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Postcolonial Studies
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To cite this article: Bernd Kasparek & Marc Speer (2013) At the nexus of academia and activism:
bordermonitoring.eu, Postcolonial Studies, 16:3, 259-268, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2013.850044
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2013.850044
provides one of the many reflective spaces we feel are a necessary condition for
militant research and critical investigation.
We come from this background of political, anti-racist networks as well as
academic work in the field of border and migration studies. However, we felt that
these two spheres weredespite the examples to the contrary cited above
generally disconnected in their modes of knowledge production. What seemed
necessary was to bridge this gap. While we value the academic discussions and
rigidity, and although academic research has often uncovered crucial information
and arguments, the latency of publication and university structures that enforce
individual rather than collective research form a barrier to the dissemination, and
subsequent discussion, of that knowledge, especially when ephemeral. To put
forward just one example: Transit Migrations and the Frassanito networks
contributions to a critical understanding of migration and borders, not only in
Europe, via the concepts of border regimes and the autonomy of migration, have
provided us with invaluable instruments to approach and make sense of what is
currently occurring at the borders of Europe, and within. We believe that these
contributions also played an important role in making the European border regime
a site of contestation by anti-racist networks, forging one of the few truly
European radical movements of the early twenty-first century in the process. But
even despite a specific focus on ethnographic methods of investigation, at least on
the part of Transit Migration through its method of ethnographic border analysis,4
we are still far from more than a selectiveboth geographically as well as
temporallyunderstanding of phenomena around the borders of Europe. To be
clear about this claim, we attribute this to the characteristics of current academic
structures and their funding, not to the actual people involved.
On the activist side, however, we often felt a lack of appreciation for theoretical
arguments or critical, reflexive assessment of ones practice, more often than not
induced by precarious conditions under which items of knowledge are being
produced. Frassanitos intervention against the understanding of the European
border regime implicit in the term Fortress Europe is only the most obvious
example of the former, even though this issue has long been resolved. It is more
instructive to focus on the latter, i.e. the precarious conditions of production. The
mere ability to do (ethnographic) research at the borders of Europe is more often
than not predicated on the availability of funds. In our observation this has led to
what we might refer to as professionalization of investigative work, funded by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and foundations. This introduced the problem
of knowledge being appropriated for campaigns that focused more on a short-term
goal and less on an abstract critique. An analysis of this conflict in aims of critical
knowledge production needs to take into account the political economy of the rise
of NGOs and private, charitable foundations and their terms of (re-)production, and
more generally the commodification of knowledge. Especially the latter warrants a
detailed discussion by itself, which is larger than the scope of this article.
From Lesvos to Dublin
Questions around organizing and structures for collective, critical endeavours are
important, but they are just the institutional setting. In order to get to the political
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issues at hand, we will provide an account of activities of the last years, which we
would trace back to the Noborder Camp in Lesvos5 in the summer of 2009.
Lesvos is a Greek island situated on the external border of Europe, and since
2008, an increasing number of refugees and migrants have attempted and most
often succeeded in crossing the sea that separates Lesvos and Turkey. In Greece,
they were faced with detention under the most inhumane conditions, and a
defunct asylum system. Just to lodge an asylum application was near impossible,
and an application would lead to a longer period of detention than without. So
most people opted against lodging an asylum application, and were released with
the notorious White Paper, which officially read as a deportation order, but
practically allowed a legal stay in Greece for 30 days, with the order to leave
Greece no matter in which direction. Certainly, this circumvention of implementing an asylum system as mandated by the EU was a strategy on the part of the
Greek government and not merely a blatant disregard for human rights, a neoorientalist view that was often voiced, in the media, by governments and NGOs
of northern Europe alike. The crucial point however is that this strategy was
short-sighted. Despite earlier failure or refusal to do so, the Greek authorities did
take fingerprints and enter them into the European Dactyloscopy (EuroDAC), the
European fingerprint database, with the sole purpose of identifying migrants and
asylum seekers within the EU and determining their first point of entry, i.e. the
country in charge of examining the respective asylum application under the
Dublin II regime. Since Dublin II enforces the physical presence of the asylum
seeker in the country in charge, there were a lot of intra-European deportations to
Greece.
The Noborder Camp was very successful at disrupting the functioning of the
border for some weeks, and it was crucial in the eventual closure of the infamous
Pagani detention centre, an old warehouse in the vicinity of Mytilini, the islands
capital, where several hundred migrants were detained in five rooms. With this
development, the Dublin II regime, i.e. the internal safe third country rule within
the EU, the system of mobilization, the internal borders of Europe, the
fingerprints in EuroDAC, and the social and political conditions of asylum
seekers in general within the EU, moved into our focus.
