Series in Human Security

Bridget M. Haas, Amy Shuman, Bridget M. Haas, Amy Shuman

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780821423783
• eBook ISBN: 9780821446676
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Across the globe, migration has been met with intensifying modes of criminalization and securitization, and claims for political asylum are increasingly met with suspicion. Asylum seekers have become the focus of global debates surrounding humanitarian obligations, on the one hand, and concerns surrounding national security and border control, on the other. In Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum, contributors provide fine-tuned analyses of political asylum systems and the adjudication of asylum claims across a range of sociocultural and geopolitical contexts.

The contributors to this timely volume, drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives, offer critical insights into the processes by which tensions between humanitarianism and security are negotiated at the local level, often with negative consequences for asylum seekers. By investigating how a politics of suspicion within asylum systems is enacted in everyday practices and interactions, the authors illustrate how asylum seekers are often produced as suspicious subjects by the very systems to which they appeal for protection.

Contributors: Ilil Benjamin, Carol Bohmer, Nadia El-Shaarawi, Bridget M. Haas, John Beard Haviland, Marco Jacquemet, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Rachel Lewis, Sara McKinnon, Amy Shuman, Charles Watters

Part I

Asylum and Protection as Contested Categories

Chapter 1

Troubling the Ethics of Durable Solutions in the Age of Suspicion

Iraq War Refugees and the Politics of Obligation

NADIA EL-SHAARAWI

“In front of Iraqi people I am now a traitor, having cheated my country, and in front of Americans I don’t have a case.” As Mustafa and I sat in the waiting room of a Cairo refugee legal aid organization, his angry condemnation filled me with shame. That afternoon, I had noticed him come into the clinic carrying a thin folder of paper and drop onto a seat in the waiting room, visibly upset. Around him, the hustle and bustle of work went on as usual: clients waited to be seen as legal advocates interviewed refugees, filled out forms, and entered data. I, the ethnographer, had been encouraged to speak with Mustafa by the director, who noted in hushed tones that Mustafa had just been rejected for resettlement to the United States and “needed to talk.” While Mustafa could appeal the decision, we knew how difficult it would be and how unlikely it was to be successful.

Resettlement rejections often came with almost no explanation for why a case had been refused in the first place, making appeals challenging. And while the legal aid clinic provided its clients with assistance before and after the resettlement interviews, refugees were almost never allowed to bring a legal advocate to the interviews that would decide their fate. A conversation with an anthropologist in a moment like this felt inadequate, empty of comfort. I knew that the director had asked me to speak with Mustafa because there was nothing substantive to offer him in that moment. Mustafa, who had been forced to flee Iraq because of his association with the Americans, had, in his estimation, risked reidentifying himself as a “traitor” in exile by applying to be resettled to the United States. Yet because his affiliation with the United States in Iraq had not been judged to fit the specific criteria of the US resettlement program, his application was rejected. Mustafa, like many Iraqis I met in Cairo, was caught in between: he didn’t quite fit the bureaucratic specificities of the programs designed to provide protection to Iraqi refugees, despite believing himself to be in need of such protection.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are 25.4 million refugees in the world today. Refugee status is, by definition, intended to be temporary. Yet displacement is increasingly protracted, with a global average length of displacement of twenty years. Nonetheless, the framing of displacement as a “temporary crisis” demands a solution, and the conventional framework employed by international organizations and states includes three discrete, so-called durable solutions: repatriation to the country of origin, local integration, and third-country resettlement. The framework of durable solutions may be less familiar and pressing in contexts where national asylum systems lead to permanent residence or citizenship for people granted asylum, but in states where national asylum systems are absent and where refugees are allowed to reside on a temporary basis only, like in Egypt, the question of a durable solution to displacement takes on urgency for refugees and humanitarians alike.

