Migrants and Refugees at UK Borders

Hostility and ‘Unmaking’ the Human

Yasmin Ibrahim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032071831
• eBook ISBN: 9781000543568
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates the hostile environment and politics of visceral and racial denigration which have characterised responses to refugees and migrants within the UK and Europe in recent years.

The European 'migrant crisis' from 2015 onwards has been characterised by an extremely intimidating atmosphere which denies the basic humanity of refugees and migrants. Deep rooted in Western Enlightenment trajectory, this racially-driven politics is linked to the Western theories of scientific superiority which went on to become the basis of eugenics and coloniality as part of modernity. Focusing on the 'migrant crisis', Brexit, and the impacts of the global pandemic, this book unpicks the waves of crises and neuroses about the 'Other' in Europe and the UK. The chapters analyse the rhetoric of camps, refrigerated death lorries, the notion of channel crossings and 'accidental' drownings, the formation of relationship with border architecture such as the razor wire, and corporeal resistance in detention centres through hunger strike. In examining such specific sites of rhetorical articulation, policy formation, social imagination, and its incumbent visuality, the chapters deconstruct the intersection of dominant ideologies, power, knowledge paradigms (including the media) as part of the public sphere and their combined re-mediation of the dispossessed humans in the shores and borders of Europe.

This important interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to researchers of migration, humanitarianism, geography, global development, sociology and communication studies.

1Borders and non-hominizationHostility and unmaking of the human

DOI: 10.4324/9781003205821-1

Introduction

On hostility….

How do we understand or even relate to the call to be hostile to another? Hostility as an affective, instrumental and operational principle to create new borders inside external borders is intrinsically anti-human. Yet when it is appropriated as a banalized yet active mode of dispelling the Other in policy and processual terms, it produces a culture of compliance, appropriating hostility as our collective encounter against the beleaguered. As an attitudinal construct, hostility entails the dislike and negative or unfavourable evaluation of others including denigration, mistrust and suspicion (Buss 1961; Berkowitz 1993; Eckhardt et al. 2004). Such feelings of antagonism can be complex and involve vindictive or aggressive behaviour (Spielberger 1988) targeting Others and having a desire to inflict harm (Smith 1994: 26). Beyond guiding policy processes or their modes of operationalization, it induces a civilized polity to inculcate these negative sentiments and antipathy towards Others as underpinning its value system. In a civilized society in which we value difference, hostility as a guiding principle weakens the very core of our existence and projects our humanity into regressive trajectories. Yet hostility remains a manifest guiding principle of the UK’s immigration policy, increasing its reification through new policy enactments. Hostility as opposed to hospitality harks to the propagation of something ‘stark and unpleasant’ as observed in the quote in the House of Lords:

When I think of the term ‘hostile environment’, it conjures up notions of a war zone, of environmental degradation or an inhospitable climatic event, perhaps an earthquake – something stark and unpleasant, like a scene from a World War I killing field. I do not think – or, I should say, I had not previously thought – of it as something to do with my own country.

(Lord Bassam of Brighton, House of Lords, 12 June 2018, cf. in Hicks & Mallet 2019: 23)

In the age of the Anthropocene, attrition does not just come from the natural environment but from each other. For civilized societies, hostility dominating our social relations with Others frames us as being in a constant state of animosity, resulting in the inability to form social bonds and affinities and forcing us to look at the face of another through distrust and suspicion. Affective architectures of hate is our nomos in present-stage modernity. Hostility is then the extension of Foucault’s (2004) biopower, invested in the logic of distribution of human species into groups combining instrumental rationality with administrative efficacy engendering a cohabitation between reason and terror. The construct of hostility as a policy orientation transmutes negative attitudes as part of an affective architecture into everyday lived quotidian encounters harnessing these as the social imaginary of humanity, forging us into a mode of anti-civilization. Regressive in the evolution of the human psyche, it foregrounds abjection as the means of transacting with the Other, calling for and manufacturing the active production of negative sentiments directed at the Other. Humanistic ethics and the evolution of civilization require that difference be countered through acceptance. If a national(ist) zeitgeist is based on the harnessing of hostility as an amorphous and violent force which occludes our evaluation of the Other, this ‘disenlightenment’ as a form of national consciousness projects ‘Othering’ as an ongoing project of dismantling and fracturing social relations with alien bodies which don’t belong. It then socially engineers a project of unbelonging in which the Other is perceptible only through difference. As Young (1999: 148) observes, ‘casting difference in essentialist mould is always liable to demonization and conflict’. The social engineering of an affective architecture of hostility and antipathy as a policy response reveals the primal within the modern British state invoking the hauntology of the empire.