We were quite excited when, in January 2011, Greece dropped out of the
Dublin II system and most deportations to Greece under Dublin II were
suspended. This is where we saw a political opportunity to alter the very
conditions of asylum in Europe in favour of those on their way to, or already in,
Europe. Our premise was that if yet another EU member state were to drop out of
Dublin II, the system itself would crumble: theironicalthreat of perpetual
mobility would be removed from those migrants and refugees who had managed
to cross the border of Europe. The price to be gained may be even larger: the
whole Common European Asylum System (CEAS), the holy grail of Schengens
interior policy, is predicated on the premise that there are comparable asylum
standards throughout the EU. So if another country were to drop out of the Dublin
II system due to its failure to uphold the illusion of a harmonized asylum system
throughout the EU, the CEAS itself would be history before it even came into
existence properly.
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we turned to various member states of the EU, in order to establish and circulate
knowledge that could be used against Dublin II. While we were never again able
to obtain such footage, which could be circulated by itself, we produced reports
on Italy, Malta and Hungary8 that tried to capture in words and quotations what
we found.
Hungary
The starting point of the research that led to the publication of the report on
Hungary was in 2011. It came about through contact between about ten mainly
Somali minors residing in Germany at that moment, fearing their deportation back
to Hungary under Dublin II, and activists in Germany who had been monitoring
the border between Hungary and Ukraine since the Noborder Camp in Ukraine in
2007.9 The migrants reported horrible stories about being homeless in Hungary
and mistreatment in detention. In several meetings with them, joined also by their
lawyers, their legal guardians, and NGO and UNHCR representatives, we
discussed possible strategies to avoid their deportation to Hungary. We also
conducted a series of interviews with them, which can be seen as the base of our
further research in Hungary.
This starting point of our research reveals a lot about our perspective on
activism, and the anthropology of the political contemporary, and raises further
questions. Firstand this is of course nothing really newfieldwork in our times
doesnt necessarily mean that a geographical fixed field is visited by mobile
researchers. On the contrary, it was the subjects in the field, and with them the
field itself, which were moving, now sitting in the office of a lawyer in the
German town of Frankfurt, to be researched by local activists.10
Butand this is the second pointwould we, the researchers, have been
present at all if we hadnt expected horror stories about the lives of refugees in
Hungary? Initially, we were less motivated by a re-narration of the spectacle of
suffering, but rather by the opportunity to scandalize the Dublin II regime as a
whole. However, this raises the first question: can the documentation, the
scandalization of human suffering, be a legitimate tool in our quest for global
freedom of movement at all? Pointing out grievances while appealing to
compassion has been the standard repertoire of humanitarian causes since the
abolitionist movement in the eighteenth century. Franoise Vergs however
convincingly points out that this very appeal to humanitarian reason cannot be
considered pure, but rather establishes a different form of power reminiscent of
what Foucault describes as pastoral power, i.e. the power inherent to the caretaker.11 At the same time, Vergs argues, the identification with the suffering of
the victims induces a cleansing of guilt of the perpetrators. Similarly, the last years
have seen what William Walters calls the Birth of the Humanitarian Border,12 i.e.
a multiplication of humanitarian interventions at the borders, especially in Europe.
We cannot but avoid the question of whether these humanitarian interventions are
really as pure as professed, or rather the product of a European schizophrenia
which has brought about a harsh border regime and needs to compensate in a pose
of self-righteousness, just like Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the self-proclaimed judge
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in Camus novel The Fall, when he argues: The more I accuse myself, the more
right I have to judge you.13
In the meantime, and removed from these political implications, our report
based on our findings was used in court cases in Germany by lawyers arguing that
a deportation to Hungary would seriously violate applicants rights to appeal for
asylum under fair circumstances. About half of the courts stopped deportations to
Hungary in the past months. Apart from our report, the conditions in Hungary
were also criticized by various local and international NGOs. Even UNHCR
Central Europe advised nation-states not to deport asylum seekers to Hungary
until conditions had changed fundamentally. But, in December 2012, the UNHCR
revised this advice, after the government announced changes in the law.
According to a statement by a German migration authorities liaison officer
working in the Hungarian migration office, which we in turn found in a German
court file, these changes were the result of intensive discussions of the Hungarian
government with the UNHCR and the European Commission.
This turn of events was definitely a setback, which led us to the following
conclusion: in cases where human rights violations were obvious and well
documented, combined with pressure by the EU, Hungarian authorities were
compelled to act. However, these changes were in turn predicated on irregular
migrants rapidly transforming themselves into asylum seekers, to enter the realm
of the UNHCR and the current humanitarian asylum discourse in Europe. We
know that there is a danger in this argument, i.e. of it playing into the populist
discourse on so-called bogus asylum seekers. However, as we will discuss later in
our discussion of asylum, we are firmly convinced that, to the European art of
governing migration, it is actually advantageous when migrants cast themselves as
asylum seekers. To the migrants themselves, it is not necessarily so. After
obtaining a status in Hungary, successful asylum seekers are allowed to stay for
half a year in a so-called pre-integration camp in Hungary. After this period,
they are normally kicked out and end up homeless. Paradoxically, obtaining a
status did not end social exclusion.