This volume focuses on the ways that discourses of humanitarianism and securitization play out in a wide range of asylum adjudication contexts. In this chapter, I focus on Iraqi refugees’ experiences of adjudication—not of asylum but of third-country resettlement, one of the durable solutions. Resettlement involves the selection and transfer of refugees from the country where they have sought refuge to a new country that has agreed to provide them with residence and, usually, a pathway to citizenship. Once the preferred solution to the “refugee problem” (Loescher and Scanlan 1998), resettlement has become the least-used durable solution. Only approximately 1 percent of refugees are resettled. Resettlement is typically only a possibility for people who have already been granted refugee status. It is often intended as an additional form of protection when asylum is insufficient. Yet, as in asylum, resettlement adjudication decides who is included and who is excluded. Both processes are complex arenas of contestation in which questions of obligation, security, humanitarianism, and protection are played out.

While resettlement and asylum processes share some similarities, there are key differences. First, while theoretically people who meet the definition of a refugee under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 protocol have the right to claim asylum, no such right to resettlement exists. Resettlement is entirely at the discretion of the resettlement state, which decides which refugees to admit and the manner in which they will be admitted. The United States has for a long time resettled the most refugees of any of the twenty-eight resettlement countries and has the most nationally independent program of any resettlement state (Van Selm 2014). Second, persons can claim asylum when they reach the territory of the state to which they have fled. Resettlement, on the other hand, allows states to select the refugees they would like to admit before they travel to the resettlement country. It is therefore not surprising that states often hold up resettlement programs as “orderly” against the uncontrolled, and therefore suspicious, mobility of asylum seekers (Van Selm 2014), who are often stigmatized as dangerous or illegitimate “queue jumpers.” But this is not always the case. For example, populist politicians in the United States have recently used versions of both of these discourses as justification for restrictions or moratoriums on refugee resettlement.

Scholars, as well as politicians, have deliberated at length about what responsibilities states have to admit refugees (Gibney 2004). In this chapter, I move away from an approach grounded in the ethical underpinnings or policy implications of inclusion and exclusion that, while important, tend to center the state in their analysis (Aleinikoff 1995). Instead I argue for an anthropological approach that focuses on Iraqi refugees’ lived experiences of the resettlement process and the ways in which the logics that underpinned resettlement were negotiated locally in Cairo. This method pays attention to the ways in which these larger geopolitical questions are made and remade in everyday encounters during the resettlement process. How do refugees like Mustafa experience, understand, and engage with questions of obligation in the context of the resettlement process?

Although resettlement has become an exceptional solution, its impact reaches far beyond the few refugees who are resettled each year. Yet research on resettlement often does not include a focus on refugees’ own hopes, plans, and experiences related to resettlement. Much scholarship on resettlement instead focuses on the integration of resettled populations, especially in the United States and Canada, and not on the process of resettlement itself, with important exceptions (e.g., Thomson 2012; Jansen 2008; Horst 2006). In addition, as Katy Long (2013) notes, the durable-solutions framework itself has rarely been subject to scholarly critique.

This chapter draws on several periods of ethnographic fieldwork with Iraqi refugees in Egypt from 2007 to 2012. During this time, I conducted interviews with refugees and humanitarians and engaged in participant observation in a refugee legal aid clinic and other key sites for the Iraqi community in Egypt. When I began my research, the resettlement process was not a primary focus of my project. However, over time I came to realize how centrally resettlement figured in the daily lives of my interlocutors, many of whom were seeking to be resettled to a third country, such as the United States. The lived experience of urban exile could not be understood without attention to the bureaucratic process that characterized much of their lives during this period.

DISPLACEMENT AND THE IRAQ WAR

In order to make sense of Iraqis’ experiences with the resettlement process, it is essential to consider why they became refugees and how they experienced life in exile. In 2007, when I began my fieldwork, the flight of Iraqis from their country was at its apex. The 2003 Iraq War and the violence and unrest that followed led to the displacement of 4.7 million Iraqis. Some 2.7 million were internally displaced, while 2 million lived as refugees, mostly in countries in the region such as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Although it would soon be eclipsed by the forced migration caused by the Syrian Civil War, at the time the Iraqis represented the largest mass migration in the Middle East after 1948 (Fagan 2007).

