Since the beginning of 2015, an unprecedented number of people from Middle Eastern and African countries—many of them fleeing war, persecution, and unrelenting poverty—have been crossing borders into and within Europe, traversing the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the English Channel. This “refugee crisis”—and we use scare quotes deliberately—has turned immigration, asylum, border control, and state sovereignty into interconnected problems, making migration not only a political event but also a media spectacle. In so doing, it has brought certain issues to the fore, from refugee quotas and the moral imperatives that ostensibly ground European humanism to the impossibility of European unity (witness the Brexit referendum), even as it has simultaneously rendered others invisible, including older patterns of migration, border control, and state violence.

This Hot Spots series therefore takes as its starting point an interrogation of the spectacle of crisis, of crisis as spectacle. How, we ask, ought we interpret the media focus on Syrian refugees, and how might this focus reinscribe a (racialized) distinction between “deserving” or “real” refugees and so-called economic migrants? How do we locate the migration crisis within an ongoing alternation on the part of the European Union and its member states between humanitarianism and border control, between a Liberal Europe committed to moral humanism and a Fortress Europe committed to expelling undesirables? How do the strategies of, on the one hand, custody and control (of foreign bodies and borders) and, on the other, rescue and care (of victims of human trafficking, asylum seekers, and refugees) reflect and refract the nature of power and sovereignty in Europe today?

The images of dead bodies at sea, of drenched refugees on overloaded, rickety boats, and of families climbing frantically through border fences made of barbed wire have become iconic in our collective imagination. No image is as iconic as the figure of Aylan Kurdi, whose tiny body washed ashore on a Turkish beach in September 2015. He and his family, fleeing the civil war in Syria, had boarded a boat bound for Greece that capsized soon after departing Turkey. The figure of Aylan became the emblem of innocence and injustice, mobilizing an international public outcry about the destruction wrought by the Syrian civil war, the cruel forms of trafficking it has produced, and the ineffective European response to that humanitarian crisis. The affective reactions generated by the image of Aylan seemed to have an effect on the decisions of European nation-states: German Chancellor Angela Merkel opted for open borders, and the Refugees Welcome movement gathered momentum across the continent.

Yet the very iconicity of that image of Aylan—its easy visibility and legibility to an international audience—also made invisible and illegible other figures, other moments, other histories. The intense focus on the image of Aylan brought with it a narrative of unprecedented tragedy that is the death of an innocent child, foreclosing potentially troubling reflections on longue durée geopolitics and the complexity of the present moment. In fact, we keep referring to “the image” and “the figure” of Aylan for a reason. It turns out that the boy’s name was likely Alan Shenu—his family took or were given the name Kurdi once in Turkey because of their ethnic background—but few readers would have recognized that name. We knew and we mourned Aylan Kurdi.

The essays in this series are an attempt to bring to the fore some of these buried histories, illegible moments, and invisible figures, to interrogate the discourse of crisis and to problematize the very framing of refugee migration as a hot spot. As Didier Fassin notes, hot spots are also the name for refugee processing centers that the European Union has put in place to triage applicants (with the goal of mass rejection), part of a long-term project of border control that increasingly extends the European frontier to its most marginal perimeters. Other essays similarly refute the notion that the 2015 migration phenomenon is extraordinary or unprecedented. Heath Cabot writes of the asylum seekers and caseworkers who constituted the grinding machinery of migration and deportation well before the present crisis and who will do so well after. Cristiana Giordano likewise draws our attention to the everyday, ordinary rhythms of migration and violence that are occluded by the spotlight on the so-called refugee crisis. Francesco Vacchianno details the thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean, rendered uneventful by their sheer quantity, and points out the neoliberal structural adjustments in Europe that created the conditions of possibility for a narrative of scarcity and crisis. While none of the essays here address the Brexit referendum since they were commissioned months ago, the success of the Leave campaign, built on xenophobia in a context where many Britons feel socioeconomically vulnerable, underscores the need to problematize discourses of scarcity and to undermine the concomitant presentation of crisis as spectacle.

Given its place in the spectacle of crisis, the iconicity of Aylan Kurdi serves as the springboard for a number of essays: Miriam Ticktin interrogates the politics of innocence and the racial hierarchy on which that politics draws, while Andrea Muehlebach juxtaposes “little Aylan” to his more menacing double, the figure of the sexually aggressive North African man whom many Europeans assume he would have become had he survived (a connection crassly depicted byCharlie Hebdo after the 2015 New Year’s Eve mass sexual assaults in Cologne). Damani Partridge, also writing about Germany, examines the role of pity and wonders what a politics of solidarity, rather than pity, might look like. The remaining three essays locate the ostensibly European crisis within a broader geopolitical frame. Mehmet Fatih Tatari documents how the Syrian war has eclipsed Turkey’s military operations in and destruction of Kurdish areas, and how both wars enable the Turkish state to reinforce its sovereignty. Suvendrini Perera connects Fortress Europe to Fortress Australia, detailing the ways in which Australia, like Europe, increasingly outsources its detention regime, turning its border into a “set of makeshift and protean geographies.” Finally, Jeffrey Kahn historicizes this spatial-qua-juridical outsourcing, showing how the modular nature of border control—including its law-evading tendencies and its constant extending of geo-juridical boundaries—has its roots in the United States’s interdiction of Haitian refugees in the early 1980s.