What does this mean for an activist approach that focuses on scandalizing
human rights violations and breaches of international law such as the Geneva
Convention on Refugees? Is there a realistic chance to reach behind the asylum
discourse? Curiously, there was an isomorphism between the options of irregular
migrants and us activists. We both were challenged to enter the realm and the
discourse of asylum and human rights, and were subsequently confined by it. Just
as the irregular-migrants-turned-asylum-seekers were not able to reach beyond the
mere recognition as refugees, we wereat that timenot able to reach beyond
the discourse of humanitarianism and human rights. We are certainly not nave
concerning this issue. The language and practice of human rights and asylum as a
particular subset itself constitutes a particular apparatus that is far from innocent.
It is thus not due to an infatuation that we speak the language of human rights.
Rather, the use of that particular language was motivated and indeed necessitated
by the fact that in our daily practice we often do need a language that can be
understood in the mainstream juridical and political realm, and in which we can
phrase certain arguments. A political pragmatism can never be clean or pure, but
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materialization and legal formations, we cannot but conclude that there is a dire
need for coordinated, pragmatic and focused production of knowledge concerning
these networks of power and knowledge. The question we need to discuss then is
not a supposed purity and incorruptibility of activist research versus a seemingly
refined, structured and rigorous academic endeavour. Rather, we need to identify
the precise conditions of this production of knowledge and discuss them in a
politically sensitive manner.
The first condition, which seriously irks us, is the tension between producing
concrete items of knowledge that can effect change and empower struggles and
contributing to a critical theory. As we have described above, this has led us on
a slippery slope. Even if we have rather gradually slipped into the language
of human rights and asylum, the reference to law, regulations and norms of
international law, and the discovery of the globalized legal system as a field of
contestation apart, it still constitutes part of our practice, and we need to account
for it. It has delivered concrete resultsdeportations have been stopped due to the
reportsbut it has also played a part in reasserting a specific discourse of the
government of migration. The language of human rights and asylum is
undoubtedly compatible with official EU rhetoric. What is needed is to make
transparent what we aim for when we use this language, even when we do so
tactically.
This leads us to the second issue we want to urge for. We posit that there cannot
be militant research that is not collective and that is void of reflective spaces. This
is an argument for the necessity to be immersed in concrete struggles, which
formulate concrete questions to be investigated and hypotheses to be tested. Just
to be clear, we want to explicitly state that this argument cannot be reformulated
as a condition on research to be able to produce concrete knowledge and to be
useful. That is a neo-liberal argument that has already wreaked sufficient havoc in
the academic system. We argue that critical, and hence militant research cannot be
detached from the concrete conditions that are existing. Furthermore we stress the
importance of reflective spaces, be they activists plenaries or academic networks.
It is in these spaces that the research and the subsequent interpretation of the
results are to be interrogated, both in terms of theory and practice.
The last question we would like to put forward is the issue of funding. We feel
that there is a distinct lack of discussion about this topic. But if we are to take
ourselves seriously as producers of knowledge, that is as workers in the twentyfirst-century factories and start-ups of knowledge production, we need to raise the
issue of wage. This is on the one hand a practical argument, in that money is
necessary for meaningful research and its subsequent publication and dissemination. On the other hand, we hint at the current boom of knowledge-based
governance and the increasing commodification of knowledge. If we do not
discuss the political economy of militant research, we are closing our eyes to our
very conditions of existence as researchers and activists. Setting up an association
did not solve this problem, but we did have the distinct experience that the labour
movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had, namely that collective
bargaining is preferable to individual negotiations.
These are the questions that we believe need to be raised. We do not consider
them merely theoretical questions, since they stem from a concrete engagement
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with the current political condition we live in and we struggle against. However,
and this is where we see the strength of a nexus of academia and activism: we
believe that, collectively, we are better prepared to engage these issues coming
from a perspective that is informed by the struggles as well as immersed in a
theoretical discussion of the deeper questions surrounding these issues.
Notes
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We want to thank Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli for discussing preliminary drafts with us and providing
invaluable input.
http://ffm-online.org.
http://kritnet.org.
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http://w2eu.info.
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http://bordermonitoring-ukraine.eu.
James D Faubion and George E Marcus, Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropologys
Method in a Time of Transition, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Franoise Vergs, The Age of Love, Transformation 46, 2002, pp 120.
William Walters, Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border, in Ulrich
Brckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds), Governmentality: Current Issues and Future
Challenges, New York: Routledge, 2011, pp 138164.
Albert Camus, The Fall (1956), Justin OBrien (trans), New York: Random House Digital, 1995.
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