Hostility as the project of expiation and unbelonging even within settled populations as evidenced with the Windrush scandal leaves deep scars and schisms which will transcend for generations to come, leaving parts of the British nation wounded and as the ‘unhealing’ abstracting them as subjects that were never part of the nation-state, as bodies consigned outside of the internal cavities of subjecthood. As a retentive trauma that unsettles settled communities through the fear of being ejected into statelessness, away from a country they call home, hostility is both the unknown and the unfolding components of state sovereignty perceived through legal excess, data amnesia and fleshed bodies queued for deportation and as perennially imagined as lacking legality and legitimacy. In its most primordial constitution, it is about the ‘unmaking’ of the human, both us and them, effacement of another and in effect effacement of all of humanity. Us and them.

Implicit within the stance of hostility is the complicit roles we (the public) play as bystanders and active enforcers of vigilance in admitting or omitting the Other. The project of unmaking is not confined to the realm of policy per se but in its ability to redraft human relationships, and in denigrative psychological evaluation of the Other. Levinas (1989), in contending that the possibility of elemental evil can be led by logic, observes that this relationality is something which Western philosophy had not insured itself against (Campbell 1994: 458). Levinas stresses the interhuman realm as that axis between phenomenological intelligibility (of this world) coupled with ethical responsibility (that which is not of this world) which forms our cosmos. It is then bound by a double axis of presence and absence and identity and alterity. The subjection to the Other refigures our own subjectivity, premising responsibility as a core premise of our moral philosophy in modernity. The notion of ‘being’, for Levinas, constitutes a radical interdependency with the Other, structured through the dominant concept of responsibility:

Responsibility for the Other, for the naked face of the first individual to come along. A responsibility that goes beyond what I may or may not have done to the Other or whatever acts I may or may not have committed, as if I were devoted to the other man before being devoted to myself.

(Levinas 1989: 83–84)

The disavowal of responsibility over the Other and our call to create negative attitudes targeting others is about disfiguring our own subjectivity, and in a wider sense the disfigurement of humanity at large. This relationship with the Other is what rearticulates ethics as our subjectivity is constituted through our relationship with the Other (Campbell 1994: 460). Humanism, for Levinas, is limited as it is insufficiently attuned to alterity. Hence the interdependency between responsibility and subjectivity as co-located with morality opens the scrutiny into hostility as introspection onto ourselves. As Friedman (1999: 239) observes, ‘in the decline of modernism what is left is simply difference itself and its accumulation’. Hostility seeks to opt out of responsibility over the Other, to opt out of humanism, appropriating an anti-humanist stance in ordering the very social fabric of human relations. Borders embody coloniality, a savagery constitutive of modernity through its primal atavistic tendencies in the production of difference and in the denial of humanity as a universal category. The notion of coloniality enables us to comprehend the ‘continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations, produced by colonial cultures and structures in the modern/colonial capitalist world system’ (Grosfoguel 2008: 8).

During the period of pandemic in the UK, hate, hostility and Othering became entwined in ways that normalized this hostility over the Other contextualizing it against increasing bio-governance over populations and citizens and determining inclusion and exclusion. The virus as a contaminant renewed hostility as an affective architecture in which the Other became imagined through its fictional transgressions conflating the virus and the Other as one. The naming of the virus and its variant through countries had the effect of creating associations with populations who could be coded as immediate threats and targets of victimization.

