Migration, Citizenship and the Challenge for Security

An Ethnographic Approach

A. Innes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137495952
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137495969
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

This study focuses on the field of security studies through the prism of migration. Using ethnographic methods to illustrate an experiential theory of security taken from the perspective of migrants and asylum seekers in Europe, it effectively offers a means of moving beyond state-based and state-centric theories in International Relations.

1

The Problem of Migration for Security Studies

In this chapter I establish my argument in the context of existing literature in feminist and critical security studies in international relations. I begin by exploring conceptualizations of security, moving through objectivist and universalist iterations, discursive approaches, and the feminist narrative and deconstructive approach. I draw on these influences to outline how performance is constitutive of security and decentred from the state. My rendering of the critical security literature focuses heavily on the role of migration, examining how migration represents an embodied contestation to the state as security provider. As I look at the schools of critical security studies that have broadened and deepened security I analyse how they have each problematized migration while demonstrating that migration continues to represent a fundamental gap in how scholars understand, interpret and constitute the concept of security. After establishing my position in the critical security literature I detail the value of ethnography for IR more broadly and for security studies (a sub-discipline in which it has been seldom used thus far) more particularly. I draw particular attention to the need for ethnography in identity-based approaches in international security. Ultimately I argue that a performative security based on ethnographic methods offers a means to reconceptualize security that does not require excluding migrants, casting migrants as a threat, or reducing migrants to a passive subject position. Instead, performative security allows security studies to access alternative forms of security that are produced and practiced by people who do not have state-based security. By accessing these forms of security a means of conceptualizing security that remains decentred from the state becomes apparent.

Conceptualizing security: Objectivist (national) security

The international relations paradigm of security studies has evolved over time from a number of sub-disciplines including strategic studies, peace studies, conflict resolution, and arms control (Buzan and Hansen 2009). In looking at how the concept of security has been variously used and constructed, many historiographies of international relations look to the ‘debates’ that mark the progression of the discipline. In particular, the ‘first debate’ shift from idealism to realism established realism as the dominant paradigm in international relations (Schmitt 2002, Wilson 1998). While I will not spend time reconstituting the history of the discipline here, I acknowledge that the long standing dominance of realism in international relations has been influential regarding the traditional conceptualization of security that assumed the sovereign state as the referent object of security and assumed migration is a problem to be solved in a world neatly organized into sovereign state territories.

In brief, US international relations was strongly influenced by the work of Hans Morganthau who developed an ethics of international relations that centred on the unit of the sovereign state. Morganthau asserted that international politics, like national politics, required rational and prudent leadership and that good leadership would seek a defensive state capable of protecting the population (Morganthau 1978). For Morganthau it was an objective fact that man would seek power. A public is not capable of rational action therefore there is a need for strong leadership and careful statecraft to allow for prudent power seeking in foreign policy, an assumption that replicates Hobbesian human nature and a conservative mode of governance. The dominance of the realist school in international relations thus saw a move towards privileging national solidarity rather than international solidarity in global politics as was preferred by pre-war liberal Wilsonian idealists (see Doyle 1986, Herz 1950 and for a discussion of the ‘First Debate’ Wilson 1998).

The forerunner to security studies as a sub-discipline in the US was strategic studies, which reproduced again the unit of the sovereign state as the referent object of security, with a positivist objectivist conceptualization of security. The positivist objectivist conceptualization is frequently cast as military security, although it included other elements that were seen as existing in support of military security, such as economic capability, territory, technology, population, diplomacy in the form of alliances, and the environment (Brooks 1997, Jervis 1978, Snyder 1984, Walt 1991). In this context, security is an object that can be obtained. While the goal is to secure a population (human life), the unit that provides security for the national population is the sovereign state, so it follows that state security acts as a proxy for the humans that compose it. A rationalist and behaviouralist epistemology is at the core of much of the work in strategic studies, which assumes that the sovereign state will act in a rational way to obtain power and security. Neorealism in international relations then contains the premise of state rationality to insert the unit of the state into a structural theory capable of explaining international action through the state’s relative position in an anarchical international system (Waltz 1979). That is, ‘to achieve their objectives and maintain their security, units in a condition of anarchy- be they people, corporations, states, or whatever – must rely on the means they can generate and the arrangements they can arrange for themselves. Self-help is necessarily the principle of action in an anarchic order’ (Waltz 1979: 111). Neorealism then further simplifies the core objective of the state: the state seeks to secure and reproduce its own existence. As a structural theory, neorealism obscures the role of the individuals inside the state. For example, in war, losses in terms of human life become less important than losses in terms of territory as the latter represents a change in the existence of the sovereign state while the former represents a sacrifice for the ongoing existence of the sovereign state.

