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Governing refugees through disorientation: Fragmented knowledges and forced technological mediations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2022

Martina Tazzioli Open the ORCID record for Martina Tazzioli [Opens in a new window]
Martina Tazzioli*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
*
*Corresponding author. [email protected]
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Abstract

This article investigates the fragmented knowledges that migrants need to deal with in order to get access to asylum, and the related effects of disorientation it generates on them. The piece argues that disorientation is as a constitutive political technology of refugee governance and develops this argument by focusing on the Greek asylum system. It starts by drawing attention to the multiple technological steps and forced digital intermediations that asylum seekers in Greece need to navigate, focusing in particular on the Cash Assistance Programme, and it shows how asylum seekers need to deal with dispersed knowledges. The article moves on by analysing how the governing through disorientation underpin the asylum legal system in Greece and how this ends up in debilitating asylum seekers and hampering them from accessing rights and humanitarian support. The final section explores how asylum seekers are racialised and treated as deceitful subjects, and argues that not only their speech but also their conduct and behaviour are assumed to be deceptive, and therefore their knowledge turns out to be pointless. It concludes by challenging claims for more transparency and more knowledge as a response to the governing through disorientation.

Keywords

Fragmented KnowledgesDisorientationRefugeesTechnological Mediations
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 425 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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References

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4 Throughout the article, I use the term ‘asylum seeker’ to refer to those people who are temporarily included in the asylum system and, therefore, are targeted by specific humanitarian and control measures that this article speaks about, and ‘migrants’ as a more general term that does not refer to any specific legal status.

5 I borrow the term ‘political technology’ from Michel Foucault's work. According to Foucault, political technologies refer to the set of techniques, practices, and knowledges used for disciplining, regulating, and governing bodies and populations. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Vintage, 2012).

6 In 2021, all interviews were conducted online, due to COVID-19 restrictions.

7 Before conducting the interviews, consent forms were provided to for interviewees to sign, which stated the goal of my research and how the anonymised data will be used.

8 On the relationship between forced speech, subjectivity, and power, see Michel Foucault, Mal faire, dire vrai: Fonction de l'aveu en justice-cours de Louvain, 1981 (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Presses univ. de Louvain, 2012).

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34 The notion of opacity is under-theorised in migration literature. It should be distinguished from akin notions like obfuscation and transparency. Unlike obfuscation, opacity is not necessarily the outcome of an intentional act. Opacity refers to both an epistemological dimension and to questions around (in)visibility. By saying that fragmented knowledges render the asylum system more opaque I do not only simply refer to lack of transparency but to the obstructions and to the effects of disorientation that they generate on migrants.

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38 {https://www.mobileinfoteam.org/skype}.

39 {https://apps.migration.gov.gr/selfregistration/login?lang=en}.

40 Author's interview (online) with the Greek Asylum Service, 28 February 2021.

41 In September 2021 UNHCR handed over to the Greek authorities. To date, it is still unclear whether and how the Greek government will continue providing financial aid to asylum seekers in camps. Actually, in October 2021, on the basis of a ministerial decision, the Greek authorities have left without food provisions and financial support both those who have been granted refugee status and those whose asylum application has been rejected.

42 M. Cheesman, ‘Self-sovereignty for refugees? The contested horizons of digital identity’, Geopolitics (2020), pp. 1–26; Martina Tazzioli, ‘Extract, datafy and disrupt: Refugees’ subjectivities between data abundance and data disregard’, Geopolitics (2020), pp. 1–19.

43 Kate Coddington, Deirdre Conlon, and Lauren L. Martin, ‘Destitution economies: Circuits of value in asylum, refugee, and migration control’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2020), pp. 1–20; see also Zimmermann, Susan, ‘Why seek asylum? The roles of integration and financial support’, International Migration, 48:1 (2010), pp. 199–231CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Kate Coddington, ‘The slow violence of life without cash: Borders, state restrictions, and exclusion in the UK and Australia⋆’, Geographical Review, 109:4 (2019), p. 531.