Our contributors map the histories, geopolitics, ethical imaginaries, forms of sovereignty, and patterns of circulation that state categories of crisis and emergency render visible and/or invisible, in Europe and elsewhere. Each essay is, moreover, accompanied by an image from End of Dreams, an installation and photo project by Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen that memorializes the massive loss of human life in the Mediterranean. As Rhiannon Welch explains in her essay on the installation, Larsen dropped forty-eight figures, wrapped in concrete canvas meant to resemble body bags or funerary sheets, into the sea near the southern Italian port city of Pizzo Calabro. In a stark reenactment of the vulnerability of the migrants themselves, a number of the sculptures came unmoored from their anchors and were cast out to sea during a violent storm, just like the human beings they were meant to memorialize.

The title of this section of the Cultural Anthropology website also happens to be the name given by the European Union to its imagined solution to the so-called refugee crisis. Hot spots are reception centers situated at main points of entry to the territory of the European Union, particularly in Italy, for people coming from the African continent, and in Greece, for those arriving from the Middle East and Central Asia. Placed under the authority of the governments concerned, the hot spots benefit from the financial and administrative support of the European Union via the agencies that coordinate the functions of control, policing, and legal assistance across countries. Their role consists in classifying those entering the European territory as either “true refugees” or “economic migrants,” acting on the assumption that such a distinction is relevant and possible. The former are to be “relocated” according to a plan for the equitable distribution of asylum seekers among European nations. The latter have their return to their country “facilitated.” In other words, this process will lead to resettlement for some and deportation for the others.

Photo by Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen.

The new policy is said to be fair for countries as well as for refugees. Thus, under the plan, each European country should receive its just share of the demographic burden depending on the size of its population and the value of its gross domestic product, while all refugees should receive conventional protection under the procedure of relocation. However, this official presentation is flawed on both counts. Indeed, not only did several countries, including Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, immediately reject the quotas, but the objective of distributing a total of 120,000 refugees across the European Union corresponds to less than one-fifth of the estimated number of people who entered Europe in 2015. To fix a quantitative goal to the hot spots implies, against the very principle of the 1951 Geneva Convention, establishing in advance a rate of recognition independent of the asylum seekers’ actual situation. Moreover, considering the estimated number of people arriving on the Italian and Greek coasts on a daily basis, this rate is implicitly determined at a level that is substantially below the current one for the European Union at large. The hot spots are to do the European Union’s dirty work: a summary human triage with the aim of massive rejection. Instead of benefiting from a thorough examination of their situation, as would be the case before national institutions in charge of asylum, applicants will have their fate decided by a fast-track process, making the provision of evidence for their claims difficult and ultimately diminishing their chances of being admitted while denying the possibility of appeal.

Hot spots are, in fact, the last of a long series of strategies invented by the European Union to deal with the refugee question. Contrary to what is generally thought, and in spite of the efforts of human rights activists and humanist policy makers, generosity has never been the main reason for granting asylum. In the first two decades after the ratification of the Geneva Convention, the motivation was mostly economic, due to the need for a workforce to rebuild European countries after the Second World War, and ideological, in relation to the Cold War. With the interruption of labor migration and, later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, these two reasons ceased to be. As nonnational workers became undesirable and Communist regimes collapsed, asylum seekers were considered with suspicion and even hostility, all the more since they were now coming from the global South. Various methods were conceived to hinder the path of the refugees, from policing and screening at the borders, complemented by the creation of waiting zones and detention centers, to the imposition of increasing administrative constraints on potential claimants, which progressively reduced the probability of a favorable outcome for asylum applications. In France, for example, the rate of recognition by the national Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons dropped from more than nine out of ten to less than one out of ten between the mid-1970s and the mid-2000s.

Yet the obstacles to applying for asylum—or, after applying, to being granted refugee status—were not entirely satisfactory from the perspective of the European states, since abuses could be contested and decisions could be appealed. In the past decade, new policies have consequently been developed to stop refugees even before they enter European territory. The control of potential candidates for immigration has been outsourced to neighboring countries: to Morocco, whose police are known to deport would-be asylum seekers into the Sahara; Libya, whose dreaded prisons and camps are a common passage point for those hoping to cross the Mediterranean Sea; and, most recently, Turkey, which was offered €3 billion by the European Union to prevent the passage toward the Greek islands and provide shelter to refugees on its own territory at the very moment when its government has taken an authoritarian turn. It is remarkable that the corresponding regimes, which have long been criticized by Europeans for their infringements of human rights and the rule of law, would now be seen as guaranteeing sufficient protection for refugees.

