“Encountering Difference, Embodying Boundaries, and Unsettling Borders: Middle Eastern Refugees and Migrants in the European Union” Conference, October-November 2020
This post was written by conference organizers Betül Aykaç, Banu Gökarıksel, Lily Herbert, Suad Jabr, Devran Öcal, and Nathan Swanson.
Introduction
Following the onset of the Syrian war and ongoing violence, wars, and political instability in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of forcibly displaced people have made the European Union (E.U.) their destination. In 2015–2016, what is often labelled a “refugee crisis” or the “European migrant crisis” took center stage in E.U. public debates. Half a decade later, asylum seeker numbers in the E.U. have dwindled. Many asylum seekers are not allowed to go beyond camps in Greece or are kept in Turkey, on the other side of the E.U. border. The E.U. Commission declared the end of the refugee crisis in March 2019. However, concerns over a refugee crisis remain important to the E.U. and E.U. policy, discourse, and practice continue to depict refugees as a problem. With the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of August 2021, there are heightened concerns over asylum seekers. Rejecting such depictions of forcibly displaced people as the cause of a E.U. crisis, we instead locate the problem within territory- and border-making practices and the global asylum regime that operationalize colonial logics to create racialized and gendered hierarchies, dehumanize migrants, and identify asylum seekers as enemies, undesirables, and the undeserving.
In this blog, we reflect on an international and interdisciplinary conference we organized (remotely) in October and November, 2020 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill). This conference, “Encountering Difference, Embodying Boundaries, and Unsettling Borders: Middle Eastern Refugees and Migrants in the European Union” (“Unsettling Borders” hereafter), broadly explored how refugee experiences on the borders of the E.U. unsettle established understandings of identity, statehood, and territory and provide insights into the production of difference, boundaries, and borders.
The conference was framed by the political context in which prolonged wars, political destabilization, the climate crisis, and economic downturn in the Middle East have caused unprecedented levels of displacement of people internally and to neighboring countries. Syrians, Iraqis, Palestinians, Iranians, and Afghanis have been forcibly displaced in especially large numbers. Many of the displaced have been seeking asylum in E.U. member states. Popular media and political leaders alike have discussed the increasing number of asylum seekers in and on the borders of the E.U. in terms of a crisis. However, this language of crisis animates racist, anti-refugee, xenophobic, and Islamophobic policies and discourses that target Middle East-origin asylum-seekers and refugees and constructs a “Europe” under threat of (and in need of protection from) an “invasion” of Europe’s political, cultural, and racial Others. Rising right-wing political movements have capitalized on and fueled these deeply rooted sentiments across Europe. The E.U. has adopted policies that seek to limit the number of asylum seekers by increasing surveillance and policing of its borders, leading to “fortress Europe” and turning the Mediterranean Sea into a deathscape. At the same time, E.U. countries have continued to build bureaucracies for “weeding out” those “deserving” refugees from those who are judged unworthy of this status, and governments have started to implement increasingly stringent requirements to qualify for settlement and integration programs. In a 2016 agreement between the E.U. and Turkey (renewed in March 2021), Turkey has agreed to keep Syrians in the country and to prevent them from going into the E.U., thereby extending to West Asia the sorts of processes that have externalized the E.U. border into North Africa. Taken together, these practices are actively remaking boundaries and redefining the borders of Europe.
The “Unsettling Borders” conference explored questions about how refugees position themselves (or find themselves positioned) within systems of power operating at multiple scales and across a variety of spaces. We centered the embodied Middle Eastern refugee experiences to understand and theorize subjects, political spaces, and technologies of governance along and within the borders of the E.U. Our approach has been informed by feminist political geography and feminist geopolitics that foreground how boundaries, borders, and territories are made through differentiated bodies and embodied practices. We also engage critical migration and refugee studies and critical race theory combined with feminist theory to think through the production of racialized, gendered, and sexual difference and the coloniality of global migration regimes.
The conference consisted of three panels on the topics of queerness, racialization, and state technologies where panelists presented their research; one panel organized around a refugee-shot documentary film, Midnight Traveler, and included a conversation between scholars and the film’s producer, writer, and editor; and a roundtable that brought together scholars, activists, students, and those who work at refugee serving non-profit organizations.