For this conventional iteration of security as an object obtained through self-help and military action by the sovereign state in an anarchical international system, migration represents a problem to be solved. The conventional (realist) security literature, along with strategic studies, does not dwell on migration because the conceptualization of security remains concerned with military and state security. The movement of peoples is a question to be asked by scholars of human rights, development, or political economy. In reference to security literature, migration is either collateral damage as a result of conflict, or is a threat to a given state, creating potential conflict within a state or at state boundaries.

The practice of conventional security supports an understanding of migration as a threat; for example, the military has been mobilized along the US-Mexico border, to prevent the threat imposed by migration (Andreas 1998–99, 2000). Migration has been linked by the media to terrorism and organized crime (as well as to petty crime and social threat), thus reinforcing the idea of threat and justifying the use of force against migrants (Innes 2010). In Europe the FRONTEX border force mobilizes military technology against migrants in the Mediterranean and at the borders of Europe. Hence, in this context migration becomes a threat towards the sovereign state that then provides the object of security to its population by stopping that threat with military force. Migration represents a problem for the positivist objectivist conceptualization of security because migrants are then people without a sovereign state willing to protect them. In order to address this gap in protection in an international system of sovereign states, states that produce migrants are labelled as ‘failed,’ ‘developing,’ or ‘in crisis,’ marking them as states that ought to have the capacity to protect their populations but have not yet activated that capacity because they lag behind developed and secure states.

International and critical security studies

International security studies deviates from strategic studies, or national security studies. Buzan and Hansen (2009) and Shepherd (2007) draw a distinction between national and international security, observing that international security studies is not driven only by a conceptualization of security that resides in the sovereign state’s ability to secure itself or its population. Rather international security involves the premise that security is something that is sought not by one state, but by all states, by society and communities, and by individuals and that co-operation to produce security is possible. Thus, international security studies does include the state as the principle referent object of security but recognizes a) that threats to security can be internal as well as external to the state, b) that security can be expanded beyond the military to include things like economic and environmental security, and c) that security as a concept is limited in that it is tied to immediate threats and dangers so it involves a sense of urgency. Security is broadened in its analytical scope in that it does not revolve only around war and military threat (Buzan and Hansen 2009). Although international security is more nuanced than state (national) security and strategic studies, there are significant conceptual limitations. Critical security studies addresses these limitations in a variety of ways, challenging the state-based assumption of security, broadening and deepening security so that it does not depend on the unit of the sovereign state. Critical security studies developed comprehensively in Europe, where rationalist theories did not enjoy the same level of dominance they achieved in US social science (Buzan and Hansen 2009). The move towards critical security studies recognized security as an Essentially Contested Concept (Buzan 1984, also discussed in Fierke 2007), rather than a positivist-objectivist concept. A shift away from positivism to interpretive epistemologies also saw a change in how security should be conceptualized, incorporating constructivist and discursive approaches that offered new insight into how security is constituted and how the meaning of threat and security is politically implicated.

In what follows I address in more detail some influential schools of thought in critical security studies and outline some critiques. Throughout, I return to how each of these schools of thought position migration to demonstrate the way in which migration provides a key problematique for security studies, even in critical conceptualizations. Finally, I draw on feminist security studies to offer a performative security that addresses some of the critiques and gaps in critical security studies, arguing that performative security provides a concrete means to reconceptualize security that does not require excluding migrants, casting migrants as a threat, or reducing migrants to a passive subject position.