But as this outsourcing of policing was still considered to be partially ineffective, hot spots were created to offer an alternative solution by screening those ultimately able to enter European territory in spite of the obstacles and arrangements with neighboring countries. They achieved a new frontierization of the border control regime, satisfying most governments and reassuring public opinion. Hot spots were sufficiently remote to operate at a distance from the gaze of human rights organizations, yet they remained within the perimeter of the Union so as to avoid gross violations of international law. Morals were satisfied. As in J. M. Coetzee’s novel, these hot spots became the front lines where Europeans could safely be “waiting for the barbarians.”

What’s Wrong with Innocence by Miriam Ticktin

The now iconic image of little Aylan, the three-year old Syrian boy whose body washed up onto a Turkish beach in September 2015, grabbed the world’s attention, eliciting sympathy rather than the usual mix of fear and indifference for those who have left their homes to land on European shores. The photo gave the so-called refugee crisis a new face: innocence. While many say that the photo is what finally shamed Europe into action, images of innocence—and the moral imperative they engender—actually have a long history of hurting those they intend to help.

Why did Aylan catch the world’s attention? As Charles Homan argued in the New York Times Magazine, Aylan’s appearance, including his shoes, shorts, and red shirt, made him look like a Euro-American middle-class child. He looked like “one of us.”

Appearances matter in whether we feel sympathy or not: smugglers know this and have instituted a racial hierarchy on the boats that carry migrants to the borders of Europe. Lighter-skinned migrants are given priority on the safer upper levels, in the hope that whiteness will translate into rescue, rather than death or deportation. While African children have long functioned as exemplary victims, Americans generally help them “over there”—during famines or wars—not “over here.” Donations and humanitarians do the work at a safe distance.

Black children in the United States, particularly black boys, rarely qualify as innocent. A black child cannot innocently pick up a toy gun, as was shown by Tamir Rice: the twelve-year old boy shot and killed by the police in Cleveland, Ohio. For such children, there is no space for innocent unknowing.

The point, of course, is that only some people and some plights get noticed when innocence is what draws our attention to them. Furthermore, while innocence can compel responses to important events such as the refugee crisis, it can also create a distinction between worthy and unworthy victims in these same events.

For instance, since April 2015, innocence has been used to create a distinction in European public discourse between refugees and illegal economic migrants. Although asylum is a legal category we should protect, here it is primarily a moral, not a legal, distinction that purports to separate the deserving from the undeserving. “Real” refugees are seen as innocent, fleeing real, well-founded fears of persecution. They are understood to be passive, vulnerable, and in need of saving.

Economic migrants, in contrast, are portrayed as wily, trying to lie their way into the European welfare state, even as they undermine not only European security but also European values.

Even though the focus on helping innocent refugees may appear generous and humane, it actually functions to limit the numbers of people admitted into Europe: as Hannah Arendt (1951) pointed out decades ago, asylum as a category was only meant for exceptional cases, never for the masses. Indeed, as just one example, Spain granted asylum to just fifteen people in 2014.

To be sure, days after the image of Aylan began to circulate, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom increased the numbers of refugees they were willing to accept. But those claiming asylum must still go through rigorous application procedures and be judged worthy. After all, the Canadian government had already denied legal status to Aylan and his family: it is not clear that he would have been saved by the policies proposed in response to his death. In fact, in the months after those measures were declared, the constraints on asylum applications became more and more apparent: Germany said that it would process asylum applications more quicklynot in order to help, but to deport those who do not qualify at record speed.

Photo by Eva Gluszak Castagna, licensed by Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen.

Ultimately, innocence works as part of a binary: the flipside is guilt. This frame was most clearly revealed after the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015, when France immediately closed its borders, establishing a state of emergency that suspended Schengen rules and rendered refugees guilty for the attacks; the United States and much of Europe followed suit. Refugees moved from innocent to guilty in the blink of an eye.

Innocence is about purity, vulnerability, and naivety; it carries the desire to protect and take responsibility for those who—in their want of knowledge—cannot take care of themselves. Innocence establishes a hierarchical relationship between those who care and those who are cared for.

Of course, care is welcome. But what does it mean to be welcomed as a victim, passive and unable to take care of oneself? In the face of such images, will these migrants be able to get a job once they are up and on their feet again? Will they be trusted as smart, capable, responsible?

Innocence structures our relationships to make some of us saviors and others victims. The process of saving innocent victims often promises absolution to the saviors. It leaves little room to think that we might also be responsible for these migrants’ plight (by helping to create the conditions that they are fleeing, from war and poverty to climate change). It leaves little room to see that we might actually owe them hospitality and welcome.

What, then, is the appropriate response to innocent suffering? The answer is related to the way we perceive refugees; we give them humanitarian assistance and, if they are lucky, we give a small number of them asylum. Yet these are stopgaps, emergency measures designed to act in the present. On the one hand, this is welcome; on the other, working on the basis of innocence can serve as a cover for removing rights from the many in the name of the few. Focusing on these exceptional cases deflects attention from the real problems that lead to such mass movements of people.

What images can possibly render visible and compel us to address the causes of war, poverty, and massive inequality, thereby granting to others what we want for ourselves: the ability to choose the lives we lead?

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian.

WATCH

WATCH