Queer Refugees/Queering Refugee Studies
The first panel of the conference placed queer refugee experiences and queer refugee studies at the forefront of larger discussions of political asylum, global or transnational perceptions of queerness, and overlapping systems of governance. Rather than treating queer refugees as exceptional or marginal to refugee studies, we sought to understand how queerness is central to the formation of refugee subjects, border regimes, and state technologies. Our panelists included: Fadi Saleh (Ph.D. Candidate, Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen, Germany), Suad Jabr (Ph.D. Student, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill), Elif Sarı (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University), Dr. Sima Shakhsari (Associate Professor, Department of Gender, Women & Sexualities Studies at the University of Minnesota), and Dr. Begüm Başdaş (Senior Einstein Fellow, Humboldt University). Several panelists spoke to concerns over how to conduct queer refugee research, asking: how do we advocate for queer refugees without making them targets? Panelists drew attention to how queer Middle Eastern refugees seeking asylum in Europe, the US, and Canada often must sidestep or omit discussions of geopolitical conditions of war, western invention, political destabilization, and economic sanctions in the Middle East. Rather they must emphasize homophobia and transphobia as root causes and locate those experiences as contained to their countries of origin in the “anti-queer” Middle East, with no mention of the violences that happen in other spaces along their refugee journeys. Several panelists touched on themes of self narration, and discussed how media analysis can show us ways that queer Middle Eastern refugees often must claim kinds of “true selfhood” that confirms to Orientalist stereotypes or position themselves as “survivors of torture.”
Panelists highlighted how, national prioritizations of certain refugees being admitted over others (such as “golden case” queer Iranian refugees or de facto prioritization of Syrian refugees) often pits queer Middle Eastern refugees against each other in a competitive hierachy of queer asylum. The panel concluded with analyses of how temporary transit for refugees has turned into indefinite waiting, and how queer life is still happening in those spaces of waiting. Although relations of trust and safety can be fragile in refugee spaces (such as in camps where queer refugees can also face homophobic or transphobic violence), queer Middle Eastern refugees still navigate these spaces, along with many others, as they work to form networks of care and solidarity.
Midnight Traveler: Uncertain Journeys to and through E.U.
The conference’s second event was a panel on the film Midnight Traveler, a 2019 documentary filmed on cell phone cameras by a family of filmmakers, whose quest for political asylum takes them from Afghanistan to Europe. This documentary is a first-hand account of displacement and border crossing, and provides insights into the cruelties of border regimes and systems of refugee governance across Eurasia, but especially in the E.U. Panelists included Emelie Mahdavian, producer, writer, and editor of Midnight Traveler; Dr. Nadia Yaqub, a film scholar and Professor of Asian Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill; Christian Wilhelm, Program Manager of International Masters Programs in the Department of Social Sciences at Humboldt University in Berlin; and Lily Herbert, a Ph.D. student in the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Geography.
We chose this film because it was actually created by people seeking asylum in the E.U. — not by U.S. or Europe-based journalists or academics, who have the ability to easily navigate E.U. border regimes while they’re filming and interviewing people who do not have that privilege. The film was pieced together from cell phone footage shot by all four members of an Afghan family from Kabul — two parents, Fatima and Hassan, who are both acclaimed filmmakers, and their two daughters, Nargis and Zahra. Although watching footage is not a substitute for being in a situation, the film gives a more equitable representation of their journey — as our panelists pointed out, the family’s daily lives and joyful moments are given as much, if not more, screen time than the moments in which they experience fear and suffering, and the film conveys their humanity past just showing them as victims or one-dimensional actors, as coverage of people in vulnerable situations often does. But it also shows this visceral experience with border crossing that is really impactful, in part because it is being presented by the people living it.
Attendees were given a link to view the film prior to the event. For the actual panel on Zoom, we had panelists choose about 3 to 5 minutes of footage from the film that they wanted to show and talk about. One of the discussion’s highlights was the context given by Emelie Mahdavian, the film’s producer, writer, and editor. She was the one receiving cell phone footage from Fatima and Hassan’s family, and she pieced it together while listening to their wishes, as well as considering issues with representation of people from Afghanistan in the US and Europe. She was the only member of the film production team who spoke both Persian and English, and so played a large part in advocating for what Fatima and Hassan wanted in the final film. So we heard from her about how the production tried to unsettle stereotypes about people from Muslim-majority areas, but also tried to upend a range of power dynamics, from monolithic ideas about refugees, to what Mahdavian pointed out as the gendered, and often patriarchal, gaze of the camera and of filmmakers — for example, it is vital not to frame the film as just a work by a filmmaker and his family but to acknowledge Fatima as a filmmaker of her own right, the contributions of the two girls in shooting the film, and several women behind the scenes also played key roles in its production. The film is a beautiful work of art, as well as a story that provokes discussion about what representation is, and why it matters, especially in the context of minorities and refugees and asylum seekers in the E.U.
Racialization of Refugees
The third panel of “Unsettling Borders” focused on the racialization of refugees in the European Union, with presentations spanning time, space, and scale. Betül Aykaç (Ph.D. Student, Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill) discussed rising anti-Arab racism in Turkey, situating it within long-running national and territorial projects of the Turkish state. Dr. Priscilla Layne (Associate Professor of German, UNC-Chapel Hill) followed with an analysis of the relationship between race and national identity in Germany, where the existence of “race” and “racism” have been denied by white Germans since the end of World War II, yet where immigrants and other racialized Germans continue to see racial barriers to inclusion. Dr. Dalia Abdelhady (Associate Professor of Sociology, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University) then discussed research on media framings of the “refugee crisis” in Swedish newspapers, which with regard to refugees, she found largely employed a human interest frame — until Islam was introduced to search terms and framings shifted dramatically toward conflict and security threats. Finally, Dr. Nathan Swanson (Postdoctoral Fellow, Honors College, Purdue University) presented an analysis of a short film by a Syrian refugee in Sweden that inverts the concept of the “no-go zone,” arguing that the filmmaker’s focus on exclusion in everyday life challenges both the widespread denial of racism in Sweden but also transnational Islamophobic discourses about refugees.
Together, these presentations demonstrated the long lives of racist discourses, particularly Orientalist and Islamophobic discourses, that have circulated for centuries in Europe but have been reproduced and reconfigured for changing contexts. In doing so, they revealed that the entanglement of racism and Islamophobia we have seen in European societies in the past — particularly in the context of colonial rule and then post-colonial migrations — continues into the present as refugees seek asylum in the E.U. We recognize through these talks, too, that some of these discourses have been imported into non-European contexts, have circulated between Europe and other places, or have been reconfigured entirely within localized trajectories of nation-building, whether we look historically at the founding of the Turkish Republic or to the recent “Muslim ban” imposed by the United States. Finally, through the feminist methodologies and perspectives employed by the presenters, we saw the racialization of refugees as it takes place in spaces and experiences of everyday life, while also seeing how refugee bodies themselves are marked as threats to territorial projects of the state and as boundaries of the nation.
Refugees and the “Crisis” of States
The fourth panel focused on different state technologies of governance in relation to asylum seekers. There were four presentations in this panel. The first presentation by Dr. Karen Culcasi (Associate Professor, Department of Geography, West Virginia University) analyzed Jordan state response to the recent Syrian refugee crisis. Dr. Martina Tazzioli (Lecturer, Politics and Technology,, Goldsmiths, University of London) focused on the Italian state’s refugee policy within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using the concept of hygienic borders, Tazzioli discussed how the Italian state used Covid-19 conditions as an excuse to further confine refugees. Dr. Kirsi Kallio (Environmental Pedagogy, Tampere University) and Dr. Jouni Hakli (Professor, Regional Studies, Tampere University) discussed the asylum system in Europe by focusing on embodied encounters between asylum seekers and government officers. Finally, the panel concluded with Dr. Banu Gökariksel, Betül Aykaç, and Dr. Devran Koray Öcal’s (Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill) joint presentation on the Turkish state’s strategies of governing refugees through deliberate inaction.
The panelists presented research on different countries, such as Turkey, Italy, and Jordan. Still, all the presentations underlined how recent forced displacement of people have unsettled established border regimes and territorial governance structures across the Middle East and Europe. States have developed unique governmental technologies in response. One of the most significant points of these talks was that a “humanitarian discourse” went side by side with border security techniques. For instance, Culcasi’s talk analyzed how humanitarianism and territorial security discourse coexist in Jordan. Syrian refugee camps in Jordan are humanitarian centers with primary health care and education facilities and job training centers. Yet, they also function as a detention center that refugees can leave only if sponsored by a Jordanian citizen. Similarly, Tazzioli’s talk also revealed how the Italian state uses the humanitarian discourse of protecting refugees from virus infection to confine refugees in certain areas. This hygienic-sanitary border regime keeps refugees inside Italy but simultaneously contains them in locations outside of Italian society and obscures asylum application procedures.
There is also a similarity between these arguments and the presentation by Gökarıksel, Aykaç, and Öcal, about state invisibility and inaction. Their focus on the invisibility of the state similarly highlighted another way of disciplining refugees by not paying attention to their problems and pains. They argued that Turkey’s various state mechanisms, from local government systems to judiciary and law enforcement, trivialize or ignore discrimination, exclusion, and exploitation of refugees. Kallio and Hakli’s presentation focused on the embodied encounters between state officers and asylum seekers. Exploring the concepts of objectification, and subjectification in such encounters, their analysis revealed how governmentality puts a barrier between officers and these asylum seekers that prevent personal relationships and intimacy. This contributes to the asylum system’s impersonal and bureaucratic coldness that limits refugee agency and humanity.
