It is this lack of political will that has led McAdam and others to favour a soft law approach to protection for climate-­displaced people. While I agree with many of McAdam’s criticisms here, especially those that raise the

The Challenge of Climate Displacement121 boundary problem, I take issue with the soft law approach as a solution. I explore that approach in the next section. THE SOFT LAW APPROACH The sceptical position favours a soft law/guiding principles approach, rather than seeking the extension of the international protection of non-­ refoulement in the form of treaties or protocols which create new rights and obligations. McAdam says that this soft law option –­something along the lines of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement –­has the advantage of being flexible and allowing states to come up with their own frameworks for supporting the climate displaced (McAdam 2012: 238). But even here, we must proceed softly, as it were, as states may still be hostile to such an approach, fearing ‘creeping obligations’ (McAdam 2012: 239). Commenting on the period 2010–­13, McAdam identifies ‘the most concerted attempts so far by the international community to develop new normative frameworks on climate change and human movement’ (McAdam 2014: 12), but says: What has become manifestly clear is that states want to retain control over these developments, both in terms of how the issue is represented and how responses are shaped. They are reluctant to assume formal obligations or to ‘delegate’ responsibility to international organizations. (McAdam 2014: 12)

The starting point for her is the Nansen Conference, convened in Norway in 2011, which formulated the Nansen Principles.2 These principles were a broad set of recommendations to guide future development in this area, rather than a set of principles for action. For example, Principle IX acknowledges the normative gap regarding the protection of people displaced across international borders due to sudden-­onset disasters and suggests that UNHCR and states work towards a new guiding framework or instrument. In response UNHCR called a Ministerial Meeting in 2011 to address key questions, including whether it would be useful for UNHCR, states and other relevant actors to develop a global guiding framework or instrument to apply to situations of displacement across borders other than those covered by the 1951 Refugee Convention. It is worth noting the open nature of this question; UNHCR also asked whether this should be limited to displacement relating to climate change and natural disasters, allowing the possibility that it could be much broader. However, McAdam agrees with Walter Kälin’s observation that there was ‘a deliberate “lack of willingness by a majority of governments,

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whether for reasons of sovereignty, competing priorities or the lead role of UNHCR in the process”, to engage with displacement linked to disasters or climate change’ (McAdam 2014: 18; Kälin 2012: 48). With only five states expressing support –­Norway, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Germany and Mexico –­UNHCR dropped explicit campaigning on this issue. However, it was taken forward by Norway and Switzerland in the form of the Nansen Initiative on Disaster-­ Induced Cross-­ Border Displacement, established in 2012 as a state-­owned consultative process outside of the United Nations, aiming at ‘bottom-­ up’ cooperation between states in order to reach a consensus on the key principles regarding the protection of people displaced across borders by natural disasters.3 This was an explicitly soft-­law approach, looking at the development of a non-­binding protection agenda, with the focus on natural disasters in general, not just climate-­related ones, and on cross-­border displacement. The Initiative ran from 2012 to 2015, ending with the Nansen Initiative Protection Agenda, which concluded that rather than a new binding international convention on cross-­border disaster displacement, the way forward was to focus on the integration of effective practices by states into their own normative frameworks in accordance with their own specific situations and challenges. The task was then taken up by the Platform on Disaster Displacement.4 This includes both sudden-­ onset and slow-­onset disasters, and so includes environmental degradation such as sea level rise, desertification and increased salinisation related to climate change. However, the Platform explicitly rejects the use of the term ‘climate refugee’. More recently we have seen the New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants in 2016, and the two Global Compacts, the Global Compact for Migration (GCM) and the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR). Kälin describes the GCM as progress in terms of the international community addressing ‘the reality of human mobility in the context of disasters and adverse effects of climate change’ (Kälin 2018: 664). It embodies ‘explicit recognition of the nexus between disasters triggered by natural hazards (including the adverse effects of climate change) and migration . . . and the commitment to address the challenges of disaster-­ and climate change-­related human mobility’ (Kälin 2018: 664). He says that during negotiations working towards the GCM, some states opposed including the issue, but states in Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, the EU and some European countries argued that if it was excluded, ‘the goal of safe, orderly and regular migration could not be achieved if a potentially very important category of human mobility remained unaddressed’ (Kälin 2018: 665). As we saw in the ‘Numbers and Causes’

The Challenge of Climate Displacement123 section of this chapter, disaster, rather than violence and conflict, is the main driver of displacement in these regions. However, while the language contained in the GCM is encouraging, ‘the disaster–­migration nexus is a topic that competes with a very large number of other important issues addressed by the Migration Compact’, and unless there are systematic efforts by states and stakeholders to prioritise it, ‘disaster-­and climate change-­related mobility will not get the attention it deserves’ (Kälin 2018: 667). Kälin finds the GCR to be disappointing on this issue: ‘Unfortunately, there is no explicit recognition of the fact that in such situations displaced persons may qualify as refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention or wider refugee notions under regional law’, which reflects ‘the reluctance of States to deal with disaster-­induced cross-­border displacement in the context of refugee law and policy’; and so, he suggests, ‘the Migration Compact will be the centre of gravity for future discussions and actions on disaster-­and climate change-­related human mobility’ (Kälin 2018: 666–­7). Jittawadee Chotinukul agrees that the GCR has little to contribute when it comes to climate displacement: ‘It leaves discretion to states under state law, and the assistance measures provided under the instrument are vague and meagre’ (Chotinukul 2021). She concludes that the GCR ‘conspicuously reflects states’ reluctance to deal with climate displaced persons in the context of the refugee regime’; in contrast, the GCM ‘paves the way for an international protection regime for climate change-­induced displaced persons’ (Chotinukul 2021). However, Nicolette Busuttil takes a more sceptical view of the GCM, seeing it as reflecting ‘States’ preoccupation with containment within national borders’ (Busuttil 2019: 12). The GCM emphasises actions to develop adaptation and resilience strategies that focus on the country of origin as a priority. ‘This emphasis on adaptation in the country of origin is especially jarring, as it follows a list of some of the changing realities people are forced to face’, and ‘provisions which initially guaranteed migrants’ rights with a view to establishing safe, legal pathways for migration have disappeared from the final text or become intentionally vague’ (Busuttil 2019: 12). Busuttil concludes that ‘the GCM’s focus on containment is made evident’ (Busuttil 2019: 12). I want to conclude this section with two criticisms of this direction of travel. The first criticism relates to the nature of soft law and the status of guiding principles. As opposed to international law, treaties and agreements with enforceable rights and obligations, soft law is made up of ‘rules’ that have no binding force. Andrew T. Guzman and Timothy Meyer identify the following problems with soft law: first, it is not law; second, it is a residual category defined in opposition to clearer

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categories; and third, it can only be hortatory, seeking to encourage and persuade. They comment: soft law is best understood as a continuum, or spectrum, running between fully binding treaties and fully political positions. Viewed in this way, soft law is something that dims in importance as the commitments of states get weaker, eventually disappearing altogether. (Guzman and Meyer 2010: 173)

The second criticism is that this approach shapes a response to climate displacement that is predominantly ‘humanitarian’, and sets aside political questions of global justice. In relation to refugees, Joseph Carens argues the duty to admit can be based on humanitarian concern, or causal connection, or the normative presuppositions of the state system (Carens 2013: 195–­6). The humanitarian concern is that there is a duty to admit refugees ‘simply because they have an urgent need for a safe place to live and we are in a position to provide it’ (Carens 2013: 195). Causal connection is more political, and means there is an obligation to admit ‘because the actions of our own state have contributed in some way to the fact that refugees are no longer safe in their home country’ (Carens 2013: 195). These causal connections can generate moral duties, and Carens comments that ‘We should already be starting to think about environmental refugees –­ people forced to flee their homes because of global warming and the resulting changes in the physical environment’ (Carens 2013: 195). Rich countries have a political duty to admit because they bear a major responsibility for environmental impacts, rather than merely because of their humanitarian ‘concerns’ (Carens 2013: 195). The point is that the humanitarian response, which dominates the discourse of soft law, avoids the political challenge that those displaced by climate change have been subjected to a global injustice which the international community has to address. With Carens, my argument is that duties to protect the climate displaced do not derive from a humanitarian concern but from one based on a politics of justice. However, given the complexities of causality in relation to global warming, some version of his third rationale will also help here. There is a collective, international, responsibility to ensure that there is a political response to climate displacement, rather than a humanitarian one which elides issues of justice for the displaced. CONCLUSION It could be replied that the criticism of the ‘soft law’ approach I outlined in the previous section overlooks some of the key challenges I have raised in this chapter, relating to the issue of the boundary problem. What about

The Challenge of Climate Displacement125 those displaced by causes other than climate change, environmental and otherwise? The answer here is that the recognition that the international community has obligations of justice to protect the environmentally displaced does extend to other forms of forced displacement –­there is no boundary here: we should fully embrace the implication that in opening up the scope of international protection for the climate displaced we open it up for other displaced people too. How we respond to the force of this conclusion is a question for the rest of this book. For now, the point is that the challenge presented by climate displacement shifts the ground from under the ‘accepted view’ of the limits of international protection in fundamental ways. Finally, McAdam points out that, in arguing for international protection for the climate displaced, any treaty or protocol ‘would privilege those displaced by climate change over other forced migrants (such as those escaping poverty), perhaps without an adequate (legal and/or moral) rationale as to why’ (McAdam 2012: 187–­8). This is a radical objection, but it challenges not just the argument for international protection for the climate displaced but the whole global displacement regime, including the Refugee Convention. The point is that this system is riddled with issues of priority that lack a moral or legal rationale, such as the distinction between the refugee and the internally displaced person. In relation to the creation of the soft-­law/guiding principles approach, McAdam notes, ‘The question remains . . . whether it is appropriate to create guiding principles focusing solely on climate change-­related movement, or whether the scope should be broader, based on the needs and rights of the displaced irrespective of the cause’ (McAdam 2012: 240). This, she says, would shift attention away from a ‘single cause’ approach, and acknowledge the connected socio-­economic causes of displacement. But once more this constitutes a radical shift in perspective, away from causes of displacement to its impacts, and to the needs and rights of the displaced, and there is nothing to prevent this shift applying all the way back to the concept of the refugee. In other words, McAdam’s suggestion here makes all the distinctions between refugees –­internally displaced, economically displaced and climate displaced –­collapse; every aspect of forced displacement has to be flipped around in this way. We have to face up to the duty of turning the world upside down. NOTES 1. Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, (accessed 5 September 2021).

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2. The Nansen Conference, (accessed 4 April 2022). 3. Nansen Initiative on Disaster-­Induced Cross-­Border Displacement, (accessed 29 April 2022). 4. The Platform on Disaster Displacement, (accessed 4 April 2022).

Chapter 6 THE INTERNATIONAL CONTAINMENT REGIME

BEING REALISTIC Normative Political Theory makes ethical recommendations for policies and practices, and so needs to have a realistic grasp of what happens to forcibly displaced people, and what impact it has on their lives and humanity. The next three chapters aim to provide this grounding for the theoretical and ethical framework I set out towards the end of this book. They draw on a range of disciplines, including Anthropology, Sociology and Urban Studies for example, in order to reach a richer perspective of forced displacement. The approach is one that could be described as a form of realism, as part of the Radical Realistic method I described in the Introduction. This is a realism about the actual processes being studied, rather than the realism that tends to get foregrounded in much normative Political Theory, which focuses on what we can realistically expect nation states to do about forced displacement, a realism which argues that because states will not do this or that we should not theorise about a world in which they would do it. The realism I am using has a clear understanding of what states are doing, and asks what should be done in response. Of course, we might ask who should be doing the responding here, but this is a question I will address in Chapter 12, when I discuss the idea and practice of solidarity. In important ways this chapter is a companion to Chapter 2. That chapter examined the violent measures taken by global North states to repel displaced people and other migrants from their territories. This chapter examines the other end of that process, the containment of displaced people in their region of origin, in camps and elsewhere. While forcibly displaced people are often conceived of as people on the move, the fact is that one of the major experiences of forced displacement is immobility, of being stranded, unable to move out of the space of displacement. Again, this is because of measures taken by global North states to ensure that displaced people are ‘warehoused’ where they find 127

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themselves, rather than able to make an onward journey to a sanctuary state. What we have here is an international containment regime. If that regime protects anyone it is global North states, by keeping displaced people contained in the global South. Serena Parekh describes containment as ‘the de facto fourth durable solution for the majority of the globally displaced’ (Parekh 2017: 28). Part of the aim of this and the following two chapters is to draw out the common features of displacements, to show why different forms of displacement need to be brought together at the level of theory and practice rather than kept apart. This chapter highlights two of those features. The first is the protracted nature of displacement, and the second is the persistent presence of violence. The presence of violence may seem too obvious to be worth discussing, as forcibly displaced people are often fleeing violence, and we saw in Chapter 2 that they often experience violence during their journey and at the borders of global North states. However, the violence explored in this chapter is that experienced by displaced people in places that are supposed to be safe, where they are supposed to be protected, such as in refugee camps. Sexual and gender-­based violence has been a persistent experience for people in these places, and, as I argued in the Introduction, if we apply the concept of structural violence, the violence of unequal life chances arising from inequalities of power, then displaced people are also caught up in frameworks of structural violence. The focus on protractedness and violence undermines the accepted view of the international order and the international protection regime. Within that view, displacements are temporary, and displaced people are protected and cared for until a solution for their displacement can be found. But this is such a distance from reality that any approach to the ethics of displacement based on these assumptions is not going to be able to provide an adequate account of what global justice demands for forcibly displaced people. THE DURABLE SOLUTIONS As well as protecting refugees, a key role of UNHCR is to find political solutions to their situation. I have characterised a political response to displacement as one that seeks a permanent solution rather than focusing on temporary support, and the fact that UNHCR describes the three strategies it pursues here as the ‘Durable Solutions’ suggests that it shares this view. The solutions at the core of UNHCR activities are: repatriation, where the refugee voluntarily returns to their home state; integration, where the refugee becomes a member of the state they have fled to;

The International Containment Regime129 and resettlement, where the refugee is given membership of another state, as the state they have fled to is unable to provide it. The problem UNHCR and refugees face is that very few find a solution via any of these pathways. In 2019, just under 3 per cent of the total number of refugees under the UNHCR mandate found a durable solution, around 500,000 out of a total of 20.4 million. The largest number, 317,291, went home; just over 107,700 were resettled; and just under 55,000 were naturalised (UNHCR 2021a: 44–­9). The COVID-­19 pandemic severely impacted all three pathways out of displacement for refugees during 2020. Resettlement, in particular, was badly hit. In its 2020 annual report, UNHCR says, ‘Resettlement, already straining to keep pace with a historic decade of displacement, was squeezed further by the pandemic, with the fewest departures since 2002’ (UNHCR 2021b: 5). Only 34,000 people were resettled, against an annual target of 70,000, and a third of the total of previous years. Most departures for resettlement were suspended between March and June 2020, and have only partially reopened at the time of writing. Voluntary repatriation dropped by 21 per cent to 250,951 (UNHCR 2021b: 228). UNHCR explains that ‘Returns and reintegration efforts were hampered by the pandemic, with border closures and public health concerns preventing voluntary repatriations but also triggering some premature returns and onwards movements’ (UNHCR 2021b: 229). However, while the pandemic has impacted on the effectiveness of the three Durable Solutions, UNHCR acknowledges that it already faced difficult challenges, and that ‘a growing number of displaced populations remain at risk with little hope of a durable solution’; the pandemic ‘has only exacerbated these challenges’ (UNHCR 2021a: 44). While resettlement is a core activity mandated by its Statute, ‘it is an option for fewer and fewer refugees due to a significant reduction in the number of places offered by States’ (UNHCR 2021a: 47). On voluntary repatriation, UNHCR states, ‘During the past few years, opportunities for voluntary repatriation in safety and dignity have not kept pace with the rate of new displacements. The result, tragically, is more and more refugees living in exile for years on end’ (UNHCR 2021a: 46). All three solutions have their problems. For example, while repatriation should be a free and informed decision by the refugee with a full commitment from the country of origin to their reintegration, UNHCR data counts returns as such and it is not clear how many of these are in fact voluntary. In addition, refugees are often returning to countries of origin that are not committed to their reintegration, because they are still in a condition of internal conflict. During 2019, 95,000 refugees returned to Syria despite that country’s violent instability, a fact which

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meant that UNHCR did not encourage or promote returns in this case (UNHCR 2020: 50). Local integration in the host state is difficult to measure. UNHCR uses naturalisation as a proxy here, but admits that ‘even this proxy is limited by the uneven availability of data and poor coverage as well as policy and legal challenges over time’ (UNHCR 2019b: 54). The fact remains that even if refugees are naturalised, they face difficulties integrating into labour markets. Data from Uganda in 2018 showed that four out of every five refugees there were unemployed, and those that were working earned wages between 35 per cent and 45 per cent lower than the host population. UNHCR concludes that refugees are ‘one of the most vulnerable groups in the labour market’ (UNHCR 2019b: 53). In 2020, UNHCR estimated that 33,800 refugees were naturalised in 28 countries, a third less than in 2019. Three-­quarters of these were in the Netherlands, and 85 per cent were reported in European countries (UNHCR 2021a: 49). The data seems to suggest that the naturalisation route out of displacement for refugees is extremely limited in global South countries, which is where the vast majority of refugees are located. UNHCR holds that resettlement into a third state is ‘a critical tool for the protection of the most vulnerable refugees’ (UNHCR 2020: 51). Of the cases submitted for resettlement by UNHCR in 2019, 76 per cent were survivors of torture and/or violence and 52 per cent concerned children. It also sees resettlement as ‘a tangible solution for responsibility-­ sharing and a demonstration of solidarity’ (UNHCR 2020: 51). However, although the number of states providing resettlement places rose from 24 in 2010 to 35 in 2016 and 2017, it fell to 29 in 2018 and 2019, and only 21 states resettled refugees in 2020 (UNHCR 2020: 51). UNHCR estimates that 1.4 million refugees needed resettlement in 2019 –­a rise of 80 per cent since 2011 –­but there is only 1 resettlement place available for every 20 refugees who need one (UNHCR 2020: 51). The actual number of places offered by states rose to 163,000 in 2016, but fell by nearly half to 81,000 in 2018 and 2019 (UNHCR 2020: 51). A significant factor here was the change in policy instigated under the Trump presidency in the United States. In the fiscal year 2016, the USA admitted 85,000 refugees, but President Trump announced a temporary freeze on refugee resettlements shortly after he took office in 2017, and a ceiling of 45,000 for the fiscal year ending in September 2018, when 22,500 were admitted. That was reduced to 30,000 for the fiscal year ending September 2019, with all places filled. A further reduction to a ceiling of 18,000 was announced for the fiscal year ending September 2020, and a 15,000 cap for 2021 (see Krogstad 2019).1 Between 2010 and 2019, 55 per cent of all resettled refugees went to the United States

The International Containment Regime131 (575,000), 20 per cent to Canada (210,000) and 11 per cent to Australia (114,500). European countries resettled 144,000 refugees during the same period. But the figures for 2019 show that Canada was now the settlement country, taking 30,100 refugees during 2019 top refugee-­ compared with 27,500 for the United States and 18,200 for Australia. It is important to note, however, that over the last decade 58 per cent of Canada’s resettlement arrivals have been through private sponsorship schemes, not UNHCR (UNHCR 2019b: 52). There was some initial confusion over whether President Biden intended to keep the cap imposed by President Trump, but in September 2021 he proposed to raise it to 125,000 for the year beginning in October 2021.2 The fact that less than 3 per cent of refugees under UNHCR’s mandate are finding durable solutions to their displacement raises the question of what happens to the other 97 per cent. The answer lies in the concept of the Protracted Refugee Situation (PRS), which UNHCR defines as ‘one in which 25,000 or more refugees from the same nationality have been in exile for at least five consecutive years in a given host country’ (UNHCR 2021a: 20). Using this definition, UNHCR estimates that by the end of 2020, there were 15.7 million refugees in a PRS, 76 per cent of the total number of refugees under its mandate (and so not including Palestine refugees under the mandate of UNWRA who are themselves in a PRS). This included the refugee situation of Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, and South Sudanese refugees in Kenya, Sudan and Uganda. The situation of Burundian and South Sudanese refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo became protracted in 2020. UNHCR points out that its definition of a PRS is limited: a group of refugees will not be counted as a PRS if it does not meet the 25,000 threshold for five consecutive years. The situations of Ukrainians (18,400) in the Russian Federation and Iraqis in Iran (20,000) ceased to be protracted as their numbers dropped below the threshold at the end of 2020, which illustrates that when a situation has ceased to be a PRS we cannot assume that it has been ‘resolved’. We also need to note that although a PRS is defined as exile for at least five consecutive years, the average length of a PRS is now estimated to be between eighteen and twenty-­six years (USCRI 2019: 1). ENCAMPMENT The overall effect of the failure of UNHCR’s Durable Solutions, especially the resettlement pathway, is that displaced people are confined to their region of origin, meaning that they are being hosted by some of the world’s least well-­off countries. UNHCR observes in its Global

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Trends 2020 report, ‘Developing regions continued to shoulder a disproportionately large responsibility for hosting displaced populations’, around 85 per cent of the total number of refugees (UNHCR 2021a: 19). Least Developed Countries (LDCs) –­for example, Bangladesh, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Yemen –­‘together . . . hosted 6.7 million people, 27% of the global total of refugees’, despite accounting for just 1.3 per cent of global GDP (UNHCR 2021a: 19). In any given year over the last decade, three-­quarters of refugees or more were being hosted by neighbouring countries. In the last decade, high-­income countries have never hosted more than 19 per cent of externally displaced people (UNHCR 2020: 25). A feature of this is what some writers call the phenomenon of encampment. Parekh, for example, identifies this as ‘the use of refugee camps to deny the displaced basic rights and political participation, for prolonged periods of time’ (Parekh 2017: 2). She says, ‘The majority of the world’s refugees remain for years, often decades, sometimes generations, in refugee camps or informal settlements’ (Parekh 2017: 3). Another way of describing this outcome is ‘warehousing’: ‘placing people in camps, dependent on aid, for protracted periods of time so that they do not pose problems for neighboring states or have the ability to claim asylum in the West’ (Parekh 2017: 4). Parekh argues that, given the approaches of Western states to refugees, the vast majority of displaced people will spend their lives in a period of limbo. ‘Living outside of a nation-­state is no longer an anomaly that can be brushed aside as exceptional to contemporary political life; it has in many ways become a standard way of living for millions of people, and will increasingly become so in the future’ (Parekh 2017: 5). Parekh argues that one of the implications of this is that the focus on the ethics of admission and resettlement that tends to dominate discussions in academic texts on global justice around these issues is too narrow (Parekh 2017:5). This is deeply problematic, in that if we understand displacement as primarily a political or legal problem to do with the loss of citizenship, ‘then we must acknowledge that the vast majority of the displaced will remain untouched by our moral discourse, since only a small percentage of the 65.3–­72 million people who are displaced “count” as refugees and are thus eligible for resettlement’ (Parekh 2017: 6). Parekh argues that we must, therefore, pay moral attention to the situation of all people externally displaced and to their experience of being displaced for protracted periods of time. Even though the majority of refugees do not live in camps, UNHCR observes that camps ‘remain an important feature of the humanitarian

The International Containment Regime133 landscape’ (UNHCR 2014: 4), and notes that host governments may have a preference for encampment as an approach for reasons of public order or security. ‘Camps may be seen as providing better control over the presence and movement of refugees and as a way of easing the potential for tension between them and local communities’ (UNHCR 2014: 4). States may restrict freedom of movement of camp-­based refugees because of fears of competition with nationals for economic resources, and concerns that if refugees settle in communities, it becomes less likely that they will eventually return to their state of origin (UNHCR 2014: 4). The fact remains that many millions of refugees and other displaced people live in camps, some of which are home to huge populations and have existed for many decades. Kakuma camp in north-­western Kenya was established in 1992 to accommodate around 20,000 unaccompanied Sudanese children –­known as the ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’ –­ displaced by civil war. As of February 2021 Kakuma had a population of 204,309. Conditions there, according to the organisation USA for UNHCR, ‘are difficult’, with ‘widespread poverty and poor living conditions’, and more than 68 per cent of its population facing high food insecurity.3 Dadaab refugee complex, also in Kenya, opened in 1991 after civil war in Somalia, and in February 2021 had a population of 224,462. The position of these two camps is, at the time of writing in July 2021, uncertain, as the Kenyan government has announced its intention to close both, and requested UNHCR develop a plan to do so, which it presented to the government in April. The timeline for closure is June 2022 (Wasike 2021). Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan was established in 2012, with a population of 78,783 Syrian refugees as of February 2021, 55 per cent of whom are children.4 The world’s largest refugee camp is currently Kutupalong Expansion Site in Bangladesh, opened in 2017, and occupied by 877,710 mainly Rohingya refugees as of February 2021.5 ENCAMPMENT AND REFUGEE RIGHTS Sarah Deardorff examines encampment from the perspective of human rights (Deardorff 2009). She points out that camps are not mentioned in the 1951 Refugee Convention, and so ‘it appears as though the framers did not envision encampment, especially long-­term camps, to be a common response to displacement (Deardorff 2009: 5). She argues that international agencies favour them as a convenient way to protect refugees and facilitate aid distribution, while host nations favour them because of concerns about control and security. As Jeff Crisp observes, a common characteristic of protracted exile ‘is the inability of exiled

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populations to avail themselves of basic human rights –­including those rights to which refugees are entitled under the provision of the 1951 Convention and other international instruments’ (Crisp 2003: 124–­5, quoted in Deardorff 2009: 14). Deardorff focuses on the rights in the 1951 Convention, specifically the right to work in Article 17 and freedom of movement, which is also captured in Article 26 and Article 31 (2). These are also basic rights for all people established in other international treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. She comments, ‘the arbitrary and often discriminatory use of restrictions on movement within camps is inconsistent with international human rights law, and appears to be more politically motivated than anything else’ (Deardorff 2009: 15). Refugees in camps are often denied access to work and free movement, and these restrictions can lead to the violation of other basic rights such as the right to adequate food and shelter and the freedom from discrimination. Rights to healthcare, education, access to courts, and security can also be compromised (Deardorff 2009: 17–­18). Article 17 of the 1951 Refugee Convention states that restrictive measures on employment which are applied to aliens should not be imposed on refugees once they complete three years’ residence in the country. Deardorff points out the Convention makes no distinction about where refugees are in relation to these rights, ‘and thus, even camps that may be allowed under domestic law must permit refugees to work after no more than three years if human rights law standards are to be respected’ (Deardorff 2009: 23–­4). In fact, Article 17 is the only right where a delay is permitted; all other rights contained in the Convention ‘are to be assumed to be immediate’ (Deardorff 2009: 24). Naohika Omata examines the impact of encampment on the lives of displaced people in his study of refugees in Kakuma camp in Kenya compared with urban refugees in Nairobi (Omata 2020). He observes that Kenya, which hosts very large numbers of refugees, has a reputation for ‘draconian refugee policies’ (Omata 2020: 866). He cites Milner’s observation that Kenya’s refugee policy is characterised by abdication and containment: abdication of responsibility to UNHCR and containment of refugees on the periphery of the state (Milner 2009). Steep increases in refugee numbers led to restrictive policies in the 1990s, which required refugees to reside in Dadaab or Kakuma camps, which are located in ‘remote, underdeveloped, and insecure areas of the country’ (Omata 2020: 869). Refugees are perceived as a security threat, connected with terrorism, with Somali refugees particularly affected. Based on fieldwork carried out in 2016–­17, Omata found that while ‘refugees engage in a range of commercial activities, giving the camp

The International Containment Regime135 an “urban” quality . . . refugeehood continues to shape the livelihood options open to camp residents’ (Omata 2020: 870). For example, they must obtain permits to access formal employment. However, in the ‘exceptional’ space of the camp they are able to work for UNHCR and partner agencies without a permit. This is on a voluntary basis and payment is in terms of ‘incentives’ –­significantly lower rates of income than locals are paid for equivalent work, around $55 a month compared with around $450. While work for UNHCR and its partners is one of the most important livelihoods for refugees in Kakuma, it is difficult to survive on incentives payments. One resident reported, ‘With my current salary, I am not able to afford basic items such as a mattress and food. But I cannot find a better job in Kakuma, so I have no choice’ (Omata 2020: 871). While there are commercial areas in Kakuma, with shops selling food, shoes and electrical equipment, restaurants, banks and bars, the county government in Turkana requires residents to register their shops with the local authority and pay a fee for a business licence, while this was previously an informal sector with no need for registration. One resident reported that he paid around $35 for a one-­year licence and regarded it as unfair: ‘We have not been treated like Kenyans at all. The municipal government has never given us any support’ (Omata 2020: 872). Other regulations exclude camp residents from keeping livestock and cutting down trees for charcoal production, activities which had created violent clashes between the camp residents and the local population in the past. On the question of the right to freedom of movement, Kakuma is depicted by residents and its officials as a half prison. A senior officer of an NGO working in the camp reported, ‘Refugees cannot move around freely due to the encampment policy. Refugees can go to Kakuma town and other nearby areas. But going beyond these areas requires a movement pass [from the Kenyan government]’ (Omata 2020: 873). Residents cannot sell produce and services outside of the camp. An NGO which teaches women to weave textiles and craft handbags in the camp reported that it was unable to provide them with access to a market for these products. ‘In the current conditions, no matter how much livelihood support we provide for refugees, success will be very limited because refugees have no place to use their learned skills’ (Omata 2020: 873). Camp residents also regularly experience police harassment both inside and outside the camps, as they target ‘unauthorised’ businesses and collect ‘toll fees’ from people using motorbikes in the camp (Omata 2020: 880). A previously announced closure of Kakuma in 2016, which was reversed in 2017, also created a great deal of anxiety for the residents, and there was a reluctance to engage in business

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ventures there (Omata 2020: 870); of course, that anxiety has returned with the government plans to close the camps in 2022. THE VIOLENCE OF ENCAMPMENT Merrill Smith agrees with Deardorff that human rights are undermined by encampment, but observes that warehousing ‘threatens refugee protection in and of itself’ (Smith 2004: 39). This is because, as well as limitations on rights to work and freedom of movement, refugees in camps are exposed to danger of the forms of violence they may have tried to escape from. One major issue is that of gender violence, and Smith cites the experience of women in camps in Kakuma, Kenya. ‘Camp life often upends traditional gender dynamics by depriving men of functions that gave them authority and status, whereas women not only retain traditional roles, but also may even receive enhanced status from refugee agencies’ (Smith 2004: 39). Aggression against women by men is common in this situation. ‘Sudanese women in the Achol-­Pii refugee settlement in Uganda report that rape at the hands of other refugees, locals, rebels, and Ugandan soldiers is common’ (Smith 2004: 39). Women, girls and young men in warehouse situations can also fall into forms of sexual exploitation, including sexual abuse by aid agency employees. What research has shown is that, far from being places of safety, camps can be sites where people remain at risk of sexual violence. The International Rescue Committee reported that rape and sexual abuse inside and outside Yida refugee camp in South Sudan was a great concern for refugee women and girls (International Rescue Committee 2012); and Human Rights Watch found that in Darfur, Sudanese women were raped by civilians when outside refugee camps collecting firewood, as well as by the army and militia during their flight (Human Rights Watch 2005, cited in Iyakaremye and Mukagatare 2016; also see Farmer 2006). While men are victims, females, especially adolescent girls, are particularly affected. UNHCR observes, ‘women and girls are the most affected since they are the primary target and undergo numerous kinds of violence such as rape, forced impregnation, forced abortion, trafficking, sexual slavery and sexually transmitted infections’ (UNHCR 2008, quoted in Iyakaremye and Mukagatare 2016). In their systematic review of sexual violence among refugees, Juliana de Oliveira Araujo and her fellow authors point out that sexual violence ‘is considered a present threat during forced displacement and the search for asylum’; the risk ‘persists during the escape journey and after the reception in apparently safe destinations’ (de Oliveira Araujo et al. 2019: 1). The consequences are serious: for women, sexual violence can

The International Containment Regime137 result in mental disorders, obstetric complications, sexual dysfunction, unsafe abortions and sexually transmitted infections; men also experience infections, and also as a result suffer from high rates of attempted suicide, alcohol and drug abuse and violent behaviour; children suffer from guilt, shame, eating disorders, cognitive distortions and school absenteeism. Míriam Juan-­Torres’s 2017 study of Krisan camp in Ghana found a highly gendered experience of encampment, especially around issues of sexual exploitation and abuse: ‘During the focus group discussions and in private interviews, some women claimed that rape, marital and extramarital, occurs in the camp and that sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) and survival sex are commonplace’ (Juan-­Torres 2017: 3). Natneal Terefe Arega studied of the position of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, in Shimelba refugee camp, run by the Ethiopian government with UNHCR. The camp housed around 8,215 people at the time of the fieldwork (Arega 2017). Arega reports: Refugees . . . felt unsafe due to limited food and water supplies. The instability and fear, combined with limited access to basic necessities, made them feel that they were unsafe and would have no future. Lack of adequate health facilities and housing and the general dismal conditions in the camp add to the challenging situation. (Arega 2017: 101)

Women report added stresses from sexual harassment, one of them saying, ‘Camp life is especially difficult for women. Many times women face sexual harassment. Many of the young women in the camp live without the protection of parents or relatives. Some marry to gain protection from men’ (Arega 2017: 101). The mental as well as physical health of refugees in the camp was also a concern. Many of them had issues of trauma arising from their experiences in their home country, and Arega found that ‘The conditions in which refugees live in the Shimelba camp fail to foster an environment promoting optimal psychosocial health. Although the UNHCR guarantees basic medical care in the refugee camp, problems remain omnipresent’ (Arega 2017: 102). The conditions in the camp, Arega concluded, ‘foster a new set of threats to psychosocial wellbeing of refugees’ (Arega 2017: 102). Innocent Iyakaremye and Claudine Mukagatare found similar issues in their 2016 study of Congolese adolescent girls in Kigeme camp in Rwanda: The findings show that rape, unwanted physical touching, sexual exploitation, commercial sex, early marriage and girl trafficking are the main forms of sexual abuse. These are facilitated by the miserable life in the camp,

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shortcomings in the camp layout and security system, and adolescent developmental stage. (Iyakaremye and Mukagatare 2016: 1)

Kigeme refugee camp is in Nyamagabe District, Southern Province of Rwanda. The research carried out found a number of forms of sexual abuse in the camp, including rape. ‘All participants in the study acknowledged the existence of rape of girls in the camp’, with a 14-­year-­old girl reporting that it was perpetrated by young and adult people including family members (Iyakaremye and Mukagatare 2016: 4). Other forms of sexual abuse reported were unwanted physical touching, including touching of breasts and other body parts, and kissing without consent; sexual exploitation in terms of sex in exchange for gifts or money, mostly perpetrated by people external to the camp who had wealth; commercial sex, again mostly outside of the camp; early marriage; and trafficking of adolescent girls. Factors that led to sexual abuse of adolescent girls in the camp were identified as ‘poverty and its miserable conditions’ (Iyakaremye and Mukagatare 2016: 6). One problem in the camp was under-­reporting of these crimes. ‘Many cases of sexual abuse, including rape, are not reported because the victims fear the stigma, the shame and the isolation that can follow. Cases are also not reported because no actions are taken to punish the perpetrators’ (Iyakaremye and Mukagatare 2016: 7). Victims also did not report abuse because the perpetrator was a family member or an important person in the community. ‘This silence and other factors . . . therefore make sexual abuse a normal behaviour in Kigeme refugee camp’ (Iyakaremye and Mukagatare 2016: 7). Strategies used elsewhere of developing gender awareness, training girls how to resist sexual abuse, and strategies for reporting crimes were not happening in Kigeme camp, according to this research. ‘According to this study, culprits are arrested for a short time and then released. Once back in the community they continue to threaten people’ (Iyakaremye and Mukagatare 2016: 8). Another group vulnerable to violence in the encampment setting is that of LGBTIQ+ refugees. According to a Voice of America report in August 2020, April Zhu highlighted their situation in Kakuma camp in Kenya, where they said they were subjected to violent attacks by other refugees and local people, some being forced to flee to Nairobi. A video filmed in June 2020 showed people surrounding a group of LGBTIQ+ refugees and beating them with sticks and stones. Zhu (2020) reports that Kenya is the only country in the region that accepts LGBTIQ+ refugees, but homosexuality is illegal and punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. Refugees and asylum seekers are required to remain in the camps and exemptions are given on a case-­by-­case basis, raising the concerns

The International Containment Regime139 about basic human and refugee rights highlighted by Deardorff. There are an estimated 300 LGBTIQ+ refugees in Kakuma, according to the report. A Reuters report in March 2021 again highlighted the issue, reporting that LGBTIQ+ refugees had been pelted with rocks, beaten and stabbed.6 In one incident, three gay mean needed hospital treatment after their bedding was set alight while they slept. UNHCR issued a statement on 15 March 2021, saying it had stepped up its services for LGBTIQ+ refugees at Kakuma.7 Kate Pincock carried out ethnographic research into the experiences of LGBTI refugees registered in Kakuma camp between August 2018 and January 2019 (Pincock 2020). She points out that in Kenya, UNHCR is operating under a government ‘that is not only openly repressive of LGBTI individuals, but also assumes a hostile stance towards all refugees’ (Pincock 2020: 9). The assistance UNHCR can deliver to refugees in camps is limited, and responsibility for urban refugees, in Nairobi, for example, lies with the national government (an example of the Sovereignty Problem I highlighted in Chapter 4). Those LGBTI refugees who seek asylum at Kakuma have to demonstrate their sexuality or gender identity in ways that mean ‘they risk being victimised by other refugees’ (Pincock 2020: 9). LGBTI refugees in Kenya therefore find themselves in a ‘dangerous space’ and increasingly lacking protection whether they are based in the camp or the city. URBAN DISPLACEMENT As we saw in the ‘Encampment’ section earlier in this chapter, the dominance of encampment in the forced displacement literature is at the expense of the experience of displaced people moving to urban areas, despite the fact that this is where the majority go. It is fair to say, I think, that much work in normative Political Theory, and other academic fields, has continued to see refugees who have not found a durable solution as living in camps, and political practice has also lagged behind this reality. UNHCR estimates that the number of refugees living in urban areas outnumbered those in camps for the first time in 2007 (UNHCR 2009a: 16). The 2014 UNHCR Policy on Alternatives to Camps estimated 40 per cent of refugees lived in camps, and at the end of 2018 UNHCR estimated that this figure had remained stable. While 40 per cent is the generally accepted figure for refugees in camps, USA for UNHCR put the figure as low as 22 per cent of the total, with 78 per cent living in cities, in February 2021.8 This recognition of the numbers of refugees who do not live in camps has led to policy shifts by UNHCR, as evidenced by its 2009 and 2014 policy statements (UNHCR

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2009b, 2014). The new policy was to ‘avoid the establishment of camps, wherever possible, while pursuing alternatives to camps that ensure refugees are protected and assisted effectively and enabled to achieve solutions’ (UNHCR 2014: 6; see Crisp 2017 for the story of this shift in policy). However, there has been a tension between UNHCR’s policy and the policies and practices of host states, some of whom still attempt to remove refugees from urban spaces to camps, for example Kenya. The policy is also dependent on working with non-­traditional partners in cities, such as mayors, councils and faith-­based organisations, but in many cities urban refugees remain a small population compared with the numbers of the host population who live in extreme poverty, which in Nairobi is about 60 per cent of the population. As a consequence, urban refugees come a long way down the list of priorities for those organisations (Crisp 2017: 94). Gerhard Hoffstaedter points out that the new policy depends on establishing partnerships with local and national service providers, and this has proved difficult: Sometimes interaction with host country authorities may be strained due to the legal situation, particularly if the host country is not a signatory to refugee conventions. Interactions with refugee communities, however, can also be strained due to suspicion, xenophobia, competing agendas and political constraints. (Hoffstaedter 2015: 2)

As a result, ‘there still exists a major disconnect between the UNHCR policy framework and the reality on the ground’ (Hoffstaedter 2015: 2). Hoffstaedter concludes, ‘the life urban refugees find themselves in is somewhere between a rock and a hard place, i.e. they are wedged between equally bad outcomes for their protection, welfare and future’ (Hoffstaedter 2015: 2). I have argued that refugees in camps experience difficulties in accessing refugee rights and basic human rights, such as the right to work and access to decent housing and health care, as well as protracted displacement and, despite camps supposedly being places of safety, disturbing levels of violence. The evidence is that urban refugees face the same challenges, such that the shift in emphasis from camp-­based to urban-­based displaced people does not change the force of the argument. In terms of access to work and other rights, Omata points out that the Kenyan government’s regulations since 2007 have ‘largely denied refugees access to formal employment’ wherever they are located, and ‘refugees are virtually excluded from engaging in the formal labour market’ (Omata 2020: 876). Self-­employment remains an option and many refugees do get licences to start their own business, which are issued by the City

The International Containment Regime141 Council, separate from the work permits that are issued by the Kenyan Ministry of the Interior, but there are still challenges such as harassment and extortion by the police and limited access to the judicial system. In her 2013 study Simone Haysom examined how displaced people in general coped in urban environments, and the role of humanitarian and development actors in supporting them. Many of the challenges and difficulties she identifies do not distinguish between the externally and internally displaced who settle in cities, and so for the rest of this discussion I will not distinguish between them either. The Sanctuary in the City? project ran for two years and consisted of seven in-­depth studies with fieldwork in Amman in Jordan, Damascus in Syria, the Gaza Strip, Kabul in Afghanistan, Nairobi in Kenya, Peshawar in Pakistan, and Yei in South Sudan (Haysom 2013: 1). The study takes a wide perspective of displacement: ‘The principal drivers of urban displacement include armed conflict, violence, human rights abuses, dislocation due to development policies and projects, land grabbing and disasters’ (Haysom 2013: 5). Haysom observes that the urban displaced tend not to be as visible as displaced people in camps. The displaced also tend to settle in areas where existing populations live in chronic poverty and vulnerability, raising serious ethical and operational difficulties in targeting assistance to them, even if they can be neatly identified. (Haysom 2013: 6)

The findings show that the twin themes of protracted displacement and violence that run through encampment also run through urban displacement, but here that protractedness has something to do with the preferences of displaced people: ‘in most of the cities we looked at displaced groups by and large believed that they would remain for the long term or permanently, even if security improved in their areas of origin’ (Haysom 2013: 6). Apart from the drivers of displacement identified above, other factors influencing whether displaced people headed for cities and preferred to remain there ‘include the prospect of better economic opportunities, better access to services and ethnic, clan or family ties’ (Haysom 2013: 5). The theme of violence, which we saw played out in the camp settings, also features in urban settings for displaced people. Violence in urban settings recorded in the Sanctuary in the City? project included politically motivated violence such as the riots linked to elections in Nairobi in 2007; airstrikes, demolitions and economic blockades in Gaza; and suicide bombings, targeted killings, kidnappings and attacks on civilian groups in Peshawar. Criminal violence was a significant threat in Yei, Nairobi and Kabul, with this being an acute problem in informal

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settlements in Nairobi (Haysom 2013: 17). A common issue was that displaced people often were unable to turn to formal authorities for protection, as in many of the case studies the authorities were unable to provide security for their own citizens among the urban poor. In Nairobi, Mukuru Kwa Njenga settlement had 13 police officers assigned to an area with 500,000 residents. Poorly paid and under-­staffed police were implicated in illegal activities such as corruption, drug smuggling and arms trafficking, and extorting bribes from residents. Haysom reports that ‘In situations where the political discourse is negative, even IDPs and refugees with the legal right to be in the city are highly vulnerable to discrimination and aggression’ (Haysom 2013: 18). This can often be linked to security fears: ‘Afghans living in camps on the outskirts of Peshawar report that, in the aftermath of insurgent attacks, they are sometimes denied entry to the city and effectively confined to camps’ (Haysom 2013: 18–­19). And, as in camps, gender-­based violence is a frequently reported problem (Haysom 2013: 19). In the city, this is often related to changing gender roles involved in migration from rural to urban settings. Women find paid work more easily but are at increased risk of sexual harassment in the workplace. Risk of domestic violence is also increased because of the confinement of men to the home to avoid detection due to irregular status, loss of their traditional role, and post-­traumatic stress. CONCLUSION The focus of this chapter has been upon those people displaced externally, across borders, including refugees but also those displaced for other reasons. The evidence is that the two features of protracted displacement and violence are common experiences for vast numbers of externally displaced people. This reinforces Parekh’s point that the focus on the ethics of admission and resettlement in much normative Political Theory is too narrow, and that more attention needs to be focused on the experiences of people who are living most of their lives in spaces of displacement. The vast majority of displaced people are not going to have their human and political rights restored and be protected from violence through one of UNHCR’s Durable Solutions of return, host-­state integration or resettlement, and we cannot assume that the suspension of their rights during displacement is ethically tolerable, nor that they are, at least, protected from violence during that displacement. Parekh argues that long-­term displacement itself harms people, in terms of both the loss of their political and legal identity, and what she calls ontological harm, ‘the loss of something fundamental to a person’s humanity’ (Parekh 2017: 5).

The International Containment Regime143 Even where the literature does focus on what happens to people during displacement, the focus remains on those who have crossed an international border, as does much political and media attention. The situation of forcibly displaced people who remain within their home state is relatively neglected, despite the fact that numbers here are far larger than those externally displaced. But it is not just a matter of numbers. The concerns for the externally displaced in this chapter have been to do with their access to basic rights, to housing, health and education, for example, as well as their experiences of protractedness and violence, and all of these issues are experienced by internally displaced people. If Parekh is right that prolonged displacement imposes an ontological harm on people, causing them to lose something fundamental to their humanity as well as their legal and political identity, there seems to be no reason why location on the inside or outside of the border should make any difference to seeing displacement as an urgent political challenge needing political solutions. In the next chapter we will look for the evidence of this impact on the internally displaced, and call into question the moral significance of the distinction of the national border when it comes to our ethical framework for forcible displacement and the logic of international protection. NOTES 1. (accessed 13 July 2021). 2. (accessed 22 September 2021). 3. (accessed 13 July 2021). 4. (accessed 13 July 2021). 5. (accessed 13 July 2021). 6. ‘LGBT+ Refugees Call on UN for Safe Space After Kenya Camp Attacks’, Reuters,  (accessed 6 September 2021). 7. (accessed 6 September 2021). 8. (accessed 29 April 2022).

Chapter 7 INTERNAL DISPLACEMENTS

THE FALL OF KABUL On 15 August 2021 the Taliban entered Kabul and seized power in Afghanistan. The political and media discourse in Europe and North America immediately focused on the prospects of enormous numbers of refugees leaving the country and heading for the global North. The German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said he expected up to five million refugees to leave the country, and the Iranian government estimated that it could face an influx of 500,000 Afghans over the next six months (Loft 2021: 8). The United Kingdom government announced a resettlement programme for 20,000 people over a five-­year period, but emphasised that people attempting to reach the country through other ‘irregular’ routes would not receive refugee status (Loft 2021: 11).1 That scheme did not open until January 2022. Whatever the accuracy of these predictions, what we know is that vast numbers of people have been displaced within the country, and, in contrast to the media and politicians, international aid agencies were stressing the importance of assisting them. By the end of 2020 there were 2.9 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), and by July 2021 this had risen to 3.5 million. UNHCR reported that ‘The overwhelming majority of Afghans forced to flee remain within the country, as close to their homes as fighting will allow’, and the major movement is from rural areas to cities such as Kabul, where nearly 120,000 people have fled since the beginning of the year.2 This will exacerbate an already serious situation, with the UN stating in July 2021 that nearly half of Afghanistan’s population, 18.5 million people, need some kind of humanitarian support, with a third suffering from malnutrition and half of children under five experiencing acute malnutrition. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has called for $1.3 billion to support its humanitarian efforts in the country, but has only received 38 per cent of this, with the United Kingdom contributing 144

Internal Displacements145 3.8 per cent (Loft 2021: 3). On 20 August UNHCR spokesperson Shabia Mantoo said that the organisation was ‘concerned about the prevailing needs within Afghanistan, and urges support to ensure that all those requiring assistance are not forgotten’.3 This focus of global North politics and media on the externally displaced at the expense of IDPs is, of course, not new, and it has to be said that this imbalance is also represented in normative Political Theory when it discusses forced displacement. It reflects the global North anxiety about borders –­as IDPs do not cross borders, they remain invisible. However, the number of IDPs in the world is consistently much larger than the total of refugees. At the end of 2020 UNHCR estimated the total number of refugees as 26.4 million, and the total number of IDPs as 48 million. UNHCR only counts those displaced by political persecution and violence, and if we add people displaced by other causes the total is higher. The IDMC arrives at a figure of 55 million IDPs by the end of 2020, using the wider definition found in the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (IDMC 2021: 7–­8). According to paragraph 2 of the Introduction to the Guiding Principles, internally displaced persons are those ‘who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-­ made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized border’. Walter Kälin comments that the ‘in particular’ here means it is a non-­indicative list such that ‘potentially a wide range of events that force people to leave their homes or places of habitual residence can count as a relevant cause’ (Kälin 2014: 163). For example, although not explicitly mentioned in the definition, the Principles include those displaced by ‘large-­scale development projects, which are not justified by compelling and overriding public interests’ (Principle 6: 2 (c)). These are not included in IDMC estimates because of lack of data, although some commentators see this as one of the most significant causes of displacement, and we will look at development-­ induced displacement in more detail, including estimated numbers, in the next chapter. This shows that we cannot assume that IDPs are ‘refugees who have not crossed a border’ (Cantor 2018: 211), that is, people who would meet the Refugee Convention definition if they did cross a border. The concept of the internally displaced person and the Guiding Principles cover a broad range of displacements. However, what all these kinds of internal displacement share is that they fall outside of the international protection framework. If the impacts of being internally displaced are

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much the same as those of being displaced across borders, then there needs to be a very strong justification for this exclusion. What I aim to show in this chapter is that no such justification is available. A key argument of this book is that displacements across the range, whatever the cause, share key features which mean that they should be treated primarily as political, not humanitarian issues. One key feature is the protracted nature of displacement, which itself leads to other impacts, such as the loss of membership of one’s political community. In this chapter I show that protractedness is experienced by the internally, as well as externally, displaced, and that it has severe impacts upon them. THE INTERNATIONAL FRAMEWORK The story of the emergence of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement has its origins in 1992, when the United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted a resolution calling for the appointment of a Special Representative for Internally Displaced Persons. The Sudanese foreign minister, Francis Deng, was appointed (Koch 2020: 22). Deng presented the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement to the Commission in 1998. At their heart was the understanding of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, the principle that with state sovereignty came a responsibility for the protection of that state’s population. Anne Koch observes, ‘Deng thus created the concept of a state’s responsibility to protect . . . He was thus one of the pioneers of the norm “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), which was established at the UN level in the early 2000s’ (Koch 2020: 24). There were objections to the Guiding Principles after their submission, mainly on the grounds that they were developed by experts rather than negotiated by states, but heads of states unanimously recognised them as part of the international framework at a 2005 World Summit (Kälin 2014: 170). While the Guiding Principles are legally non-­binding, Kälin argues that they have authority as they reflect existing international human rights and international humanitarian law; they are drawn from international instruments that are legally binding. In fact, says Kälin, ‘almost every Principle has a solid foundation in provisions enshrined in human rights instruments or international humanitarian law’ (Kälin 2014: 170). Erin Mooney observes that in the deliberations leading up to the Guiding Principles, some participants did argue for a definition limited to persecution (Mooney 2005: 12). However, NGOs argued this would risk failure to capture the root causes of displacement, such as disasters and development projects. There were also proposals to include people forced to migrate because of extreme poverty or economic hardship, but

Internal Displacements147 this was rejected (Mooney 2005: 13). What we have, therefore, is a definition which ‘tries to strike a balance between too narrow a framework that risks excluding people who share similar characteristics and one so broad that it loses the focus on the distinct protection and assistance needs arising from forced displacement’ (Mooney 2005: 13). What we can see from Mooney’s account is the significance of the boundary problem, and we cannot assume that the Guiding Principles framework succeeds in striking the balance Mooney identifies, or that such a balance is actually available to be struck. Walter Kälin took over from Francis Deng in 2005, with the new title of UN Special Representative for the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons (Koch 2020: 25), and we should see some significance in the mention of human rights here rather than IDP rights, in that IDPs do not have distinct rights. In 2010 Kälin was made a UN Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, but this was a downgrading. ‘Since then, it no longer entails official employment with the UN, but is fulfilled by a private individual without remuneration’ (Koch 2020: 26). Minimal travel funds make official country visits very difficult. At the same time the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), UNHCR and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) ‘reduced the size of their organisational units dealing with internal displacement or disbanded them altogether in the early 2010s, referencing the successful mainstreaming of the issue’ (Koch 2020: 26). However, UNHCR reconsidered its approach in 2017, when internal displacement received a low profile in the 2016 New York Declaration and was not mentioned in the subsequent Global Compact for Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees. The UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons is part of the UN Inter-­ Agency Standing Committee (IASC), the primary inter-­agency coordination platform for emergencies. According to a report written by the Secretariat of the High-­Level Panel on Internal Displacement (which was established by the UN Secretary General in January 2020), ‘internal displacement has rarely been discussed in depth at this forum over the past ten years and there has been a loss of literacy on the issue of internal displacement among international humanitarian actors overall compared to 15 years ago’ (Secretariat 2020: 5–­6). According to that report, agencies tasked with dealing with internal displacement ‘are often under-­resourced and sidelined or their mandates are limited to humanitarian responses’, and while around forty governments have developed laws and policies to address internal displacement, ‘they generally remain poorly implemented’ (Secretariat 2020: 4). Some of those laws do create a special status for IDPs,

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‘but often have the unintended consequence of further separating IDPs from the rest of the population, making it more difficult for them to integrate locally and find solutions’ (Secretariat 2020: 4). The IASC established a Framework on Durable Solutions for Internally Displaced Persons in 2010, defining a durable solution here as being achieved ‘when IDPs no longer have specific assistance and protection needs that are linked to their displacement and such persons can enjoy their human rights without discrimination resulting from their displacement’ (IASC 2010: 5). The durable solutions for IDPs parallel those for refugees: sustainable reintegration at the place of origin; sustainable local integration in areas where internally displaced persons take refuge; and sustainable integration in another part of the country. The High-­ Level Panel Secretariat comments: The IASC Framework is . . . significant for establishing that return to the area of origin is not the only valid durable solution for IDPs, but that, depending on circumstances, resettlement elsewhere in the country and local integration might even be preferable. (Secretariat 2020: 2)

This reflects the recognition that internal displacements can be extremely protracted, such that the prospect of a return home is remote. The High-­Level Panel on Internal Displacement published its report in September 2021. The Executive Summary of the Report identifies ‘a collective failure to prevent, address and resolve internal displacement’ (High-­Level Panel 2021a: 1). Internal displacement ‘is all too often neglected in Government policies and plans, UN strategies and guidance, development financing, and in public communications and media’ (High-­Level Panel 2021a: 1). This invisibility of the issue leads to neglect, so that the internally displaced ‘slip into obscurity and neglect’ (High-­Level Panel 2021a: 1). Without significant improvements, ‘this global crisis will never be truly resolved’ (High-­Level Panel 2021a: 2). What the Panel found most striking was ‘the lack of political will to address internal displacement’, with too many states failing to take responsibility for their displaced (High-­Level Panel 2021b: 5). But also the UN, donor states and other agencies have ‘not demonstrated the level of commitment required to overcome this global crisis, particularly in contexts of protracted displacement’ (High-­Level Panel 2021b: 5). The only legally binding instruments for the protection of IDPs were established in Africa. The Protocol on the Protection and Assistance to Internally Displaced Persons of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region was established in 2006, making the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement legally binding on the ten states that were party to the conference; and the African Union established the Convention for

Internal Displacements149 the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa (the Kampala Convention) in 2009, which was ratified by twenty-­nine states by December 2019. THE ‘INTERNALLY DISPLACED PERSON’ The key question to consider is why people who cross the border should qualify for international protection (if they cross the border for the right reasons), while people displaced (for the same reasons) within the state do not. Many commentators and activists think there is an important ethical distinction to make here. For example, Kälin says that while refugees and IDPs share many experiences, there is a fundamental difference between the two in that refugees ‘cannot turn to their own government for protection’ and therefore need protection elsewhere, while IDPs remain under the jurisdiction of their own governments. ‘By virtue of state sovereignty, the international community is not entitled to substitute for national authorities but plays a subsidiary role of supporting or complementing state governmental action’ (Kälin 2014: 165). This means that while refugee protection is essentially international, protection for IDPs is ‘primarily’ national, a view confirmed by the High-­Level Panel in its report: ‘States bear the primary responsibility for supporting their displaced citizens and residents to achieve an end to their displacement’ (High-­Level Panel 2021b: 13). However, there is something odd about Kälin’s argument in terms of timescale. Kälin seems to be saying that refugees cannot turn to their own government because they are outside the state, while IDPs can because they remain within it. But refugees are most often within the territory of their home state when they face persecution and cannot turn to their own government for protection and so subsequently flee across the border. It is not the fact that they are outside the territory that means they cannot turn to their own government, but the nature of that government while they remain within it. The situation is exactly the same for many internally displaced people: both they and refugees fleeing persecution and violence are under the jurisdiction of their own governments at the initial point of displacement in time and space. The only difference, in the end, is that refugees manage to cross an international border, and the question of why this makes such a difference remains unanswered by Kälin. The assumption which seems to underpin the distinction is that displacement for refugees only begins once they cross the border, but this is obviously not the case. It is the case that their displacement as refugees only begins once they cross the border, but the displacement itself begins within the national territory, and it is at that point that they cannot turn

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to their government for protection. And so there is a puzzle to answer here. Kälin’s point about sovereignty may hold the key, and I will examine the argument from sovereignty in the next section. However, another key question concerning the idea of the internally displaced person is whether they should count as a distinct category of concern. The debate here is not whether they should be distinguished from refugees, but whether they should be distinguished from other people within the nation state who are having their human rights violated –­is there something distinct about being internally displaced? The International Committee of the Red Cross, while it does agree that displacement adds to vulnerability, ‘does not believe that someone displaced is automatically more vulnerable than someone who is not’ (ICRC 2009: 20). It says it is ‘greatly concerned by the increasing tendency within the humanitarian and donor communities to consider the needs of IDPs as separate and distinct from those of resident populations’ (ICRC 2009: 20–­1). James Hathaway asks: If the primary needs of the internally displaced are in fact best defined by reference to generally applicable human rights, why should they be treated as a category of concern distinguished from other internal human rights victims who have not been displaced? (Hathaway 2007a: 360)

This, says Kälin, overlooks the fact that IDPs do have special needs. He identifies eight displacement-­specific needs (Kälin 2014: 167). IDPs need to: 1. Be protected against being displaced. 2. Be able to leave the danger zone and reach a safe location and not be forced to return. 3. Find a place of shelter. 4. Be protected from discrimination on account of their displacement. 5. Have lost documentation replaced and documents issued to children born during displacement. 6. Be able to register as voters and participate in elections, etc. 7. Have property left behind protected and restored. 8. Find a durable solution to their displacement through sustainable return or sustainable local integration. Mooney agrees there are important reasons to identify IDPs as a distinctively vulnerable group (Mooney 2005). People are forced from their homes and so deprived of shelter, and cut off from land and means of survival. Family and support networks are broken, and symbolic goods such as cultural heritage and connection to a particular place are lost

Internal Displacements151 (Mooney 2005: 15). She argues that ‘it is difficult to deny that IDPs have certain needs that are distinct from the general population and which require special attention’ (Mooney 2005: 18); but at the same time this is ‘not to privilege them over others but rather to ensure that their needs are addressed and their human rights are respected along with those of other persons’ (Mooney 2005: 19). And so there are two arguments here: first, that IDPs face a distinct set of risks; and second, that where they share the same risks as the non-­displaced, those risks are made more severe through displacement. Hathaway is not convinced by the first argument, that IDPs can be separated from other internal victims of human rights abuse simply because they face different kinds of vulnerabilities: ‘Just because IDPs face different threats than the non-­displaced, does this fact alone justify scholars or the international community giving priority attention to their predicament?’ (Hathaway 2007a: 361). The second argument, also, does not convince him: Unless it were shown –­rather than simply asserted –­that IDPs around the world face an across-­the-­board greater risk of exposure to the gravest forms of human rights abuse relative to non-­displaced victims, there is no good case for normative, institutional, or other privileging of their predicament. (Hathaway 2007a: 362)

The problem we are looking at here is the now familiar one of the boundary problem, that once we create a category of concern, at the same time we construct its opposite: in defining a particular group of people as needing some kind of protection, we have at the same time created a category of people who do not need it. This is the problem Hathaway is exploiting against those who construct the ‘Internally Displaced Person’ as a category of concern, arguing that there are people outside of the category who face the same challenges to their human rights (note his reference to ‘privileging’). But he is using a tactic that raises dangers for his own argument that refugees are a distinct category; he faces his own boundary problem, and I will explore it in the next section. Also, it is not being claimed that the internally displaced are in all cases across the board worse off than non-­displaced populations, and such a claim is not needed to act as the basis of a distinct category of concern. A more realistic claim is that there is a family of issues that have a tendency to affect internally displaced people more than the non-­ displaced, and that some of those issues are, as a matter of fact, distinct. This, I suggest, is sufficient to maintain the category, especially if we take Mooney’s point that this is not to argue for privileging those needs over the needs of others, but simply to point out that those needs have to be

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recognised and addressed. And if we recognise that a vital dimension of the experience of internal displacement is protractedness, then this, in itself, makes it urgent to recognise the ‘Internally Displaced Person’ as a category of concern. I will look at the evidence of protractedness and its impact later on in this chapter, but in the next section look at the distinction between internally displaced persons and refugees, and at Hathaway’s defence of it. THE REFUGEE/IDP DISTINCTION Hathaway vigorously defends the distinct legal and conceptual status of the refugee in contrast to internally displaced persons in particular. He emphasises the specificity of refugees’ circumstances, ‘including in particular the fact that refugees are not just involuntary migrants, but are by definition the victims of fundamental social disenfranchisement and uniquely within the protective ambit of the international community’ (Hathaway 2007a: 350). Refugees can be distinguished from other forced migrants in two ways. The first is that ‘refugee status is a recognition of the special imperative to respond to the needs of persons in flight from risk prompted by discrimination –­the prohibition of which is the most central human rights commitment of the international community’ (Hathaway 2007a: 352). The fact is that ‘refugees are persons seriously at risk because of who they are or what they believe’ (Hathaway 2007a: 352), and this means that refugees are doubly deserving: the risk they have fled is very serious, and it is based on unchangeable or fundamental characteristics. The second distinguishing feature is that refugee status is a functional designation directly linked to the capacity of the international community to guarantee a remedy. The alienage requirement limits refugee status to doubly deserving persons who, by crossing an international border, are now within the unqualified protective competence of the international community. (Hathaway 2007a: 353)

A refugee both deserves protection and can be protected by the international community. Hathaway states, ‘there is a fundamental difference between the circumstances of those outside of their own country and those still inside it –­namely, the unqualified ability of the international community to ensure that protection is provided’ (Hathaway 2007a: 353). And so although Hathaway’s defence of the distinction between the refugee and the internally displaced person appeals to the importance of discrimination, in the end it is the factor of alienage that seems to do much of the work, as IDPs can face discrimination too.

Internal Displacements153 This brings us back to the apparent privileging of the refugee in terms of international protection based only on the fact that they have crossed a border. We could make the point that what Hathaway has provided here is an understanding of the distinction between the refugee and the internally displaced person as primarily pragmatic, in the sense of what the international community can actually achieve, but he argues that this is sufficient to give the distinction a moral dimension: Because ethicality is not only a function of the ‘ought’ but equally of the ‘can’, it is not inappropriate to guarantee rights to forced migrants who are outside of their country which cannot be guaranteed to forced migrants still inside the borders of their own state. (Hathaway 2007a: 353)

However, Hathaway’s argument here is vulnerable to the same objection I raised against Betts’s approach in Chapter 4 in relation to what I described as the Sovereignty Problem. The assumption seems to be that the international community cannot intervene to protect IDPs because it would be a violation of the sovereignty of the nation state they are displaced in, but that it has unqualified access to externally displaced people; the Sovereignty Problem somehow disappears in the latter case. But why would we make such an assumption in an international system of sovereign states, where the state the refugee has entered has the same entitlements to sovereignty as the state they have left? We have already seen the case of Poland refusing UNHCR access to its border region, and another example is the situation in Bangladesh after 2012, when thousands of Rohingya fled from Myanmar to escape violence. The Bangladesh government decided to close its border to prevent more people entering its territory, and insisted that international aid organisations stop providing aid to Rohingya already in Bangladesh, living in and around Cox’s Bazaar (UNHCR 2018: 30). The situation improved in 2013, but the government appointed the IOM as lead partner in providing assistance to the Rohingya rather than UNHCR, ‘indicating that the Government of Bangladesh viewed those unregistered Rohingya as migrants rather than refugees’ (UNHCR 2018: 30). These displaced Rohingya were defined as Undocumented Myanmar Nationals (UMNs) and UNHCR was not permitted to assist them (UNHCR 2018: 41). In October 2016, with renewed violence in Myanmar displacing 74,000 more Rohingya into Bangladesh, there was little change, as the government ‘prevented international humanitarian agencies and NGOs from providing aid. In particular, UNHCR was prevented from carrying out essential protection activities common to other refugee responses’ (UNHCR 2018: 30). After more large-­scale displacements in 2017, ‘there were still restrictions in place on UNHCR

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responding outside the “registered camps”’ (UNHCR 2018: 35). It was only later in 2017 that the government gave UNHCR permission to play a more substantial role. UNHCR also had problems accessing people of concern in neighbouring Thailand in 2008. Spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis reported concerns about the repatriation of ethnic Lao Hmong people from Thailand to Laos, saying that UNHCR ‘was unable to observe the return process as it has not been granted access’.4 The returns were from Huay Nam Khao camp in July 2008, which held around 6,000 Lao Hmong, with others living outside the camp, some of them in hiding. UNHCR did not have access to the camp despite repeatedly urging the Thai authorities to allow this, and called for Thailand to meet international standards for voluntary repatriation. Human Rights Watch described the returns as forced deportations.5 This shows how the Sovereignty Problem does not simply disappear once a refugee crosses an international border, and that the international community does not have ‘unqualified’ access to them. Another challenge for international protection for the displaced is where there is little or no sovereign power in place, making the situation too unstable and dangerous for agencies like UNHCR to operate. In November 1996 UNHCR reported its concerns about people caught up in fighting in eastern Zaire, including 1.2 million Burundi and Rwanda refugees.6 Heavy fighting forced UNHCR’s staff to evacuate from the refugee town of Goma, and it had no contact with 520,000 refugees in the Uvira and Bukavu regions. In February 2015 there were similar concerns about displaced people, including refugees, fleeing violence in regions of Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger. UNHCR reported, ‘Insecurity is making it increasingly difficult for UNHCR teams to access the border areas where refugees arrive.’7 The refugee situation in Guinea illustrates both sides of the Sovereignty Problem. In the face of large-­scale displacement across its borders, ‘the Guinean government . . . routinely took numerous measures hostile to refugee protection. Aid providers faced numerous logistical difficulties establishing the Guinean camps’; and cross-­border violence in 2000–­1 meant that ‘agencies encountered major problems ensuring the security of their workers and of the refugees’ (Farmer 2006: 57). As we saw in Chapter 2, the situation in Libya is a mixture of these situations, with a great deal of political instability and violence, and Libyan authorities controlling access to refugees and migrants. Writing in 2017, Issa Leghtas reported that ‘UN and other humanitarian actors working in Libya face significant challenges in accessing populations of concern and threats to their own security’ (Leghtas 2017: 16). And so

Internal Displacements155 there are two kinds of cases which undermine Hathaway’s claim that the international community has unqualified access to refugees because they have left the territory of their home state. The first is where the government of that state obstructs access by international agencies, and the second is where the situation in the area of refuge is so dangerously unstable that the agencies cannot access it safely; and, as in the case of Libya, these can occur together. The Sovereignty Problem, therefore, continues to apply whether the displaced person is inside or outside of their state of origin. One possible reply is to pose the Sovereignty Problem in slightly different terms, such that the decision not to intervene to protect people displaced within the territory of their home state is not pragmatic, but principled –­the international community ought not to interfere with the internal affairs of a sovereign state. The Sovereignty Problem has, if you like, been transformed into the Sovereignty Principle, which rules out interference in the internal affairs of a state. In fact, the Sovereignty Principle should be familiar as a basic principle of the accepted view of the international order. However, the nature and scope of national sovereignty has been the subject of some debate in the international community, with the rise of the notion of ‘conditional sovereignty’ emerging from the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a doctrine which, as we have seen, arose precisely because of concerns about the situation of internally displaced people. Michael Barnett describes this as ‘the creation of a more humanity-­friendly definition of sovereignty and the rise of human rights’, with the idea that ‘sovereignty was conditional on how states treated their populations’ (Barnett 2014: 248). At the extreme, the R2P doctrine allows for humanitarian intervention (i.e. military intervention) in order to protect the fundamental human rights of people in the face of mass atrocity crimes.8 What we see, then, is that there is a doctrine accepted by the international community which recognises the need to protect internally displaced persons from certain forms of serious harms inflicted by their government, including military intervention if necessary, and the threshold of harm that would justify such intervention is open to critical debate in global public policy forums (some would argue that the United Nations has set the threshold of harm too high). The implication of the R2P doctrine is that alienage makes no difference to the moral applicability of international protection. The difference is now to do with the threshold of harm; if IDPs are being subjected to one or more of the mass atrocity crimes, then the international

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community has a responsibility to protect them. The threshold of harm for refugees, whether we take the political or humanitarian approach, is much lower than this. Of course, the Sovereignty Problem, or Principle, might return here to explain this difference in threshold, but the overall argument of this book is not that international protection has to be identical in all cases of displacement, but rather that the duty of the international community to protect displaced people cannot by limited by alienage (see Cohen 2010 for a discussion of the relevance and limitations of the R2P doctrine for internal displacements). Hathaway has another argument, to do with the relevance of refugee rights for the internally displaced: ‘Specifically, refugees are entitled to protection against refoulement, the right not to be sent back to their country of origin for the duration of the risk’ (Hathaway 2007a: 358). They also receive a set of entitlements in terms of access to housing, health and education, and so on. Hathaway points out: Rights of this kind would be of no value whatever to IDPs who are by definition still within their own country. As citizens of that state, the internally displaced are clearly already entitled to a standard of treatment that meets or exceeds that owed to refugees. (Hathaway 2007a: 358)

But we can agree with Hathaway that IDPs ought to have access to at least basic citizenship rights; the question is whether they in fact do have access to them, and the whole problem to do with internal displacement is that they do not. When it comes to the relevance of non-­refoulement, he has slightly misstated the scope of protection here. It is not only that refugees are protected against being sent back to their country of origin for the duration of the risk, but that they are protected against being sent to any territory where they would be at risk of persecution on any of the Convention grounds. Also, as we saw in Chapter 4, the non-­refoulement protection is interpreted as applying whenever someone is under a state’s jurisdiction, not only within their territory, which amounts to asking ‘whether or not he or she is subject to the State’s effective authority and control’ (UNHCR 2007: 16). UNHCR states, ‘the decisive criterion is not whether such persons are on the State’s territory, but rather, whether they come within the effective control and authority of that State’ (UNHCR 2007: 19). And we saw Caelin Briggs argue that this opens up the possibility of the non-­refoulement principle being extended to internally displaced persons, ‘to cover many of the threats that could be experienced by displaced persons if forced to return to places of persecution’ (Briggs 2017: 6). It is, therefore, perfectly possible to argue

Internal Displacements157 that the protection against refoulement can be applied to the internally displaced. PROTRACTED INTERNAL DISPLACEMENT So far in this chapter we have looked at the conceptual difficulties in maintaining a distinction between refugees and IDPs which can justify reserving international protection for the former. But those conceptual difficulties are based on the empirical claim that the conditions that justify protection for those included within the refugee definition also affect those left unprotected on the outside. If we think the argument from sovereignty fails, then the empirical claim shows that there are no grounds that can morally justify the distinction between the externally and internally displaced when it comes to protection. The argument, therefore, now turns towards empirical, rather than conceptual, issues. The evidence shows that key features –­the experiences of violence, of protracted displacement, and of loss of membership of the community –­ are shared across different forms of displacement. In the previous chapter we saw how the protracted nature of displacement is a major challenge for refugees and other externally displaced people, and in this section we will see that it is also a central experience for the internally displaced. The UN Secretary General’s High-­Level Panel on Internal Displace­­­ ment observes that ‘IDP numbers remain high because millions of people are trapped in protracted displacement’, and ‘In some cases, second and even third generations of children have been born into displacement and grow up without ever having known their family’s original home’ (High-­Level Panel 2021b: 3). The IDMC estimates that the total of 48 million people living in internal displacement as a result of conflict and violence by the end of 2020 includes people who have been living in internal displacement ‘for decades’ (IDMC 2021: 14). In addition, around seven million people were living in internal displacement because of disasters by the end of 2020, but the IDMC says this ‘should be considered a significant underestimate’ (IDMC 2021: 15). It estimates that an average 24.5 million people are displaced by disaster every year, and what is often overlooked is the protracted nature of this kind of displacement (IDMC 2021: 78). Data here is scarce, and ‘makes it difficult to fully understand the scale and nature of protracted displacement triggered by disaster and climate change impacts’ (IDMC 2021: 15); and because the protracted nature of disaster displacements is overlooked, ‘there are few if any programmes dedicated to responding to longer-­term displacement’ (IDMC 2021: 78).

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In the Methodological Annex to its 2020 Global Report, the IDMC comments: it is particularly difficult to keep track of how many people remain displaced over time following a disaster. All too often, data collection stops a few days or weeks after the disaster. This limits our understanding of the needs and conditions of the displaced, and our ability to estimate how many people remained displaced at the end of each year. (IDMC 2020b: 25)

In its 2015 report on disaster displacement the IDMC found 715,000 people ‘stuck in limbo’, but estimated that hundreds of thousands more in protracted displacement situations had not been recorded, with some cases lasting for up to twenty-­six years (IDMC 2015: 47). While most of these were in low-­and middle-­income countries, there were significant cases in rich countries such as Japan and the United States (IDMC 2015: 47). By the end of 2019, 52,000 people were still displaced by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and in the United States, the IDMC found 450 families still living in trailers after Hurricane Michael in October 2018 (IDMC 2020b: 25). In the case of Japan, Isaac Gagné reported 73,000 people still living in prefabricated residential facilities or other temporary housing arrangements by late 2018, waiting to return home, to be relocated to new housing, or to be relocated elsewhere. While the housing was rent free, it was designed to last only a few years, and many of those who remained were the socially and economically vulnerable (Gagné 2020). Other examples in the IDMC 2015 report were 2,700 people still displaced after the 1999 Marmara earthquake in Turkey after fifteen years (IDMC 2015: 97), and the 1988 earthquake in Armenia, a protracted displacement situation for twenty-­six years affecting an estimated 18,500 people at the time of the report (IDMC 2015: 94). As of October 2019 the IOM estimated that in Haiti 34,500 people remained displaced by the 2010 earthquake, living in twenty-­three displacement camps. ‘Those living in such sites are not willing to leave either because of the living conditions in their places of origin or because they are not ready to return –­due to, for example, delays in the reconstruction of their housing’ (IDMC 2020b: 26). However, Juliette Benet reported in January 2020 that the IOM’s estimates did not tell the full story ‘of the protracted and multi-­layered impacts of the devastating event on the displaced population’ (Benet 2020). They did not include numbers in informal camps and settlements that formed around cities during and after the emergency response. Three major such sites –­Canaan, Jerusalem and Onaville –­were removed from the official camp list in 2013 at the request of the Haitian government. Benet estimates that as of January 2020

Internal Displacements159 up to 300,000 people were in Canaan camp alone, ten times the ‘official’ total estimate. Many of those are at risk of further displacement due to vulnerability to eviction by people who claim to own the land they are living on. Another, perhaps less well-­known, case of protracted displacement is that of the Manam islanders in Papua New Guinea (IDMC 2015). A volcano erupted on the island in 2004, causing 11,000 people to be evacuated to mainland areas, many in temporary official sites, others hosted informally within the community. The government declared return to the island to be unsafe but no solution to the displacement was suggested until 2006, when land was identified for relocation. The majority of the IDPs agreed to move on the basis that infrastructure was put in place beforehand, and the Manam Resettlement Authority (MRA) was established to do this (IDMC 2015: 53). However, little progress was made due to shortage of funds, lack of political will, bureaucratic delays and poor technical capacity. The MRA was disbanded in 2009 and replaced by a new task force but there was still little progress, mainly due to land disputes, and when the IDMC visited in October 2014 it found that the displaced population had grown to around 15,000. Some had returned to Manam despite the dangerous conditions, following clashes between IDPs and the local population, and there were suggestions that some had been forced to return by the government. The IDMC thinks that more returns have taken place since because of the deteriorating conditions in the care centres and growing local tensions, although it acknowledges a lack of reliable data here. Conditions in the care centres were poor, with inadequate housing and access to health and food, and freedom of movement was restricted because of fear of violence (IDMC 2015: 54). The displacement has continued given volcanic activity on Manam island, and in April 2020 The National reported that IDPs were still in care centres sixteen years after their initial displacement, and that violent conflict continued between the locals and the displaced islanders (Kero 2020). Walter Kälin and Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat comment that ‘a rapidly resolved internal displacement crisis where IDPs find durable solutions –­ sustainable return, local integration or relocation –­has become a rare exception’ (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 4). This means that significant numbers of IDPs ‘live far below the poverty line in substandard housing without security of tenure, and with no or only limited access to basic services, education and health care’ (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 4). In addition, ‘they are particularly vulnerable to gender-­based violence, forced evictions and marginalization’ (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 4). They point out that according to their research, less than 12 per cent of IDPs live in managed camps or self-­governed

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settlements; the majority stay with host families or settle amongst the poor in peri-­urban and urban settings. As with urban refugees, ‘Urban IDPs are often “invisible” and may face specific challenges, such as urban crime or evictions’ (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 16–­17). While UNHCR has defined what protracted displacement means in relation to refugees, there is no accepted definition in relation to IDPs. The IDMC defines displacement lasting at least one year as protracted, while others have suggested applying the refugee definition of five years or more, and the High-­Level Panel suggests that there is a need for relevant actors ‘to come together and agree on a common definition’ (High-­Level Panel 2021b: 76). However, Kälin and Entwistle Chapuisat point out that while duration is relevant, there are other dimensions to protracted displacement for the internally displaced, and reliance on time-­span alone means we ‘do not grasp the vast differences between situations where IDPs, while not being able to return, have found ways to resume (more or less) normal lives, as compared with situations where IDPs experience long-­lasting extreme vulnerability and marginalization’ (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 17). They define protracted displacement as referring to situations in which tangible progress towards durable solutions is slow or stalled for significant periods of time because IDPs are prevented from taking or are unable to take steps that allow them to progressively reduce the vulnerability, impoverishment and marginalization they face as displaced people, in order to regain a self-­sufficient and dignified life and ultimately find a durable solution. (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 20)

This can mean that IDPs remain in extreme or absolute poverty for extended periods of time, remain in irregular settlements without security of tenure or access to basic services, experience extended food insecurity, and remain dependent on long-­term humanitarian assistance with no improvement in their situation. Protracted internal displacement, therefore, can have a range of significant impacts, raising concerns about access to basic rights. THE IMPACT OF INTERNAL DISPLACEMENT While Kälin and Entwistle Chapuisat acknowledge that experiences are different in different contexts, they eloquently describe the impact of internal displacement on people’s lives: Being internally displaced is a devastating experience. From one moment to the next, IDPs may lose their homes, their livelihoods, assets, the security

Internal Displacements161 of community ties and much of what they cherished in their daily lives. Disoriented and frequently traumatized, often fleeing with no more than they can carry, most displaced people desperately look for safety, a place to stay, food to eat, clean water to drink and a minimum of medical assistance. Once these basic needs are addressed, they then seek livelihood opportunities, adequate housing, education for their children and access to basic services. In other words, displacement shatters lives and it often takes a very long time to rebuild them. (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 19)

Michelle Berg captures the intense multidimensional disruption experienced by internally displaced people, examining challenges faced by IDPs in northern Uganda: The social fabric was torn apart, and many young people knew no other life than that in the camps. As a result, the conflict deepened poverty and dependency on humanitarian assistance. Displacement changed the traditional way of life. An already poor region faced destitution –­its population living in appalling conditions in congested camps facing food shortages, security gaps, and a lack of income generation opportunities. (Berg 2011: 128, quoted in Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 30)

Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat state that IDPs face key dimensions of vulnerability to do with safety and security, freedom of movement, access to food and water, basic shelter and housing, health, access to education, housing, land and property rights, documentation, participation in public affairs and social integration. In relation to safety and security, as with refugees, IDPs may be fleeing violence but may also face violence in the places they flee to. There is evidence of a specific risk of conflict with host communities, increased levels of gender-­based and domestic violence, increased risk of trafficking, infiltration by gangs into camps, militarisation of camps and settlements, and violent evictions. In terms of freedom of movement, IDPs in protracted displacement face restrictions, even in contexts of disaster displacement; as we saw in the case of the Manam islanders, their freedom of movement was restricted by threat of violence. Such restrictions ‘can significantly contribute to greater impoverishment by limiting IDPs’ access to livelihood opportunities, social and family networks, basic services and education’ (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 33). There is evidence that IDPs are most affected by food insecurity, and live in basic shelter and housing, often in emergency or transitional shelters that deteriorate over time. Health is a significant vulnerability: ‘Living in a state of chronic displacement places a significant toll on many IDPs’ physical and mental health’ (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 34). Even where they do have access to health care, the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights

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of Internally Displaced Persons, Chaloka Beyani, reported that ‘the negative impact of poor health on the general economic and psychosocial situation of IDPs is often more substantial for them than the general population’ (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 34). In terms of access to work and livelihoods, the evidence is that, even where they are living amongst the urban poor, IDPs can be the poorest of the poor (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 35). In Colombia the percentage of IDPs in extreme poverty is 2.5 times higher than the general population. In Ukraine between 2014 and 2015, 8.6 per cent of the general population lived at or below the national poverty line, but for IDPs this was 81 per cent. People displaced over extended periods of time face challenges asserting rights over property they have fled from, or benefiting from restitution, compensation or reconstruction schemes. They can have difficulties obtaining or replacing lost documents which may be essential for accessing IDP-­related services such as education, employment and health care, and where they do have documents local authorities may not recognise them. Social integration can be a challenge in situations where protracted displacement exacerbates social, cultural and economic marginalisation and stigmatisation (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 36–­7). Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat state: This is particularly true when IDPs are perceived as a long-­term burden on the host community, are viewed as supporting an adverse party in the conflict or live in geographically isolated and/or marginalized locations. Protracted displacement can also exacerbate pre-­ existing discrimination. (Kälin and Entwisle Chapuisat 2017: 37)

According to the political conception of refugeehood, what matters is that refugees have lost membership of their political community, but it argues this loss only applies to people displaced across borders by persecution. The evidence suggests that loss of membership is experienced across different kinds of displacement whatever their cause, and this is true of internal displacement. Internal displacement plays a key role in the argument here as IDPs remain under the jurisdiction of their home government, such that we might imagine that they retain some form of membership of their community. However, the evidence shows that the disruptions and vulnerabilities caused by internal displacement, especially in its protracted form, can have a destructive impact on internally displaced people’s membership of their political community. Even if we were to take a narrow concept of membership, confining it to participation in specifically political processes such as voting in elections, there is clear evidence that internal displacement can radically disrupt it.

Internal Displacements163 Jeremy Grace and Erin Mooney focus on this specific impact, observing that, in practice, ‘IDPs often face obstacles that impede their exercise and enjoyment of their rights to political participation and may even lead to their disenfranchisement and exclusion from the political process and political affairs’ (Grace and Mooney 2007: 1). There are many obstacles which stand in the way of full participation for IDPs. One of these is a residency requirement, where the right to vote is tied to a person’s normal place of residence (Grace and Mooney 2007: 8). In Georgia, for example, national legislation denied IDPs the ability to vote in districts where they were displaced. While they could re-­register in those locations, this involved the obligation to relinquish their IDP status and the loss of support that came with that status (Grace and Mooney 2007: 9). While IDPs in Sri Lanka were allowed to change their registration to their location of displacement, they faced significant challenges in doing so. They were required to return to the area of their original registration and collect a letter of confirmation, when this was neither practical nor safe for them to do so. In addition there was fear of the loss of IDP status and relief aid and support (Grace and Mooney 2007: 9). In other cases Grace and Mooney found ‘exacting evidentiary requirements’, involving the need for extensive documentation which typically would have been lost in the process of being displaced (Grace and Mooney 2007: 10). Obtaining replacement documentation ‘often is very difficult’, and again could require return to places of origin which remain dangerous (Grace and Mooney 2007: 11). In addition, ‘ IDPs are often members of ethnic or religious groups who continue to suffer discrimination during displacement’ (Grace and Mooney 2007: 11). Such discrimination can result in difficulties obtaining voter registration, difficulties accessing information in specific languages, and harassment at polling stations. Insecurity, disaster conditions and distance can make physical access to polling stations challenging. Absentee voting is often not an option, for example in municipal elections in Mostar, Bosnia-­Herzegovina in 1996, when refugees could use absentee votes but IDPs could not. And even when there is the absentee-­voting option it may be so complex that IDPs face frustration in accessing it, for example in elections in Louisiana when people were displaced by Hurricane Katrina (Grace and Mooney 2007: 12). Lack of adequate information can also be a challenge for IDPs, and this is often in terms of lack of clear guidance for electoral officials about procedures for enabling IDPs to participate. In Chechnya in 2003 ‘dramatically conflicting information’ was issued to the effect that, although polls were established for IDPs in the place of temporary residence, IDPs were also told that they could only vote in their place

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of origin, which meant that many were deterred from voting (Grace and Mooney 2007: 13). Roma voters in Serbia faced language barriers which resulted in low participation in elections, and in Turkey languages other than Turkish were banned in political campaigning, meaning that Kurdish IDPs had difficulties participating and making informed choices (Grace and Mooney 2007: 13–­14). All this evidence points to the fact that even if we understand membership of society in a narrow sense of consisting of access to political and civil rights, displaced people experience loss of that membership even though they are displaced within the territory of their home state. If we take a wider view of political membership, which recognises the importance of the social dimension of rights, benefits and protections to underpin the ability to be an active participant in the political community, then the evidence that internal displacement leads to a loss of membership is much wider and deeper. What is needed is a political conception of forced displacement, which recognises that forced displacement, whatever its cause and wherever people are displaced to, is a profoundly political issue, not only a humanitarian one, and so calls for a profoundly political response. CONCLUSION Two key arguments have been developed in this chapter. The first is that attempts to provide an ethically grounded distinction between externally and internally displaced people which justifies the exclusion of the latter from international protection are beset with problems of contradictions and arbitrariness. The boundary problem erupts along any line which supposedly separates refugees and the internally displaced. The second argument is that displacements with different causes seem to give rise to the same key experiences for people, in particular of violence, of protracted displacement, and the loss of membership of the political community. There seems to be no good reason why internal displacements should not be seen as a political issue for the international community, an issue of justice for the internally displaced. What is needed is a political conception of forced displacement, which recognises that all displacements are evidence of a deeply political challenge for the international community, one that it is failing to meet. I will outline that conception in Chapter 11, but in the next chapter I will explore development-­induced displacement. This move is somewhat at odds with my insistence that we should look at the impacts of forced displacements rather than their causes, as the focus is on a specific cause, or range of causes, to do with development. But the move is

Internal Displacements165 justified because what emerges from an understanding of development displacement is a critical awareness of the nature of the international order, one that adds substance to the criticisms I made of that order earlier. That awareness is of an order which is far from stable and enduring, but instead is a process of continual appropriation and dispossession in the name of development. States and their borders are not things but violent processes in which people are constituted as citizens and aliens, wanted and unwanted, refugees and irregular migrants. The forcibly displaced are caught up in unstable border zones that can erupt anywhere, in the peripheries of states, in remote internal regions or at the centre of cities. We will have to ask whether such an order, such an ‘international community’, is capable of delivering what justice requires for displaced people. NOTES 1. ‘Bespoke Resettlement Route for Afghan Refugees Announced’, (accessed 29 April 2022). 2. ‘UNHCR Warns Afghanistan’s Conflict Taking the Heaviest Toll on Displaced Women and Children’, UNHCR, (accessed 18 August 2021). 3. ‘UNHCR Warns That Humanitarian Needs in Afghanistan Cannot Be Forgotten’, UNHCR,  (accessed 23 August 2021). 4. ‘Close to 400 Lao Hmong Repatriated from Thailand’, UNHCR, (accessed 5 August 2021). 5. ‘Thailand: End Mistreatment and Deportation of Lao Hmong’, Human Rights Watch,  (accessed 5 August 2021). 6. ‘Ogata Urges Emergency Lifelines to Refugees and Displaced People in Zaire’, UNHCR,   (ac­­­­ cessed14 July 2021). 7. ‘As Violence Spreads Beyond Nigeria, UNHCR Calls for Urgent Access to the Displaced’, UNHCR, (accessed 14 July 2021). Thanks to Jeff Crisp for bringing these cases to my attention 8. See (accessed 10 March 2020).

Chapter 8 DEVELOPMENT DISPLACEMENT

BERTA CÁCERES During the writing of the second draft of this chapter in July of 2021, it was announced that Roberto David Castillo had been found guilty of the murder of Berta Cáceres.1 Cáceres was an Indigenous leader in Honduras, who organised a campaign to stop construction of the internationally funded Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River, regarded as sacred by the Lenca people. She was murdered on 2 March 2016, and in July 2021 Castillo was found guilty of being a co-­collaborator in ordering her murder. He was a US-­trained former army intelligence officer and president of the hydroelectric company behind the proposed dam. Cáceres was shot dead by hired assassins two days before her forty-­fifth birthday. The court decided that Castillo used paid informants and military contacts to keep track of Cáceres, and coordinated, planned and paid for the assassination. The seven men who carried out the murder were convicted in December 2018. The story of Berta Cáceres is told by Nina Lakhani in her book Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet (Lakhani 2020). I wrote the first draft of this chapter in June 2021, and when I saw the headline on 6 July I remembered that I had mentioned Cáceres in the section on ‘Violence in the Borderlands’. She was one of the many named in a report published in 2018 by Victoria Tauli-­Corpuz, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, where she identifies a global crisis of Indigenous and community leaders being increasingly targeted for violent attack and murder as they try to oppose development projects that expel their people from their lands (Tauli-­Corpuz 2018). In that report she identifies 313 human rights defenders murdered in 2017, most of whom were defending Indigenous land rights, and most murders taking place in the context of development projects. Front Line Defenders, which publishes an annual report on the murder of human rights defenders 166

Development Displacement167 each year, found that at least 331 were murdered in 2020, again mostly in relation to land rights (Front Line Defenders 2020). In this chapter I examine development displacement. This includes the forced resettlement of people to make way for development infrastructure projects such as dams, but also the displacement of people in the broader context of development processes. By the latter I mean the state strategy of pushing people out of what are considered to be marginal lands so that they can be brought under state control in the name of development; in a sense, it is the state that is developing itself through establishing its ‘legitimate’ territorial scope. While this form of displacement has predominantly been seen as taking place in the global South –­ in the developing world –­I also look at how it takes place in the global North, in the form of what is known as gentrification in the centres of developed world cities. Not only can we see this as an example of forced displacement, we can also see it, I argue, in terms of state strategies of pushing people out of marginal places so that those spaces can be ‘developed’ by being brought under state control and opened up for capitalist exploitation. What we will see is that the impact of development displacement is severely disruptive, bringing about disempowerment, impoverishment and dislocation, even in relation to projects with state-­run resettlement programmes. These impacts are even more severe for those who are simply forced out of their habitual homes and lands without any attempt to resettle them. Another theme is that of violence, as we can see from the numbers of human rights defenders murdered each year. Development displacement has often been accompanied by acts of extreme violence committed against those the state wishes to move; the record of massacres of local populations is long, and we will see that Indigenous peoples have especially been targeted for killing. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg member of the Alderville First Nation in Canada, observes: We have experienced four centuries of apocalyptic violence in the name of dispossession in the part of the Nishnaabeg nation I am from and live in. White supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy have targeted and continue to murder, disappear, attack, criminalize, and de-­value our bodies, minds and spirits. (Simpson 2016: 21)

The discussion of development displacement here is not an exercise in filling in gaps in the forced displacement literature. Nor is it an attempt to outline an ethical approach for development displacement in particular (see Penz et al. 2011 for such an approach), and so I remain agnostic on the question of whether some development projects are so valuable

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overall that they justify the displacement of people without their consent (a position Peter Penz and his fellow authors defend as long as a detailed framework of moral responsibilities has been met). Rather, the chapter develops the theoretical and political arguments of the book. What it exposes is the ongoing process of state formation in the shape of internal colonisation of the margins or borderlands of states. This changes our view of the global order of things from a fixed and stable system of sovereign nation states to something that is not an order of things at all. Rather, it is a process in which states are constantly constituting themselves; they are, themselves, processes. Historically, a central part of state formation has been the expulsion of those not considered to be proper members of the nation, the establishment of control over territory, the establishment of borders, and the colonisation of ‘other’ peoples, through extreme violence. The argument is that this is not a history of the past but a history of the present, that the violent process of state formation is constant under the nation-­state system. States are always in a process of being constituted, and it is a process which continues to be oppressive and violent to populations seen as ‘marginal’, especially those peoples seen as Indigenous, present within territories prior to colonisation. This radically undermines the view that the order of sovereign nation states has a form of legitimacy which can be maintained if only we can build in processes that respect basic human rights (and so has radical implications for the development ethics approach to displacement taken by Penz et al. and others). What I will argue is that this global order is incapable of meeting the most basic demands of global justice when it comes to forced displacement and other issues, and so cannot be seen as legitimate. To argue that the system of nation states has legitimacy is to expel Indigenous peoples from politics altogether, to disenfranchise them completely, to render them positionless and invisible. NUMBERS There are no accurate figures for the number of people displaced by infrastructure development projects, and if we include those displaced by the development process in general then the search for numbers is even more elusive. The IDMC might be expected to collect this data as development-­induced displacees are often internally displaced persons, but it does not include them within its numbers. It states that ‘Data is sparse and difficult to obtain, and greater efforts are needed to fill this significant information gap. There is currently no global estimate of the scale of displacement associated with development projects’ (IDMC

Development Displacement169 2019a: 86). However, ‘such projects have historically forced large numbers of people off their land “in the public interest” across the world, as states exercise their power to further development through compulsory acquisition based on the legal principle of eminent domain’ (IDMC 2019b: 24). The problem in monitoring them is that such displacements occur over long periods of time, with some people leaving early in anticipation while others wait until the last moment: ‘Some stay while the project is ongoing if their land has not been taken, but are forced to leave months or years later because the project has hindered their access to natural resources, services or markets’ (IDMC 2019b: 24). Although development-­displaced people are not included in its annual estimates, the IDMC does consider them to be IDPs, stating ‘that people who are forced to leave their home because they have no legal option to oppose it, even if they sign an agreement and receive compensation for it, are considered displaced’ (IDMC 2019b: 24). The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement explicitly refer to development displacement in Principle 6, 2 (c), which asserts that every human being shall have the right to be protected against being arbitrarily displaced ‘in cases of large-­ scale development projects, which are not justified by compelling and overriding public interests’. However, the IDMC may have a different understanding of who counts as an internally displaced person in relation to development projects, as indications are that it would include people displaced by any development project, not just large-­scale ones, and also not just those which cannot be justified by ‘compelling and overriding public interests’. We could argue that the Guiding Principles’ conception of who counts as an internally displaced person when it comes to development displacement is too narrow. While it does not attempt to quantify all such displacements, the IDMC analysed more than 562 resettlement plans published by the World Bank between 2014 and 2017, projects approved for funding by the Bank, and identified more than 130,000 people at risk of displacement in 77 projects, mostly in Sub-­Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Pacific regions. Christopher McDowell estimates between 280 million and 300 million people have been displaced and involuntarily resettled over the past twenty years –­15 million a year –­because of public and private sector infrastructure development projects (McDowell 2014: 333), but comments that ‘this number is likely to be a significant underestimate’ because of under-­reporting (McDowell 2014: 340). Michael Cernea, one of the leading authorities on development displacement, also estimated that more than 15 million people are likely to be involuntarily resettled through such projects each year in the developing world (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 10).

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In terms of the impacts of infrastructure-­development displacement, the United Nations Principles and Guidelines on Development-­Based Evictions and Displacement state that forced evictions ‘share many consequences similar to those resulting from arbitrary displacement’.2 In their discussion of the Three Gorges Dam Project in China, Li Heming and Philip Rees argue that the people displaced by that project should be placed ‘in a more general context of forced migration’ (Heming and Rees 2000: 440). If we understand forced migrants as those who have no realistic choice but to move, then ‘development-­induced displacees’ belong within that category. Like refugees, ‘people displaced by dams are forced to move against their will’ (Heming and Rees 2000: 442). Unlike refugees, there is an assumption that ‘there is a social contract between the many who benefit from the dam and the few who suffer’ (Heming and Rees 2000: 442). They usually have time to make necessary arrangements for relocation although their choice of where to relocate may be highly restricted by state resettlement plans. However, the evidence is that development-­induced displacees are seldom better off than they were before they moved. Another difference is that for refugees the possibility of a return to their home remains, while people replaced by dam projects have lost their homes permanently; there is no prospect of return (Heming and Rees 2000: 443). The emotional and psychological impact of this upon the development displaced is a significant dimension, as the hope of return, however remote, is something that informs many refugee experiences. The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest hydroelectric power project. It commenced in 1994 and was completed in 2009, and in the process it is estimated that around 1.13 million people were displaced to make way for the project, as more than 1,000 square kilometres of land were flooded. However, this estimate is for those people directly displaced by the project, those whose lands were taken by the state and who were resettled elsewhere (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 3). Such projects can also cause indirect displacements, ‘where people lose access to lands and other resources that are vital to their livelihoods, which fundamentally disrupts their patterns of settlement and livelihoods’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 3). The estimate for indirect displacement in relation to the Three Gorges Dam project is around 4 million people over a ten-­year period (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 8). INTERNATIONAL FRAMEWORKS McDowell observes that there is very little international protection against this kind of displacement (McDowell 2014: 334). In 1957 the

Development Displacement171 International Labour Organization developed a Convention on Indi­­­ge­­­ nous and Tribal Populations to try to reduce conflicts caused by development projects, and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization produced a manual for resettlement in 1971, but these were voluntary codes. As we saw above, the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement do state that people should have the right to be protected against arbitrary displacement caused by large infrastructure projects which cannot be justified by compelling and overriding public interests. This, says McDowell, was an attempt to bring development displacement into the realm of humanitarian law and human rights, and away from the weaker domain of corporate codes of conduct (McDowell 2014: 355–­6). However, he points out that what constitutes a compelling public interest is not defined and remains contentious, and the emphasis on large-­ scale projects is misguided as these are more likely to be safeguarded by development banks, when there are thousands of smaller scale projects that displace people. He concludes that ‘there is little evidence that the Principles have brought significant changes in the policies or operations of governments in any high-­profile development project involving involuntary resettlement’ (McDowell 2014: 337). The World Bank has played a leading role in putting in place protections for people affected by development projects, with the Environmental and Social Safeguards framework currently applied to development projects for which it grants funding. Philipp Dann and Michael Riegner explain that these came into force in 2017, replacing the Safeguarding Policies that had developed since the 1980s. Those initial policies arose because of controversies arising from World Bank-­ funded development projects, for example the Narmada Dam in India which displaced around 140,000 people and affected the livelihoods of many more (Dann and Riegner 2019: 540). The reform process that began in 2012 was motivated by several factors, most importantly criticisms of the shortcomings in the existing Standards. Dann and Riegner observe that there were ‘serious implementation deficits’ in that once the loan was granted, implementation was down to the member states (Dann and Riegner 2019: 543). But there had also been a shift to a multipolar global order with the rise of China and India as world powers, nations which disliked the conditionality of the Safeguards and regarded them as a bureaucratic burden (Dann and Riegner 2019: 547). They were less reliant on the World Bank, and funded their own development projects, and acted as development project funders for other states in the developing world. ‘Indeed, they assert an alternative vision for wider international law that is more sovereignty oriented and less individual-­ centred’ (Dann and Riegner 2019: 548); in other words, human rights

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considerations were not a priority. The World Bank needed to find a role in this world order, and so commenced the review of its Standards. Although there were four years of public consultations including hearings with Indigenous groups, consensus was difficult, with civil society organisations and donor states arguing for stronger protection standards, and borrower states looking for greater flexibility and more autonomy for their own national legal systems (Dann and Riegner 2019: 550). As a result, say Dann and Riegner, the new Environmental and Social Safeguards have to be understood as a compromise, a combination of stronger rights protections for those people affected by development projects funded by the World Bank but also increased capacity for developing states to opt out of those protections (Dann and Riegner 2019: 550–­1). The new Safeguards have a vision statement expressing commitment to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and sustainability, and other positive measures, but they also have ‘a much more permissive approach to the use of country systems’, making it much easier to replace them with national processes (Dann and Riegner 2019: 552). Under the previous system, the Use of Country Systems (UCS) was limited to pilot projects under restrictive conditions and was rarely used. Under the new system UCS has been expanded, under pressure from China, India, Brazil and South Africa, and includes high-­risk projects of any volume. This ‘carries the risk that World Bank standards will be undermined. This can . . . represent a risk for project-­affected people and the environment, if they are not adequately protected under the country system’ (Dann and Riegner 2019: 554). A precondition for UCS is that the country system is consistent with the Standards. However, Yogesh and Amita Mahor point out that in the case of India, while it has ‘a stringent and elaborate system of checks and balances, . . . internal contradictions within the government, and the machinations of external vested interests, have made this elaborate system unproductive, and often dishonest’ (Mahor and Mahor 2020: 39). Another attempt to protect those most affected by dam construction in particular was the World Commission on Dams, formed in 1997 to investigate the severe impact dam projects were having on local populations. The Commission was based in South Africa, and chaired by long-­ term anti-­apartheid activist Kader Asmal, with a membership which included Joji Cariño, an Indigenous representative from the Philippines, and Medha Patkar, who fought against the Sardar Sarovar Dam in India. The Chinese government initially sent a representative but withdrew from the process at an early stage, and the Commission was banned from holding a stakeholder consultation meeting in India, and struggled

Development Displacement173 to hear the testimonies of dam-­affected people in authoritarian countries. The Commission published its report in November 2000, setting out a new framework for dam development projects, based on five core values of participatory decision-­making, equity, efficiency, accountability and sustainability (Schulz and Adams 2019: 1). It also identified a set of strategic priorities which included comprehensive options assessment, recognising entitlements, and sharing rivers for peace, development and security (Schulz and Adams 2019: 4). However, few organisations formally adopted its recommendations, and the World Bank refused to endorse the guidelines, its senior water adviser personally lobbying developing countries to reject them.3 Since the Commission issued its recommendations the development landscape has changed, with the World Bank losing its significance and governments of developing states funding their own projects, and increased private investment. Christopher Schulz and William M. Adams comment that twenty years after the report was published dam construction is booming with an estimated 3,700 dams planned or under construction without using the Commission’s recommendations (Schulz and Adams 2019: 5). They cite the experience in Latin America, ‘where the importance of private investment in dam construction has been growing across the region, sometimes facilitated by easing regulatory procedures or providing financial incentives’ (Schulz and Adams 2021: 257). China finances infrastructure development projects through the state-­ owned Export-­Import Bank of China, and is engaged in the Belt and Road Initiative, a trillion dollar investment programme across seventy countries, including support for large-­ scale hydropower projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Human Rights Watch 2020: 1). One such project is the Souapiti Dam in Guinea, which began operations in 2021 and was funded by the China International Water and Electric Corporation, which jointly owns and operates the dam with the government of Guinea. Human Rights Watch reports that the project is predicted to eventually displace around 16,000 people. ‘Forced off their ancestral homes and farmlands, and with much of their land already, or soon to be flooded, displaced communities are struggling to feed their families, restore their livelihoods, and live with dignity’ (Human Rights Watch 2020: 1). Eventually the project will flood 253 square kilometres of land, much of it agricultural. Human Rights Watch reports lack of assistance for the displaced to find new livelihoods following the loss of their land, a compensation scheme that lacks transparency, and a situation made worse for many by lack of adequate recognition for customary land rights under Guinea national law (Human Rights Watch 2020: 27). Human Rights Watch also reported on the impact of the Lower Sesan 2

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dam in Cambodia on the Mekong River Basin, again part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which forced between 4,500 to 5,000 people to move when their villages were submerged.4 Another contemporary example is the Pancheshwar Multipurpose Project (PMP) on the Mahakali–­Sharda River on the border between India and Nepal, predicted to flood 116 square kilometres of land and displace almost 60,000 people (Grönwall 2020). Jenny Grönwall comments, ‘Many of the concerned in the Mahakali–­Sharda basin, as well as experts, challenge the effectiveness and legitimacy of the public policy processes being used to assess and validate the PMP’ (Grönwall 2020: 4). And she says: The PMP, if built, will impact fundamental rights to self-­ determination, land, territory, resources, and cultures belonging to the affected, including Indigenous peoples. In such a project, meaningful dialogue in good faith during the entire process is a prerequisite. However, the various consultations with rights-­holders so far resemble a ticking-­off formality to get project approval by the government authorities; stakeholder involvement has been symbolic rather than meaningful. Moreover, the steps to realise the right to information in decision-­making processes have been characterised by tokenism. (Grönwall 2020: 39–­40)

GENTRIFICATION One key feature of development has been what some commentators call ‘gentrification’, and scholars in the fields of Sociology, Geography and Urban Studies have drawn attention to the way in which this kind of development causes people to be displaced (see Lees et al. 2008, 2010; Lees 2018; Krase and DeSena 2020). Gentrification, of course, captures a variety of processes and has been much debated since the concept was first used by Ruth Glass in 1964 (Glass 1964). The idea of displacement has been central to those debates, but we cannot assume that what is meant coincides with the idea of forced displacement in Refugee Studies, for example; as I pointed out in the Introduction, a multidisciplinary approach has strengths but also dangers when it comes to assuming that shared concepts such as displacement are understood in the same way. The key scholar of displacement when it comes to gentrification is Peter Marcuse (Marcuse 1985), but at the time it was first developed, displacement was largely seen as the outcome of laissez-­faire housing markets (Zhang and He 2018: 135), where gentrification was a process of ‘the repopulation of inner-­city neighbourhoods by affluent groups through residential rehabilitation at the expense of displacement of working-­class residents’ (Lees et al. 2016: 25); this is sometimes

Development Displacement175 described as replacement rather than displacement (see Ivester 2020: 66–­7). However, Zhao Zhang and Shenjing He argue that a shift of focus from global North to global South developments enriched the theoretical framework, as spatial transformation in the global South had a strong state presence. ‘Gentrification-­induced displacement in the developing world has demonstrated other complex features, even coercive domicide against space users’ wills’ (Zhang and He 2016: 135). This in turn has led to a re-­examination of current gentrification displacement in the global North, where ‘direct residential displacement tends to be associated with more state-­led and entrepreneurial actions’ (Zhang and He 2016: 138). Loretta Lees and her co-­authors also argue that we need to take a wider view of the process. They identify gentrification processes in global South cities, through mega-­projects such as the Mysore–­Bangalore Information Corridor in Karnataka State, India, the construction of an information highway, expressway and new townships, which is expected to displace more than 200,000 rural people (Lees et al. 2016: 32). In China, the redevelopment of Beijing in the 1990s affected half a million people, permanently displacing two-­thirds of those (Lees et al. 2016: 172). Mega-­projects such as Olympic Games and World Cups have been used by governments ‘to initiate more permanent urban spatial restructuring’ (Lees et al. 2016: 17). The Geneva-­based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) issued a report in 2007 on the impact of Olympic Games projects in particular, estimating that they had displaced more than 2 million people over twenty years, with a disproportionate impact on minorities such as the homeless, the poor, Roma and African Americans. COHRE found that mega-­events like Olympic Games ‘are often catalysts for redevelopment entailing massive displacements’; and that ‘specific legislation is often concurrently introduced, for example to allow for speedy expropriations of property or to criminalise homelessness’ (COHRE 2007: 11). Around 720,000 people were forcibly evicted in Seoul, South Korea, for the 1988 Olympic Games; housing in Barcelona became so unaffordable because of the development of the city around the 1992 Olympic event that low-­income earners were forced to leave; in Atlanta, USA, 9,000 arrest citations were issued to homeless people as part of a campaign to ‘clean the streets’, and around 30,000 people displaced by gentrification and development related to the 1996 Olympics; and in Athens for the 2004 Games, ‘hundreds of Roma were displaced under the pretext of Olympic-­related preparations’ (COHRE 2007: 11). Mike Duignan and Adam Talbot report that in the run-­up to the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, ‘the favela community of Vila Autódromo was virtually destroyed’ because of its location on prime real estate on Rio de Janeiro’s water’s edge (Duignan and Talbot 2021).

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‘Dwellings were demolished, and hundreds of families were pressured to leave’; in all, 22,059 households were evicted (Duignan and Talbot 2021). Naofumi Suzuki and his co-­authors write about the forced evictions in Tokyo for the 2020 Games (which eventually took place in 2021 as a result of the COVID-­19 pandemic) because of the building of a new stadium and related urban development in the surrounding area. Two groups of people were displaced: The homeless people who lived in and around the Meiji Park surrounding the stadium were evicted due to the stadium expansion. Meanwhile, the Kasumigaoka public housing estate, situated just south of the park, was to be knocked down to create a new open space for visitors of the stadium. (Suzuki et al. 2018: 90)

The evictions of the homeless ‘took place in a sudden and violent manner’, with belongings being set on fire (Suzuki et al. 2018: 91); and the residents of the Kasumigaoka estate received relocation notices in July 2012, and ‘irresistable pressure started being felt by the residents as if they were required to sacrifice themselves for the “national policy”’ (Suzuki et al. 2018: 91). A large majority of the residents ‘were elderly and attached to their “home”, and thus would have great difficulties in relocating, both physically and emotionally’ (Suzuki et al. 2018: 93). The Olympics are just one kind of displacement event, and COHRE’s research shows that cultural, sporting and political mega-­ events in general are characterised by negative housing impacts. It found that 18,000 people were evicted from the site of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, and at least 400,000 people were moved to make way for related urban development; the 2002 Miss World Beauty Pageant in Abuja in Nigeria led to the destruction of around 1,000 homes in shantytowns; the 500th Columbus anniversary in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic saw 180,000 people evicted in 1992; the 1991 Miss Universe Beauty Pageant in Bangkok led to 5,000 people being evicted; between 1,400 and 3,000 were evicted because of the 1988 Expo in Brisbane; Vancouver saw the loss of between 1,000 and 2,000 low-­income housing units because of the 1986 World Fair; and the 1982 World Fair in Knoxville led to the eviction of 1,500 tenants (COHRE 2007: 11). Political events such as the 1991 IMF–­World Bank conference in Seoul also have a negative impact, with 1,200 slum-­dwelling families evicted for that event (COHRE 2007: 12). Gentrification as a process of displacement also shifts our focus from the global South to the global North, as it is more usually understood as something that happens in global North cities. An implication of this is

Development Displacement177 that, given the scale of gentrification projects in those cities, large numbers of people in global North states are being forcibly displaced but not counted as internally displaced people for the purposes of international protection and assistance. Lees et al. state, ‘Displacement, the forced displacement of poor and working class people from the spaces and places to which they have legitimate social and historical claims, is what constitutes gentrification with its remaking of space for the middle classes and the elite’ (Lees et al. 2010: 317). Once more, mega-­projects such as Olympic Games can pave the way for this process, as we saw above in the cases of Atlanta, Barcelona and Tokyo, and Anna Wherry examines the impact of the London Olympics of 2012. Around 1,000 people from low-­income communities were forcibly evicted to make way for the construction of the Olympic Park, but ‘processes of displacement reach beyond these immediate evictions’ (Wherry 2015: 2). Wherry asks why this kind of displacement is not conceptualised as ‘forced migration’, and why most scholarship on forced displacement focuses on the developing world and not developed nations.5 While we have seen that scholars working in the fields of Geography and Urban Studies have conceptualised this kind of impact as forced displacement, it remains true that literature in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies and the Philosophy of Migration have largely overlooked it; and it is also true that most of the literature in those former disciplines remains focused on the issue of development displacement in the global South. This is not only a gap in the literature, argues Wherry; rather, it reveals that the concept of forced migration rests on a hidden humanitarian logic, which ‘sets the boundaries of forced migration and defines the figure of the forced migrant’ (Wherry 2015: 3). Forced migrants are those ‘who experience existential threats to life, are the product of a failure of the “state–­citizen” bond, and inhabit a perceived geography of forced migration that primarily exists in the global South’ (Wherry 2015: 3). Displacements that occur in global North states are ‘consequently relegated to the margins of the forced migration concept’ (Wherry 2015: 3). In other words, the humanitarian logic conceals an act of power which locates forced displacement elsewhere in the world, but not ‘here’. Under this framework, East Londoners forced to leave their homes to make way for the Olympics –­and the residents of Welsh villages such as Capel Celyn, forced to abandon their homes in the face of reservoirs in the 1960s6 –­cannot be understood as falling within the logic of humanitarianism because it is assumed that they were not displaced through existential threats to their lives. The challenge for theorists is to ‘shift away from assumptions about where and to whom displacement occurs –­assumptions that are embedded in particular power relations –­to truly consider

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displacement in all its forms’ (Wherry 2015: 25). Despite Wherry’s challenge, there is still a distance to travel for political theorists of forced displacement to conceive of development displacement as something that impacts on the lives of people living in global North states. IMPACTS OF DEVELOPMENT DISPLACEMENT As with the other forms of displacement we have examined in this book, development-­ induced displacement has a range of impacts on those affected by it. Chris de Wet observes that people are ‘dis-­emplaced, and have to reconstitute, i.e. re-­emplace themselves socially, politically and economically in a new environment’ (de Wet 2015: 86); and he concludes, ‘There seems no way out of the fact that resettlement hurts, definitely in the short term and, often, also in the longer term’ (de Wet 2015: 92). Olivia Bennett and Christopher McDowell point to studies that show that ‘the creation of new forms of impoverishment or the deepening of existing forms of impoverishment and the distancing of displaced people from full participation in society are . . . marked features of the displacement–­ impoverishment nexus’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 10). Michael Cernea identifies the potential risks intrinsic to development-­ induced displacement as landlessness, joblessness, homelessness, marginalisation, food insecurity, increased morbidity and mortality, loss of common property, and community disarticulation (Cernea 2021). Bennett and McDowell describe community disarticulation as ‘the tearing apart of social structures, interpersonal ties, and the enveloping social fabric as a result of forced resettlement’, and as the most complex impact of the displacement process (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 11). They identify a nexus ‘between displacement, resettlement, and disenfranchisement arising out of the resettlement process, the impoverishment that so often follows, and the loss of status and citizenship rights’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 205–­6). This results in people ‘losing power over their lives and being unable to alter or even influence the course of events’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 206). They observe that ‘displaced people are in many senses a special category of people who, by virtue of their displacement and resettlement, enter a different realm of social and political relations and who face a particular set of interlocking disadvantages’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 207). These impacts include ‘deep seated sociocultural and psychological consequences . . . including crises of identity, a detrimental impact on health’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 207). Bennett and McDowell identify ‘the psychological distress caused by grieving for lost places and the

Development Displacement179 sense of having lost control over so much in one’s life beyond simply the physical location where it is being played out’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 214). In interviews with people displaced by the Tarbela Dam in Pakistan in 1976, they found that ‘their memories were extraordinarily vivid’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 38). One narrator interviewed nearly thirty years after being displaced reported that they never felt ‘at home’ in their new location (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 44); and, ‘for many of the resettled, in particular those who left in their middle age, Tarbela remained their “home” some 30 years on and their attachment to it was undimmed’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 48). In these and other interviews and testimonies from displaced people, the theme of mourning for a lost home or homeland recurs strongly, which should lead us to ask whether political theories of forced displacement that focus on political membership of a state, of citizenship, as the most significant loss, fail to grasp the extent to which it is the loss of home or homeland which is at the forefront of displaced people’s experiences. Again, the loss of any hope of return is particularly important in the case of development displacement. This echoes some of the impacts that gentrification displacement has in cities, both in the global South and in the global North. Adam Elliott-­Cooper and his fellow authors describe this kind of urban displacement as ‘a form of un-­homing that violently severs the connection between people and place’ (Elliott-­Cooper et al. 2020: 494). Yunpeng Zhang explicitly uses the concept of violence in relation to urban redevelopment in China, where older residents compared the processes of displacement to their experience of war (Zhang 2018: 201, cited in Elliott-­Cooper et al. 2020: 498). Elliott-­Cooper et al. compare with this ‘the psychological trauma of the economic, social and emotional coercion of gentrification-­led displacement’ in cities such as London (Elliott-­ Cooper et al. 2020: 500). Importantly, they point out that displacement ‘is never a one-­ off event but a series of attritional micro-­events that unfold over time, generating different emotions and mental states for those affected: anxiety, hope, confusion, fear, dislocation, loss, anticipation, dread and so on’ (Elliott-­Cooper et al. 2020: 502). In some cases, such as the demolition of the ‘million estates’ around Stockholm, it can be years between the announcement of redevelopment and tenants knowing what will happen to them. In that period, neighbourhoods can ‘desertify’ and services shut down. ‘In such cases, the life of residents is effectively suspended: there is no longer any incentive to improve the neighbourhood, nor is it clear how they should plan for the future. They are effectively trapped in the present, and displaced before the event’ (Elliott-­Cooper et al. 2020: 503).

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This has psychological and physical impacts, ‘with the tortuous and exhausting processes of establishing how displacement will impact on one’s home-­space leading to feelings of shame, stress and anxiety’ (Elliott-­ Cooper et al. 2020: 503). Catharina Thörn points out that as long ago as 1966 Marc Fried had identified grief as ‘the only reasonable description’ of the stress, feelings of depression, anger and homesickness experienced by people relocated in Boston when their neighbourhood, identified as a slum, was demolished for new development (Thörn 2020: 179; see Fried 1966). Psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove used the term ‘root shock’ as something that could affect an entire neighbourhood, ‘where the grief should be understood not only as a personal matter, but also as a shock that rips apart people’s social networks and relationships’ (Thörn 2020: 179; see Fullilove 2004). Thörn observes, ‘Gentrification is a process that invades people’s homes’ (Thörn 2020: 180). While we have seen the systemic and structural violence involved in much development displacement, direct, physical violence in the form of murder and massacres has been part of its history in the developing world, especially in relation to dam construction. Heming and Rees cite the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe, where 6,000 Gwembe Tonga people were removed by force, with 9 people being killed and more than 30 injured, and the Chico Dam in the Philippines, where the police and army were used to crush opposition (Heming and Rees 2000: 453). The Chico Dam was planned by the Marcos regime in 1974, with four dams built on the Chico River in the Cordillera mountain range predicted to flood around 1,400 square kilometres and displace around 100,000 people, mostly of the Kalinga and Bontok Indigenous peoples, whose farmland, homes, communal forests and sacred burial grounds would be lost. The project was initially to be funded by the World Bank, but opposition was organised, with Macli-­ing Dulag, an elder of the Butbut tribe in the mountain village of Bugnay, acting as a leader.7 He was murdered by government soldiers in April 1980, when they surrounded his house and sprayed it with bullets. Given the attention this received the World Bank withdrew from the project, forcing the government to cancel it. The Chixoy Dam in Guatemala is also an example of the violence and death that can accompany development projects. Jaroslave Colajacomo gave a detailed account of the Chixoy Dam massacres in his 1999 report for the World Commission on Dams. The Chixoy Dam development was announced by Guatemala’s National Institute of Electrification (INDE) in 1975, with funding from the Inter-­American Bank and the World Bank. The plan was for a basin for 50 kilometres along the river affecting around 3,445 people. Colajacomo comments, ‘The project

Development Displacement181 completely disregarded the people displaced by the dam: no consultation with local Indigenous people was envisaged or undertaken in the planning of the Chixoy dam that ended in 1975 and no meaningful information was given to them’ (Colajacomo 1999: 2). The village of Río Negro, the centre of the violence, was the largest community along the Chixoy River, made up of Achì-­speaking Maya people. They farmed parcels of land, raised livestock and engaged in fishing along the fertile lands of the riverbanks. Representatives of INDE flew over Río Negro in 1976 to inform the people that the dam was going to be built and their lands would be flooded. The Chixoy Project officially began in 1976. After some delays and modifications following an earthquake, the area was deemed a zone of national emergency in 1978 so that families could be resettled as an urgent priority. INDE offered resettlement in Finca Pacux, close to the nearby town of Rabinal, and work began on that site in 1978, but residents from Río Negro rejected the site and after this a campaign of intimidation began. Colajacomo reports that seven people were killed in March 1980, and in July that year two representatives of Río Negro were asked to attend a meeting in Rabinal to present documents proving ownership over the affected land; two mutilated bodies were later discovered and those documents were never found. In 1981 Civil Defence Patrols (PAC) were introduced, ‘an armed network of community-­ based, counter-­ insurgency militias, targeting community leaders, religious workers, development specialists, human rights workers, and others’ (Colajacomo 1999: 4). A PAC was formed in the neighbouring village of Xocox. In February 1982, 73 men and women from Río Negro were ordered to report to Xocox. According to inhabitants of Xocox they were taken to military headquarters, but Río Negro inhabitants believed them to have been massacred by the Xocox PAC. In March 1982, 70 women and 107 children were taken from Río Negro into the mountains and raped and killed. Three women and some children managed to escape. Eighteen children of working age were kidnapped and enslaved for many years (Colajacomo 1999: 5). In September 1982, 84 Río Negro inhabitants were tortured and killed, and 15 women were forced to board a helicopter and disappeared. Altogether, between February and September 1982, Colajacomo estimates that around 400 men, women and children from Río Negro had been killed by the PAC and Guatemalan military in what the government declared to be counterinsurgency activities. The filling of the basin began in January 1983, and people started to move away and the village of Río Negro was abandoned. Many took refuge in the mountains, remaining there until an amnesty in 1985. Those

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who did move to the resettlement village of Pacux had no resources and found badly constructed houses, already damaged by the military who had been using it as a base from which to control guerrilla movements. ‘The situation was so dramatic that in the first years INDE had to distribute food to the resettled people’ (Colajacomo 1999: 5). The violence continued for many years as men arriving at the resettlement site were taken by the military for torture and interrogation. Activism around the massacres began in 1992, and mass graves were exhumed in November 1993. They were moved to a new gravesite in 1995 where a Monument to Truth was inaugurated. A World Bank mission was sent to investigate, which recognised the severity of the massacres ‘but yet admitted no responsibility’ (Colajacomo 1999: 5). VIOLENCE IN THE BORDERLANDS It was, of course, in response to events like these that the World Bank reviewed its funding practices and drew up the Safeguards we examined in the ‘International Frameworks’ section of this chapter. However, despite those Safeguards, violence against Indigenous peoples who oppose development projects has continued. If we take a wider perspective of what ‘development’ means, this violence extends to people who face eviction from their lands from agribusiness, mining, logging and other extractive industries as they look to expand their operations through forced evictions. Victoria Tauli-­ Corpuz, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, presented a report to the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 which highlighted the fact that intensified competition for exploitation of natural resources had led to a drastic increase in acts of violence against Indigenous peoples resisting large-­scale development projects (Tauli-­Corpuz 2018: 3). She argues that the lack of respect of collective land rights has undermined the ability of Indigenous peoples to defend their land effectively (Tauli-­Corpuz 2018: 8). She states: Disregard of Indigenous rights of traditional lands ownership breeds tensions, subsequent violence and criminalization, as Indigenous peoples become trespassers or illegal occupants of their own lands, subject to criminal charges such as ‘usurpation’ or illegal occupation, and liable to forced evictions and removal from the lands they rely upon for their livelihoods, social and cultural cohesion and spiritual traditions. In the worst instances, escalating militarization, compounded by historical marginalization, results in Indigenous peoples being targeted under national security acts and antiterrorism legislation, putting them in the line of fire, at times literally, by the army and the police. (Tauli-­Corpuz 2018: 8)

Development Displacement183 In her report Tauli-­Corpuz identified a ‘global crisis’ as Indigenous and community leaders who try to oppose these developments are increasingly targeted for violent attacks. She reports that 313 human rights defenders were murdered across 27 countries in 2017, and 67 per cent of those were engaged in the defence of land, environmental and Indigenous peoples’ rights, with most of the killings taking place in the context of mega-­projects, extractive industries and big business (Tauli-­ Corpuz 2018: 9). One of the many examples she cites in her report is of Berta Cáceres, killed because of opposition to the proposed Agua Zarca dam in Honduras, where this chapter began. Tauli-­Corpuz’s report draws on the work of the organisation Front Line Defenders, which publishes an annual report on human rights defenders killed each year. Its report for the year 2020 states that at least 331 human rights defenders were killed, of which 69 per cent were working on land, Indigenous peoples’ and environmental rights, and 26 per cent specifically on Indigenous peoples’ rights. The killings took place across 25 countries, mostly in Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Honduras, Colombia, the Philippines and Afghanistan (Front Line Defenders 2020: 4). As well as killings, these activists were also subjected to detention and arrest, physical attack, and torture and ill-­treatment, and again most of the people targeted were working on land, environmental and Indigenous peoples’ rights. In the Philippines, 25 activists were killed, and 84 per cent of those were working on land, environmental and Indigenous peoples’ rights. In one incident in December 2020, 9 Indigenous leaders and activists of the Tumanduk nga Mangunguma nga Nagapangapin sa Duta kag Kabuhi (TUMANDUK) community were shot dead on Panay Island during a police and military operation, ‘seemingly designed to break the resistance to the construction of a mega-­dam’ (Front Line Defenders 2020: 30). All this points to a wider view of the development process rather than an exclusive focus on infrastructure projects such as dam construction, as people are pushed out of their homes to make way for agribusiness and extractive projects in the name of progress. One aspect of this process of dispossession is the practice of ‘land grabbing’, defined by Jérémie Gilbert as ‘the large-­scale acquisition of land for commercial or industrial purposes, such as agricultural and biofuel production, mining and logging concessions, big infrastructure development or tourism’, which is undertaken ‘with limited (if any) consultation of the local communities, limited (if any) compensation, and a lack of regard for environmental sustainability and equitable access to, or control over, water resources’ (Gilbert 2017: 11). One of the triggers for the current wave of large-­scale land acquisition was the combined food and financial crises

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of 2007–­8, and there has been a sharp increase in land grabbing globally, ‘notably by foreign investors in search of arable land and natural resources’ (Gilbert 2017: 8). Indigenous peoples have been particularly affected. Over the past decade, many millions of hectares of land have been taken in this way, mostly in Africa. While it is difficult to arrive at an exact figure, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that at least 20 million hectares had been acquired in Africa between 2007 and 2009, and more recent figures put that at around 80 million hectares. In 2011 Oxfam reported that 227 million hectares had been acquired worldwide since 2000 (Gilbert 2017: 12). ‘The impacts on local communities have been brutal. They have lost their lands, forests and water sources and have suffered violent repression, food insecurity and all kinds of social ills’ (AFSA et al. 2020: 5). Gilbert reports that although Africa is at the centre of land grabs, it is a global practice with large tracts being taken over in Asia, Latin America and former Soviet countries. The investment for these takeovers comes mainly from countries such as the United States, Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom, although China, India, South Korea and the Gulf States are increasing their activities. Most deals are private investments involving Western banks and financial institutions, although ‘in most situations, the land deals lack transparency and also involve multiple layers of different actors’ (Gilbert 2017: 12). A report by Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN) and Witness Radio Organisation on land grabs in Uganda examines what happened in Kiryandongo District, where three multinational companies were at the centre of violent evictions of people from their homes (AFSA et al. 2020). They report that more than 35,000 people from more than 20 villages have been made homeless after being evicted from around 9,300 acres of land. Many of the people living in Kiryandongo had arrived there through displacement caused by war or disasters (AFSA et al. 2020: 6). When they began to protest against the loss of their lands they were subjected to arrest and detention and violence. One resident, Mukabariyanga Anamario, reports that people came with guns and threatened her and her children, saying they should leave their house. ‘They pushed us out forcefully and I was caned thoroughly in the back without consideration of my pregnancy. I was thrown down by one of the evictors and continued being beaten on the ground’ (AFSA et al. 2020: 11). While the communities seek legal remedies, ‘the evictions, arbitrary arrests and human rights violations –­even during the COVID

Development Displacement185 19 pandemic and despite a ministerial directive not to evict any land occupants –­have continued’ (AFSA et al. 2020: 15–­16). In July 2021 it was announced that the Korindo group, a Korean producer of palm oil, would lose its endorsement by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) because it was buying large areas of rainforest in the remote Indonesian province of Papua, and there was evidence that fires were being deliberately set in those forests to clear them so that palm oil plantations could be established.8 The BBC reported that the company had cleared nearly 60,000 hectares of forest, and an FSC report in 2018, which was never published after legal threats from the company, found that its palm oil operation had destroyed 30,000 hectares of high conservation forest, and that the company was ‘on the balance of probability . . . supporting the violation of traditional and human rights for its own benefit’, and was ‘directly benefitting from the military presence to gain an unfair economic advantage’ by ‘providing unfair compensation rates to communities’. Reporting for the BBC in November 2020, Ayomi Amindoni and Rebecca Henschke say that much of the land was the traditional home of the Mandobo tribe. A member of the Mandobo, Petrus Kinggo, told the BBC that he was approached by Korindo in 2014 and asked to help persuade his tribe and ten others to accept £6 a hectare in compensation for their land. The company arrived with permits and wanted a quick transaction, and, say Amindoni and Henschke, ‘the promise of development was coupled with subtle intimidation’ (Amindoni and Henschke 2020). The military police came to Mr Kinggo’s house, telling him he had to meet with the company. ‘They said they didn’t know what would happen to me if I didn’t’, reported Mr Kinggo (Amindoni and Henschke 2020). Elisabeth Ndiwaen, another member of the Mandobo, told the BBC, ‘The company didn’t bring prosperity . . . The forest is gone and we are living in poverty’ (Amindoni and Henschke 2020). Korindo promised free schools and health, and to build new roads and provide clean water. None of these promises was delivered, and thousands of hectares of the Mandobo tribe’s rainforest have been replaced with palm oil plantations. While an important aspect of this ‘development’ process of dispossession is profitability for private investors and states, a crucial dimension is control of territory. Bennett and McDowell identify state evictions as a strategy of control: resettlement should not be viewed as merely happenstance, or as a by-­product of a particular project; rather, the moving of people is in itself a means of

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advancing forms of political, economic, and social change and is frequently a means to extend state control. (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 4–­5)

This has particularly been observed in states emerging from colonialism in the twentieth century who believed that ‘economic and social progress could be achieved through mass population relocation’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 5). Bennett and McDowell make the crucial point that ‘deliberate planned displacement and the forced settlement of populations by states has been a universal feature of state formation and nation building’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 5). Much of this nation-­building has taken the form of formerly colonised states themselves pursuing a programme of colonisation of marginal regions and peoples to establish political, social and economic control. For example, Rodolphe de Koninck draws attention to the process of colonisation taking place in Vietnam and Indonesia, a general process as ‘the modern state needs to reaffirm its own territoriality by establishing tighter control over people’s activities as well as movement’ (de Koninck 2006: 34). He says of his case studies, ‘In both cases, the State has been heavily involved in promoting and financing the opening of the frontier to new settlers and the development of so-­called marginal lands, with the explicit aim of better integrating them into the national territory’ (de Koninck 2006: 34). The discourse of ‘development’ as part of ‘nation-­building’ in such regions has ‘meant colonising the “margins”, through state sponsored agricultural expansion’ (de Koninck 2006: 36). CONCLUSION As Wherry pointed out, this discussion of development displacement is not an exercise in gap-­filling in the literature but has profound implications for how forced displacement is conceptualised generally and for how we conceive of the global order. We cannot accept an idealised vision of that order as consisting of sovereign nation states in a more or less stable system of territories demarcated by clear border lines; instead, that system is a process in which nation states constitute themselves violently, and borders themselves are part of that process, and are not so much lines on a map as zones which can occur anywhere as states seek to impose their control. Another lesson that has emerged is that displaced people repeatedly say that the most significant thing that they have lost through their displacement is not their citizenship or political membership but their home. This is what they mourn for, through the grief of exile. It is not clear to me, as yet, whether a normative Political

Development Displacement187 Theory of forced displacement which builds itself so strongly around concepts of nation state, membership and citizenship can have anything to say about this specific loss. In the next chapter I explore these implications for how we understand nation states and their borders, as violent and indistinct processes and spaces, and work towards an ethical framework for forced displacement that is grounded upon this understanding of the global order. NOTES 1. ‘Berta Cáceres Assassination: Ex-­Head of Dam Company Found Guilty’, Guardian newspaper, 6 July 2021, (accessed 5 July 2021). 2. (accessed 29 April 2022). 3. (accessed 15 July 2021). 4. ‘Left with Fish Too Small to Sell in Cambodia’s Mekong River Basin: How a China-­Built Damn Destroyed an Ecosystem and Livelihoods’, Human Rights Watch, 10 August 2021,   (accessed  23  August 2021). 5. Thanks to Cathryn Costello for drawing Anna Wherry’s work to my attention. 6. (accessed 23 September 2021). 7. (accessed 15 July 2021). 8. ‘Korindo: Korean Palm Oil Giant Stripped of Sustainability Status’, BBC News, 15 July 2021, (accessed 15 July 2021).

Chapter 9 BORDER ZONES

DESTIERRO Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was built in 1998 to memorialise those lost in that country’s Dirty War. In 2017 the Park hosted an exhibition by the British artist Anish Kapoor, entitled Destierro. The work consisted of 100 tonnes of earth painted red, with a bright blue digger in-­between the mounds.1 While the Park is dedicated to those lost through state persecution (it was built close to the military airport from where many dissidents were flown to be dropped over the Atlantic Ocean), Kapoor’s exhibition aimed to highlight those lost through neglect, engaging with a new sense of borders brought about by the refugee ‘crisis’. The curator of the show, Marcello Dantas, said, ‘The real borders of today’s world are no longer the ones that separate nations, but the borders that separate those that have some bit of ground to stand on and those who have none.’2 Aurora Vergara-­Figueroa says that the term destierro translates as ‘uprooting, deracination, exile, exodus, and banishment’ (Vergara-­Figueroa 2018: 1). It captures historically complex processes which concepts such as forced displacement and forced migration are too limited to contain: ‘Their analytical scope is too narrow’ (Vergara-­Figueroa 2018: xxvi). A major aim of this project is to widen the concept of forced displacement so that it can better capture the range of people caught up in these complex processes of destierro. Part of this has to be to move away from a conception of a global order made up of nation states clearly demarcated by borders as incisive lines on the surface of the globe –­ states as pieces of a jigsaw that fit neatly together to take up all the space. Rather, what we have seen, especially through the experiences of Indigenous people dispossessed through development, is that there are borderlands and border zones, both on the peripheries of nation states and within them, where those states seek to impose control and identity on people who may resist them. These can be spaces of extreme 188

Border Zones189 violence, where people are constituted as wanted or unwanted by states, and people who have lived in their homes for generations can find themselves caught up in the processes of destierro. And so this chapter reassesses how we should conceive of borders in this global disorder, and indeed of that global disorder itself. BORDERLANDS David Owen characterises the normative role of the modern refugee regime as a legitimacy-­repair mechanism for the global order of states. The legitimacy of that order depends on its ability to balance the two international norms of state sovereignty and international human rights (Owen 2020: 45). Maintaining this legitimacy is a collective responsibility, because states are co-­participants in the governance of this order. Normally, the balance of legitimacy is met by states taking responsibility for securing the human rights of their own members on the assumption that other states will do the same. However, if certain states are unwilling or unable to secure the human rights of their own citizens, ‘this constructs a legitimacy problem not only for the states in question, but also for the international order of states as a regime of global governance’ (Owen 2020: 46). This problem is solved by having a refugee protection regime. This is, says Owen, a conceptual and normative reframing of refugee protection, of the meaning and purpose of the institution of refugeehood –­namely one that ties the international refugee regime to the work of repairing legitimacy problems confronted by an international order of states whose legitimacy hangs on their claim to be able to reconcile state sovereignty with human rights. (Owen 2020: 101–­2)

At the start of his book Owen tells the story of two vessels, the SS St Louis which we explored in Chapter 1, and the contemporary story of the MV Aquarius, a rescue vessel operated by SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, and the challenges it faced in finding safe harbour for those it rescued, leading it to end its operations in December 2018 (Owen 2020: xi–­xiii). At the end of his book he warns that the case of the Aquarius is a warning signal of the potential emergence of a world in which the reconciliation of state sovereignty and human rights ceases to be a matter of political concern, in which human rights are sacrificed on the altar of a far-­right nationalist vision of state sovereignty. (Owen 2020: 114)

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I want to suggest that the evidence we have encountered in this book shows that we already live in such a world, and that it is not necessary for far-­right nationalists to take control of global North states for it to exist. Global North governments of all different political shades have been prioritising their sovereignty over the human rights of the displaced and migrants in general, and have done so in extremely violent ways, including those states that would normally be upheld as paragons of liberal democracy. An implication of accepting this reality is that the concept of a ‘legitimacy-­repair mechanism’ for the global system has no application; there is no legitimacy to repair here. Indeed, what we need to do in the face of the evidence is radically reconceptualise the global order and the Political Theory that embodies it. The most crucial evidence here comes from the previous chapter on development displacement, especially Rodolphe de Koninck’s point that the development processes we are witnessing in some global South states are part of a general process, as ‘the modern state needs to reaffirm its own territoriality by establishing tighter control over people’s activities as well as movement’ (de Koninck 2006: 34). This moves us away from the conception of the global order as a world divided into separate territories governed by distinct nation states, demarcated by borders understood as static lines on the surface of the globe. Rather, there are border zones or borderlands, marginal spaces where control and authority is indistinct, or spaces where people are neither one thing nor another. Gloria Anzaldúa writes about the borderlands of the United States Southwest and the Mexican border, saying, ‘the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy’ (Anzaldúa 1987: preface). She describes herself as a border woman, ‘straddling that tejas-­Mexican border, and others, all my life’ (Anzaldúa 1987: preface). It is a place of contradictions: ‘Hatred, anger and exploitations are the prominent features of this landscape’ (Anzaldúa 1987: preface). She contrasts borderlands and borders: Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. (Anzaldúa 1987: 3)

Transgressors, aliens, live in the borderland –­‘the squint-­eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-­breed,

Border Zones191 the half dead; in short, those who cross over, or go through the confines of the “normal”’ (Anzaldúa 1987: 3). But this idea of the borderland is not confined to radical critiques of the global order. A recent report by the World Bank focuses on the importance of ‘borderlands’ for mainstream development thinking. Looking at the Horn of Africa in particular, the authors comment, ‘Development policy makers and social scientists often suffer from “borderland blindness”, treating the territorially bounded nation-­state as both the central unit of analysis and as the primary site of development intervention’ (Vemuru et al. 2020: 2). Three assumptions lie behind this state-­centric approach to development policy making: (1) that the state exercises authority over its entire territory; (2) that we can have a clear delineation between the domestic and international spheres; and (3) that group identities coincide with the territorial boundaries of the state. The Horn of Africa is at least one place where all of these assumptions have to be rejected, with its long history of colonial rule, separatism, territorial conflicts, fluid identities, mobility, and ‘multiple overlapping hybrid governance institutions’ (Vemuru et al. 2020: 2). If we focus on the existence and importance of borderlands, we will foreground the need ‘to take context and history seriously and to understand power as it actually exists on the ground’ (Vemuru et al. 2020: 2). The borderlands in the Horn of Africa are places of economic, social and political marginalisation, entrenched poverty, forced displacement and environmental degradation, all spilling over state borders. And they are zones of violence, contested and fought over by different groups: ‘Border areas are becoming increasingly militarized, with an increase in the circulation of weapons as well as in the number of people who use violence in pursuit of their goals’ (Vemuru et al. 2020: 3). One reason for that violence is the protection of borders themselves; borders, in this region of Africa at least, are generating spaces of violence. Jonathan Goodhand, in his contribution to the report, comments, ‘State building is the diffusion of power outward from center to the periphery, and the borderlands are unruly spaces that need to be incorporated and pacified’ (Goodhand 2020: 178). And he concludes, ‘Borders are not so much a line as a relation; they epitomize contradictory forces –­they are something that simultaneously divides and connects, a source of security, a barrier that protects, and a site of friction and conflict’ (Goodhand 2020: 179). ABJECTION When it comes to Indigenous peoples, we can see that these borderlands need not be literally at the borders of the state. As we saw with de

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Koninck’s examples of Vietnam and Indonesia, the ‘frontier’ which needs to be colonised can be internal to the state, those remote places where state control and authority are weaker. This gives us another dimension of the reconceptualisation of the global order of nation states: that nation states are continually in the process of constituting and reconstituting themselves, and this continual process of nation-­building continues to be oppressive and violent to populations seen as ‘marginal’, especially those peoples seen as Indigenous, present within territories prior to colonisation. The ‘nation-­state’ system continues to be constituted through processes of violent ‘nation-­building’ and colonisation. Vergara-­ Figueroa draws attention to the massacre of 119 people killed in the Catholic church of Bellavista, in Bojayá Municipality, Chocó Department, Colombia in May 2002.3 While at the time the slaughter was blamed on guerrillas, six years later a report by the Administrative Court of Quibdo, Chocó, said the government was administratively responsible (Vergara-­Figueroa 2018: xx). The region of Chocó –­with a population made up of 82.7 per cent who self-­identified as Afrodescendant in a 2005 census –­was conceived by the authorities in a way familiar in our discussion of development displacement: this region has been represented as a space of darkness where it is impossible to live, and as a space of extreme poverty and ignorance, which is unable to administrate its own resources. On the other hand, the region is seen as having potential for territorial expansion, as an area open for exploration, and continuing colonialization. (Vergara-­Figueroa 2018: xx)

Vergara-­Figueroa says, ‘the ideas of marginality and isolation attached to the history of the state of Chocó are foundational to make legitimate the stealing of the territories of Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities and the systematic killing of their populations’ (Vergara-­Figueroa 2018: xxi). And: Little is said about the historical continuities and discontinuities of colonial capitalism, racialized colonialization, class, race, sexual, gender, and generational exploitation this case reveals. It is as if the history of colonialization and racialization of the Atrato River region and the state of Chocó itself –­ and its significance for the world political economy –­is invisible to most social scientists devoted to the case of Bellavista, and the analogous cases in different regions of the world. (Vergara-­Figueroa 2018: 3)

She concludes that the constellation of the historical process, which lies behind acts of land dispossession, is revealed in the limitation of concepts associated with forced

Border Zones193 displacement/migration. The usefulness of these concepts as analytical categories of liberation/transformation is limited due to their lack of historicity and to their ability to reinforce racialization and marginalization. (Vergara-­ Figueroa 2018: xxi)

And she observes, ‘the concepts of forced migration and forced displacement are limited in their ability to explain the complexity of the world-­ historical realities they are expected to capture’ (Vergara-­Figueroa 2018: xxvi). She says there is ‘the need for a theoretical reflection about what constitutes a refugee, a forced migrant, or a forced displaced person’, and argues that the concept of forced migration ‘needs to be unthought, both epistemically and politically, from a Black feminist perspective’ (Vergara-­Figueroa 2018: 3). And so violent border practices of displacement and massacre continue as the international system of nation states is continually constituted, and as we saw in Chapter 8 there is a wider story to be told of the difficult position of Indigenous peoples in that ongoing process. Ronald Niezen says of them: Their territories are imposed upon by extractive industries; their beliefs and rituals are imposed upon by those who would convert them (or selfishly acquire their knowledge); and their independence is imposed upon by states striving for political and territorial control. They are those people whose position in the world is the least tenable. They are especially vulnerable to warfare, genocide, dispossession, disease, and famine. (Niezen 2003: 5)

Heather N. Nichol comments that ‘the notion that sovereignty is the “natural” outcome of universal governance processes can be contrasted with the idea that it is a form of governance generalised through colonial imposition and that it has its limits’ (Nichol 2017: 796). She highlights the ‘myth that nation-­states are the only legitimate form of government and that these governments . . . have the undisputed right to sovereignty over their respective territory’ (Nichol 2017: 796). Instead, sovereignty is constantly ‘reconfigured and networked’ at the expense of marginal groups who do not ‘fit’ the ‘national’ state system (Nichol 2017: 796). And William D. Coleman says: For Indigenous peoples, the global institutionalization of the nation-­state form of governance, complete with the pursuit of ‘national’ identities and the establishment of individual property rights led everywhere to the dispossession of their lands and the denigration of their cultures. The very definitions of ‘territory’ and ‘borders’ applied to their traditional lands by nation-­states everywhere created a problem of dispossession on a global scale. (Coleman 2012: 681–­2)

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The practice of borders, and their constitution of national territories, is a continuing process of the exercise of violent power, control and displacement of peoples who are themselves constituted as marginal, disruptive of the ‘national story’, and subject, at the extreme, to massacre. We need to recognise the existence of border zones or borderlands, and realise that these can exist in different places. In our discussion of gentrification processes in global North cities we saw that those border zones can exist at the centres of developed cities, and one motivation in urban development in both the global South and global North is to bring those border zones under some form of state control so that they can be opened up for more efficient corporate capitalist exploitation. Olivia Bennett and Christopher McDowell comment on the situation in the global South, ‘Throughout the developing world, it is increasingly marginal, “squatter,”, and “illegal” urban communities who are being moved to make way for the infrastructure essential for the functioning of modern and fast-­growing megacities’ (Bennett and McDowell 2012: 2). But this can equally be applied to global North cities. Loretta Lees and her co-­authors characterise gentrification as a new urban colonialism, and comment, ‘In the UK this new urban colonialism . . . seeks to socially cleanse British city centres’ (Lees et al. 2010: xii). In her work on ‘revolting subjects’, Imogen Tyler explores this process in relation to global North states, by examining the ways in which certain social groups are defined as ‘revoltingly other’ or ‘national abjects’, such that they must be confined or expelled from the territory of the state, often through the kind of extreme violence we see directed against Indigenous peoples. For Tyler, ‘abjection describes the violent exclusionary forces of sovereign power: those forces that strip people of their human dignity and reproduce them as dehumanized waste, the disposable dregs and refuse of social life’ (Tyler 2013: 21). Tyler explains: the disciplinary forces of sovereignty, its processes of inclusion and exclusion, produce waste populations: an excess that threatens from within, but which the system cannot fully expel as it requires this surplus both to constitute the boundaries of the state and to legitimize the prevailing order of power. (Tyler 2013: 20)

Certain ‘figurative scapegoats’, argues Tyler, are stigmatised as ‘national abjects’, groups such as welfare recipients and irregular migrants. ‘These abject figures are ideological conductors mobilized to do the dirty work of neoliberal governmentality. They are symbolic and material scapegoats’ (Tyler 2013: 9). And ‘The national abjects constituted through these processes and practices are the border subjects of the neoliberal

Border Zones195 body politic –­those whose lives are deemed worthless and expendable’ (Tyler 2013: 10). One of Tyler’s examples of the national abject of the United Kingdom is the Gypsy and Traveller community, whom she characterises as ‘quintessential outsiders’ (Tyler 2013: 133). Part of this outsider status is to do with the community’s determination to retain their nomadic way of life, which brings them into conflict with the state for which immobility is the norm. The state has therefore made their way of life more and more difficult, including the criminalisation of aspects of it. Tyler observes, ‘They are in effect an internally displaced migrant population within the state’ (Tyler 2013: 133). She focuses on Dale Farm, a Gypsy and Traveller site near Basildon in Essex, home to around 500 people. Half the site was legal, established in the 1960s, while the other half had developed since and was deemed ‘illegal’ (Tyler 2013: 1). On 19 October 2011 police arrived in force and violently evicted all the inhabitants from the site. The impact on those evicted is familiar from what we have learned of the impacts of forced displacement, and Tyler cites Michael Cernea’s assessment of those impacts which we saw in Chapter 8. She says: In the case of Dale Farm, people lost homes and access to land in which they had invested a considerable amount of their time, labour and income. They will receive no compensation for damage wreaked by the eviction . . . The community the residents of Dale Farm had established over a decade had provided filial networks of friendship, care and protection that have been torn asunder. They have lost, or risk losing, stable access to state education and established welfare support systems. The evictees have also been considerably traumatized, the impact of which, both in terms of mental and physical health and also in terms of their faith and trust in the state and state actors, is difficult to measure or comprehend. (Tyler 2013: 128)

She concludes, ‘The entire community has been left in a degraded state of perpetual insecurity’ (Tyler 2013: 128). Tyler cites Ann Laura Stoler and her discussion of the ‘riots’ that took place in France in November 2005. The violence took place in the banlieues, tenements on the periphery of cities built in the 1960s, mostly home to former colonial immigrants and their children, with high unemployment rates among the youth. Stoler describes the tenements as examples of ‘territorial segregation’ and ‘postcolonial urban apartheid’ (Stoler 2011: 127, 128). These were ‘zones of containment and abandonment’, examples of ‘state strategies that have repeatedly created compartmentalized space in the colonial past and the postcolonial present’ (Stoler 2011: 129). The response of the government reflected this colonial perspective, as the state of emergency imposed to control

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the violence drew on colonial era legislation from 1955, established in response to the Algerian war (Stoler 2011: 127). We can see that such groups exist in the border zones of states, but, once more, those border zones can be far away from the edges of national territories: they are, rather, subjected to what Tyler describes as the internal borders of the state (Tyler 2013: 16). BORDER PRACTICES The concept of the border as a one-­dimensional line at the edge of a nation state marking the limits of its sovereignty does not capture the reality of borders as they are practised. A body of work has emerged both in Political Theory and in other fields such as Critical Border Studies which takes a far more realistic perspective of what borders are, such that there is little excuse for sustaining a discussion of the ethics of forced displacement on the assumption the borders are straightforward conceptually and practically.4 Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-­Williams, for example, argue that ‘the border is not something that straightforwardly presents itself in an unmediated way. It is never simply “present”, nor fully established, not obviously accessible. Rather, it is manifold and in a constant state of becoming’ (Parker and Vaughan-­Williams 2012: 728). What is required is ‘a shift from the concept of the border to the notion of bordering practice; and the adoption of the lens of performance through which bordering practices are produced and reproduced’ (Parker and Vaughan-­Williams 2012: 729) We need to change our understanding of what borders are: not imaginary stable lines on the surface of the globe that mark out distinct national territories, nor walls or fences, but sets of processes and practices. Vicki Squire talks of the proliferation of borders, by which she means not the proliferation of national borders marking out nation states but the proliferation of border practices (Squire 2015: 28). The proliferation of border practices can be ‘understood in terms of processes of subjectivity formation’ (Squire 2015: 29). Rather than borders simply reflecting pre-­existing identities –­of citizen and alien –­‘bordering practices effectively produce and reproduce particular processes of subject formation’ (Squire 2015: 29). The processes of control being acted out in these zones ‘are internal to the social and political fabric of the nation-­state’ (Squire 2015: 28). And what we see are ‘the multiple ways in which bordering practices constitute migrant and non-­migrant subjectivities’ (Squire 2015: 29). She also emphasises the importance of border zones as physical spaces where the struggle to exclude and be included takes place. One such zone is the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and the

Border Zones197 United States, a place ‘pulled between (and constituted as such) through the contending forces of migration and control’ (Squire 2015: 19). Border processes and practices do take place in space, but that space is varied and not at all confined to the territorial lines that are the ‘standard’ view of where borders are. They can take place within a state territory or outside of it, or in cyberspace as biometrics takes an increasingly central role in contemporary border practices (Squire 2015: 28; also see Lemberg-­Pedersen and Haioty 2020). These practices constitute the objects that may be taken for granted in Political Theory, such as nation states themselves, but also aliens, citizens, migrants and refugees. Squire argues that such practices are also ‘implicated in the policing of sexuality and gender, as well as race and class, thus constructing subjectivities through moral hierarchies that differentiate and exclude’ (Squire 2015: 29). And Reece Jones comments, ‘boundaries do not mark the edges of already existing things; the thing comes into being by placing boundaries’ (Jones 2016:167). As well as seeing nation states and their borders as processes, we also need to understand citizens, migrants, refugees, and so on, themselves as ‘things’ in a process of becoming, caught up in the continuing dynamics of nation-­building, a process which is continual, dynamic, and often violent. We saw in the Introduction the distance between the world I experience from my study and the world experienced by the forcibly displaced and others. One of the gaps is precisely this, that I experience my citizenship as a stable and enduring status, but what our study of forced displacement has revealed is that it is always a process, and one that can suddenly change in nature. The experiences of the many people who found themselves caught up in the Windrush Scandal in the United Kingdom show how sudden and dramatic this can be (for a discussion of the Scandal and its context in the policy of the ‘hostile environment’, see Gentleman 2019; Goodfellow 2020; Yeo 2020). And Nadine El-­ Enany argues that British immigration law should be understood as a ‘continuation of British colonial power’, a process that continues to reproduce colonial racial hierarchies (El-­Enany 2020: 13). My own citizenship, then, however stable and enduring it appears, is part of the violent process of nation-­state constitution, through which some who have lived as members for most of their lives suddenly can find themselves as unwanted, to be expelled. We can see once more that border zones can erupt anywhere at any time. The process approach provides another crucial insight to understanding borders. We have seen the border process as one of violent separation, of keeping two ‘things’, the inside and the outside, apart, if necessary at the expense of the lives of those on the outside. However,

