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On the Migrant Subject

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2021

Hengameh Ziai
Hengameh Ziai*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Abstract

Pluralism is deployed to govern migration across the Global North and Global South in contradictory ways. Fearing the arrival of migrants on its own shores – a threat to its biopolitical constitution – Europe deploys discourses of pluralism in the Global South to encourage migrants en route to Europe to sedentarize in “transit” countries like Sudan. Neoliberal development projects propagate the virtues of pluralism to host communities in Sudan, who are exhorted to view migrants as potential economic assets. Yet, in the context of Europe those same migrants continue to be seen as an economic and racial threat. While a lack of skills and entrepreneurialism are framed as the “root cause” of migration to Europe, migrants are paradoxically presented as trainable and therefore economically productive in the Global South. This article offers a critical examination of consolidating migration management practices in Sudan, their imbrication with development projects, and the racial anxieties they evoke in both Europe and in “transit” countries. It homes in on not only populations headed towards Europe, but those intending to remain in Sudan, notably Syrians, and explores the lessons and aporias of Sudan's hitherto open-door policy towards the latter.

Keywords

MigrationDevelopmentRaceSudanSyriansEuropean Union
Type
Special Focus: Pluralism in Emergenc(i)es in the Middle East and North Africa
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , December 2020 , pp. 196 - 214
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc.

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References

1 Pluralism is not a natural condition requiring management and resolution. Postcolonial scholarship has shown that pluralism and multiculturalism, including their instantiations in metropolitan centers, have roots in the colonial production of race and other forms of difference. For a relatively recent account of the colonial production of identity, see: Mamdani, Mahmood, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The purported crisis refers to increased numbers of migrants entering the EU, either through the Mediterranean or Southern Europe, beginning in late 2014 and peaking in 2015. However, the real crisis lies in the obstruction of safe migratory routes to Europe – including safe ways to seek asylum – manifest in the spectacle and tragedy of boats carrying migrants sinking in the Mediterranean. The year 2015 saw the five shipwrecks leading to the deaths of around 2000 people.

3 On subjectivation and the duality of acquiring subjectivity and subjugation, see: Balibar, Etienne, ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, in Supposing the Subject, ed. Copjec, Joan (Verso, 1994), 1–15Google Scholar. On the discursive production of the subject see: Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980)Google Scholar.

4 On the migration of non-white populations to Europe, see: De Genova, Nicholas, “The “Migrant Crisis” as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41.10 (August 2018): 1765-82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Following Foucault, biopolitics concerns the management of the “population,” including its “quality” and “racial” constitution. Foucault, The History of Sexuality.

6 The EU operates on the basis that the liberal order can tolerate the upsetting of its biopolitical balance at the hands of non-white migrants only to a certain degree before succumbing to right-wing forces or otherwise imploding. It therefore attempts to “manage” this balance as a means toward its purported self-preservation.

7 Maurice Stierl, “EU Sued at International Criminal Court over Mediterranean Migration Policy - as More Die at Sea,” The Conversation, 4 June 2019, https://theconversation.com/eu-sued-at-international-criminal-court-over-mediterranean-migration-policy-as-more-die-at-sea-118223?fbclid=IwAR1C1EkLSUFe1ILU_pVIv44ilpYMbb8lnIyQ7pi9sR6Nb6M-PouUHi2z-pU.

8 Brachet, Julien, “Policing the Desert: The IOM in Libya Beyond War and Peace,” Antipode 48.2 (2016): 272–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mark Akkerman, “Expanding the Fortress: The Policies, the Profiteers and the People Shaped by EU's Border Externalisation Programme” (The Transnational Institute, 2018), https://www.tni.org/en/node/24130?content_language=en.

9 The Khartoum Process is formally known as the EU-Horn of Africa Migration Route Initiative. It includes 27 member states of the EU and states situated along the migratory route from the Horn of Africa to Europe, namely: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sudan, and Tunisia.