Learning, Teaching, and Community-Building with Refugees
The roundtable “Learning, Teaching and Community Building with Refugees” aimed to bring scholars, activists and NGO volunteers together, share practical interventions that seek to address refugees’ problems and discuss how to engage ethically with refugees. There were five panelists in the roundtable. The first panelist, Christian Wilhelm (Humboldt University), shared his and his colleagues’ efforts to make it easier for refugees to access higher education in Germany. Their efforts made possible a new MA track for refugees within the university, for which refugees do not have to prove German language skills and have flexibility in providing documentation like certificates and diplomas. The second panelist, Dr. Diya Abdo, who is the Director of UNC-Greensboro’s Center for New North Carolinians, talked about her initiative, Every Campus a Refuge in Guilford College, which aims to support refugees through housing and integration on the college campus. The third panelist, David Sandy Marshall, an Assistant Professor of Geography at Elon University, started his talk by emphasizing the challenges of working with refugees in a way that does not reinforce stereotypes and uneven power dynamics, and shared his attempts to make his students engage with local refugee communities. Throughout the semester, he worked with an organization that was built upon refugees’ agricultural knowledge. Sandy Marshall brought his students to work with refugees on the farms and learn about the history of those foods and traditions from their home countries.
The fourth panelist was Meagan Clawar, the program manager of Refugee Community Partnership in Carrboro. Clawar highlighted that refugee communities are resettled in apartment complexes, with poor public transportation and a language barrier that perpetuates their isolation. To provide a solution to these problems, Clawar emphasized that Refugee Community Partnership aims to build a unique and holistic community infrastructure for those making North Carolina their home. The last panelist was Lizzie Russler, an undergraduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill. Russler’s interest in migration flourished when she was an exchange student in Switzerland. While she was there, she saw how climate change was creating vulnerability, and moreover, the people who were the least contributing to the problem were the ones who were the most impacted. This fact led her to engage more with refugee communities. In her talk, Russler shared her experiences in the UNC Center for European Studies’ Working Group on Refugees, Europe, and Service Learning, and provided us insights on how this working group brings different integration approaches into the conversation, seeks out to learn about the experiences of refugees, and also build community partnerships and provide refugee assistance programs.
Conclusion
On September 18, 2021, a new camp for asylum seekers funded by the Greek and E.U. governments opened on the Greek Island of Samos. Located in a remote area of the island, millions were spent in building this camp and its military-grade barbed wire and state-of-the-art surveillance technologies. This is only the latest of the series of new asylum centers opened in Greece that are like prisons. Doctors Without Borders and other organizations that work with refugees have criticized these “prison camps” and their dehumanizing and marginalizing effects. The “Unsettling Borders” conference sessions provided crucial insights into bordering practices of the E.U. and the many challenges asylum seekers face as they encounter the violence of the global asylum system, border regimes, and nation-states. The discussions throughout the conference underlined the importance of standing against the racialization and dehumanization of refugees and migrants. Refugee lives and subjectivities exceed their designation as a refugee or migrant and cannot be reduced to this status. This means pushing beyond understanding refugees only through the lens of displacement, violence, trauma, loss of home, and waiting in uncertainty. These are certainly crucial parts of the refugee experience and need to be problematized and urgently addressed. But the conference warned against the language of “refugee crisis” and misidentifying asylum seekers as the problem. Instead, the conference invited accounting for the colonial and racist logics that continue to dominate the way refugee issues are framed and that drive refugee policy.
In addition to providing critiques of the modern nation-state system and the global asylum regime, the conference also drew attention to refugee stories that enabled approaching asylum seekers and migrants as fully human. These stories challenge the reduction of refugees to their suffering and bring to the fore refugee experiences of love, joy, and intimacy, of forming spaces of belonging, making new homes, navigating complex, multiscalar systems of refugee governance, and continuing to live even in the most hostile environments like the prison camps of the E.U. Asylum seekers encounter state officials, NGO workers, neighbors, and other refugees and immigrants, and they build valuable knowledge. Their subject positions are shaped by the interactions between these experiences and their gendered, ethnic, sexual, racial, classed, age-based, religious, and political differences. Interactions with refugees also transform those who come into contact with them, just as they transform the spaces that they travel through and that they inhabit. The “Unsettling Borders” conference, we hope, will encourage work that attends to these politically and ethically important issues regarding refugees, migration, and borders.
The recording of the Learning, Teaching, and Community-Building with Refugees roundtable can be accessed on the @UNCEurope YouTube channel.
The Unsettling Borders conference was co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, and was co-sponsored by the UNC Center for Middle East & Islamic Studies, the Duke Middle East Studies Center, the UNC College of Arts & Sciences, and the UNC Global Research Institute.
The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
