Humanitarian exploits: Ordinary displacement and the political economy of the global refugee regime

Abstract

Can the displacement of refugees continue to be understood as exceptional? The recent global increase in refugees has prompted calls to develop new solutions to displacement that focus on integrating refugees into the local economies of nations that receive them. Transforming refugees from economic burdens to economic benefits does not, however, resolve displacement: doing so only shifts the project of refugee protection from a supposedly humanitarian imperative to an economic incentive. Examining how political economy intersects with moral economy in the global refugee regime by drawing on fieldwork conducted with refugees in Uganda and Australia, I describe how efforts to incorporate refugees into local economies not only fail to resolve their displacement but serve to exacerbate it, with such ‘humanitarian exploits’ transforming refugees from recipients of humanitarian aid to highly exploitable workers who are, in their words, unable to ‘make a life’. I consider that continuing to analyse refugees as objects of humanitarian intervention rather than actors in a globalised political economy is a way to reproduce the exceptionality of refugee experiences and conceal how their lives are implicated within and indicative of new formations of global capitalism. Not only is the displacement of refugees not exceptional: it is emblematic of an increasingly globalised experience of ordinary displacement through which citizenship and civic rights are stratified by reducing the value of human life to the potential to extract economic productivity.

The international governance of refugee work: reflections on the Jordan compact

“…The re-engagement of the ILO in matters of refugee labor is only the first step. As the Jordan and Ethiopia Compacts illustrate, the EU and individual donor governments are powerful actors in the field, pursuing refugee employment in host countries primarily as a deterrence strategy to dissuade refugees from seeking work in Europe (Fakhoury, 2019;Panizzon, 2017Panizzon, , 2018Ramsay, 2020). The ILO is not well positioned to oppose the terms on which the EU undertakes such efforts, critical as such opposition may be.…”

“…Decent work until recently has rarely been mentioned in relation to refugees in the Global South. In the past few years, scholars have begun to highlight the tensions between security, sovereignty, and protection motivations underlying the drive towards refugee employment (see, for example, Fakhoury, 2019;Panizzon, 2017;Ramsay, 2020), and to explore how refugee employment policies have played out at the host country level, with particular emphasis on the Jordan Compact (Gordon, 2019;Hartnett, 2018;Lenner and Turner, 2019;Morris, 2020;Razzaz, 2018). However, little has been written on the structures of governance required to establish and enforce meaningful labor protections for refugees as workers.…”

Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration

“…Rozakou's questions draw on insights from scholars who have increasingly begun to problematise the exceptionality often attached to migrants in migration studies and how this is entangled with discourses that normalise migration-related differences and certain, often exceptional, modes of governance (Anderson, 2013;Ramsay, 2019b). Migration researchers risk reinforcing a logic of otherness when characterising migrants as people who occupy a distinct temporality related to their migration status (Çağlar, 2016).…”

“…As Ramsay (2019a: p. 20) argues: 'We deny the coevalness of refugees by describing them as "stuck" in the present and ignoring the ways in which they share particular temporal rhythms with other people.' Ramsay (2019b) criticises in particular the tendency to analyse 'refugee' and 'migrant' as a distinct category of experience that is defined by lives lived in 'crisis,' which does not reflect the contemporary reality of how precarisation, stemming from the expansive effects of global capitalism, has made 'crisis' the norm in many contexts. Ramsay's critique thus draws attention to the difference between understanding irregularised migrants' waiting as exceptional, or as emblematic of a more pervasive experiences of precarity caused by contemporary configurations of neoliberal capitalism.…”

Time and the other in crisis: How anthropology makes its displaced object

“…Relatedly, there are some people with full citizenship status who may, conversely, feel that they are excluded from political significance. The sovereignty through which bare life is produced is not clearly cut across the boundaries of citizen/refugee (Ramsay, 2017(Ramsay, , 2019. If, as Didier Fassin (2012) suggests, the effects of political exclusion are constantly contingent and not easily mappable onto legal categorisations, it follows that an experience of displacement cannot be automatically loaded onto a specific politico-legal status, such as that of a refugee.…”