Human security

The 1994 Human Development Report is often cited as the document articulating human security and provides a useful starting point from which to outline the concept. It should be noted that the Human Development Report was by no means the first articulation of human security understood simply as security for humans (Bosold 2011), but it outlined in detail a potential conceptual definition that has since been adopted in state policy and much scholarship, becoming the default understanding of human security. This conceptual definition includes seven specific types of security that need to be met for a human to be secure. These are economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security and political security. The Human Development Report recognizes that ‘for most people, a feeling of insecurity arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event’ (UNDP 1994) and proposes four dimensions to human security: it should be universal, it is interdependent, it is easier to ensure through early prevention, and it is people-centred. The final criterion proposes a shift from the dominant paradigms of human rights and security studies, both of which are state-centric.

Liberal articulations of human security create a nexus between individual security, state security and the security of the international system (UNDP 1994, Hampson 2004).¹ All of these things are interrelated according to the UNDP articulation of human security, and all three must be upheld in order for security to prevail. One cannot logically be substituted for another because removing one hinders the survival of the others. Human security literature has tended to be empirically focused in ‘failed’ states, states in condition of civil war, developing states, and states that have experienced natural disaster (Alden 2007, Fukuda-Parr 2011, Kaldor 2007, Salih 2008, Suhrke 1999). In these geographic locations, human insecurity is considered to be prevalent and is generally related to poverty or inefficient state institutions and a history of conflict.

Conceptually, the assumption that human insecurity is represented by a simple lacking of objective security suggests that security experiences are universal. However, subaltern populations such as people with non-state-based identities are overlooked or actively suppressed by these analyses when they are cast as the threat to globe, state, or society (Duffield 2007, Nuruzzaman 2006, Thomas 1999). Thus, while human security offers a broadening of security to include things like poverty, environmental degradation, health, crime and gender, it does not recognize security as a socially and discursively constructed process that can account for differing experiences of security according to identity and geographic or temporal location. Consequently it does not offer a theoretical conceptualization of security with a potential to be open, inclusive and sensitive to subjective experiences of the world. This is particularly apparent with regard to the treatment of migration in the UNDP report. For example, in the report migration is identified as a threat, linked to terrorism and designated provocative of insecurity at both the global and state levels (UNDP 1994). In this way, the liberal conceptualization of human security emphasizes the state and the neoliberal, Western-dominated global system as holding the ‘solution’ to insecurity. Migrants themselves become a threat to liberalism: the bodies of migrants at the borders provoke restrictive policies that are necessary to counteract terrorism, instability, economic insecurity and potential conflict. While human insecurities might provoke migration, the migrants themselves are then constructed as a faceless threat rather than people experiencing insecurity.

In summation, two main critiques that the prism of migration offers the human security school of thought are worth acknowledging: Firstly, human security tends to have absorbed state-based assumptions rather than challenged them. Although human rights are individualistic, the state is the agent that provides or withholds human rights. Human, state and global security all depend on one another and the state is the body that operationalizes security provision in order to maintain the security of humans and of the international system. Secondly, human security is limited to a material concept of security defined in the security goods listed above such as health, environment, community, political security and so forth, which universalizes security as an objective concept. Human security offers only a zero-sum view of security as an obtainable and material good, precluding the theoretical possibility of an ontological feeling of security despite the UNDP report positing insecurity as a feeling. This inconsistency betrays assumptions of universality and objectivity at the core of the human security paradigm. Such a conceptualization of security is at odds with the hermeneutic forms of security that dominate critical and feminist security studies whereby feelings of threat and security are discursively constructed and reproduced.