The crossings in the channel and overland routes are deemed as presenting larger looming threats over the populations. Hence the feral qualities of invaders at the gate conjoined with the viral threats of contamination of the ‘foreign virus’. Hostility as an environment was enlarged as an amorphous category of hate and abjection over the Other sustained through new governance to regulate its spread. If Covid-19 revealed the intense inequalities in society, racialization of the labour force, front line and the precarious (Ibrahim 2020b), it dovetailed with the intrinsic ‘racial logic’ of immigration policies and measures.¹ Both the virus and illegal bodies at the border were perceived as ‘foreign invasions’.² If the pandemic revealed the primeval within our society, hostility as a processual and affective architecture is the transhistorical ground of West’s episteme of the Other in which new techniques are refashioned through older historical technologies of producing and consolidating difference such that skin, flesh, body and pigment are entrenched as part of these technologies of difference.

Unleashing the hostility discourse

As an unfinished schema targeting a cumulative policy infrastructure which it deems to be ‘broken’, this hostility project is pledged to ‘fixing’ this unhinged policy assemblage, testing the limits of suffering, or birthing it through the ‘limit-experience’ (Foucault 1991), such that humanity/self is abstracted from this ‘migrant being’ in its relentless annihilation against this broken infrastructure.³ The phenomenology of the border induces the ‘limit-situation’ Jaspers defined through its instability, state of flux or characterized in relative terms or such everything is stripped from the subject, a moment in which the human confronts the pathological limitations of its own existence (cf. Bruns 1997). Similarly, for Blanchot the subject is without relation to itself. The discourse of a broken system will mean the quest to find a systemic resolution which perfects hostility to the point at which no ‘body’ can appear at the gates. Hence this project is always in the process of accumulating enactments to banish the beleaguered to go over historic treaties to discern its loopholes. This cleansing of the borders combined with an infrastructure of hostility captures the neurosis of losing control, revealing how the threat of the Other is couched in rationalized policy domains of modernity as risk and securitization. As Bauman (2005: 391) posits, militancy acquires its own momentum and feeds on its own fury. Hostility works in not dissimilar modes.

Bauman (2012) draws on the notion of an ‘interregnum’ as a concept from Gramsci (1971) to speak about an extraordinary situation

in which the extant legal frame of social order loses its grip and can hold no longer, whereas a new frame, made to the measure of newly emerged conditions responsible for making the old frame useless, is still at the designing stage, has not yet been fully assembled.

(49)

This interregnum in the current UK context is the period in which a new Nationality and Borders Bill is being proposed. The hostility machine is always in the making, in its refinement and enlargement, such that the machine operates within and without the border as a site of biological control. Operating in ‘the realm of the techne – the realm of dealing with the non-human world or the human world cast as non-human’ (Bauman 1991: 147).

The broken system as the loss of control and the quest to regain it composes the phenomenology or bordering in the UK. Priti Patel, UK Home Secretary, in declaring ‘Now we have taken back control and ended free movement, security is at the very heart of our immigration strategy’ (Robertson 2021) attests to this obsession with the broken border and the inconvenient phenomenon of mobility. The ‘take back control’ entails extensive changes to the UK’s immigration policy to streamline ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface: hostility as affective imperialism
• 1 Borders and non-hominization: Hostility and unmaking of the human
• 2 The migrant ‘Other’: Animality, monstrosity and non-hominization
• 3 Calais at the margins of civilization: The jungle and the racialized ‘migrant’
• 4 Migrant Channel crossings: Death, drowning and ‘invasions’ in boats
• 5 Immigration incarceration and detention estates: Languishing bodies, entrapment and resistance
• 6 ‘Razor wire and abject flesh’: Wounded bodies, trauma and the ‘migrant crisis’
• 7 Children of the ‘jungle’: The child refugee and the hostile environment
• 8 The Vietnamese ‘box(ed)’ people: Entombment, lorry deaths and irregular migration
• 9 Conclusion: Empire, hostility and the Other
• Index