The March 2003 invasion of Iraq, dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom, was justified by the premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, a rationale that was later demonstrated to be false. In April of that year, Baghdad fell, ending the twenty-four-year rule of Saddam and the Ba’ath Party. US troops would remain in Iraq until their official withdrawal in 2011. There was significant protest and public criticism of the war, which many likened to that of the Vietnam War. Criticism focused on a number of different issues, including the legality of the invasion, the human costs and financial costs, which have been estimated at more than $823 billion (Crawford 2014), abuses by the armed forces and private contractors, and failure to plan for the transition of power.

Immediately following the toppling of Saddam’s regime, policymakers expected large-scale population movement both into and out of the country. However, the initial refugee movements did not materialize. Instead, beginning in 2005 and reaching its apex in 2006–7, escalating sectarian violence led to the mass displacement of millions of Iraqis, catching policymakers and practitioners unaware. After the fall of Saddam’s regime, the absence of a strong state and a climate of insecurity further encouraged Iraqis to turn to other groupings, including tribal, sectarian, ethnic, and regional allegiances, in order to provide security and protection (Al-Mohammad 2010; Boyle 2009). This built on patterns of allegiance under the previous regime in which the stifling of political opposition was such that Iraqis identified with religious, tribal, and ethnic leaders for authority separate from that of the state. However, in a climate of fear and uncertainty, this plurality of groups led to great insecurity. In 2005, the number of militias, insurgent groups, tribal groups, and criminal gangs carrying out attacks exceeded one hundred (Filkins 2008). At the same time as the military, police, and other organs of the state were disbanded, weapons and ammunition became widely available in the marketplace, leading to well-armed civilians and militias and the absence of governmental authority (Sahlins 2011).

Many people fled Iraq after experiencing death threats, kidnappings, or other forms of violence in the climate of escalating sectarian violence and unrest. A smaller number of Iraqis were forced to leave the country when they were targeted as a result of their work (or their perceived affiliation) with the US war effort. Iraqis who had worked for the Americans were identified as collaborators by militias and subject to threats, kidnapping, or murder. At the same time, some Americans who had worked in Iraq and later received pleas from their terrorized interpreters and other Iraqi associates were actively pressing the US government to assist Iraqis who were in danger because of their association with the American war effort (Johnson 2013).

IRAQI REFUGEES IN EGYPT AND THE HOPE FOR DURABLE SOLUTIONS

At the height of their displacement, a population of approximately 150,000 Iraqis sought exile in Egypt (Yoshikawa 2007), primarily in urban Cairo. Although Egypt is a signatory to the 1951 refugee convention, it is difficult if not impossible for refugees to realize their rights in practice due to reservations Egypt has entered to the convention and a lack of implementing domestic legislation. These reservations limit the state’s legal obligations to refugees, passing most of the administration and management of refugee populations onto the UNHCR and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), in an example of what Aihwa Ong (2000) has referred to as graduated sovereignty.

Because of the state’s “benign neglect” (Sadek 2010), Iraqi refugees could not work or access public education in Egypt, and they lived with precarious residency status, granted on the basis of their refugee claim but requiring renewal every six months. Citizenship is conferred on the basis of descent in Egypt and thus is not available to refugees. As a result, I found that Iraqis did not conceive of Egypt as a home but often spoke of their time there as “a station,” “a temporary place,” or “a problem to be solved,” and conditions in Egypt contributed to Iraqi refugees’ inability to settle more permanently in the country. In visits to my interlocutors’ homes, I often saw the material evidence of this existential limbo (Haas 2017): the temporariness of life in Egypt combined with the uncertainty of the resettlement process often meant that people lived with their bags packed and ready to go, just in case. As my work has illustrated and as has been documented in a number of other asylum and migration contexts (El-Sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Negotiating Suspicion, Obligation, and Security in Contemporary Political Asylum Regimes
• Part I: Asylum and Protection as Contested Categories
• Part II: Technologies of Suspicion
• Part III: Enacting and Navigating Suspicion
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index