Alexandria J. Innes

In Search of Security: Migrant Agency, Narrative, and Performativity

ABSTRACT This article explores a performative conceptualisation of security, foregrounding the experiences of an asylum seeker from Ghana in Greece, named Sonny. This article follows Sonny’s search for security, analysing both his journey to Greece and to refugee status (something that he was still waiting for) and the narrative through which he told his story to me. I argue that Sonny’s search for security illustrates how security might be produced by security-seeking actions performed by an agent other than the state. It accesses security on an ontological level that is performative in that security is constituted through actions, and is known through attending to experience. This security allows for incorporation of intersectional identities, subaltern identities and diverse experiences. The argument is situated in the context of migration and the migrant journey as offering unique scope for analysis in international relations that is capable of moving beyond the state. It briefly surveys the human security and feminist security literatures to elaborate on the value of conceptualising security as a practice and as an experience of everyday life, rather than an object to be obtained. To offer purchase on the performative conceptualization of security narrative analysis foregrounds Sonny’s agency to seek security, juxtaposing his feeling of security and process of security with the material security that was provided to him as an asylum seeker in Greece.

Performing Security Absent the State: Encounters with a Failed Asylum Seeker in the UK

Drawing on feminist research methodologies and theory, this article recentres critical security studies to focus on a migrant seeking an alternative form of security after his application for asylum was denied by the state. The two main objectives of this article are; first, to resituate a failed asylum seeker, Qasim, as an agent of international security as understood through his practice of seeking and obtaining security; and, second, to demonstrate a revised performative conceptualization of security through understanding the failed asylum seeker as practicing an embodied theorization of security. The encounter with Qasim shows alternative means of seeking security, which illustrates agency on the part of the migrant that exists actively outside of the state. This contests the positioning of migrants as passive victims and recognizes a way of being in the world that by necessity cannot rely on a state-based identity. Ethnographic methods, including participant observation and a narrative interview with Qasim, elucidate his practice of security and allow for the development of a theoretical conceptualization of security that remains true to a failed asylum seeker’s practice in the UK.

The politics of a ‘Poncy Pillowcase’: Migration and borders in Coronation Street’

This article examines the ways in which popular culture stages and supplies resources for agency in everyday life, with particular attention to migration and borders. Drawing upon cultural studies, and specific insights originating from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, we explore how intersectional identities such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender are experienced in relation to the globalisation of culture and identity in a 2007 Coronation Street storyline. The soap opera genre offers particular insights into how agency emerges in everyday life as migrants and locals navigate the forces of globalisation. We argue that a focus on popular culture can mitigate the problem of isolating migrant experiences from local experiences in migrant-receiving areas.

Mobile diasporas, postcolonial identities: the Green Line in Cyprus

ABSTRACT This paper explores the scope for understanding postcolonial and hybrid identities through the theory of ontological security in International Relations. It examines the circulation of identity for a dispersed postcolonial population, namely Cypriots. This circulation happens amongst a deterritorialised public, through media and movement of people. It carries meaning that is formative of the identity of the diaspora and of the identity of the home state, implicating both in a complex and relational ontological security comprising identity, memory, state and society. The Green Line dividing North from South in Cyprus represents the bifurcation of the island, rupturing the possibility of a territorially unified Cypriot identity. The line also represents a rupturing of contiguous ethnic identities, marking the creation of refugee populations and Cypriot diasporas. The Green Line is both a physical location and circulating symbol of ontological insecurity. On one hand, the Green Line marks the creation of Cypriot refugees and diasporas. On the other, it marks a gateway to Europe for asylum seekers attempting to enter the Southern part of the island. I theorise the Green Line as an emblem of ontological insecurity whose meaning is (re)constituted in the lived experience of Cypriot diaspora and migrants seeking security, revealing a hybrid and fluid identity.

