Ruins of Empire: Refugees, race and the postcolonial geographies of European migrant camps

Davies, Thom; Isakjee, Arshad

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.09.031

Cited by 64 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Most notably, this policy regime subdues asylum seekers. Their bodies are, to paraphrase Davies and Isakjee (2019) made docile through pain, as they endure the slow violence (Nixon, 2011) of the policy regime. And yet, this is not so much a spectacle of pain because the impoverishment of asylum seekers disperses them, and in the case of the interviewees in this research, it removes them from the public sphere – from public transport, from clothing shops, from restaurants, from anywhere but the cheapest supermarkets.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…From this perspective asylum seekers are included through exclusion (Agamben uses ‘the camp’ as the focus of his analysis) and are consequently reduced to ‘bare life’, nothing more than biological life (see Darling, 2009 for an overview). And yet, as Davies and Isakjee (2019) point out, such perspectives are often dehistoricised and particularly disconnected from colonial racialisation. They argue in their discussion of the Calais migrant camp that it is the fact of being ‘kept alive but in a state of injury’ (Mbembe, 2003: 21), the spatial exclusion and the being exposed to gradual wounding which characterises such contemporary camps, as opposed to outright extermination.…”

Section: The Postcolonial Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“….] an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Davies and Isakjee, 2019: 214). If necropolitics is, in its most visible form, governing through death, slow violence is both its mode of operation and its effect at the level of the everyday.…”

Section: The Postcolonial Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Necropolitics and the Slow Violence of the Everyday: Asylum Seeker Welfare in the Postcolonial Present

2019

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This article responds to dual calls for researching and theorising everyday social phenomena in postcolonial studies on the one hand, and serious engagement with the postcolonial within the discipline of sociology on the other. It focuses on the everyday lives of asylum seekers living on asylum seeker welfare support in the UK. Asylum seekers offer a good case study for exploring the postcolonial everyday because they live in poverty and consequently experience daily harms at the hands of the state, despite the UK fulfilling its obligations to them under human rights law. The article proposes a conceptual framework drawing together sociologies of the everyday, necropolitics and slow violence in tracing how hierarchical conceptions of human worth impact on the everyday.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Postcolonial Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Necropolitics and the Slow Violence of the Everyday: Asylum Seeker Welfare in the Postcolonial Present

2019

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“…68 As Thom Davies and Arshad Isakjee suggest, 'a postcolonial lens allows modern imperial forms of subjugation to become strikingly visible', and shows how 'the racial othering that sustains national borders correlates to the logics and legacies of empire'. 69 Lucy Mayblin draws on Sylvia Wynter and other scholars from the Global South in order to show how a gendered civilizational conception of 'man' informs human rights as an exclusionary category. 70 Indeed, there are important overlaps here with the critical work of Black feminist scholars, many of whom focus on the ways in which 'the human' is structured through a colonial register.…”

Section: The Production Of Precaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Migration and the politics of ‘the human’: confronting the privileged subjects of IR

Squire

2020

International Relations

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In what ways has migration as a field of scholarship contributed to the discipline of International Relations (IR)? How can migration as a lived experience shed light on international politics as a field of interconnections? And how might migration as a political and analytical force compel IR to confront its privileged subjects? This article addresses these questions by focusing specifically on precarious migration from the Global South to the Global North. It shows how critical scholars refuse the suggestion that such migrations pose a ‘global challenge’ or problem to be resolved, considering instead how contemporary practices of governing migration effectively produce precarity for many people on the move. It also shows how critical works point to longer standing racialised dynamics of colonial violence within which such governing practices are embedded, to emphasise both the limitations of liberal humanitarianism as well as the problematic politics of ‘the human’ that this involves. By building on the insights of anti-racist, indigenous and postcolonial scholarship, critical scholars of migration are well placed to draw attention to the privileging of some subjects over others in the study and practice of international politics. The article argues that engaging IR while rejecting the orthodoxies on which the discipline is built remains critical for such works in order to advance understanding of the silences and violences of contemporary international politics.

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“…As one manifestation of this trend, cities from Seattle to Louisville and Monterrey to Rotterdam have joined approximately 90 others to affirm an international Charter for Compassion and, as a part of that affirmation, developed plans to make their respective cities more compassionate. This interest in compassion emerges amidst ongoing restructuring of state involvement in welfare regimes, unfolding crises for migrants-that are also often imagined as crises for cities or nation-states-and longstanding patterns of injustice at the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality that structure individual cities and stretch beyond them to the uneven distributions of wealth, violence and precarity that characterize the contemporary world (Davies and Isakjee 2018;Derickson 2017a;Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Indeed, in the United States, which has been a central, but not exclusive, location of cities affirming the charter, the empowerment of white supremacist and xenophobic nationalist organizing, the increasing visibility of progressive liberal and left movements around immigrant justice, interfaith anti-Islamophobia and racial justice organizing, and emerging centrist concerns about populism and polarization together form an important context for the politics of urban commitments to compassion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘There is no political agenda’

Ruez¹,

Parekh

2019

City

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This paper examines the emerging trend for city governments to declare themselves compassionate. Opening up the 'compassionate city' as an object of critical scrutiny, we outline some of the key ways that compassion has been approached in critical scholarship before turning our attention to the politics of these urban commitments to compassion as they are enacted in practice. Focusing on the city of Louisville, where the 'compassionate city' imaginary has been taken on both by politicians and by economic, migrant and racial justice activists, we examine the potential of compassion as and in relation to other political grammars, and consider the polyvalent nature of the compassionate city as it has shaped public debate and political struggle in the city. We argue that this turn toward compassion should be evaluated and understood neither in terms of the good intentions of compassion proponents nor exclusively through analyses that reduce compassion to a single logic to be critiqued, but, instead, in terms of its contingent politics. In doing so, we respond to recent debates about the specificity of the political by emphasizing that the meaning of politics and the political grammars through which we understand urban problems are never the province of critical scholarship alone, and we highlight the value of approaches that can sensitize us to the ways that politics-and its meaning-can itself become a problem as the political nature of the compassionate city is called into question.

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Ruins of Empire: Refugees, race and the postcolonial geographies of European migrant camps

Cited by 64 publications

References 39 publications

Necropolitics and the Slow Violence of the Everyday: Asylum Seeker Welfare in the Postcolonial Present

Necropolitics and the Slow Violence of the Everyday: Asylum Seeker Welfare in the Postcolonial Present

Migration and the politics of ‘the human’: confronting the privileged subjects of IR

‘There is no political agenda’

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