This book presents an alternative view, drawing on theoretical insights from Third World Approaches to International Law, post- and decolonial studies, and presenting new research on the context of the British Empire. The text highlights the fact that since the early 1990s, for the first time, the majority of asylum seekers originate from countries outside of Europe, countries which until 30-60 years ago were under colonial rule. Policies which address asylum seekers must, the book argues, be understood not only as part of a global hypermobile present, but within the context of colonial histories.
This book presents an alternative view, drawing on theoretical insights from Third World Approaches to International Law, post- and decolonial studies, and presenting new research on the context of the British Empire. The text highlights the fact that since the early 1990s, for the first time, the majority of asylum seekers originate from countries outside of Europe, countries which until 30-60 years ago were under colonial rule. Policies which address asylum seekers must, the book argues, be understood not only as part of a global hypermobile present, but within the context of colonial histories.
Asylum after Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking
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Asylum after Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking
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Overview
This book presents an alternative view, drawing on theoretical insights from Third World Approaches to International Law, post- and decolonial studies, and presenting new research on the context of the British Empire. The text highlights the fact that since the early 1990s, for the first time, the majority of asylum seekers originate from countries outside of Europe, countries which until 30-60 years ago were under colonial rule. Policies which address asylum seekers must, the book argues, be understood not only as part of a global hypermobile present, but within the context of colonial histories.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783486175 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/05/2017 |
| Series: | Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 210 |
| File size: | 339 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Lucy Mayblin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research focuses on the political sociology of asylum. Lucy is co-convenor of the British Sociological Association’s Study Group on Diaspora, Migration and Transnationalism, has been Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, and 2015-2018 holds a prestigious ESRC Future Research Leaders fellowship for research in to the economic rights of asylum seekers. This book, which won the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2018, is based on her doctoral research, which was funded by the ESRC.
Read an Excerpt
Asylum after Empire
Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking
By Lucy Mayblin
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2017 Lucy MayblinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-617-5
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In spring 2015 the UK-based Guardian newspaper featured a gallery of images taken by photographer Christian Sinibaldi which showed the conditions in the migrant camp in Calais – the so-called 'Jungle'. On a wall covered in political graffiti one contributor had written, 'Why always black man?' in both French and English. In the French text 'noir' is capitalised for emphasis – NOIR. Just four words, which presented an analysis of the camp as embedded in a global historical web of racial power relations. This is not an unusual occurrence; asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants often draw attention to the global colonial histories which give context to their present situation (Langa 2015; Robinson and Sergott 2002). The Sans Papiers movement in France, for example, which includes many forced migrants, explicitly draws attention to the colonial relations that connect not only their home countries with France but also their present situation with histories of French colonialism (see Cissé 1997: 2) – what Gurminder Bhambra calls 'connected histories' (2007). So if migrants make these connections so frequently, so automatically, why is it that these connections are not made frequently or automatically by academics?
The task of this book is to take the first steps towards theorising asylum policy within the context of such histories and to make sense of contemporary public policy developments on asylum within the context of histories of colonialism. The book is a historical sociology which brings together postcolonial and decolonial theories on the hierarchical ordering of human beings; it troubles the supposedly universal category of 'man' within the epistemological framework of 'modernity' and names the response of the British state (which acts as the case study) to contemporary asylum seekers as an example of the coloniality of power. It is an attempt to make sense of the dehumanisation of asylum seekers not as racism but as enmeshed within interconnected histories – of ideas of distinct, geographically located 'races', of human beings as hierarchy organised in relation to civilisation and of colonial power relations. In this sense, I am taking as my starting point the sophisticated analyses of forced migrants and sans-papiers and elaborating their conclusions with academic study.
Asylum in Britain
In the period since 1993 huge sums of public money have been spent on preventing people from seeking refuge from persecution in Britain. The country is typical of Western states in this sense. Policy measures have included preventing would-be asylum seekers from arriving and preventing those who do manage to arrive and therefore make a claim for asylum from working, travelling or living in a city of their choosing and detaining and deporting the many whose claims are unsuccessful back to unstable countries with poor human rights records (Zetter, Griffiths and Sigona 2005; Gibney 2006; Squire 2009). Since the early 2000s this policy approach has been taken and regularly intensified, despite numbers of applications generally decreasing (Schuster 2003a). In the year ending June 2015 the largest number of applications for asylum to the United Kingdom came from Eritrea (3,568), Pakistan (2,302), Syria (2,204) and Sudan (1,799) (Home Office 2015). These are all places known to be experiencing the kinds of situations where persecution is likely to occur, and yet at the same time as limiting the rights of asylum seekers, British politicians have often boasted that theirs is a country for which respect for equality and human rights and the provision of refuge is of the utmost importance. For example, in the government's 2005 white paper 'Controlling our borders: Making migration work for Britain', the authors wrote that the 1951 Convention 'is part of the legal and ethical framework that enshrines basic principles of human decency' – and must not be undermined – while in the next sentence proposing new legislation that would do just that (Home Office 2005: 17).