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what we are also able to understand is that the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ are, at the same time, closely related to each other, and indeed dependent upon each other. The process is one of maintaining some kind of relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. Crucially, the inside and outside are constituted together in a single process –­they constitute each other –­so that we cannot understand the nature of one unless we also understand the other and the relationship between them. The border, then, is not a boundary separating the inside and the outside but a specific relationship between them. This relationship is antagonistic, a process of constitution, a power struggle as the inside seeks to constitute the outside in order to sustain its central position, while the outside resists as it seeks to contest the structure of that relationship. This means that the outside is in fact inside the political system, as a crucial part of it, contributing to its constitution; the ‘outsider’ is, in an important sense, already inside the political order. So how should we think of borders? First, we should see them not as static boundary lines between entities but as dynamic practices and processes that actively constitute the inside and the outside, and a series of identities relating to the inside and outside –­the citizen, the non-­citizen, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the migrant. Second, we should see them as processes with a history, with connections with the past that mean that specific pasts are being acted out in the present. Third, we should see them not as a division between insiders and outsiders but as a constitutive relationship between them –­the insider cannot be an insider without being in a specific constitutive relationship with the outsider. Fourth, we should see border practices as manifestations of power, with the inside seeking to control and contain the outside, and the outside seeking to evade or subvert that control. Fifth, we can see that the outside cannot actually be outside of the political order of things, as it is an essential component of that order. It may even be that we need to stop talking about an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ of the political order. Indeed, if we take as our object the global system as such, there is no ‘outside’ at all. Finally, we should see borders not as traditionally understood as dimensionless lines on maps or the globe, or even as walls and fences, but as zones where power is contested and the ‘objects’ of politics are constituted, where the complex relationship between the inside and the outside is constantly in a process of becoming. Importantly, these are also zones of resistance, where people fight against being constituted in specific ways and to evade the power of control. Natasha King points to the ‘undramatic, everyday and mundane acts of quiet evasion . . . that, when performed by many, change or alter a landscape of power’

Border Zones199 (King 2016: 30). What we have arrived at is a conception of the border as a space of constant struggle, on the one hand to constitute the political inside according to a specific core identity –­to keep it pure and uncontaminated by the disorder of the political outside –­and on the other to make space for different ways of belonging to that core. The border zone can therefore be, and often is as we saw in Chapter 2, a space of intense and violent struggle. CONCLUSION Border zones, however, do not just exist in specific geographical spaces; theory has its own border zones. Boundaries of exclusion function not only in political practice but also in Political Theory. As a theorist in this field, I need to be aware that I am working in this border zone, and that I am not working in a space of reason but am located in a system of power, a system which is connected with other systems of power, within which I also have a location. This means that by engaging in theory on questions of migration and membership I am always exercising power and using the power of my location to constitute others. To be constituted in forms one would not recognise, would not accept, and would resist, is to be subjected to a form of violence; and those of us who engage in normative Political Theory, when we constitute the citizen, the alien, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the ‘illegal’ migrant, have to recognise that we are working in that border zone, and we may be participating in it in a way that is doing violence to people’s self-­understandings, confining them and marginalising them in an act of power. Unless we are at least aware that we are in a space of the power of constitution and the resistance of contestation, and that we are exercising constitutive power over others, then we are in danger of inflicting violence, however conceptual, over those others. The conceptual framework applied to the issue of forced displacement at the level of normative Political Theory is produced not through something we might describe as reason or the force of better argument, therefore, but through the exercise of power and exclusion. In the section ‘The Problem of Complicity’ in Chapter 3 we looked at the postcolonial critique of Political Theory and the challenge of complicity, that the conceptual framework I am working with may be in some sense complicit in the oppressive systems I am working to overthrow, and that, however benign my intentions, I may be contributing to that oppression. There I concluded that rather than political theorists seeing themselves as the exclusive owners of questions concerning forced displacement in Political Theory, they must understand themselves as

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making a specific kind of contribution to answering those questions in partnership with others. The challenge, I said, was to see the displaced not as passive objects of political practice or Political Theory but as subjects with agency. In the Introduction I pointed to the tendency in the literature and in policy to see forcibly displaced people as helpless victims, in need of rescue, and argued that the reason why they are being beaten, shot at, tortured, and in many cases killed, is precisely because they are exercising agency. If forcibly displaced people were really the helpless, passive, voiceless people they are portrayed as in much discourse, then nobody would bother to shoot at them or beat them or kill them. In the next chapter we will therefore address the question of the agency of the forcibly displaced. NOTES 1. ‘Anish Kapoor Dyes This Earth Red in Memory of Refugees’, Phaidon, (accessed 4 April 2022). 2. ‘Anish Kapoor Dyes This Earth Red in Memory of Refugees’, Phaidon, (accessed 4 April 2022). 3. Thanks to Lucy Mayblin for drawing the work of Aurora Vergara-­Figueroa to my attention. 4. For example, see Rajaram and Grundy-­ Warr 2007; Vaughan-­ Williams 2009; Squire 2011; Parker and Vaughan-­Williams 2012; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Jones 2016; Nail 2016; Graziano 2017; Longo 2017.

Chapter 10 VOICE, SPEECH, AGENCY

THE CHILD IN THE POND In their book Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System, Alexander Betts and Paul Collier use the thought experiment of what we should do if a child fell into a nearby pond and was unable to swim (Peter Singer, so far as I am aware, is the originator of the child-­in-­the-­pond analogy in practical ethics: see Singer 1972). The thought experiment tells us that under certain circumstances we have a duty to rescue others, and Betts and Collier argue that the situation of refugees fleeing Syria is such a case. ‘Those Syrians forced to flee their homes by violence are ethically analogous to that drowning child’ (Betts and Collier 2018: 99). The analogy is poignant, as what we are faced with in the English Channel and the Mediterranean and other waters are drowning children, and the names of Alan Kurdi and Artin Iran Nezhad, and images of them, are stark reminders of this fact. However, I pointed out in the previous chapter that refugees and other displaced people are not in need of rescue, as they most often rescue themselves from the dangers they face by moving. The people in danger of drowning at sea or in rivers or dying crossing deserts or mountains, including children, do not need to be rescued from the danger they have fled from. They are dying precisely because of their agency, not the lack of it, as global North states and their proxies seek to undermine that agency, to block it, and repel them and ‘warehouse’ them in zones of containment. Despite this, when it comes to their representation in political and media discourse displaced people are more often than not framed as victims, as passive and helpless, without agency and without voice. Kaarina Nikunen comments on the gap between the representations of refugees in the news media and the experiences of those refugees, with them being framed as ‘dangerous others or voiceless victims’. She says, ‘While refugees and migrants are highly visible, as subjects of many news stories, their representation tends to culminate in invisibility and silence’ (Nikunen 201

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2020: 411; on media representation of migrants and refugees, also see Moore et al. 2012; Moore 2017). Humanitarian organisations can also constitute the displaced as helpless, and a visit to the UNHCR website is one that involves many headline photographs featuring mainly women and children.1 Liisa Malkki has argued that the ‘visual prominence of women and children as embodiments of refugeeness’ is connected to the ‘institutional, international expectation of a certain kind of helplessness as a refugee characteristic’ (Malkki 1996: 388). Humanitarian actors have a tendency to universalise displaced people as ‘pure victims’, a ‘dehistoricizing universalism’ which sees displaced people as mute victims rather than historical actors. ‘It can strip from them the authority to give credible narrative evidence or testimony about their own condition in politically and institutionally consequential forums’ (Malkki 1996: 378). Shahram Khosravi observes, ‘Refugees are not only “helpless”, they are also “speechless” and need someone to speak for them, for example, journalists, researchers, politicians and activists’ (Khosravi 2010: 72). Even where irregular migrants mobilise in the form of protests, these are depicted as ‘acts of desperation’ by ‘destitute and powerless individuals’ (Karyotis et al. 2021: 1). What I want to explore in this chapter is the issue of voice, or speech, and the way in which displaced people have been silenced. The key question here is of representation: who gets to represent displaced people? It seems an obvious requirement of justice that they should represent themselves, but the extent to which refugees, for example, have been excluded from the processes that deal with refugee questions is breathtaking. There have been active steps taken to include refugees in policy making, most recently in relation to the Global Compact on Refugees (see Drozdowski and Yarnell 2019), and the idea of the ‘Refugee Voice’ has received increasing attention, both from humanitarian organisations and from theorists. David Owen points to ‘The entitlement of refugees to have voice with respect to how they are governed, their claim to have a say over the norms, institutions and practices of global refugee governance’ (Owen 2018: 41). The inclusion of refugee voices is ‘a necessary condition of the legitimacy of any regime of global refugee governance’ (Owen 2018: 41). As I mentioned in Chapter 3, Sarah Fine takes a broader view of the importance of ‘listening to and engaging with voices of refugees and other migrants’ if we are going to arrive at ‘a more nuanced understanding of refugee and other migrant experiences’, and this, she says, helps ‘inform a “realistic” (in the straightforward sense of “in touch with reality”) and sympathetic approach to

Voice, Speech, Agency203 refugee movements’ (Fine 2019: 29). And so this chapter explores themes of voice, speech and agency in displacement. VOICE There has been more emphasis in recent years on the importance of the ‘refugee voice’ in policy making. Paragraph 34 of the GCR states, ‘responses are most effective when they actively and meaningfully engage those they are intended to protect and assist’, and James Milner says: This is a potentially significant area of innovation for the governance of the global refugee regime, especially given the regime’s history of claiming that the core institution of the refugee regime has the moral and expert authority to represent the needs and interests of refugees. (Milner 2021: 1)

It is, he says, in ‘stark contrast’ to the past position of UNHCR on refugee participation: Informally, senior UNHCR officials noted that, prior to 2015, there was no perceived benefit to including refugees directly in global policy discussions due to either the perception that refugees were not equipped to engage in such discussions, that no individual refugee could represent the great diversity of refugee experiences, and that the unscripted participation of refugees could be problematic for UNHCR if refugees were critical of UNHCR’s work. (Milner 2021: 11)

Where refugees were allowed to speak at global meetings, they ‘would be carefully selected and prepared, with their speaking points crafted and vetted by UNHCR to ensure that the views expressed by refugees aligned with UNHCR’s views’ (Milner 2021: 12). However, despite the more positive tone concerning refugee participation in the language of the GCR, Milner points out that at the first meeting of the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva in December 2019, only 70 of the 3,000 delegates were refugees, a total of 2.3 per cent of participants. The rest were made up of 90 government officials at the ministerial level, representatives of 55 international organisations, 130 private companies and foundations, and around 250 civil society organisations. Milner says it was noted by some participating in the margins of the event ‘that had this been a UN conference on women’s rights or Indigenous rights, and if only 2.3% of the participants had been women or representatives from Indigenous communities, the gathering would not have been seen as legitimate’ (Milner 2021: 2). Rebecca Root comments that very few of the refugee representatives were featured in

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plenary sessions. ‘Instead, it was whole panels of statesmen because of the nature of diplomacy’ (Root 2019). Despite these shortcomings the move towards meaningful participation by refugees in the refugee regime is important, says Milner, as it would help to address concerns about legitimacy, accountability and global power (Milner 2021: 2). Other developments include the establishment of the Network for Refugee Voice in 2017, formed by twelve refugees, who published a ‘Declaration for Effective and Sustainable Refugee Policy’ in July 2017.2 A Global Summit of Refugees was held in June 2018, convened by refugees from around the world, ‘with the aim of collaborating on advocacy at the international level and creating a space for States, international organizations, civil society, and others, to engage directly with refugees in international policymaking’ (Harley and Hobbs 2020: 201; also see Viloria et al. 2018). And in December 2019 the Global Refugee-­led Network published guidelines for meaningful refugee participation which were endorsed by a wide range of civil society organisations (Milner 2021: 12).3 This, says Milner, is part of a ‘growing recognition of the inclusion of affected communities in other areas of global public policy, especially in the context of international human rights law’ (Milner 2021: 12). However, he asks whether meaningful inclusion of refugee participation would make any difference, and answers that it ‘would not fundamentally change the distribution of power within the refugee regime’ (Milner 2021: 17). While it could increase the perceived legitimacy of the regime in the eyes of refugees, and the accountability of states and agencies, there is the danger of moral hazard: ‘Could states perform the norm of refugee participation as a means of diverting attention from restrictive refugee protection practices? Could adherence to the norm of refugee participation make refugees complicit in the erosion of refugee rights?’ (Milner 2021: 18). Milner points to the examples of Denmark and Australia, who have signed up to the Global Refugee-­ led Network guidelines but who stand accused of severe violations of refugee protection standards. And Mauricio Viloria and his co-­authors observe that, ‘Despite recent calls for the increased involvement of refugees in both global processes and local initiatives, there is very little evidence that refugee and other forcibly displaced communities (particularly women’s organisations) are better represented’ (Viloria et al. 2018: 62). International humanitarian agencies have also used refugee voices and there are again concerns about how those voices are framed. Kerri Woods notes that while there is an emphasis in the humanitarian field on the importance of refugee stories, ‘mediation may play a significant role’

Voice, Speech, Agency205 and it ‘will . . . shape how stories are told, both by the directions given by questions that fit the stories to a purpose, and by the formality of roles and power relations within the dialogue’ (Woods 2020: 514). There are ‘paradigmatic’ refugee stories, those that stand a good chance of winning asylum hearings or the attention of NGO staff. Nando Sigona notes a ‘process of standardization of the “refugee experience”’ whereby asylum seekers have to conform to what is considered to be the ‘normal’ refugee experience in order to have their status confirmed (Sigona 2014: 375). The standard narrative that is sought, and so reproduced, is one of trauma and victimhood. Shahram Khosravi observes that this can have an impact on those seeking refugee status. While he was in Karachi, Pakistan, having fled Iran, his application for refugee status was rejected and he was told by a UNHCR office that his ‘fear of being killed in a horrible war was not “well-­grounded enough”’ (Khosravi 2010: 33). He says: To have a chance of getting refugee status, one must have the ability to translate one’s life story into Eurocentric juridical language and to perform the role expected of a refugee. . . . I was advised to wear dirty clothes when going to the UNHCR for the interview, and to look ‘sad’ and ‘profound’. (Khosravi 2010: 33; for recent discussions of these issues, see Parker and de Jong 2019; Tammas 2019)

Years later, once he had travelled ‘illegally’ to Sweden and was granted refugee status there, while arranging links between failed asylum seekers and the Swedish media, Khosravi observed how his contacts knew what was expected of them and performed ‘victimcy’. ‘My informants were aware that displaying any kind of agency would cast the authenticity of their refugeeness into doubt’ (Khosravi 2010: 72). Prem Kumar Rajaram gives the example of a project by Oxfam aimed at giving the voices of the displaced a role in policy making (see Demusz 2000). Describing the project, its leader, Kerry Demusz, states: The inclusion of direct testimony in the development debate can help make it less of a monologue and more of a dialogue . . . it is not enough for the development ‘expert’ to summarise and interpret the views of others –­the others must be allowed to speak for themselves. (Demusz 2000: 16)

However, the fieldworkers were asked to look for ‘quotes’ from the participants that were ‘particularly representative of the overall situation or were especially poignant’ (Demusz 2000: 29). Rajaram argues, ‘Disembodied, de-­ politicized and de-­ contextualized, these quotations further restrict refugees to an identity characterized by helplessness and puerility, and further a dehumanizing process’ (Rajaram 2002: 256).

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The Oxfam project restricts ‘refugees to a bare corporeal existence’ and ‘constructs refugee identity in terms of a knowable constellation of physical and economic needs’ (Rajaram 2002: 256). The confinement of refugees to ‘a cycle of repetition of physical needs reinforces their identity as helpless and abject’ (Rajaram 2002: 259). It is also significant that the ‘quotes’ needed to be ‘representative of the overall situation’, locking the refugee voice in the present, rather than allowing it to project into the future or be located in a historical past. SPEECH There are, then, challenges around the idea of including the voices of the forcibly displaced in the processes and policies of the international protection regime and its agencies. I want to use the distinction between Voice and Speech made by Jacques Rancière to take this argument further (Rancière 1999; see King 2016 –­it was through King’s work that I first encountered Rancière). Rancière begins his book Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy with a lengthy quotation from Aristotle from Book 1 of The Politics (1253a7) which I reproduce here: Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and she has endowed man alone among the animals with the power of speech. Speech is something different from voice, which is possessed by other animals also and used by them to express pain or pleasure; for their nature does indeed enable them not only to feel pleasure and pain but to communicate these feelings to each other. Speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and unjust. For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, the just and the unjust, etc. It is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household and a state. (Rancière 1999: 1)

‘Speech’ in the passage is a translation from the original Greek ‘logos’, which can be understood as reasonable speech, being opposed to voice. Later in the text Rancière recounts Pierre-­ Simon Ballanche’s 1829 retelling of a story from Livy, of the secession of Roman plebeians on the Aventine Hill in Rome (Ballanche 1829). According to Rancière, Ballanche argues that Livy has missed the meaning of the conflict between the patricians and the plebeians, which was in fact ‘a quarrel over the issue of speech itself’ (Rancière 1999: 23). The view of the patricians is that there can be no discussion here because the plebeians do not speak: ‘They do not speak because they are beings without a name, deprived of logos –­meaning, of symbolic enrolment in the city’, Rancière says; and ‘Whoever is nameless cannot speak’ (Rancière 1999: 23). However, he

Voice, Speech, Agency207 says, the plebeians do the unthinkable: ‘they establish another order . . . by constituting themselves . . . as speaking subjects sharing the same properties as those who would deny them these’; in other words, ‘they conduct themselves like beings with names’ (Rancière 1999: 24). They have become ‘beings engaging in a collective destiny through words. They have become beings who may very well make promises and enter into contracts’ (Rancière 1999: 25). This, for Rancière, is a political act. ‘Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account’ (Rancière 1999: 27). Politics takes place ‘when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part’ (Rancière 1999: 11). The part that is not a part represents ‘those who are of no account to political society’, which is ‘to be effectively discounted from politics; to be invisible as a political subject and for the things that you say to not be heard as political speech at all’ (King 2016: 43). Politics is the demonstration of the presence of the not-­counted as political subjects, ‘making visible that part which is not counted as equal’ (Rancière 1999: 123). Equality for Rancière is a practice, ‘a presupposition between people of each other’s inherent equality that is qualified by nothing so much as someone being human’ (King 2016: 44). Politics is a rare event in societies. More common is what Rancière terms the police order, the system by which resources and roles are distributed: The police is . . . first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. (Rancière 1999: 29)

Politics occurs only when the part that has no part in this order interrupts it with an assertion of its equality, making itself visible: ‘it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise’ (Rancière 1999: 30). This is an ‘egalitarian logic’ which breaks and enters the police order and jolts it out of its ‘natural’ logic. Because of this, argues Rancière, there can be better or worse police orders, depending on how much impact this egalitarian order has had. However, ‘Whether the police is sweet and kind does not make it any less the opposite of politics’ (Rancière 1999: 31). Later Rancière comments, ‘There is a world police and it can sometimes achieve some good. But there is no world politics’ (Rancière 1999: 139).

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Through Speech, as conceived here, the forcibly displaced can represent themselves as political subjects. This would constitute a disruptive assertion of equality into the (police) order of the international protection system. An important part of political subjectivity is the capacity to formulate and act out plans for the future and participate in plans for the future of the community, rather than being locked in the present. This future-­orientation of political subjectivity is expressed by Rancière when he says that the Roman plebeians, through asserting their equality with Speech, become ‘beings engaging in a collective destiny through words. They have become beings who may very well make promises and enter into contracts’ (Rancière 1999: 25). Speech, then, represents a continuing life-­project, extending into a future and with a history, contrasting with noise which represents the present moment of pain and distress. The forcibly displaced, even in Oxfam’s project, remain trapped in the present moment of poignant suffering. They remain, in Rancière’s words, ‘the wordless victim, the ultimate figure of the one excluded from the logos, and only with a voice expressing a monotonous moan, the moan of naked suffering’ (Rancière 1999: 126). They are trapped in this state by the efforts taken to depoliticise them and their condition. Georgios Karyotis and his co-­authors observe that even where irregular migrants organise protests, these are depicted as ‘acts of desperation’ where ‘destitute and powerless individuals resort to protest, overrun by their negative emotions about their predicament’ (Karyotis et al. 2021: 1). They are represented as unable ‘to constitute a “community” and construct a positive identity that could form the basis for the emergence of a protest movement’ (Karyotis et al. 2021: 1). However, they argue that the scale of political mobilisation by refugees and irregular migrants in Europe and elsewhere means we have to move beyond this characterisation (Karyotis et al. 2021: 2). They cite the storming of the Pantheon Mausoleum in Paris in July 2019 by around 700 undocumented African migrants calling for the right to stay; riots in Rosarno, Italy in 2010; the occupation of Oranienplatz in Berlin; and several hunger strikes across Europe (Karyotis et al. 2021: 2). There is also the example of the march of asylum seekers from Keleti Station in Budapest, Hungary, to the Austrian border in August 2015, after the Hungarian authorities blocked their onward journey by train (see Benli 2018). Taken together, these are strategic and rational actions which could constitute ‘a new migrant movement’ (Karyotis et al. 2021: 16). Federico Oliveri says such protests ‘largely rest on practices of self-­organization and self-­ representation’ by people who are ‘affirming themselves as rights-­bearing subjects’ (Oliveri 2016: 263). He says ‘migrant struggles

Voice, Speech, Agency209 open the opportunity for processes of political subjectivization through which previously silenced and invisible people occupy the public scene, and affirm themselves as rights-­bearing subjects’ (Oliveri 2016: 276). Irregular migrants, through their own political mobilisations and protests, are constituting themselves as part of the political order. However, the protection framework provided by the international community cannot recognise such agency, so that displaced people are rendered depolitical simply because of the fact of their displacement. That framework is built on the assumption that political subjectivity can only exist when a person is a member of a nation state; it cannot exist outside of the international system of national membership. Therefore, runs the logic, the person forcibly displaced has lost their political subjectivity, and it can only be restored once they have been granted surrogate membership of a state of refuge, or safely repatriated into their state of origin. They cannot be regarded as political subjects while they are in the field of protection, because political subjectivity is exclusively attached to national membership and they lie outside the national membership system. Therefore, says Rajaram, UNHCR solutions are ‘premised on reintroducing the lost refugee back into the fold of a state’ (Rajaram 2002: 248). This connection of political identity and discourse to the territorial state means that those without citizenship or bereft of it are speechless (or taken to be speechless), requiring an agency or expert to speak for them. The ‘speechlessness’ of refugees reinforces the state-­centric political imagination. (Rajaram 2002: 251)

This means that, while the forcibly displaced may well have lost their political subjectivity through displacement, the international protection regime perpetuates that deprivation by its inability to see them as agents capable of Speech, with the capacity to engage in debates about their collective destiny. What emerges, then, is the need for an international protection regime that not only works towards restoring the political subjectivity of the forcibly displaced as full members of a nation state but also creates a field of protection which maintains and respects their political subjectivity during displacement. This requires that this be a field of intersubjectivity, where the displaced are recognised and respected as full participants and partners in finding solutions to their displacement, with the capacity to plan life-­ projects for themselves and their communities which extend into the future. The field of protection must therefore be transformed into an ethical space of intersubjectivity.

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AGENCY This framing of the refugee as lacking political agency is also present in what we might describe as the ‘accepted’ view within normative Political Theory, which sees displacement as a temporary gap in which the displaced person loses their membership of their nation state. As we saw in Chapter 4, for the political conception of refugeehood this is loss of political membership through persecution, but whatever kind of membership we are talking about, the accepted view is that it can only be restored through the displaced person being reintegrated into their home state or, where that is not possible, being granted surrogate membership of another state. UNHCR’s three durable solutions with regard to refugees –­repatriation, local integration or resettlement –­are all premised on this position. As Jean-­François Durieux states: as a subject of international law, the refugee is inherently temporary: refugee status exists in order to fill the gap caused by the breakdown of the normal bond between citizen and state with ‘international protection’, until that bond can be restored, either with the original state of nationality, or with another state. (Durieux 2014: 221, quoted in Buxton 2020: 4)

What is lost, according to this view, is political membership, understood as membership of a nation state, with the rights to protection and resources that come with that membership. The displaced person is thrown into a space –­understood both in terms of a specific geographical space and in terms of a duration of time –­where membership cannot exist. The severity of the problem of protracted displacement –­the fact that people displaced by a range of causes can be in the space-­time of displacement for considerable periods of time –­means that seeing this space-­time as ‘temporary’, and therefore able to be resolved by meeting only basic human rights, is problematic. What we are referring to here is the space-­time between being displaced and finding a solution to that displacement. We saw in Chapter 6 that around 76 per cent of refugees were considered to be in a Protracted Refugee Situation, around 15.7 million people at the end of 2020, with estimates of around twenty years for the average length of time spent in displacement, although in some cases it can be for a lifetime, or lifetimes. We also saw that internally displaced people experience protracted displacement, again for considerable periods of time. And so while temporariness is embedded in the accepted view of displacement, and also within the ideas of protection and assistance built around it, this conflicts with the reality.

Voice, Speech, Agency211 While the opposite of the concept of the ‘temporary’ is conventionally thought to be the ‘permanent’, in the context of displacement they do not work as antonyms. The problem is that the accepted position on displacement does understand them in this way, such that any displacement is conceptualised as a temporary situation, and therefore not one in which rights of political membership are appropriate. These must wait for the end of the displacement and the permanent integration of the displaced person into a new state, or their reintegration into their home state. What we see here is that even at the heart of a political conception of refugeehood there is a strongly humanitarian element, with the need for temporary assistance in the space of displacement while displaced people wait for a political solution. The argument here is that this space of displacement, also, needs to be politicised. The failure to do so means that the issue of protractedness makes the accepted approaches, political or humanitarian, ineffective. Displaced people do live in a gap, but not so much a temporal one; rather, it is a gap in the political order of things, a space of violence and contestation between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of that order. The temporariness they live within is equally not temporal; rather, they are constituted as temporary subjects on a semi-­permanent basis who are reliant on humanitarian assistance, not political solutions. The lack of agency for displaced people is, of course, recognised by the international agencies that govern the space of displacement, and strategic responses have been proposed to constitute them as agents. One example is the ‘resilience’ agenda being pursued by the international protection regime which seeks to empower displaced people, a strategy which explicitly recognises the problem of protractedness. Jeff Crisp identifies this approach as emerging from the Global Refugee Forum in December 2019, with a stronger focus on ‘market-­oriented approaches to self-­reliance, host community support and social inclusion, facilitated by the greater involvement of development actors and the private sector’ (Crisp 2020). The aim here is the incorporation of refugees within their region of displacement. Crisp comments that this approach may have some benefits for refugees, but it is also designed to benefit other stake holders, for example enabling donor states to reduce their aid budgets, stopping the movement of refugees from global South to global North states, and helping UNHCR given the dramatic shortfall in its budget (as of the end of August 2020, UNHCR estimated that it needed a budget of $9.131 billion, but had an available budget of $4.458 billion –­a funding gap of 51 per cent4). ‘In all of these respects, what could be better than to rebrand refugees as resilient entrepreneurs, gifted innovators and

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hard-­working employees, rather than as long-­term dependents on international assistance?’ (Crisp 2020). There is also the strategy of moving towards refugee self-­governance in camps, again through a discourse of resilience and empowerment. Susan Ilcan and Kim Rygiel identify a trend in camp management ‘of engaging refugees to become self-­governing in the management of the camp and to think of camps in terms of community development’ (Ilcan and Rygiel 2015: 334). Through their experience of camp life, ‘refugees are supposed to refashion themselves as resilient, entrepreneurial subjects’ (Ilcan and Rygiel 2015: 333). They place this trend in the context of a move towards neoliberal governance –­rationalities, strategies and techniques to establish government at a distance –­through controlled choices of individuals rather than governing through society. In this neoliberal context, humanitarian emergency governance aims not only to protect and shelter refugees through the provision of accommodation, food, medicine, and infrastructure projects in refugee camps, but also to create self-­governing and entrepreneurial refugee subjects who will be responsible for their futures. (Ilcan and Rygiel 2015: 377)

Camps are no longer seen as spaces of ‘temporary permanence’ but as more permanent spaces of settlement, and refugees are ‘reconstituted along the lines of the neoliberal subject, from passive recipients of aid to camp “residents” and resilient subjects’ (Ilcan and Rygiel 2015: 334). Displaced people are being constituted as subjects in the space of displacement through these strategies, but this form of empowerment, argue Ilcan and Rygiel, is ultimately disempowering. It is an abandonment of political subjectivity. Empowerment here ‘embodies a kind of depoliticization’ (Ilcan and Rygiel 2015: 344), encouraging refugees to accept a life which ‘renders superfluous the many political issues circulating in and outside of migrant camps –­from the increasing securitization of migrants and refugees to the everyday demands for human rights, recognition, and social justice’ (Ilcan and Rygiel 2015: 344). The resilience strategy, therefore, moves the situation of displaced people out of the realm of politics. Once more, we see the need to politicise the space-­time of displacement itself. CONCLUSION All of these arguments move us to looking beyond these compromised forms of agency for displaced people, towards a political agency demanding political change and social justice. But how is political agency for

Voice, Speech, Agency213 forcibly displaced people to be achieved in the space of displacement? Obviously it points towards some level of participation in the way that space is governed, but I think it also points beyond this level, to something much more radical. To take this step we need to return to the idea of political membership and look at ways in which structures of political membership can exist outside of the dominant system of national citizenship. The problem we face is that people are stuck in a limbo of protracted forced displacement in which they are deemed to have lost their political agency. This is because political agency is conceived of as only being possible in the context of political membership, and political membership can only be of a nation state. This, however, is not an argument but rather a bedrock assumption of the accepted view of displacement, and it is this bedrock assumption we need to shift. Our understanding of displacement as protracted –­neither temporary nor permanent –­and as destructive of membership of society as such has to lead us to a new way of understanding political membership itself. What is needed is a political conception of forced displacement, which has the issue of agency and membership at its centre, and I attempt to supply that conception in the next chapter. NOTES 1. (accessed 9 September 2021). 2. (accessed 20 July 2021). 3. (accessed 20 July 2021). 4. (accessed 9 September 2021).

Chapter 11 A POLITICAL CONCEPTION OF FORCED DISPLACEMENT

BEYOND THE BINARY Throughout this book I have criticised what I have taken to be the ‘accepted’ view in Political Theory and practice, that we can make a distinction between two kinds of forced displacement, the political and the humanitarian, which call for different kinds of response. The basic difference is that the first kind of displacement has the potential to be more-­or-­less permanent and has severe impacts on people’s lives, while the second kind of displacement is merely temporary, and in general has less severe impacts. What is important, though, is not the severity of the impact but the permanent/temporary distinction. It means that the first kind of displacement calls for political responses, which themselves constitute permanent solutions for the displaced. The second kind of displacement calls for temporary responses. Refugee displacements are seen as primarily political and so calling for permanent, or ‘durable’, solutions such as membership of a sanctuary state, while other kinds of displacement, for example through weather-­related disasters, are seen as temporary and so regarded as humanitarian and calling for temporary solutions such as the provision of basic shelter, food and health care. My argument has been that this distinction is unsustainable, and that we need to see all displacements as political, calling for permanent political solutions. First, we have seen that the permanent/temporary binary does not make sense: all kinds of displacement can be extremely protracted; temporary events like hurricanes or volcanic eruptions can cause such long-­term displacements, given the complex relationships between these events and their social, economic and political contexts. Second, we have seen that the political approach has a fundamentally humanitarian element at its centre as the displaced are left with basic support during their displacement until a political solution is found, which, given 214

A Political Conception of Forced Displacement215 the first point, is a profound mistake; instead, we have to politicise the space-­time of displacement. Third, we have seen that any kind of displacement, not just those caused by persecution or political violence, can mean that people experience loss of membership of their political community and so lose a significant dimension of their agency. Fourth, we need to see forced displacements not as isolated and disconnected from each other but as systematic features of an international disorder and therefore as profoundly political. This means we do not need to establish that every individual case of displacement is political, but we do need to see forced displacement in all its forms as an important political feature of the global order, and so see every individual case as evidence of this feature. We therefore need a political conception of forced displacement, and we need it as a matter of urgency because, as Daniel Bertrand Monk and Andrew Herscher have observed, the political response to forced displacement is being eroded and replaced by an approach of ‘rightless relief’, a shift to ‘technocratic responses to humanitarian problems’ that ‘constitutes an evasion of the political’ (Monk and Herscher 2021: xviii). This is the making of the Global Shelter Imaginary (Monk and Herscher 2021), a neoliberal approach of ‘resilience’ which abandons any notion of justice for the displaced. In this chapter I set out my version of a political conception of forced displacement. At the centre of this conception is the importance of politicising the space-­time of displacement, and the key to achieving this lies in the political agency of the displaced. We have seen that displaced people are often represented as helpless, needing to be rescued, which overlooks the fact that they mostly rescue themselves through the act of escaping from danger and so do have agency. Nevertheless, forcibly displaced people lose control over central aspects of their lives and, fundamentally, lose control over their future through their displacement, and so are deprived of important dimensions of their agency. At the core is loss of political agency. The accepted view, as we saw in the previous chapter, is that this can only be restored through regaining membership of a nation state, either by returning home, or integrating into the state they have been displaced to, or being given surrogate membership of a third state. We have seen problems with this accepted view at the practical level in that none of these ways of restoring political agency is actually available to the vast majority of forcibly displaced people, but also at the theoretical level, in that this view assumes political membership can only be of a nation state. The implication is that forcibly displaced people cannot have political agency during their displacement, which may last all of their lives and even across generations.

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POLITICAL SUBJECTS In order to arrive at a new understanding of political agency for the displaced we need to turn to the concept of political subjectivity. This is because the idea of political agency is so closely connected with the framework of national membership of states that in order to break free of that framework we have to think, initially anyway, in other terms. Political subjectivity can be understood in two senses: first, being a subject with political power, and so the capacity to shape one’s life and the community of which one is a member; or, second, being subjected to political power, to be formed as a subject by that power in specific ways, such that whatever political agency one possesses is determined by power from above. Paul Patton conceives of the first kind of political subject as ‘a being endowed with certain capacities or possibilities for action’, while the second is being ‘subjected to power relations’ (Patton 1998: 66). We could make a contrast, then, between being a subject-­with-­power and a subject-­ of-­power. By ‘subjects-­with-­power’ I mean those constituted as agents with the capacity to shape the context in which they are embedded and so their own subjectivity; by ‘subjects-­of-­power’ I mean those constituted as passive, without agency, who have no role in shaping the context which embeds them nor themselves. There is, of course, great complexity here, as both are constituted through processes –­neither is simply given –­and the result of those processes is most often going to be a more-­or-­less condition of possessing and being subjected to power. The concept of political subjectivity, and an awareness of how it is constituted through processes, enables us to understand that people can be constituted as political subjects or can constitute themselves as political subjects, outside of citizenship of nation states. Kristine Krause and Katharina Schramm recognise the importance of political subjectivity in their study of displacement in Africa. They point out that ‘citizenship is not everything when it comes to inclusion, voice and rights. Other forms of incorporation may co-­exist with (or be in conflict with) citizenship regimes. The focus on political subjectivity . . . allows us to take these other forms into account’ (Krause and Schramm 2011: 119). Crucially, for the argument I am developing here, not only may these forms coexist or conflict with national citizenship regimes, they can exist where such regimes are absent, on the outside of the system of national citizenship. Krause and Schramm argue that we must ask how political subjects emerge, the processes through which they are constituted: that is, how individuals or groups gain a position which makes them recognizable as such. It is only through these forms of recognition that they gain

A Political Conception of Forced Displacement217 voice and are therefore able to address authorities, but it is through the same processes that they can in turn also be addressed as subjects. (Krause and Schramm 2011: 127)

The focus on subjectivity-­formation allows us to see the variety of ways through which people can be formed as political subjects. As Krause and Schramm point out, ‘citizenship becomes but one aspect of political subjectivity, and a specific one, linked to legal and institutional practices and ultimately to the nation-­state’ (Krause and Schramm 2011: 127). Other forms of political subjectivity are possible outside of those state-­based and institutional practices. In the context of forced displacement, Krause and Schramm argue that displaced people do have political subjectivities through their interaction with agencies and other actors who have power over access to resources ‘and take on the role as recognition-­granting authority’ (Krause and Schramm 2011: 128). Their case studies show that these political subjectivities emerge in relation to international agencies and NGOs amongst others: The positions that people claim for themselves, accept in order to get resources, or inhabit in the processes of negotiating belonging, are assigned through multiple actors and emerge in specific situations alongside the intersections of race, class, gender and other social stratifications. (Krause and Schramm 2011: 128)

The formation of political subjects is therefore a double process, ‘which grants people or groups positions to claim rights, but at the same time forces them to accept being subjected to the rules and governing practices of those authorities they address’ (Krause and Schramm 2011: 130). This means is that forcibly displaced people are still constituted as political subjects in the space of displacement, although they have lost political membership of their state. The balance between their being subjects-­ with-­power and subjects-­of-­power is shaped by the way in which that space is governed, or policed, by international agencies and other actors, and their own capacity for resistance. If they are being denied political subjectivity-­with-­power, then this is due not only to the fact of displacement but also to the way in which that space of displacement is constituted. By political agency I mean the capacity to represent oneself as a political subject, which amounts to having the capacity to participate in decision-­making about the future development of one’s life chances and community. The problem with the accepted view of displacement in normative Political Theory and political practice can now be understood

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as this: it assumes that displaced people have no political agency because it assumes political agency can only be embodied within citizenship of a state, and so can only be restored when people regain some form of national membership. Because displaced people are positionless in the global order of things, they cannot possess the agency needed to represent themselves and their own interests; others must speak for them. This means that when they do speak this is only heard as noise, rather than legitimate speech. We can also now see that the international protection regime itself denies displaced people political agency, constructing them largely as subjects-­of-­power through governing or policing the space of displacement in specific ways. The passivity and speechlessness of the displaced is imposed upon them by the order of things, including the order of protection. The political conception of forced displacement shows that displaced people should be constituted as political subjects with agency –­ subjects-­with-­power –­in the space of displacement itself, such that the governance of that space is shared with the other agencies who, at present, govern it without their participation. It enables us to see that the fact that the displaced have lost their political membership of a nation state does not prevent them from being constituted –­or constituting themselves –­as political agents in this sense. POLITICAL MEMBERSHIP OUTSIDE OF THE NATION STATE But how is political agency for forcibly displaced people in the field of displacement to be achieved? How can they possess a position in the international order in the absence of national membership? We have seen that if this is limited to including the ‘refugee voice’, the political agency of displaced people remains fragmented and sporadic. Felix Bender argues that refugees should govern refugee camps (Bender 2021), but I believe the arguments of this chapter take us in a much more radical and demanding direction, towards the need to ensure that displaced people are political agents, not only in spaces of displacement but within the global policy forums that determine policy and constitute the field of protection and assistance for displaced people, to share in the governance of that field in a much more authoritative way. To understand this we need to return to the idea of political membership. The reality is that agency is difficult to achieve outside of a system of political membership, but this does not mean that political agency is out of the question for displaced people because they are outside of that system. This is to reject the conception of the global political order as ‘a world in which state membership is the basic condition of political

A Political Conception of Forced Displacement219 standing’ (Owen 2020: 56). We have to look at structures of political membership that can exist outside of the dominant system of nation-­ state citizenship. There are two elements to this, the first being a distinctive conception of the international order, and the second a distinctive conception of what it is to be a political member of that international order. Taking the international order first, contemporary work in global governance argues that we should see it as much more disorderly, rather than as a fixed and stable system of sovereign states. Diane Stone has been highly influential in developing this view of an international disorder when she argues that, in William D. Coleman’s words, ‘nation-­ state institutions no longer serve as the sole organizing center for policy’ (Coleman 2012: 678; see Stone 2008). This is to move from a state-­ centric to a polycentric model of global governance. Central to this is Stone’s idea of the ‘global agora’. The agora was the Athenian market-­ place or public square, ‘the heart of intellectual life and public discourse’ (Stone 2008: 20). She applies the idea to global governance, where she uses it ‘to identify a growing global public space of fluid, dynamic, and intermeshed relations of politics, markets, culture, and society’; but here ‘the global agora is a social and political space –­generated by globalization –­rather than a physical place’ (Stone 2008: 21). We can also add that it is increasingly constituted by technological digital regimes of power. Most importantly, she states, ‘The global agora is also a domain of relative disorder and uncertainty where institutions are underdeveloped and political authority is unclear, and dispersed through multiplying institutions and networks’ (Stone 2008: 21). This means that in reality, ‘policy making is messy’ (Stone 2008: 29). Stone observes that ‘disorder and unpredictability are the norm’, and that ‘there is no consistent pattern of global policy processes’ (Stone 2008: 29). This allows for multiple positions in that global order from which to exercise agency. Coleman says: the agora concept leaves room for an increasingly common aspect of global policy-­making: the active presence in a policy field of several international organizations, with divergent interests, leading to difficulties in coordinating policy discussions and policy development and in implementing policy outcomes. (Coleman 2012: 678)

He suggests that rather than one single global agora for global public policy making, there may be multiple ones for different policy areas. If we allow, with Coleman, that there can be a range of global agoras for different fields of global public policy, then the global protection regime certainly fits this characterisation: a disorderly field with many

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actors sometimes in competition with each other in arriving at protection policy and practice. Importantly, for Stone, ‘dynamics for exclusion, seclusion, and division are just as likely’ as progressive developments in the global agora. As it stands, it ‘is characterized primarily by elite rule and lack of participation’ (Stone 2008: 22). If we understand the field of global protection in this way, my argument is that the forcibly displaced certainly do not experience it as an ‘accessible participative domain’ in which they are able to contribute to policy formation (Stone 2008: 22). However, there is nothing about the nature of the international order which excludes them in principle. If they were to organise themselves as an agency at the global level, they could contest for a place in the global agora of global protection. But how can they constitute themselves, or be constituted, to make this a possibility? This brings us to the second element, how political membership can exist within such a global order but outside of national citizenship, to break out of the limits of what Tendayi Bloom describes as ‘methodological citizenism’, by which she means ‘the assumption that thinking about politics and individual–­State relations must be structured around citizenship’ (Bloom 2017: 2). She argues, ‘Liberal democratic analyses till now have largely been citizenist. That is, they have focused on citizens, or people insofar as they relate to States as citizens’ (Bloom 2017: 1). The assumption within liberal Political Theory is of ‘citizenship of a recognised State as the core or even sole allocator of rights, personhood and political existence’ (Bloom 2017: 154). And in practice, in the current global order it is ‘necessary for individuals to be members of a modern recognised State in order to be represented on the world stage and in order to claim access to the modern internationally recognised set of rights and protections’ (Bloom 2017: 166). There is an important and growing literature around the idea of transnational citizenship, but to an extent that literature understands this idea in terms of people being able to move from one nation state to another and access the rights of citizenship within that state, or retain their citizenship of the state they have left. Although ‘transnational’, this approach still sees citizenship as connected in some way to nation states, just not in the limited way which a more territorialised conception of citizenship would allow for (see Collyer 2014). This is membership beyond the nation state but within the nation-­state system, while what we are exploring here is the possibility of political membership outside of that system. Katherine Tonkiss makes the same observation about developments in the theoretical field of post-­nationalism (Tonkiss 2019). Her findings are based on interviews with those she terms ‘post-­national activists’

A Political Conception of Forced Displacement221 campaigning around migration and asylum. She identifies a post-­national activist as: one who contests the parameters of nationally defined membership and rights regimes from within the existing state system and proposes alternative solidarities rooted in commitments to human rights rather than national group membership, taking a leadership role in the practice of post-­nationalism. (Tonkiss 2019: 164–­5; my emphasis)

She says they can be seen as part of a ‘trans-­state civil society’, but observes: Yet these activists are working within the nation-­state, seeking to engage with the structures of the state as they exist now and to press for change from within, rather than seeking explicitly to build alliances across borders. Many have a degree of ‘insider’ status . . ., meaning that they are able to develop formal and informal avenues for engaging with and influencing political and policy actors. In this sense, the participants in the research ‘root’ the cosmopolitan orientation of global civil society in engagement with the existing institutions of individual states. (Tonkiss 2019: 165–­6)

This, says Tonkiss, is problematic, because such activists ‘hold a more privileged position than those excluded and thereby silenced by the citizenship regime in question’ (Tonkiss 2019: 173). She concludes that this reflects a ‘tension implicit in theories of post-­nationalism more broadly’, that it faces a ‘bounded demos’ problem ‘whereby the exclusionary logics of those pre-­existing systems continue to limit the marginalized voices of those they exclude in the process of transformation’ (Tonkiss 2019: 174). I am arguing for a complete break from the kind of ‘national citizenism’ Bloom and Tonkiss have identified. Indeed, I have deliberately titled this section of the chapter ‘Political Membership Outside of the Nation State’, rather than ‘Beyond the Nation State’, because I am arguing for a political membership that embodies political agency outside of the dominant system of national membership, which nevertheless has a position from which it is able to represent itself in the world. The problem is, of course, that the ‘accepted’ view of the international order as consisting of nation states and citizens of nation states leaves no space for any kind of significant political membership outside of national citizenship. But as we have seen in our discussion of global governance, this does not reflect the reality of how the international system actually works, and, more importantly, it does not set a conceptual limit to the possibility of effective political membership within that system.

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I am suggesting that there can be effective political membership of a global community of interests, such that this community has a recognised and authoritative place at global policy forums in order to represent those interests, and membership of it enables one to participate within that representation. Here, political membership and agency are radically detached from national membership, but this remains a political membership with real access to participation in the formation of policies and practices that relate to that community of interests, such that it plays a central and authoritative role in constituting those policies and practices, rather than being limited to simply seeking to influence others who have such a role, or being permitted by them to have a ‘voice’ at global policy forums as guests. We should see forcibly displaced people as political members of a global community of interests which ought to have an authoritative place at global policy forums which determine policy and practice concerning international protection and assistance and solutions to forced displacement. Or rather, forcibly displaced people should see themselves, and constitute themselves, as such a community. A GLOBAL COMMUNITY OF INTERESTS How, then, is it possible for displaced people to possess a political membership outside of the nation-­state system, a membership that embodies political agency? There are two kinds of evidence that show this to be a possibility. The first is the admittedly limited and nascent emergence of refugee-­led forums such as the Global Summit of Refugees and other organisations as evidence of a movement towards achieving such a global community of interests. The second kind of evidence is an example of how such a global community of interests did constitute itself as a movement with members and political agency, and achieved a place at the level of global policy forums with a significant role to play at that level. That example is of Indigenous peoples’ political activism, where a global movement was achieved that succeeded in Indigenous peoples representing themselves in global, regional and national forums and achieving a significant say over policies and practices that affected their wellbeing. Ronald Niezen comments that ‘The Indigenous peoples’ movement has arisen out of the shared experiences of marginalized groups facing the negative impacts of resource extraction and economic modernization’, and that ‘it is grounded in international networks’ (Niezen 2003: 9). But to make progress, they had to identify with each other globally. Coleman argues, ‘The identities of peoples in most places in the world are very specific and place-­based. Only very gradually over the twentieth century did peoples come to recognise that there are “others”

A Political Conception of Forced Displacement223 like them across the planet’ (Coleman 2012: 681). The core characteristic of Indigenous peoples is that ‘they have inhabited a particular place or territory for a long time or since “time immemorial”’ (Coleman 2012: 681). While it took time for Indigenous peoples to learn about each other and what they had in common, they succeeded in constituting themselves as a global community capable of gaining a position in the international order. Crucially, this movement had to work outside of the nation-­state system, because it was the global institutionalisation of the nation-­state system ‘which led everywhere to the dispossession of their lands and the denigration of their cultures’ (Coleman 2012: 681–­2). In response to pressure from social justice networks of Indigenous peoples, the UN set up a Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1982. ‘This Working Group and its activities marked the beginning of the building of a “global policy space” where the notion of indigenous rights could be discussed on a global scale’ (Coleman 2012: 683), so that Indigenous activism did not only lead to the constitution of a global community of interests capable of representing itself; it also led to the constitution of a global policy space where it could represent those interests. Indigenous peoples organisations used this as a platform to push for new standards in UN law, such as the International Labour Organization Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in 1989, and eventually to the Permanent Forum for Indigenous Peoples set up in 2000, ‘the formalization of a global policy space’ (Coleman 2012: 683). This has in turn led to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007, embodying principles of recognition and Indigenous status and rights to consultation over territory, culture and autonomy (Nichol 2017: 795). It could be argued that an Indigenous sovereignty has been established alongside state sovereignty (Lenzerini 2006; also see Nichol 2017: 797). Heather N. Nichol says that Indigenous sovereignty ‘is a sovereignty which legitimises non-­ state challenges to the total authority of the state and situates state sovereignty in a consultative process’ (Nichol 2017: 797). Importantly, UNDRIP is cited as legal and moral authority for the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in international deliberations. For example, the 2007 Ilulissat Declaration on Arctic Sovereignty, arrived at following meetings between the Inuit Circumpolar Council and five coastal Arctic nation states, states that ‘international relations in the Arctic and the resolution of international disputes in the Arctic are not the sole preserve of Arctic states or other states; they are also within the purview of the Arctic’s Indigenous Peoples’. Nichol argues that ‘UNDRIP opened up new possibilities for restructuring the relationship between states and Indigenous Peoples, and amplified the “voice”

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afforded to Indigenous Peoples’ organisations in international affairs’ (Nichol 2017: 798). Indigenous peoples obviously still face extremely difficult challenges. For example, on 24 August 2021 Human Rights Watch reported on the dangers of a bill being considered by the Brazilian government that would prevent Indigenous peoples from claiming their rights to traditional lands, and so make it easier for those lands to be taken for exploitation.1 However, the important point is that Indigenous peoples engaged in a successful global movement to constitute a political agency outside of the nation-­state system, and this shows that it is possible for a body of people as varied as those termed ‘Indigenous’ to work together as a global community of interests and represent themselves, through their political membership of that community. I propose that we explore the same possibilities in relation to the forcibly displaced. There are, of course, challenges here. The forcibly displaced constitute a widely diverse range of people and experiences and situations, but the same can be said of the Indigenous peoples movement, and they managed to forge a common identity as described by Coleman, an identity which was not simply given but was constituted by the movement itself (as, indeed, any political identity must be). There is also the challenge of finding representatives to stand for this diverse range of people and speak for them at global policy forums, but again the Indigenous peoples movement shows that this can be achieved very effectively, and the same challenge faces any democratic forum or movement at any level of politics, and so cannot be seen as a decisive objection for thinking in these terms. In other words, the challenges of identity-­formation and representation here are not unique, and have to be faced by any political group at any level. Tristan Harley and Harry Hobbs make an explicit connection between the potential for refugee participation ‘in the design and implementation of policy’ and the Indigenous peoples movement and the achievement of the UNDRIP (Harley and Hobbs 2020: 200). They say, ‘Although Indigenous peoples are normatively distinct from refugees, and their aspirations and entitlements in international law differ, several articles of the UNDRIP highlight a more inclusive or substantive approach to participatory rights’ (Harley and Hobbs 2020: 207). For example, Article 18 says that Indigenous peoples have ‘the right to participate in decision-­ making in matters which would affect their rights, through representatives chosen by themselves in accordance with their own procedures’; and Article 19 says that states ‘shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative

A Political Conception of Forced Displacement225 institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them’. Harley and Hobbs observe that the principles of participation, engagement and consultation underlying these articles are goals shared by refugees (Harley and Hobbs 2020: 208). Harley and Hobbs say that the 1951 Refugee Convention, its 1967 Protocol, the New York Declaration, and Global Compact on Refugees ‘were largely developed without the formal participation of refugees in consultations’ (Harley and Hobbs 2020: 225). This is a striking contrast with the processes leading to the UNDRIP. They cite Megan Davis, an Indigenous academic lawyer who was involved in the development of UNDRIP. It was, she says, ‘the first time that states had drafted a human rights instrument directly with the rights-­holders empowered by the instrument’ (Davis 2008: 440, quoted in Harley and Hobbs 2020: 225). Harley and Hobbs observe that ‘the presence of Indigenous leaders, lawyers, and activists around the drafting table has enhanced the instrument’s normative weight and grounded the document in a “high degree of legitimacy”’, quoting James Anaya, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Indigenous Peoples Rights, in his interim report in 2010 (Harley and Hobbs 2020: 225, quoting Anaya 2010: para. 60). Anaya goes on to say: This legitimacy is a function not only of the fact that it has been formally endorsed by an overwhelming majority of the United Nations Member States, but also by the fact that it is the product of years of advocacy and struggle by indigenous people themselves. (Anaya 2010: para. 60)

While the struggle for Indigenous rights continues, Harley and Hobbs say that the UNDRIP ‘is increasingly valuable as a political and legal instrument that protects and promotes the rights of Indigenous peoples’ (Harley and Hobbs 2020: 226), and that this points to the value of a ‘new, non-­binding United Nations (UN) declaration that clearly details both the right of refugees to be heard and the right of refugees to have some authority in decision-­making processes that affect them’ (Harley and Hobbs 2020: 202). This is, of course, just the outline of a sketch of an idea at present, but still that idea has a core to it: that forcibly displaced people as such constitute a global community of interests that should recognise itself and be recognised as a political agency with all forcibly displaced people as its members, and that this community should have an authoritative place –­not just a ‘voice’ –­at the global policy forums that determine the governance of the space of protection for displaced people and the solutions for their displacement. That role can be achieved by recognising

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this community of interests as a legitimate political agency. UNHCR, as it stands, is not that agency, partly because of its dependence for funding from states, and I do not think it can be transformed so that it can be. We are looking for something distinct, formed through ground-­level activism, again much in the same way as happened for Indigenous peoples. We have already seen the potential for such a movement, in the form of the Network for Refugee Voices and the Global Summit of Refugees. Another example is the regional Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network established in 2018.2 Although my case is that forcibly displaced people in general are all members of this global community of interests, it may be that refugees, having some political identity and activity in place, can act as a vanguard for a wider movement. In terms of a global policy space where that community should be represented, there is the Global Refugee Forum. Again, as constituted, it falls far short of giving displaced people, or even refugees, a share of governance; it is still dominated by states and international agencies, and still pursues a predominantly state-­led agenda on forced displacement. Jeff Crisp points to the criticism of the GCR as ‘a negotiated deal between states with limited input from refugees or host communities themselves’ (Guy Goodwin-­Gill, quoted in Crisp 2019), and, writing before the Forum met, suggests that there is a risk of the Forum going down the same road: ‘Attendance is by invitation only, and a number of civil society and refugee-­led organisations have had to lobby hard to be represented’ (Crisp 2019). UNHCR, which organised the Forum meeting, said that given the presence of heads of government and high-­level ministers, the opportunity for speaking slots at the Forum plenary was limited. Crisp comments: In such a context, there is an evident risk that refugee and host community representatives will be confined to fringe events, their voices drowned out in formal sessions by diplomatic dignitaries, some of whom are more eager to defend their governments’ records than advance the cause of refugee protection and solutions. (Crisp 2019)

As we saw in Chapter 10, Crisp’s prediction was borne out by what happened to the few refugee representatives who attended the Forum. As things stand, then, UNHCR cannot function as the representative agency for the global community of the forcibly displaced, and the Global Refugee Forum cannot function as the global policy forum where that community can represent its own interests. There is much work to do if these things are going to happen, but it is doubtful that this work will be done by nation states. We have to look elsewhere.

A Political Conception of Forced Displacement227 CONCLUSION If my argument for the political conception of forced displacement is correct, then it follows that forcibly displaced people constitute a global community of interests that should be recognised as a political agency with all forcibly displaced people as its members, and that the representatives of that community should have an authoritative place –­not just a ‘voice’ –­at the global policy forums that determine the governance of the space of protection and assistance for displaced people, and for finding solutions to their displacement. If that is right, then there is a long way to go to making this vision anything like a reality, and we need to look beyond UNHCR and the Global Refugee Forum. It also seems to follow that we should not see our task as persuading nation-­state governments or their citizens that this is the right road to go down. Instead, we should be looking to activist organisations and movements to move this process forward, again as was the case for the Indigenous peoples movement. This will be a bottom-­ up movement which eventually cannot be ignored by international agencies and states, as the demand for a real and authoritative say by displaced people in constituting the policies and practices that determine their life chances is such an obvious and reasonable demand for justice that it is impossible to deny. One criticism of this proposal is that, first, the idea of the forcibly displaced making up a global community of interests rests on our ability to offer a clear definition of who counts as forcibly displaced so that we know who can claim to be a member of this global community; and second, it commits the error of assuming a uniformity of experience of forced displacement. Just as many have pointed out that there is no single refugee experience, it is all the more true that there is no single experience of forced displacement. I will address the first criticism in the next chapter. To the second criticism one reply is that I have not argued that the experience of forced displacement is exactly the same for all forcibly displaced people, but I have argued that there are core experiences that evidence suggests are shared –­of violence, of the protractedness of displacement, of the loss of membership of one’s political community, and, of course, of being forced to leave one’s home. Another reply is that the achievement of political solidarity in such a global community does not rest on the existence of a single identity and experience. As the example of the Indigenous peoples movement shows, it is possible to construct commonalities across differences. Felix Anderl, examining solidarities built around women’s political activism, argues that ‘The global . . . is not present as a shared condition. Rather,

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solidarity builds on relationality, which is strongly place-­based. At the same time, however, the global is necessary as a highly normative political horizon’ (Anderl 2020: 2). In other words, the global community of interests is not given at the start of the process of solidarity but is constituted through that process; rather than a common community being the ground of solidarity, solidarity is the ground of a common community. Of course, the process is more complex than this, and it is important to emphasise that we are talking about a process, rather than a ‘thing’. In the end, the arguments of the book drive us towards the need for solidarity, not just between the forcibly displaced but between those of us who see forced displacement as a major global injustice and those impacted by it. In the next chapter, therefore, I explore the concept of solidarity and what shape it might take in this context. NOTES 1. ‘Brazil: Reject Anti-­ Indigenous Rights Bill’, Human Rights Watch, 24 August 2021, (accessed 25 August 2021). 2. (accessed 21 July 2021).