10 The Better Migration Management program, implemented across the Horn of Africa, is funded jointly by the EU and Germany. It consists of four components: policy harmonisation; capacity building; protection; and awareness-raising.

11 Duffield has presciently described the emergence of a security-development nexus in the aftermath of the decline of Third Worldism as a political alternative. While dependency theory had integrally linked development to underdevelopment, the liberal order that came to predominate has succeeded in reconceptualizing underdevelopment as a security issue, focusing on the forms of instability produced as a result of the outbreak of conflict. Today the fear remains that conflict will increase refugee flows into Europe. Duffield, Mark R., Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London; New York: Zed Books; Distributed in the USA exclusively by Palgrave, 2001)Google Scholar.

12 ECOWAS is a political and economic union of West African states, namely, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cote d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

13 See: “Outsourcing border controls to Africa,” DW, March 13, 2019, https://www.dw.com/en/outsourcing-border-controls-to-africa/av-45599271?fbclid=IwAR3i_EY-fcBz_6Zgy6ghSNI7p0SXhT5qZHdhpXjFYY3_RRuP3FIvjaOmjeU.

14 This is what was stated in the documentary created by DW, see ibid.

15 “EU To Work with Despot in Sudan to Keep Refugees Out - DER SPIEGEL,” accessed 29 September 2020, https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/eu-to-work-with-despot-in-sudan-to-keep-refugees-out-a-1092328.html.

16 It is noteworthy that border management technology is a booming sector in the arms industry, a sector which, in Europe, happens to be dominated by German companies. Thus German industry directly benefits from the export of border management technologies to Africa as part of the EU's Better Migration Management program, which Germany itself leads. This is an issue which merits greater consideration.

17 It should be mentioned that the fall of Omar al-Bashir's government, and the subsequent institution of a Transitional Government with “liberal” oversight, now makes “material” collaboration, conventionally understood, significantly easier.

18 Following approaches in Science and Technology Studies, I am opening the “black box” of technology, combining this with a Foucauldian approach that accounts for the importance of discursive practices. For the former, see: Latour, Bruno, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Latour, Bruno, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

19 As funding has been channelled towards “migration management,” with INGOs and research institutions on the receiving end, the number of policy documents produced on migration in Sudan has ballooned.

20 The EU has worked on “capacity building” in Sudan since at least the mid-1980s, when it embedded this goal in the Sudanese government's Relief and Rehabilitation Commission. This is indicative of a longer history in which humanitarianism is the means through which to strengthen state apparatuses. I thank Mark Duffield for sharing this insight.

21 For more on ‘incitement to discourse,’ see: Foucault, The History of Sexuality.

22 The emphasis on vocational training should be understood in light of the hegemony of neoliberal development economics. This has been heavily influenced by the work of Chicago School economists, who posit that a lack of development results from an underinvestment in “human capital.” Development thus comes to be oriented around the imparting of skills and other forms of “expertise” through, for example, vocational training. For a classic account, see: Schultz, Theodore W., Transforming Traditional Agriculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar. For more on neoliberalism, development economics, and vocational training, see (forthcoming): Hengameh Ziai, “The Birth of Biopolitics in Underdevelopment.”

23 A more detailed critique is forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook on the Horn of Africa: Hengameh Ziai, “The Migrant as Entrepreneur.”

24 These include laws criminalizing illegal entry into Sudan, which were rarely and unevenly enforced.

25 This information is based on interviews conducted with Syrians living in Khartoum in 2017 and 2018, supplemented by several follow-up interviews more recently. It also draws heavily on: Alice Koumurian, ‘Le Soudan, pays de destination? Le cas des Syriens arrivés après 2011 à Khartoum’, l'Observatoire de l'Afrique de l'Est Vol. 3 (July 2017), https://www.umifre.fr/c/68559.

26 Numbers are inevitably higher since UNHCR figures represent only the number of officially registered refugees. See: http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/syria-emergency.html (updated March 15, 2021).