To put the proliferation of new legislation in context, between 1793 and 1870 there were three new pieces of asylum legislation, one of which extended the rights of asylum seekers and one whose provisions were never actually acted upon. Between 1871 and 1993 there was no new national legislation passed to deal with asylum seekers or refugees. These were not periods which did not see the arrival of large numbers of people fleeing persecution; Jews from Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century and those fleeing the aftermath of the Russian Revolution are two examples. In the twenty years since 1993, however, there have been nine rafts of new legislation covering asylum. The policy framework which has resulted is now widely termed 'the non-entrée regime' (Orchard 2014). So what has changed? Or, more precisely, how have social scientists conceptualised this change? For many scholars, the policies have changed because the asylum seekers have changed. This change is often said to be about numbers, methods of travel and reasons for flight. More specifically, there are more asylum seekers facilitated by the rise of mass international air travel, with many seeking an alternative route to legal economic migration as avenues for this have closed.
Political analyses of the current asylum regime in Britain often point to the unprecedented nature and context of contemporary asylum flows (Zolberg et al. 1989; Loescher 1993; Spencer 1995; Joly 1996; Appleyard 2001; Koser 2001; Gibney 2003; Hansen 2003; Spencer 2003; Bohmer and Shuman 2008) or to longstanding political formations, such as the nation state system (Boccardi 2002; Nyers 2003; Haddad 2008; Malkki 1995), as leading to this (inevitable) policy response. There is also a tendency to focus on recent deviations from the 1951 United Nations (UN) Convention obligations by wealthy nations as lying at the core of 'Western' asylum problems. Beneath many of these explanations presented for the current asylum regime, discussed further in chapter 2, is a set of unelaborated assumptions. The set includes the following: The assumption that readers understand that non-European asylum seekers arriving in Europe will be seen as undesirable, or even dangerous, to the integrity of communities and nation states. The assumption that this fact is so obvious that it does not require explanation. The assumption that responsibility for non-European asylum seekers, who are 'other', is obviously not generally seen to rest with host states. The assumption that, irrespective of the circumstances of their flight, some human bodies are simply more easily and acceptably degraded than others. A core aim of this book will be to unpack some of these assumptions and examine the connections between such assumptions, Britain's colonial past and current asylum policy.
Refugee studies, as an inter-disciplinary field of study which straddles the modern/traditional, developed/developing divide, is an obvious place to look for the application of broadly postcolonial analyses within the context of asylum. Bearing in mind that its object of study – the refugee – is the embodiment of the darker side of modernity and of the global fallout from colonialism, is a figure who migrates from the 'non-modern' to the 'modern' world and is treated all over the world as not quite human enough to deserve full access to human rights, one would have thought that refugee studies would have fully incorporated postcolonial analyses decades ago. This is not the case. The reason is in part because refugee studies is a field which has not tended to engage to any great extent with history (Marfleet 2007) or to any great extent with thorny social and political phenomena such as racism.
In contrast to mainstream refugee studies scholars, some in sociology and cultural studies have brought a critique of 'Western' asylum policy regimestogether with analyses of the wider social contexts in which the media and general public are broadly hostile to asylum seekers and refugees in order to diagnose this societal response as racism (Cole 2009; Garner 2013; Hubbard 2005; Fekete 2009). Anti-asylum sentiment, as well as the actions of the state, is therefore conceptualised as one of many contemporary racisms alongside Islamophobia and hostility to white Eastern European immigrants. I will argue in the next chapter that while hostility to asylum seekers is certainly historically entangled with the formation of ideas of 'race' and the proliferation of racism as both a sociocultural and a political-institutional phenomenon, that does not mean that it can straightforwardly be conceptualised as racism, or that such a conceptualisation helps us to make sense of it. What is missing from this analysis is an engagement with those inter-connected histories – colonial histories – which have allowed for the assignment of differential worth to various human bodies.
Those working in sociology and cultural studies have of course long held an interest in the impact of colonialism on patterns of not just migration and settlement but also identity, inter-cultural encounters, racism, race relations and community cohesion (Gilroy 2003, 2004, 2002; Rex 1970; Wemyss 2009). There is a well-established literature which speaks to the links between colonialism and immigration, particularly in the British context. Economic migrants travelling from the colonies and former colonies to Britain have been the subject of a great deal of study, which inevitably brings issues of racism, 'race' and 'race relations' to the fore. From case studies of specific areas (Patterson 1965; Rex and Moore 1967; Rex and Thomlinson 1979) to histories of immigration and integration policy in response to colonial immigrants (Joshi and Carter 1984; Dean 1987; Rich 1990; Spencer 1997; Bleich 2005; Hansen 2000; Hampshire 2005), the cultural articulations of the racialised immigrant experience (Gilroy 2002), inequality in employment (Jowell and Prescott-Clarke 1970; Brooks and Singh 1978; Berthoud 1999), education (Bhatnagar 1981; Gillborn 1990) and housing (Peach and Byron 1993; Peach 1998; Phillips 1998) to 'race riots' (Keith 1993; Amin 2003), this cornucopia of scholarship consistently makes explicit links between colonialism, racism and the economic immigrant experience in post-war Britain. Is it not strange, then, that this same postcolonial analysis has not been extended to the politics of asylum? That it is not integral to a political and sociological analysis of asylum policy today?