Chapter 12 SOLIDARITY

WHAT IS THE POINT? I have argued that any form of forced displacement should be seen as political, calling for a political response; a political conception needs to be extended across the whole range of displacements. This requires a different conception of political protection than the one that dominates at present, as surrogate membership of a sanctuary state may not be relevant to some forms of displacement (although it remains relevant for a great many), and it is not part of the argument that we need to arrive at a one-­size-­fits-­all model. What matters is that the responses to displacements should aim at permanent solutions, and should be significantly informed and determined by displaced people themselves, recognising their political agency. However, an objection which could come from both the political and humanitarian conceptions of refugeehood is that, whatever political protection looks like, extending it across the range of displacements is radically implausible. The numbers of displaced people are vast, and the international community is already reluctant to see refugee displacement as a political issue, pushing towards a more humanitarian framework to temporarily shelter them until they achieve some form of ‘resilience’ wherever they happen to be. Indeed, it might be suggested that the arguments I have put forward lead us to such unrealistic conclusions that I could have better devoted my time to the more realistic project of proposing achievable reforms of the international protection regime, something more like Matthew Lister’s progressive conservativism approach (Lister 2014: 629 n.9). The question, then, is: what is the point of a political conception of forced displacement? There are two reasons why I think it is worth arguing for such a position. First, its implication is that stronger political solutions are needed across the range of displacements, and the fact that the global order of sovereign nation states is incapable of delivering these solutions exposes its inadequacy –­it is, as it stands, incapable of 229

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arriving at anything that looks like an answer to the injustice of forced displacement. This is surely worth pointing out. What follows is that we need to rethink our conception of the global order and imagine a global system which has genuine answers for forcibly displaced people. The second reason why it is worth arguing for is that it leads us to the conclusion we explored in the previous chapter: that the forcibly displaced should be constituted as a global community of interests that has an authoritative place at any forum that arrives at policies and practices regarding their situation, and that they should have a significant degree of ownership of those policies and practices. This is a practical proposal, although it remains ambitious. It might look like an attempt to persuade policy makers to change their policies, or how they make them, but more importantly it is a call for all people to come together to ensure that the forcibly displaced are constituted as such a global community and are able to take their place at policy-­making forums, or establish new policy-­ making forums where existing ones are inadequate. This in itself is more likely to be achieved by strategies of resistance and solidarity than by attempting to catch the ear of the powerful, against whose interests such a coalition would be. However, this latter outcome raises the problem of the boundary question. I have been critical of the boundaries of refugeehood and international protection as they are practised, and of some of the boundaries that have been proposed in normative Political Theory. That criticism has been based on the argument that those boundaries turn out to be arbitrary; the factors that are supposed to justify the protection of those inside the boundary are in fact present on the outside, and so the boundary always collapses. I have said that we need just and fair processes of debate and policy-­making that include the forcibly displaced as a global community of interests, but how are we to define the boundary of that global community? I have occasionally used some kind of list, which has included at various stages not only refugees but also people displaced by extreme poverty, disasters, environmental events and development projects. But in each of these cases there are boundaries that are extremely fuzzy; for example, I suggested that we could see people who have had to leave their homes due to gentrification processes as forcibly displaced, but I recognise this is contestable. And if an extremely wealthy person is displaced from their mansion through a disaster, such as a flood, are they included as members of the global community of the forcibly displaced? And if not, why not?1 The point is that I could be the victim of my own critical method. The answer is that it is not for me to define who is forcibly displaced. I have pointed to the power the political theorist exercises in defining

Solidarity231 categories of people in ways they may not recognise, and have argued that this is an exercise of power which can itself be a form of violence, in that it can do violence to people’s understanding of who they are, as well as possibly lead to practical consequences of exclusion from protection for some. Who is included within the global community of interests is itself going to be a process that is enacted by that community as it constitutes itself along with those who would consider themselves to be part of it. Again, we can look to the experience of the Indigenous peoples movement here. Ronald Niezen discusses the ‘complex, delicate issue of defining the term “indigenous”’, an issue that became ‘more pertinent as the term is increasingly associated with new rights and benefits (especially political power)’ (Niezen 2003: 18). Indigenous peoples have resisted a precise legal definition, as this ‘would impose standards or conditions for participation in human rights processes that would be prejudicial to their interests’ (Niezen 2003: 18). The danger is that such a definition ‘would be controlled by the very state powers that they see as the principle source of their exploitation, marginalization, and suffering’ (Niezen 2003: 19). While the lack of a rigorous definition is a challenge to academic debate, Niezen says: this state of affairs is in some ways preferable: a rigorous definition, one that in effect tried to close the intellectual borders where they were still porous, would be premature and, ultimately, futile. Debates over the problem of definition are actually more interesting than any definition in and of itself. (Niezen 2003: 19)

There is therefore a virtue in leaving the boundary question unanswered here, so that debates around whether gentrification constitutes forced displacement can take place. It would, as Niezen says, be premature for me to close off those debates. It would be naïve, however, to suppose that there are not difficult challenges here, which, again, the example of the Indigenous peoples movement illustrates, as there have been disputes about who counts as a member of a specific Indigenous people. An example is the use of blood quantum rules to determine membership of Native American tribes in the United States, at the expense of those known as Freedmen, those Africans used as slaves by Native Americans until 1866.2 For example, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation –­one of the largest federally recognised Native American tribes in the United States –­disenfranchised Black Creeks in 1979 when it adopted a new Constitution requiring a blood quantum, a measurement of how much ‘Indian blood’ a person must have, in order to be a member. Enslaved Africans living in Indian territory were held to be citizens of the relevant Native American tribe

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on emancipation in 1866 (see Somvichian-­Clausen 2020). Other Native American tribes, such as the Choctaw and Cherokee, have used a similar system, and it has been argued that as sovereign nations they have the right to determine who counts as a member without interference. Am I not defending such a right here, despite its implications and despite the criticisms I have made elsewhere of membership arguments based on a people’s right to determine itself (see Cole 2000: 180–­7)? It is worth pointing out, though, that the concept of the blood quantum and the systems on which present practices are based are the product of European colonialism in North America. Maya Harmon observes that European colonists seeking to control land and resources that had belonged to Native peoples manipulated legal and sociological constructions of ‘race’, and blood quantum was one of these methods: ‘The government hoped that using blood quantum would eventually eliminate Native peoples –­that intermarriage would “dilute” the amount of “Indian blood” in the population, causing descendants of Native peoples to become indistinguishable from the rest of the population’ (Harmon 2021). When the United States government began negotiating treaties with tribes as sovereign nations in the nineteenth century it ‘used the language of blood’ to define them: ‘Using blood quantum allowed the government to turn independent nations into racialized groups, which thus enabled the government to subordinate them’ (Harmon 2021). Tribal lands were subsequently divided into individual lots to be distributed to individual Native Americans, with the aim of breaking up tribes by encouraging individual family farming. One-­quarter ‘Native blood’ was needed to receive an allotment of land, and determining this was done by using the Dawes Rolls, a census of Native Americans carried out in 1898 by Henry Dawes, which had assigned black Freedmen as having a different status, mostly based on judgements of skin colour. Before colonisation, says Harmon, many Indigenous tribes used lineal descent and socio-­cultural-­territorial definitions to determine membership. Mixed-­ race individuals were generally accepted, and for some membership could be acquired through long-­term residence, or adoption of cultural norms. ‘Colonization caused a shift to legal and race-­based definitions’ (Harmon 2021). The concern is, of course, that Native American nations still use the blood quantum system to determine membership, and have used it in recent history to exclude those held to be descended from Africans who had been enslaved. Harmon observes, ‘Modern definitions of indigeneity within tribes closely mirror the nineteenth and early twentieth century European-­ American conceptions of race’ (Harmon 2021). However, Christine A. Li argues that there are signs that these practices are being

Solidarity233 problematised. She says, ‘Looking forward, sustained, open community dialogues can foster recognition of these complexities by considering the legacy of colonization, lived realities, and pre-­colonial practices from a time when Indigenous Peoples had ultimate authority over their land’ (Li 2021). The Cherokee Nation abandoned the blood quantum approach in February 2021, and at the time of writing the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the Choctaw Nation have agreed to reverse such policies (Cameron and Walker 2021). And so we need to recognise the colonial legacies of these boundary disputes, and support attempts by Indigenous peoples to move beyond them. There is one more question I need to engage in before I close the arguments, and that is to do with moral responsibility, and how we should respond to that responsibility. Serena Parekh discusses moral responsibility for finding solutions to forced displacement in a world of structural injustice (Parekh 2020: 159–­75), but my concern is with my moral responsibility as a political theorist. I have argued that the forcibly displaced should constitute themselves as a global community of interests and take some degree of ownership of the processes that decide policies and practices concerning their situation, and have argued that it is not appropriate for me as a political theorist with no experience of displacement to decide what those policies and practices should be. This may sound like saying this is not my problem, and it is down to the forcibly displaced themselves to get on with solving it, and the very words ‘the forcibly displaced should constitute themselves as a community of interests and take ownership’ can sound like an instruction being issued to them. But that has not been the argument. I have engaged seriously with the postcolonial critique and recognised the problematics of my own location, and I have questioned the extent to which I can theorise about the injustices done to those whose experience of oppression I have not shared. But at the same time I have insisted that I must be able to do this, in the sense that I must do it. I have a deep ethical obligation to pay close attention to certain injustices and put them at the centre of Political Theory and action. It cannot be the case that only those who have suffered a form of oppression should oppose it, and equally cannot be the case that only they can normatively theorise about the injustice of it. The ideal of solidarity enters here and tells me that I must act and speak with others who are fighting injustice. This includes arguing and campaigning for the right of the forcibly displaced to have a say over policy and practice that affects them, and supporting the efforts they themselves make to bring this about. Far from claiming I can step aside and leave everything to the forcibly displaced to solve at the level of theory and practice, the

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argument is that I need to become more engaged at both levels, but in a way that does not involve claiming to possess a privileged and authoritative perspective. And so a third outcome emerges from the arguments of the book, in additional to the first two described above: that rather than proposals for new ‘rationing’ systems of international protection, what emerges is a thoroughly practical and achievable proposal that networks of resistance, co-­resistance and solidarity must be built that connect and support forcibly displaced people and others to achieve their political objectives. And so the writing of this book is intended as an act of solidarity with forcibly displaced people. However, what does ‘solidarity’ mean in this context, and what makes this book part of that solidarity? These are the questions I seek to address in the rest of this chapter. SOLIDARITIES The concept of solidarity has long been argued over in Political Theory. At its simplest the dispute is between what we might call thick and thin conceptions, where the thickness and thinness is determined by what has to be shared for a relationship of solidarity to exist. The thicker conceptions argue that a great deal has to be shared in terms of interests, values, institutions or a shared community, and what follows from this is a degree of scepticism about establishing solidarity with ‘strangers’, people who are not already members of a bounded community. According to the thinner approach, very little needs to be shared, and so people can be in relations of solidarity with others they do not know, members of a different and distant community. The ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ here does not refer to the content of solidarity –­what duties it gives rise to –­but refers to what must already exist for solidarity to be possible. However, very often the thicker conceptions of solidarity are taken to give rise to a thicker set of duties, and the thinner conceptions a thinner set. Most usually, the thicker end of the solidarity spectrum has a cognitive basis: at its simplest, we know the people we are in a relationship of solidarity with. And the thinner end of the spectrum has a non-­cognitive basis, most often described in terms of empathy for others: again, at its simplest, we do not know the people we are in a solidarity relationship with, but we know enough about their suffering to feel empathy for them. Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka take a thick approach to solidarity, emphasising a bounded form of national and social solidarity, and contrast this with unbounded ‘pure humanitarianism’. The latter comes into play when we provide emergency aid to people in distant places in response to famines, for example, but bounded solidarity is needed

Solidarity235 ‘to motivate people to accept obligations beyond duties of rescue and humanitarian need’ (Banting and Kymlicka 2017: 6). David Miller, however, does not rule out the possibility of solidarity existing across humanity in an unbounded form, but argues that something must be shared for solidarity to exist: ‘There must . . . be a “we” that feels and practises solidarity, and this relationship is reciprocal in the sense that each member recognizes and is recognized by the others as belonging to this “we”’ (Miller 2017: 63); and so any solidarity at the global level would be extremely thin both in the sense of what is shared and in the sense of what duties emerge from it. Miller makes a distinction between solidarity within groups and solidarity across groups (Miller 2017: 62). He says of solidarity across groups: Experiencing solidarity with a group of people –­for example a group that is suffering hardship at the hands of an oppressive regime –­means identifying with them emotionally, trying to imagine what it must be like to be in their place, and then taking symbolic or practical steps to help them. (Miller 2017: 62)

In other words, such solidarity must rest on empathy. This distinction between solidarity within and across groups may seem important to the discussion in this chapter, as I have distinguished between solidarity within the global community of interests that is the forcibly displaced, and solidarity across groups in terms of non-­displaced activists and forcibly displaced people. However, it is not clear to me that there is a clear distinction to make here, as in the first case there is still the need for solidarity across different groups of forcibly displaced people who may be in very different situations and distant places, and in the second case there is the need for solidarity within the activist movement itself, which again could consist of different and distant people. In both cases, we are talking about solidarity between ‘strangers’, and it is this possibility I want to explore here. I want to argue that solidarity between strangers can have a cognitive basis and give rise to a rich set of obligations. That is not to dismiss the important role empathy can play, but it is not necessary for an account of solidarity across difference. This echoes the views of Hannah Arendt, which Ken Reshaur highlights (Reshaur 1992). He argues that Arendt is concerned to keep the cognitive and affective dimensions of solidarity separate, and that it is the cognitive dimension that is prior. Solidarity is ‘a necessary condition for emotions such as compassion in the face of suffering’ (Reshaur 1992: 724). Arendt states, ‘It is through solidarity that people establish deliberately and, as it were, dispassionately a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited’ (Arendt 1963: 84, quoted in Reshaur

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1992: 724). For Arendt, solidarity is world-­building. ‘It provides a means by which a relationship can be established between people who suffer and people who decide to remove or at least ameliorate this suffering, by establishing a community of interest with the oppressed’ (Reshaur 1992: 724). As Patrick Hayden and Natasha Saunders express it, ‘solidarity arises when individuals together put their efforts either towards actively resisting oppression and injustice, or towards speaking and acting in the common cause of (re)building the relational fabric of a shared world’ (Hayden and Saunders 2019: 185). It is this world-­building dimension of solidarity which is crucially important to my account. One writer who is sceptical about the project of extended solidarity is Patti T. Lenard (Lenard 2010). She argues that solidarity is understood as necessary to enable members of political communities to identify with each other over humanity in general, and that makes it a domestic or local rather than global phenomenon. Lenard argues that a community must have four features in order for it to be solidaristic. The first two are that members identify with the goals and values of the community, and so feel they are members; and that they are loyal to the institutions that embody these goals and values. These give rise to two more features: mutual empathy for group members and a willingness to support the worst off; and mutual trust that all members are willing to make the same sacrifice to maintain those institutions, a trust which acts as a foundation for cooperation. A community with all these features is robustly solidaristic (Lenard 2010: 103). Lenard argues that conceptions of global solidarity are too thin compared with domestic or local solidarities for four reasons. First, accounts of domestic solidarity give ‘precision’ to the commitments members of the community must hold for solidarity to exist. Membership of the community is based on shared values and goals and these ‘must be fairly precise’, but this precision is absent at the global level (Lenard 2010: 106). Second, domestic accounts can explain why members of the community are loyal to it, such that they will promote the good of the community over their own interests. It is difficult to find a source for this kind of loyalty at the global level; indeed, what would it be loyalty to? Third, with domestic solidarity the commitment to shared values plus the loyalty to co-­members gives rise to empathy and trust. Global solidarity has to rely on empathy by itself without loyalty, but ‘empathy on its own is insufficient to build a commitment to thick duties of justice, even if it is enough to interest us in the affairs of others’ (Lenard 2010: 106). Fourth, accounts of global solidarity have little to say about trust-­building processes among members of a global ‘community’.

Solidarity237 However, it could be argued that solidarity is a political construct, such that it can be built across different communities, and between strangers, despite the lack of any pre-­existing connections between them. Lea Ypi argues that solidarity has to be politically constructed even within the nation state, and the current political divisions in the United States and United Kingdom, for example, show how difficult that national project can be (note, though, that Lenard talks of local or domestic, not national, solidarity). For Ypi, this means that relations of solidarity do not have to be established before moral obligations between fellow citizens are recognised. Rather, people can recognise moral obligations towards others, and on that basis construct a relationship of solidarity. When it comes to solidarity across groups, Ypi argues that grass-­roots organisations have an important role to play in educating the domestic public: ‘widespread feelings of solidarity do not necessarily precede the construction of social justice initiatives. Solidarity constitutes the result of emancipatory political action rather than its indispensable condition of possibility’ (Ypi 2010: 120). What is crucial here is the role of what Ypi describes as a ‘cosmopolitan avant-­garde’, a group of people leading the development of emancipatory solidarity projects across borders, in ways similar to the artistic and political avant-­garde at key historical moments. These avant-­garde political actors ‘try to expand the boundaries of solidarity within a given political community’ (Ypi 2010: 123). They occupy ‘the empty space between the critique of existing institutional practices and abstract ideals of social justice with a concrete project for the emancipation of society and the political construction of solidarity’ (Ypi 2010: 123). It should not matter if such movements are, initially, unsuccessful, because it seems that the real interest of cosmopolitan avant-­garde initiatives all over the world lies not so much in what the movement achieves but in what kind of alternative discourses on social solidarity it manages to create; not in what problems it resolves but in what issues it problematizes. (Ypi 2010: 126)

Solidarity across borders is, therefore, a political project, built on the commitment of people to make common ground with others where it did not exist before. As Hannah Arendt observes, solidarity is a practice of world-­building. SOLIDARITIES OF RESISTANCE I understand solidarity as the commitment to support, protect or stand by another, based on the recognition that something is shared in an egalitarian sense, and the egalitarian element is, I think, indispensable for

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this to be a relationship of solidarity. That commitment is understood to be reciprocal. This element of reciprocity is controversial, and there is resistance to it in much writing about solidarity. Lilie Chouliaraki, for example, says, ‘Solidarity, the imperative to act on vulnerable others without the anticipation of reciprocation, is the humanitarian claim par excellence’ (Chouliaraki 2011: 364). I have a great deal of sympathy with that view, but nevertheless I want to argue for the necessity of reciprocity in order for this to be political solidarity rather than ‘unbounded humanitarianism’. However, the reciprocity I am arguing for is open-­ ended; it is not contractual. What I understand by a contractual reciprocity is the commitment that if I do X for you, you will do Y for me; or if I do X, you will also do X; or if I do X at time a, you will do X or Y at time b. In European politics solidarity is often talked about in these contractual terms, but I do not mean it in this sense. What I mean by an open-­ended reciprocity is something like this: I will do X to support you, on the understanding that if I ever need X or something similar to be done for me, and you are in a position to do it, you will do so; but there is no expectation that I ever will need that support, and I recognise that if I do ever need it you may not be in a position to supply it, and I do not need an explicit undertaking from you before I do X to support you. You may even be unaware that I have acted in solidarity with you, for example if you are isolated in a prison in a distant country and I campaign for your release or organise pickets of that country’s embassy or boycotts of its businesses and products. When a European citizen makes a commitment of solidarity with a refugee or migrant from a non-­European country, they do so on the understanding that the refugee or migrant would make the same commitment. But in making that commitment of solidarity, the European citizen does not need the other to make an explicit commitment of reciprocity; nor need there be any expectation that the European citizen will ever be need of this kind of support; or if they ever are in need of it, they recognise that the other may not be in a position to provide it –­there is no contractual expectation that the refugee or migrant will actually provide any kind of support in the future. None of that subtracts from their commitment of solidarity. In a sense, this is perfectly compatible with Chouliaraki’s statement; there is no anticipation of reciprocation here. It may be argued that this does not amount to reciprocity at all, but I think there is something in the act of solidarity that entails this recognition of the commitment to support each other in political struggles. In a sense, this egalitarian recognition of the other is an act of moral and political respect, the recognition that the other is as capable of being a

Solidarity239 moral and political agent as ourselves, such that if they were to see that we were engaged in a difficult political struggle, they would recognise the moral and political obligation to stand by us. It is this egalitarian recognition of the other that lifts the act of solidarity out of the sphere of charity; and it is this that gives us a cognitive basis for solidarity with strangers –­this is an act of recognition of moral and political agency, not an empathic recognition of some aspect of what it is to be human. We do know something important about the other, that they have the same capacity as ourselves for moral and political agency. Eugenia Siapera explores the phenomenon of solidarity between grass-­ roots activists in Greece and refugees and asylum seekers, by examining the discourses they employ. She takes this approach because research on discourses framing the issue of irregular migration to Europe has tended to focus on the mainstream media, non-­governmental organisations or the charity sector. This alternative activist discourse ‘is not based on spectacle or pity . . ., but on togetherness and solidarity’ (Siapera 2019: 245). Siapera’s project examined how bonds of solidarity were actively created and reconstituted through a range of activities on social media, such as: posting news and announcements; instrumental communications focusing on actions; refugee stories and testimonials; information about planned actions and events; and posting opinions and commentaries stressing commonalities. The last two activities were especially important. The posts about planned actions and events emphasised togetherness, binding refugees, activists and wider society into everyday life and constructing a common future. The opinions and commentaries linked the refugees’ struggles with struggles against austerity, pointing out commonalities of experience. Siapera argues that there are two kinds of solidarity being created through these processes: human solidarity, seeing refugees as fellow human beings in need of assistance (solidarity across groups); and social solidarity, building social bonds within a society (solidarity within a group). The refugee support groups claimed both kinds of solidarity in their campaigns. The first move was to reassert human solidarity, but with a political aim –­‘to reclaim the humanity of refugees from the dehumanising politics of the EU and Frontex’ (Siapera 2019: 260). Part of this was the telling of refugee stories and reporting the activities of the authorities in oppressing asylum seekers. The second move was to build social solidarity, by building connections between volunteers, refugees and Greek society –­building and sustaining a community. Siapera observes, ‘Social solidarity as the building and sustaining of community hinges on creating commonalities between refugees and the local community that go deeper than merely claiming a common

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humanity’ (Siapera 2019: 261). And so the crucial third move was ‘connecting the various parts of society that are suffering’ (Siapera 2019: 261) –­an act of world-­building. The tactic here was to make the connection with resistance in Greece to austerity politics: Solidarity clinics, housing, food provision and so on were already in operation when the refugees started coming in. These were then extended to include refugees. . . . in doing so, they explicitly acknowledged that refugees (and economic migrants) are also the victims of capitalist crises that take the form of accumulation by dispossession through war or through austerity politics. (Siapera 2019: 261)

This was the attempt to build a political solidarity based on class that went beyond the national level, and was not constrained by cultural identity. Refugees were repositioned alongside Greek workers, the unemployed and others hit by austerity, and this was ‘a crucial component in the political project in which such solidarity groups are involved’ (Siapera 2019: 261). Solidarity with refugees emerges ‘as part of a political project that extends beyond the offer of immediate help towards a reconstruction of society along lines of autonomy, equality and justice’ (Siapera 2019: 262). WORLD-­BUILDING What we can see from the empirical work of Siapera and others is that solidarity is a creative process. Earlier, I offered a conception of solidarity as the commitment to support, protect or stand by another, on the basis of the recognition that something is shared. What emerges from these studies is that the ‘something that is shared’ is also a creative process of identification, but at its core is the recognition that we are all caught up in the same processes of oppression and dispossession even if those processes have different impacts and take different forms and give rise to different experiences. All those differences have the same foundation in common, and, in the act of solidarity, it is recognised that in engaging in transforming the lives of others, people are at the same time engaged in the transformation of their own lives. In other words, what is shared and created through political action is a common political space of resistance. This resonates with Hannah Arendt’s conception of solidarity as world-­building. Rather than requiring the existence of a community of interests in order to build a relationship of solidarity, it is through building a relationship of solidarity that we create a community of interests. The systems of common oppression around which that community is created may pre-­exist it, but the

Solidarity241 shared community and its resistance to that oppression are created through the very act of solidarity. Exploring Arendt’s approach, Hayden and Saunders say, ‘solidarity is constituted by and with people of fundamentally diverse views and experiences, thereby making solidaristic belonging a political rather than pre-­political phenomenon’ (Hayden and Saunders 2019: 187). Óscar García Agustín and Martin Bak Jørgensen share this view of solidarity as a creative process: ‘Solidarities produce new ways of configuring political relations and spaces’ (Agustín and Jørgensen 2018: 30). The evidence from Greece, they say, is that ‘solidarity goes beyond the empathetic view and contributes to shaping a common struggle with the goal of overcoming labor and border divisions’ (Agustín and Jørgensen 2018: 31). They conclude, ‘The spaces of solidarity, both in mobilizations and everyday practices, transform the preexisting solidarity and create the possibility of forging new social alliances’ (Agustín and Jørgensen 2018: 31). David Featherstone observes that ‘solidarities . . . are not just part of the binding together of the pre-­ existing communities. They can be much more active in shaping political contestation than this suggests’ (Featherstone 2012: 7). Crucially, say Agustín and Jørgensen, solidarity ‘is inventive of new alternatives and imaginaries’ (Agustín and Jørgensen 2018: 34). Hayden and Saunders also emphasise that solidarity has a ‘process character’: it is something ‘that must be brought into existence and sustained over time’ (Hayden and Saunders 2019: 193). The discussion and examples so far have focused on solidarity between European political activists and irregular migrants, but there is still the question of the solidarity needed to ground the forcibly displaced as a global community of interests. It may be that the possibility of solidarity between diverse groups of forcibly displaced people is much more problematic. In the previous chapter I used the Indigenous peoples movement as an example of a global community constituting itself outside of the nation-­state system, and solidarity has played an important role in bringing different Indigenous groups together in that movement. Felix Anderl makes some observations in relation to the global feminist movement which can help us understand how solidarity across difference is possible. His focus is on the World March of Women, a network of 5,500 groups from 163 countries and territories who presented a declaration to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2003, entitled ‘Perspective of Women of the World March of Women: Declaration at the 2003 World Social Forum’. Anderl notes that ‘There is no plural to perspective, the women of the World March of Women apparently spoke with one, global, voice’ (Anderl 2020: 1). There have been strong

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criticisms of the possibility of feminist solidarity across difference, especially following Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s influential paper ‘Under Western Eyes’ (Mohanty 1984; also see Felski 1997; Mohanram 1999; Dhawan 2013). Here, says Anderl, there is ‘a shared skepticism towards “global solidarity” as a frame for emancipatory feminist struggles’ (Anderl 2020: 2). However, writing in 2003, Mohanty says that she did not intend to be interpreted as saying that solidarity across difference was impossible (Mohanty 2003: 224). She says: differences are never just ‘differences.’ In knowing differences and particularities, we can better see the connections and commonalities because no border or boundary is ever complete or rigidly determining. The challenge is to see how differences allow us to explain the connections and border crossings better and more accurately, how specifying difference allows us to theorize universal concerns more fully. (Mohanty 2003: 226)

She defines solidarity in terms of mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities. Rather than assuming an enforced commonality of oppression, the practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together. (Mohanty 2003: 7)

She cites Jodi Dean’s notion of ‘reflective solidarity’, where the ‘we’ that stands in solidarity is itself a process, and solidarity ‘is always an achievement, the result of active struggle to construct the universal on the basis of particulars/differences’ (Mohanty 2003: 7; also see Dean 1996). Based on his interviews with activist women in the Philippines, Anderl argues that binaries like global/local and general/particular are unhelpful when it comes to understanding solidarity across difference, ‘because solidarity is a process that sits uneasily between these dichotomies’ (Anderl 2020: 2). These activists occupied an in-­between space, in which particularities are highlighted but commonalities are constructed (Anderl 2020: 4). The problem with cosmopolitan visions of the global is not that they refer to the whole, he argues, but that they understand it ahistorically (Anderl 2020: 7). What is constructed through solidarity is a common political horizon. ‘It is through this very work to construct a common political horizon that solidarity across difference takes place’ (Anderl 2020: 7). In this context, the global ‘loses its descriptive nature and becomes an aspirational commitment’ (Anderl 2020: 7). To talk of a global community of interests is not to assume that it already exists, even in some crude, proto-­form. It is to say that such a community is a

Solidarity243 possibility, and one which, in some cases, should be aspired to. A global community of the forcibly displaced is such a case. CONCLUSION To end this book, I want to return to one of its conclusions which I identified in the first section of this chapter, ‘What is the Point?’, that the inability of the global order of sovereign nation states to deliver global justice for the forcibly displaced exposes its inadequacy. It is, as it stands, incapable of arriving at anything that looks like an answer to the injustice of forced displacement, and we need to imagine a global system which has genuine answers for forcibly displaced people. However, this may still seem a disappointing conclusion to some and represent a profound failure in my part. Given that international protection is a scarce resource, we have to have some scheme for rationing it, and the current international refugee regime and the proposals made by those who defend the political and humanitarian conceptions of refugeehood can be seen as rationing proposals. They are not claiming that those who lose out in the rationing procedure do not need or deserve protection; they are just prioritising those in most need or who are most deserving under conditions of scarcity. Unless I can propose an alternative system of rationing, then I should accept the system as it stands, or one of the more ‘realistic’ proposals coming out of normative Political Theory. I recognise the force of this criticism, and recognise the value of the work others have done in proposing reforms of the current international regime within the world of nation states as presently constituted, reforms that, while not delivering what justice demands for all forcibly displaced people, would deliver more justice for specific groups of the displaced than is currently available to them. But rather than add yet another proposal to an already rich field of work, I have chosen a different task, that is to argue that the current order of things cannot deliver what justice demands for the displaced, that it cannot or will not be reformed to any significant extent in the face of those demands, and that we need to look beyond it, to the possibilities of a different world. But my decision not to propose practical reforms of the current system is not only based on the recognition of the need for a division of theoretical labour, it is also driven by a political impulse to push ethical critique beyond arguments for reform –­of rationing ‘scarce’ resources –­and to demonstrate that the radical approach is in fact the only reasonable answer in the face of forced displacement. It is also based on the thoroughly realistic position that nation states as they are currently constituted will simply not engage with the proposals for reform that emerge

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from normative Political Theory, however liberal their credentials and however modest those proposals, such that any degree of change will only happen through the more radical processes of solidarity I have described here. Rather than seek to establish connections and dialogues with governments and their policy makers, normative political theorists in this field should be seeking to establish connections and dialogues with the forcibly displaced, with activists and others, to forge alliances that will work to change the world from the ground up, through strategies of solidarity and resistance. In her conversation with Eve Tuck, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says she is not interested in justice but rather in ‘Indigenous resurgence, nation building, addressing gender violence, movement building, linking up and creating constellations of co-­resistance with other movements’ (Simpson 2016: 27). The Indigenous peoples movement has to ensure it does not reproduce gender violence or heteropatriarchy or antiblackness ‘by learning how to engage in constellations of co-­resistance’ (Simpson 2016: 27). This theme, of resistance and co-­resistance, reoccurs through Indigenous peoples’ writings. She goes on to say, ‘I am not particularly interested in holding states accountable because the structure, history, and nature of states is exploitative in nature. I’m interested in alternatives, I’m interested in building new worlds’ (Simpson 2016: 31). We saw in the previous section the potential of a solidarity of resistance and co-­resistance to build new political communities across boundaries of difference, and Hannah Arendt’s view of solidarity as world-­building. Patrick Hayden and Natasha Saunders talk of the importance of solidarity as a potent way for the forcibly displaced to ‘participate in a shared world genuinely hospitable to their future as equal members of society’ (Hayden and Saunders 2019: 196). Simpson reminds us that this shared world of hospitality and equality does not exist and must be built, and my argument has been that it must be built in a partnership of equally respected political agency between all those who participate in it. Simpson’s comments also resonate here with my refusal to propose reforms of the international protection system. I realise that I leave myself open to the criticism that I have produced a form of unrealistic or extremely ideal theory in that I point to the need to think beyond the global order as such rather than reform it. However, I have taken a radically and robustly realistic approach to forced displacement, focusing on the details of its impacts on people’s lives and humanity, and this approach leads us away from a politics of reform, to a politics of solidarity, resistance and uprising, to the need to build new worlds. This is a thoroughly practical politics: not some ideal theorising about the attainment of some future order of global justice, but a radically critical

Solidarity245 assessment of the reality of forced displacement and the call for action to change the world and change it now, not through attempting to persuade those who make policies to change them despite all the evidence that they are not listening, but through strategies of resistance and co-­ resistance and solidarity. This book, in its limited way, is an act of solidarity, and, hopefully, a small contribution to building new worlds. NOTES 1. This was pointed out to me when I presented a version of the political conception of forced displacement at a conference, but I did not make a note of who made that point, for which I apologise. 2. Thanks to the Edinburgh University Press anonymous reviewer for pointing out these difficulties and this particular example.

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