Aberystwyth School

The Aberystwyth School of critical security studies is grounded in the Frankfurt school of critical theory and has focused on an emancipatory agenda for security studies. Ken Booth’s determination of emancipation with reference to security studies is that ‘emancipation seeks the securing of people from those oppressions that stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do, compatible with the freedom of others’ (Booth 2005). This emphasis on emancipation shifts the focus from the state to the individual. For Booth, emancipation is not a universal, timeless concept, it cannot be at the expense of others, and it is not synonymous with Westernization. It is a philosophical anchorage, a strategic process and a tactical goal (Croft and Terriff 2000). Emancipation offers ‘a theory of progress for politics, it provides a politics of hope and it gives guidance to a politics of resistance … Emancipation is the only permanent hope of becoming’ (Booth 2005: 42).

However, the Aberystwyth School of critical security studies has been criticized for remaining dependent on Enlightenment conceptions of individualism and freedom, in that the agents of emancipation tend to be Western, or at least the bearers of Western ideas (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, Fierke 2007), and the agents that identify emancipation tend to be Western academics or development professionals (Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006). Security as emancipation understands individuals as secure only when they are not forced to do anything they would not freely choose to do. The notion of the individual echoes Enlightenment understandings of isolated individuals who form contractual societies by choice, as opposed to societies that are formative of identity. Emancipation follows from the notion of negative liberties and freedom from oppression. While the security of the Aberystwyth School is rooted in Frankfurt School critical theory and offers a substantial critique of the state, the solution of shifting the referent object to the individual obscures productive structures and communities that exist at the local level. Emancipation can neglect the idea of rootedness in community as a component of security because particular communities become emblematic of oppressions that prevent people from doing what they would ‘freely choose to do’ were they not within the community. In this way, identities that are produced and reproduced within communities are secondary to individual freedoms.

The prism of migration again offers unique insight into some of the drawbacks of this school of thought. For example, migrants might be characterized by individuals who freely choose to migrate and are obstructed by the power of the state. Contesting the state as the provider of security holds the potential to emancipate those individuals. However, to position the individual as the referent object of security understands the individual as the body to be secured, rather than the security provider. The state then represents threat. What is missing is an alternative understanding of what security looks like in order to nullify that threat. Security as the negative liberty of emancipation casts migrants into a passive position. Migrants are reliant on either the emancipatory theory that rejects the unit of the state operating in their favour or the actions of society in rejecting or contesting the oppressions of the state in order to ‘save’ migrants who are subject to arbitrary and unfair detentions and deportations. Although the Aberystwyth School offers valuable insight into the oppressions of the state, its weakness appears in the lack of attention to alternative productive forms of security by bodies other than the state. It offers what Buzan and Hansen describe as a ‘pessimistic view of global security: states make individuals insecure and the Neoliberal economic structure further exacerbates this condition’ (Buzan and Hansen 2009: 206). The Aberystwyth School then advances a normative theory that requires an active process of emancipation and recognizes universal human rights (Booth 2005). However, a weakness in this normative approach is apparent: if security as emancipation is a conventional negative liberty – someone not being prevented from doing what they would freely choose to do, similar to freedom of speech or freedom of religion – then it is something best served by inaction on the part of authority, rather than action. Migrants who are oppressed by the state are best served by the state not acting in an oppressive way – for example, by not restricting immigration. To consider the emancipation theory of security through the prism of migration engenders two assumptions: the first is that migrants seek accessible human rights and freedom from state oppression, which might be true although simplified and impersonal. The second is that the migrant identity itself is a consequence of experience of oppression. Migrants need to be emancipated from state oppression, whereas for many people the act of migrating is an agentive act that removes them from the oppression. Yet the process of emancipation is put into prac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Producing Knowledge in International Security Studies
• 1. The Problem of Migration for Security Studies
• 2. Insecurity and Asylum Seeker Identity
• 3. Human Rights, Mobile Humans: A Critical Reading of Mobility and Access to Rights
• 4. States in a World of Asylum Seekers: Agency, Rights, Security
• 5. Performing Security, Theorizing Security
• Conclusion: Opening
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index