45 Tazzioli, ‘Refugees’ debit cards, subjectivities, and data circuits’.

46 However, since 2019 the asylum seekers who are on the mainland can also live autonomously, in apartments they rent, provided that they are able to show an official rent contract.

47 Designation used by the UNHCR in official documents as well as on the ground.

48 Indeed, those who receive a salary are excluded from the Programme.

49 Author's interview with UNHCR coordinator, Lesvos, 24 August 2020.

50 The information related to 2020 concerns the period of time before the fire that destroyed the hotspot on 8 September 2020.

51 Author's interview with a UNHCR officer, Lesvos, 24 August 2020.

52 Author's interview with Caritas, Athens, 18 July 2019.

53 I had the opportunity to assist to card distribution and monthly verification procedure at the Caritas office in Athens in August 2018, April 2019, and July 2019. I got the authorisation from Caritas, which is a partner of UNHCR in the Cash Assistance Programme.

54 Author's interview with M., an Iranian asylum seeker, Athens, 28 April 2019.

55 Pikpa is a camp on the Greek island of Lesvos that hosts vulnerable asylum seekers, as well as those who had been denied of the international protection by the Greek authorities. The camp is run by the Greek association Pikpa.

56 Oesch, ‘The refugee camp as a space of multiple ambiguities and subjectivities’.

57 Stel, Nora, ‘The agnotology of eviction in South Lebanon's Palestinian gatherings: How institutional ambiguity and deliberate ignorance shape sensitive spaces’, Antipode, 48:5 (2016), pp. 1400–19 (p. 1409)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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59 HIAS, ‘Observations on the Implementation of Law 4636/2019 on International Protection and Other Provisions at the Hotspot of’, report written in May 2020 by the following NGOs: RSA, HIAS, Legal Center Lesvos, Praxsis, and European Lawyers Lesvos.

60 Article 78 of the Greek International Protection Pact (IPA), enforced in January 2020, available at: {https://www.asylumineurope.org/reports/country/greece/annex-i-transposition-ceas-national-legislation?fbclid=IwAR3Zl99pB6Acudb0iZG_4NYi293aVasTzd4Rfx8IyaaI3W4NAGFuDT5C3ME}.

61 Author's interview with the Legal Centre Lesbos, 21 August 2020.

62 EU-Turkey Deal (2016), available at: {https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-towards-a-new-policy-on-migration/file-eu-turkey-statement-action-plan}.

63 Oxfam, ‘Diminished, Derogated, Denied. How the Right to Asylum in Greece is Undermined by the Lack of EU Responsibility Sharing’ (2020), available at: {https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621011/bp-diminished-derogated-denied-greece-refugees-020720-en.pdf?fbclid=IwAR32PJ4ooBixZCE_RnLDZuyM2btsNl3n9ruvXrbbkQlGWDsDwhPZGDM5zvY} accessed 7 October 2020.

64 Nicholas De Genova et al., ‘Europe/crisis: New keywords of “the crisis” in and of “Europe”’, Near Futures Online, 1 (2016), pp. 1–16.

65 Barbara Pinelli, ‘After the landing: Moral control and surveillance in Italy's asylum seeker camps’ (Respond to this article at: {https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate}’, Anthropology Today, 31:2 (2015), pp. 12–14.

66 Jill Maybritt Alpes and Alexis Spire, ‘Dealing with law in migration control: The powers of street-level bureaucrats at French consulates’, Social & Legal Studies, 23:2 (2014), pp. 261–74; Tobias G. Eule, Lisa M. Borrelli, Annika Lindberg, and Anna Wyss, ‘Migrants before the law’, Contested Migration Control in Europe (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2019).

67 I include here both the knowledge of refugees’ rights, and the knowledge of bureaucratic procedures but also of the eligibility criteria to get cash card or other forms of financial support, as well as the ways in which it functions. In a nutshell, it refers to the knowledge about how to navigate the asylum system – both to lodge an asylum claim and to get access to rights and support.

68 {https://invite.viber.com/?g2=AQBwbnVKr3AUHUv7i1F8blVpQ6t6fqUHHHqTaIVCMvoPy3ty6b4DM6Lio%2BryaTS0&lang=en}.

