Mobilities and Forced Migration

Nick Gill, Javier Caletrío, Victoria Mason

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415857956
• eBook ISBN: 9781351558129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Whether precipitated by political or environmental factors, human displacement can be more fully understood by attending to the ways in which a set of bodily, material, imagined and virtual mobilities and immobilities interact to produce population movement. Very little work, however, has addressed the fertile middle ground between mobilities and forced migration. This book sets out the ways in which theories of mobilities can enrich forced migration studies as well as some of the insights into mobilities that forced migration research offers.The book covers the challenges faced by both forced migrants and receiving authorities. It applies these challenges to regions such as the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa. In particular, the chapter on Iraq to Jordan foced migration tests the sincerity of the concept of Pan-Arabism; the chapters on Bangladesh and Ethiopia deal with the more historically familiar variables of warfare and famine as drivers of forced migration.This book will be of value to practitioners in the area of human rights and to scholars of racial and ethnic politics, human geography and globalization.This book was published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Introduction: Mobilities and Forced Migration

NICK GILL, JAVIER CALETRÍO & VICTORIA MASON

ABSTRACT Whether precipitated by political or environmental factors, human displacement can be more fully understood by attending to the ways in which a set of bodily, material, imagined and virtual mobilities and immobilities interact to produce population movement. Very little work, however, has addressed the fertile middle ground between mobilities and forced migration. This article introduces the special issue by setting out the ways in which theories of mobilities can enrich forced migration studies as well as some of the insights into mobilities that forced migration research offers.

Introduction

In 2008, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), there were over 42 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, excluding environmental refugees. There is continuing controversy over the number of environmental refugees that are likely to be produced by climate change, and attendant controversy over the most useful way to categorise this group, but the Stern Report (2006) quotes an estimate of 150 – 200 million by the middle of the century and some third sector organisations give much higher predictions (Conisbee & Simms, 2003; Christian Aid, 2007).

Mobility is inherent to our understanding of both political and environmental refugees. ‘Displacement’ – whether this leads to international movement and permanent resettlement or to short distance, repetitive, temporary movements – involves the corporeal travel of migrants, the physical movement of objects such as clothing, keepsakes and identity documents, the imaginative travel of aspirations, longings and memories, and impacts powerfully on the virtual and communicative mobilities of those that move (Urry, 2007; Büscher & Urry, 2009). Displacement may involve not just the mobility of refugees but also of criminal gangs enabling border crossings, crisis relief personnel and infrastructure as well as media personnel and techniques for the retransmission of crises to global audiences. Moreover, the tragedy of human displacement may be triggered or amplified by the collapse of mobility systems whose rehabilitation often becomes a key priority of aid and development agencies.

Displacement itself is also best understood not as a one-off event, but as a process that could last many months or years. During this process, a range of different mobilities may be evident depending upon whether the displaced are located in urban areas or camps, whether they have easy access to the basic resources that they need, whether they are fearful of renewed violence or environmental stress, and whether they expect or aspire to return home.

Human displacement cannot be fully understood in all its political, cultural, economic and technological complexities without looking at the dynamic and systemic nature of these interlocking mobilities. However, given the clear overlap between mobilities and forced migration, relatively little work has combined the two bodies of research. This special issue seeks to address this lacuna by including a range of papers that approach the overlap between mobilities and forced migration from a variety of different directions. Between them they cover a variety of different areas of the world including both developing and developed country contexts, and address the technological, political and environmental aspects of forced migration. The remainder of this introduction will outline why an engagement between forced migration studies and mobilities might be beneficial, and will introduce the various papers in the volume.

A Promising Engagement

While the forced migration literature and the mobilities literature are both well-established, there are a range of areas in which the two approaches overlap, both theoretically and empirically. There are a number of ways in which both disciplines might therefore benefit from a more fluid dialogue with the other. Although a range of prominent scholars of mobilities promise to attend as much to moorings as to mobilities and as much to fixity as to flow (for example see Cresswell, 2001; Hannam et al., 2006), so far the empirical emphasis has been on the latter. An engagement with forced migration promises to provide a new window onto this complex relationship, since the tension between fixity and motion is already inherent in the ‘forced migration’ couplet. Through studying situations in which movement begets constraint, constraint begets movement, and movement occurs within constraints and constraints within movements, a dialogue between fixity and flow has the potential to emerge in ways that have so far not been explored.

Moreover, although the mobilities paradigm has the potential to speak to both developing and developed country issues and agendas, some of the seminal texts in this paradigm explicitly take on a North Atlantic Rim focus (Lash & Urry, 1994; Urry, 2000, 2008; Baerenholdt et al., 2004; Canzler et al., 2008). While this focus is admittedly self-conscious and some efforts have been made to address this partial geographical concern (e.g. Sheller, 2003; Priya Uteng & Cresswell, 2008; and recent issues of the journal Mobilities), overall the result is the exclusion of a range of different peoples, cultures, histories and societies from analysis. The UNHCR (2009) points out, for example, that four fifths of the world’s refugees are hosted by developing countries.

A greater sensibility towards social and political contexts beyond the North Atlantic Rim would explicitly avoid the temptation to treat the refugee as a figure outside the modern industrial world. Rather than adopting an Orientalist vision of the world that divides countries into developed, technologically advanced regions with predictable, peaceful mobilities and developing regions with unpredictable, chaotic mobilities triggered by violence and governance deficits, a critical, historically-informed focus on forced migration can fruitfully connect mobilities research with debates about entangled and contested modernities (Eisenstadt, 2000; Arnason, 2003). This seems particularly pertinent at a moment when global balances of power are shifting with uncertain political and environmental consequences, and when the charismatic discourse of an era of global flows and borderless horizons of endless opportunity is taking hold not only in the West, but also in emerging economies such as India, China or Brazil (see Featherstone, 2007; Nyíri, 2010). In more and more parts of the world increased circulation is uncritically being seen as a promising sign of global newness and future-making.

Mobilities theorists have criticised this romanticisation of mobility through its association with freedom, liberation and resistance. Adey (2010), for example, is critical of writers as diverse as Mackinder, Deleuze and Guattari, and Bachelard for equating mobility with power, for associating the nomad with the ability to evade power and for suggesting that ‘mobility is … inextricably linked to freedom and liberty’ (Adey, 2010, p. 62). In a similar vein, Cresswell (2006) is also cautious about viewing mobility positively, outlining in critical terms what he sees as the ‘longstanding history of positive valuation of mobility as progress, as freedom, and as change’ (Cresswell, 2006, p. 43). He writes that:

Mobility in Deleuze and Guattari, Michel de Certeau, or in the work of Bernard Tschumi is, on the whole, positive … But just as the sedentarist point of view has a hidden politics, so does the nomadic. As the critiques of Deleuze and Guattari have shown, mobility is differentiated socially. The romanticization of the nomad, for instance, is infected with the discourse of Orientalism. It is also the outcome, historically, of deep-rooted ideas about mobility as a progressive force, as a form of relative freedom, as a break from earlier, more confused, spaces and times. (Ibid., pp. 56–57)

In keeping with these reservations about mobility, this special issue charts some of the ways in which movement is imposed upon populations that long for stillness, examining the role of mobility itself in subjugating populations. Here, in contrast to the volitional mobility of the nomad, mobility is a last-ditch attempt to exercise agency – often regrettably and from a position of deep insecurity. The lack of an end point or destination, the constant movement from one location to another and the persistent uncertainty about the future that many forced migrants experience are all shared with the nomad, but in the case of the environmentally displaced, the political refugee and the sans papier this is no cause for celebration due to their reluctance to be subjected to these conditions. Rather, viewed from the perspective of the displaced, geographic and cultural stability can appear highly attractive. The experiences of forced migrants therefore shed light upon the rich and complex relationship between states, freedom and mobility. States cannot simply be viewed as obstructive to mobility and freedom because these latter two are not necessarily aligned. States must also be viewed as produced by the human desire to ‘fix’ and be still that runs alongside the human desire to move. Hence the suffering of a forced migrant when their state fails, when they are persecuted by their state, or when their state cannot protect them from external threats. The message from forced migrants to those that romanticise mobility may very well be one of caution: there is as much un-freedom in mobility as there is in fixity.

It is in this way that the figure of the refugee might illustrate something broader than its immediate context that is of relevance to social and cultural theory generally. The refugee has not featured as prominently as it might have been expected to alongside detailed treatments of the foreigner (Honig, 2001), the flâneur (Frisby, 1994; Benjamin, 1999), the tourist (MacCannell, 1976) and the stranger (Simmel, 1976; Diken, 1998). There are, of course, the more recent accounts of Agamben (2000) and Derrida (2001), but neither focus on the reluctance of the refugee regarding their condition, which must be what distinguishes the refugee from these other figures. Caren Kaplan thinks this relative neglect of the refugee is due to writers’ and intellectuals’ inclination to favour the more singular and elite term ‘exile’ rather than migrant or refugee:

One key question I ask in relation to terms and tropes of travel is why, if the modern experience of forced or voluntary movement has been widespread and diverse, the metaphors and symbols used to represent displacement refer to individualized, often elite, circumstances? In literary criticism the model for the author or critic is the solitary exile who is either voluntarily expatriated or involuntarily displaced. (…) Few of the writers included in critical assessments of Euro-American high modernism are referred to as immigrants or refugees. Their dislocation is expressed in singular rather than collective terms, as purely psychological or aesthetic situations rather than as a result of historical circumstances. (1996, p. 4)

Perhaps the relative absence of the refugee or the forced migrant in social theory is traceable to the difficult connotations of the two terms. The refugee – the refused – is a term that implicitly longs for the recognition of a state, thereby re-producing the authority and legitimacy of the state itself. The forced migrant, on the other hand, is in practice often mythical. In most cases there is no migration without, at some point, a conscious and volitional choice to migrate, however constrained and artificial this choice has become (see Turton, 2003). Nevertheless, despite the shortcomings of both these terms, the under-theorisation of those communities and individuals for whom movement is an undesirable necessity largely as a result of factors outside their control, remains a key agenda for social theory in general that mobilities scholarship is well placed to address.

Perhaps this absence of the refugee in social theory is also traceable to other absences in popular culture and academic discourses about Western modernity. Writing about the Caribbean, Sheller (2003) has noted the processes of purification that have shaped modern Western imaginaries:

The exclusion of the Caribbean from Western modernity occurs not only within popular culture and the media, but also within academic discourse. How has this physical incorporation but symbolic exclusion of the Caribbean from ‘the West’ made certain ideas of Western modernity viable? What kinds of global relations have allowed for this hiatus, this forgetting, this break between Western modernity and the Caribbean? Can we re-think the history of modernity in a way that recognises this double gesture of Caribbean colonisation and expulsion, incorporation and erasure? And how can heretofore marginal colonial histories be reintegrated into foundational studies of ‘the West’, rather than envisioned as perpetually outside its borders? (2003, p. 1)

Without these entangled but silenced histories of colonialism, partition and the exploitation of nature that Sheller is referring to, it is most likely that the metropolis and the figures of the tourist and the flaneur as we know them would not have been possible. That ‘the West’ continues to be purified testifies to the power of Western modern imaginaries.

A critical reassessment of this purification of Western histories has been undertaken by recent theories of globalisation motivated by the explicit attempt to bypass the poorly examined assumption of much social theory that the social world is usually or primarily in a peaceful or ordered condition (see Appadurai, 2006, pp. ix – x; Graham, 2008; Elden, 2009). In its attempt to theorise the emergent properties of the global level, for example, complexity theory has equipped mobilities research with a heightened sensibility towards the systemic and dynamic character of ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Urry, 2003). Yet, so far, these theoretical interventions have been developed with too few empirical applications. Much of mobilities research selectively focuses on ‘pools of order’ around North Atlantic Rim societies and empirical work still needs to address the dialectical relationship between order and disorder or the ‘ordered disorder’ of emergent global systems. In fact, violence, the potential for violence, the threat of persecution and the fear of violent environmental disasters routinely produce both movements and moorings (Gregory & Pred, 2007). This is not, moreover, only an attribute of developing, non-Western societies. European history bears the scars of violence, and historical European population movements illustrate the profound influence violence can have over demography and its engines: human mobility and stasis. This special issue begins to address this blind spot in contemporary mobilities research by provoking an engagement between emerging theories of disorder and real-life catastrophe.

There have, furthermore, been calls for a re-worked understanding of the nature of both conflict and climate change in recent years. Understandings of war as cataclysmic, one-off conflict-events between two parties in one place over a relatively short period of time have given way to understandings that admit longer periods of conflict across diverse interest groups in multiple places (Kaldor, 2001; de Waal, 2007). This evolution opens the door to a mobility perspective that focuses on how these temporal and spatial evolutions in conflict practices evolve, and what consequences they have for corporeal, physical, imaginative, virtual and communicative mobilities, both among military personnel and civilians. In the case of environmentally-forced migration, the shifting emphasis from environmental events towards more gradual environmental processes (McCue, 1993; Brown, 2007) has also paved the way for a mobilities approach that attends to the ways in which displaced persons are repetitively mobile, gradually mobile, seasonally mobile and locally mobile, pointing towards the development of mobility as a way of life rather than an exceptional event in response to climate change. In both cases then, the mobilities paradigm has an opportunity to be highly topical and policy-relevant in order to fac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: Mobilities and Forced Migration
• 2. Specters at the Port of Entry: Understanding State Mobilities through an Ontology of Exclusion
• 3. Reconsidering the Problem of ‘Bogus’ Refugees with ‘Socio-economic Motivations’ for Seeking Asylum
• 4. The Im/mobilities of Iraqi Refugees in Jordan: Pan-Arabism, ‘Hospitality’ and the Figure of the ‘Refugee’
• 5. Confined Offline, Traversing Online Palestinian Mobility through the Prism of the Internet
• 6. Mobilising Images: Encounters of ‘Forced’ Migrants and the Bangladesh War of 1971
• 7. Governmentality in Motion: 25 Years of Ethiopia’s Experience of Famine and Migration Policy
• 8. Statelessness and Environmental-Induced Displacement: Future Scenarios of Deterritorialisation, Rescue and Recovery Examined
• Index