The Never-Ending Journey? Exclusive Jurisdictions and Migrant Mobility in Europe

Migrant journeys are often conceived as linear movement from a sending country to a receiving country. However, a recent work suggests that the notion of linear migrant journeys is a misrepresentation. I argue that European regulations that standardise immigration policy around a common goal of ‘burden-sharing’ such as the Dublin II Regulation interact with the journeys of migrants to create paths that are not linear, circular or guided solely by intent. Rather migrant journeys can be conceived as a series of negotiations with state policies that shape experiences, choices and destinations through constructions of illegality. Mobility becomes an on-going condition rather than a temporary one. Borders then are reproduced as phenomenological rather than physical. I illustrate my argument through an ethnographic case study of a Sudanese man seeking to join his wife and child who had filed an asylum application in France. He interacts with the borders of Europe throughout his journey; however, as he becomes known as an undocumented migrant he moves further from the possibility of entering Europe with immigration status despite being within the territorial boundaries. Conversely, as his physical proximity to Europe increases and is established, his legal proximity decreases.

Spousal visa law and structural violence: fear, anxiety and terror of the everyday

Attending to mundane bureaucratic politics can highlight forms of everyday structural violence. This article draws attention to the spousal visa law in the UK. On the surface, this law does violence to family life, forcing indefinite separation. However, this law is also symbolic of some of the main structural violence in society that cross-cut gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic class, age, education level and profession, thus making tangible some of the intangible borders in society. Through the vehicle of this law we will consider how structural violence can operate as an everyday terror, disrupting the boundaries of public and private life.

Human Mobility and Security

This chapter explores the relationship between security and human mobility, offering some insight into the migration-security nexus first by establishing where migration has consistently been characterized as a point of contestation for security studies. The assumption that states are the providers of security for their populations is called to question when large numbers of people are forced to flee a country because they are insecure. Following that, the chapter turns to the construction of human mobility as a threat to bounded human communities, with particular attention to how Western states construct immigration as a threat. Finally, the chapter considers the consequences of this construction: how the provision of security for some people renders other people insecure.

Insecurity and Asylum Seeker Identity

This question was put to me by Mark, an asylum seeker from Burundi who had a long and frustrating experience seeking asylum in the UK. He possessed no identification documents. The UK did not accept his testimony as credible because the immigration officer to whom he had given his testimony did not believe he was from Burundi. Because of the discrepancy in his country of origin he could not be deported, yet his asylum application was not successful. He found himself in limbo, neither with legal status nor without status from 2002 until 2011 when I met him. He had been detained a number of separate times in the UK and processed for deportation. However, his deportation was never carried out successfully, resulting each time in his release from detention but no resolution to his pending asylum application. Mark’s journey to seek asylum indeed appeared to be never-ending, despite reaching a country where he was safe. He was afforded little freedom of movement in the UK as he remained monitored by the immigration authorities and was required to register at a local office on a weekly basis. He did not have permission to work and relied on the minimal support designed to protect non-deportable failed asylum seekers from absolute destitution. The nature of his journey from his home country left Mark unable to prove his identity. The process Mark went through to seek asylum ultimately undermined his asylum claim.

Performing Security, Theorizing Security

The preceding chapters have established the problems migration poses for extant theories and conceptualizations of security and of human rights, and the particular problem created in the separation of forced and voluntary migration. In Chapter 2 the empirical focus was on the journey to seek asylum. Here I turn to the experiences of migrants performing security once in a host state. I begin with a detailed interpretive analysis of data taken from participant observation notes and interviews during several months spent with migrant organizations in Athens and in northern England. I identify the most commonly occurring issues associated with insecurity as migrants experience it. I then turn to in-depth case studies gathered through narrative interviews with migrants. Through these case studies I show how the individuals in question navigated insecurities. I argue that this negotiation with insecurity is a process of security. Conceptually, this security can be understood as performative as migrants act to resolve the provocations of insecurity that they encounter. It is also an international security because the people performing security are acting in an international realm rather than a domestic one: in other words, they do not have particular status within a state. The provocations of insecurity cross international borders and the means of performing security are communicative actions that happen in an international forum.

Introduction: Producing Knowledge in International Security Studies

Looking around Viktoria Square in the centre of Athens on a summer morning in 2010, one can clearly see the realities of international migration. Viktoria Square is not where the various embassies are located in the Greek capital. Nor is it a commercial or financial centre. The migration that is apparent in Viktoria Square is the movement of people that happens outside of the world of visa programmes, commerce, or international banking. What is evident in Viktoria Square is irregular, undocumented and forced migration, a movement of peoples that is intimately related to the aforementioned international forces, yet takes place in what often seems as though it is a different world.