69 Viber chat sent to the asylum seekers in Lesvos on 29 September 2020.

70 Borrelli, ‘Using ignorance as (un)conscious bureaucratic strategy’, p. 98.

71 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 1.

72 Roberto Beneduce, ‘The moral economy of lying: Subjectcraft, narrative capital, and uncertainty in the politics of asylum’, Medical Anthropology, 34:6 (2015), pp. 551–71.

73 Didier Fassin and Estelle d'Halluin, ‘The truth from the body: Medical certificates as ultimate evidence for asylum seekers’, American Anthropologist, 107:4 (2005), pp. 597–608 (p. 107).

74 Claudia, ‘Assembling (non) knowledge’, p. 10.

75 Code, Lorraine, ‘Ignorance, injustice and the politics of knowledge: Feminist epistemology now’, Australian Feminist Studies, 29:8 (2014), pp. 148–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collins, Patricia Hill, ‘The social construction of black feminist thought’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14:4 (1989), pp. 745–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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78 Nicholas De Genova, ‘The “migrant crisis” as racial crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41:1 (2018), pp. 1765–782; Martina Tazzioli, The Making of Migration: The Biopolitics of Mobility at Europe's Borders (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Limited, 2019).

79 In fact, as Fanon stresses in the text ‘The North African syndrome’ (1952), the colonised subjects are constantly mistrusted by the doctor: ‘the behaviour of the North-African often causes a medical staff to have misgiving as to the reality of his illness.’ Fanon, ‘The North African syndrome’, p. 4.

80 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2008); Fanon, ‘The North African syndrome’.

81 Beneduce, ‘The moral economy of lying’, p. 553.

82 Author's interview with UNHCR officers in Lesvos, 23 April 2019.

83 Author's interview with UNHCR in Athens, 18 July 2019.

84 Jenni Millbank, ‘“The ring of truth”: A case study of credibility assessment in particular social group refugee determinations’, International Journal of Refugee Law, 21:1 (2009), pp. 1–33.

85 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, p. 44. Nor, I suggest, can the racialisation of refugees as deceitful subjects be opposed through a fight against prejudices and by gesturing towards responsible and virtuous hearers. Indeed, in the field of techno-humanitarianism it is not a matter of prejudices, or of lack of reflexivity but of the fundamentally disqualified speech and conduct of the asylum seekers as suspect and as guilty until proven otherwise.

86 Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton, ‘Free speech and illocution’, Legal Theory, 4:1 (1998), pp. 21–37.

87 {https://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2019/12/5b6c40f04/cash-assistance-gives-refugees-power-choice.html}.

88 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, p. 1.

89 Therefore, the appearance of the asylum seekers as deceitful subjects cannot be disjoined from states’ attempt to keep them outside the channels of the asylum.

90 Claudia Aradau, ‘Become a permanent migrant to the UK!’, Radical Philosophy (2015), available at: {https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/become-a-permanent-migrant-to-the-uk} 3 February 2020.

91 Michel Foucault, ‘Prison talk’, in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York, NY: Vintage, 1980), pp. 37–54 (p. 52).

92 See, for instance, Nicholas De Genova (ed.), The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) and Vicki Squire, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (New York, NY: Springer, 2016).

93 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Vol. 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 27. See also Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) and William Walters and Lüthi Barbara, ‘The politics of cramped space: Dilemmas of action, containment and mobility’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 29:4 (2016), pp. 359–66.

94 Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York, NY: Penguin, 2015).

95 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

96 In fact, opacity also evokes tactics of appropriation, refusal, and resistance that colonised subjects and migrants engage in against techniques of control

97 Sandra Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘Between inclusion and exclusion: On the topology of global space and borders’, Theory, Culture & Society, 29:4–5 (2012), pp. 58–75 (p. 69); see also Genova, Nicholas De, ‘The queer politics of migration: Reflections on “illegality” and incorrigibility’, Studies in Social Justice, 4:2 (2010), pp. 101–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Puar, The Right to Maim.

99 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (New York, NY: Springer, 2008), p. 36.