Post–Cold War forced migrants, and the policies designed to deal with them, have tended to be the focus instead of empirically engaged social and public policy research (e.g. Bloch and Schuster 2002; Gibney 2004; Hassan 2000; Joly 1996; Koser 2001; Morris 2002; Phillimore and Goodson 2006; Schuster 2003a; Silove et al. 1997; van Wetten et al. 2001; Vink and Meijerink 2003; Zetter, Griffiths and Sigona 2005). This is an important body of work but nevertheless again leaves broader transnational, historical political concerns under-explored. Indeed, the historical geopolitical linkages made so commonly by forced migrants are decisively not the starting point for mainstream political analysis of contemporary Western asylum regimes.
As a first step towards rethinking the way we approach the turn to restrictive policies, I would like to highlight one key change in the contemporary period, rarely systematically and critically addressed in academic literature, though of course decisively identified by migrant activists. It is this: since the early 1990s, for the first time in British history, the majority of asylum seekers making applications for refuge come from outside Europe. They are, in fact, by and large people who originate from countries which until thirty to sixty years ago were under British colonial rule. Rather than depicting contemporary asylum seekers as fundamentally different to those of the past, this book suggests an alternative perspective. Underpinning this perspective is the idea that histories of asylum should not be considered as exclusively European. This may not seem to be a radical statement, and indeed others have attempted such an intervention previously. For example, Chimni's work on the 'myth of difference' argues that academics contribute to a pervasive myth that European refugees in the past and 'Third World' refugees in the present are fundamentally different. He has argued that the idea that Third World asylum seekers are in some sense 'new' asylum seekers is incorrect, and yet this idea has proved powerful in justifying restrictive asylum polices in both the academic and policy-making communities. Though nearly two decades old and widely cited, the driving thrust of this paper, a call to rethink the imperialist foundations upon which refugee studies sits, appears to have remained largely unheeded. Indeed, the vast majority of academic accounts of refugee and asylum history are European histories.
Yet even periods of massive displacement in Europe, such as the middle of the twentieth century, were not periods in which only Europeans were displaced. Before the 1980s refugees and asylum seekers existed in a wide range of locations outside of Europe in numbers comparable to, or even in excess of, those seen within Europe in the wake of the Second World War. This is an issue I take up in chapters 2 and 5. Acknowledging the existence of such refugees means that non-European asylum seekers cannot be understood as appearing as a global 'problem' only since the 1980s. Furthermore, these histories of displacement need to be incorporated into European understandings of the history of asylum, not as external and consequently irrelevant occurrences.
The book takes as its starting point the exclusionary history of 'man' upon which the right to asylum is founded. It shows the durability of ideas of differential humanity through time, even when equality and universal rights have been central to international discourse. This is done through a diachronic analysis – four snapshots of very different periods in history but through which run threads of ideational continuity. These snapshots are as follows: the debates surrounding the abolition of slavery in 1833, when black bodies became human in law; the legacies of scientific racism in debates around the introduction of 'race equality' rules at the League of Nations in 1919; the discussions surrounding the establishment of the human rights framework, including the right to asylum, in 1951; and debates around levels of asylum support in 2012–15. The thread running through these snapshots is then pulled right through to the present with an analysis of the contestations over the levels of financial support to be provided to destitute asylum seekers in contemporary Britain.
Developing such an argument requires a postcolonial and decolonial analysis. Indeed, it requires us first to accept that Britain is a post-colonial country and that the legacies of colonialism live on beyond the facts of historical events. Britain is used as a case study here but coloniality, a concept which is elaborated further in chapter 3, can be found in many other contexts. In other words, the worldviews that are discussed in this study of Britain in domestic and world politics can certainly be observed in other post-colonial contexts, which would include at least the European former colonial powers and the white settler colonies.
Key Terms
The Right to Asylum
Before moving on it is important to clarify some key terms. First, the refugee and the asylum seeker. The category 'refugee' has been subject to considerable scrutiny. There are many who reject the use of the purely legal definitions 'asylum seeker' and 'refugee' since these are bureaucratic, arbitrary, exclusionary and imply classifications of deservingness (Zetter 1991; Sigona 2003). However, because my interest here is in policy and the chapters that follow interrogate the exclusionary nature of legal definitions deployed in policy contexts, it is appropriate that the legal categories are used in this case. Asylum seekers and refugees are, then, legally distinct categories of person in both international and national law. An asylum seeker is someone who has made an application for asylum. Their application is in the process of being assessed, a process which can take up to ten years in the United Kingdom. The application is a legal document with which evidence must be submitted as proof of persecution. The purpose of the application is, therefore, to prove to the host state that an individual has been persecuted.
The definition of a refugee in international law is as follows:
A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. (UNHCR, 1951)
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