27 See, for example: Fatma Naib and Durra Gambo, “‘At Least We are Treated as Human’: Syrians in Sudan,” Al Jazeera, December 7, 2015, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/12/7/at-least-we-are-treated-as-humans-syrians-in-sudan.

28 For example, see: Sajjad, Tazreena, “What's in a Name? ‘Refugees,’ ‘Migrants’ and the Politics of Labelling,” Race & Class 60.2 (October 2018): 40-62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Describing the experience of Jewish refugees to the United States, Arendt presents an intimate account of refugeehood, one that is located in the everyday, mundane, emotional, and psychological: “Before this war broke out we were even more sensitive about being called refugees. We did our best to prove to other people that we were just ordinary immigrants… If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded.” Arendt, Hannah, ‘We Refugees’, in The Jewish Writings, ed. Kohn, Jerome and Feldman, Ron H., 1st ed (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp. 224-268Google Scholar.

30 The issue of legality should not be underestimated. Other receiving countries like Jordan and Lebanon have not signed the 1951 Geneva convention and do not have specific asylum laws. Instead, they cooperate with the UNHCR on the basis of a “memorandum of understanding.” In Jordan, UNHCR registers Syrians as refugees, giving them prima facie status without a determination process. In Lebanon, the lack of an updated “memorandum of understanding” for Syrians implies that the Lebanese government does not recognize UNHCR registration as a type of legal status, meaning that most Syrians are vulnerable to arrest as illegal citizens, http://www.iemed.org/observatori/arees-danalisi/arxius-adjunts/anuari/med.2016/IEMed_MedYearBook2016_Refugges%20Jordan%20Lebanon_Lenner_Schmelter.pdf.

31 This was confirmed by the draft of a study conducted by the Center for Economic, Judicial, and Social Study and Documentation (CEDEJ): “N'ayant pas le statut de réfugié au Soudan, les Syriens qui se rendent à Khartoum pour fuir le conflit n'ont en principe pas de barrière administrative pour rentrer en Syrie s'ils le souhaitent. Il y a même fort à penser que cette possibilité du retour constitue, aux yeux de certains, l'un des avantages importants du Soudan. Cette situation permet aux Syriens ayant la possibilité de rentrer en Syrie de ne pas se sentir bloqués dans le pays dans lequel ils ont trouvé refuge,” Koumurian, “Le Soudan, pays de destination?,” 22.

32 IOM Report, “Migrants in Sudan, Pilot Study on Migrants’ Motivations, Intentions And Decision-Making In Khartoum,” 2017.

33 “al-sudan tamnih al-aman lil-suriyyin wa tarḥab bihum “mā dām al-nil yajri,”” CNN Arabic, September 6, 2016, https://arabic.cnn.com/middleeast/2016/09/07/sudan-syrian-refugees.

34 Mamdani has argued that the genealogy of this binary lies in colonial mappings of different races and tribes and historiographies that explain the presence of Arabs in Sudan as the result of a territorial migration (as opposed to primarily the dissemination of the Arabic language in regions where it was deemed useful to state formation). See: Mamdani, Mahmood, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009)Google Scholar.

35 Jok, Jok Madut, Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007)Google Scholar.

36 Goldberg, David Theo, The Racial State (Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2002)Google Scholar.

37 Moreover, if we are to follow Foucault, then racism acts as the last stage of biopolitics – demarcating the line between letting live and the right to kill. This racism functions such that killing is no longer enacted against a political enemy, but in defense of the population, the species. Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, 1st ed (New York: Picador, 2002)Google Scholar.

38 “Not only did loss of national rights in all instances entail the loss of human rights; the restoration of human rights … has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights. The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human,” Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1994), 299Google Scholar.

39 To draw on Arendt's insights on “bare life” is not necessarily to adopt wholesale her analysis on the centrality of political community, though it has been partially drawn on. See: Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar.