Vicki Squire

The exclusionary politics of asylum

The issue of asylum has become the focus of intense debate over recent years, much of which is organized around questions regarding how far and in what ways increasing numbers of asylum seekers pose a ‘problem’ or a ‘threat’ to ‘host’ states. This book steps back from this debate in order to consider how, why and with what effects such questions have come to take such a hold in UK and EU contexts. Critiquing the securitisation and criminalisation of asylum seeking, it analyses recent policy developments in relation to their wider historical, political and European contexts, and argues that the UK response effectively produces asylum seekers as scapegoats for dislocations that are caused by the shifting boundaries of the nation state. Any move beyond such an exclusionary politics, it claims, requires a distinctly political re-thinking of asylum, as well as of citizenship more widely.

Reshaping critical geopolitics? : the materialist challenge

How can the ‘materialist turn’ contribute to the reshaping of critical geopolitics? This article draws attention to the limits of an approach that emphasizes the representational, cultural and interpretive dimensions of geopolitics, while acknowledging the difficulties of an ontological shift to materiality for many scholars of critical geopolitics. It draws on work of Karen Barad and Annemarie Mol in order to advance three arguments for the reshaping of critical geopolitics as a field of research. First, it argues for an approach to the analysis of power that examines materialdiscursive intra-actions and that cuts across various ontological, analytical and disciplinary divides. Second, it argues for an analysis of boundary-production that focuses on the mutual enactment or co-constitution of subjects, objects and environments rather than on performance. Third, it argues for an analytical approach that engages the terrain of geopolitics in terms of a multiplicity of ‘cuts’ that trouble simplifying geopolitical imaginations along with the clear-cut boundaries that these often imply. In so doing, the article makes the case for a more-than-human approach that does not overstate the efficacy of matter, but rather that engages processes of materialisation and dematerialisation without assuming materiality to be a determinant force.

Politics through a web: citizenship and community unbound

What happens to citizenship when the nation and the state are no longer assumed to be the inevitable starting points from which politics is defined? This paper considers how a refusal of the nation as political community and a questioning of the state as guarantor of rights and responsibilities reconfigure our understandings of citizenship. We do this by taking as a metaphor and analytical entry point an art installation developed by artist Tomás Saraceno titled 14 Billions (Working Title). Forming an exaggerated version of a black widow spiders web, this installation offers us a way of engaging politics in relational terms. Inspired by this installation, we ask: how are the categories of citizenship and community troubled or reconfigured when we address sociality and politics from a relational perspective? In which ways does 14 Billions prompt us to address questions of spatiality, power, coexistence, and contestation differently from those accounts of citizenship that remain wedded to the state as a contained geographical unit and to the nation as an imaginary of political community? And finally, how might this web installation suggest an intervention into the broader problematic of ‘citizenship without community’ that forms the focus of this theme issue? We address these questions by way of an engagement with the ‘lines’, ‘gaps’, and ‘tension points’ presented by 14 Billions and argue that an understanding of citizenship as based upon membership appears inadequate when we address politics through a web. In so doing, we contend that the provocation of citizenship without community presents a challenge that does not simply demand a shift from the nation to the state or the reaffirmation of a rights-bearing subject; rather, this provocation leads us to argue that politics involves more than a search for inclusion and recognition, whilst the web installation offers us a way in to thinking about politics through heterogeneous sites and moments of encounter.

From Community Cohesion to Mobile Solidarities: The City of Sanctuary Network and the Strangers into Citizens Campaign

This article draws attention to the limitations of the UKs integration and cohesion agenda and introduces an alternative analytical approach that focuses on solidarity, mobility and citizenship over cohesion, integration and community. Developing such an approach through analysing the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, the article has two interrelated objectives. First, it aims to shed critical light on the assumptions regarding community that inform the UKs integration and cohesion agenda, which involves a series of contradictions that exclude asylum seekers and irregular migrants as subjects of integration and cohesion. Second, it aims to offer some reflections on how these assumptions are challenged by the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, based on the activation of mobile solidarities that cut across established social hierarchies. In so doing, the article suggests that the UKs approach to integration and cohesion is flawed because it overlooks engagements and solidarities in which cultural categories and legal distinctions are extraneous, while at the same time it privileges the collective engagements of established residents over those whose presence may be more fleeting or less definite. In order to demonstrate the inadequacies of such an approach, the article shows how minor acts of citizenship that are mobilised by City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens enact a mobile form of solidarity based on participation through presence. This, the article argues, potentially serves as the grounds for a critical alternative to an approach that assumes that intensified movements and diversities induce hostility.

‘Integration with diversity in modern Britain’: New Labour on nationality, immigration and asylum

Does New Labours multicultural introduction of the 2002 White Paper ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain’ mark a progressive shift in migration policy? Analysing policy debates surrounding the 2002 legislation through a discourse theoretical perspective, this paper assesses how far New Labour practices an integrative approach to nationality, immigration and asylum. Locating the analysis historically, the paper first reconstructs New Labours normative framework through the adaptation of Berrys model of refugee acculturation. It then goes on to problematise claims to a multicultural ‘integration with diversity’, arguing that processes of ‘assimilation through segregation’ are indicative of a primary monoculturalism within New Labours approach. In showing how a complex of inclusions and exclusions maintains this exclusivist approach, the paper suggests that the ideological concealment of monoculturalism is evidence of a reactionary and conservative response rather than a radically progressive one.

Unauthorised migration beyond structure/agency? Acts, interventions, effects:

What are the most appropriate conceptual tools by which to develop an analysis of ‘unauthorised migration’? Is ‘migrant agency’ an effective critical concept in the context of a so-called European migration ‘crisis’? This article reflects on these questions through a detailed exploration of the ‘structure/agency debate’. It suggests the need for caution in engaging such a conceptual frame in analysing the politics of unauthorised migration. Despite the sophistication of many relational accounts of structure-agency, the grounding of this framework in questions of intentionality risks reproducing assumptions about subjects whose decision to migrate is more or less free from constraint. The article argues that such assumptions are analytically problematic because they involve a simplification of processes of subjectivity formation. Moreover, it also argues that they are normatively and politically problematic in the context of debates around unauthorised migration because discussions of structure/agency can easily slip into the legitimisation of wider assumptions about the culpability and/or victimhood of people on the move. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theorisation of subjectification, the article proposes an alternative analytics of acts, interventions, and effects by which to address the politics of unauthorised migration in the midst of a so-called ‘migration crisis’.

Governing migration through death in Europe and the US: Identification, burial and the crisis of modern humanism:

Border deaths have become an established feature of contemporary migratory politics in both Europe and the US. This article examines the similarities and differences in practices of ‘governing migration through death’ across the US–Mexico (Sonoran) and in the EU–North African (Mediterranean) contexts. Instead of taking a conventional comparative analysis of two distinct sites, the article draws on critical scholarship in the field of border studies in order to examine biopolitical, thanatopolitical and necropolitical dynamics of bordering that cross contexts. It argues that these operations of power converge in both European and US bordering practices, specifically through a form of biophysical violence that operates directly on the biological functions of migrating bodies. The article suggests that the establishment of this violence represents a crisis of modern humanism, which becomes implicated in the toleration of such violence through processes of denial, displacement, rejection and compensation. By focusing, in particular, on the ways that the treatment of the dead functions as a means of compensating for (yet not redressing) biophysical violence, the article highlights the deficiencies of contemporary practices of identification and burial, and raises questions about the limitations of contestations that emphasise dignity only to perpetuate a hierarchy of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ lives. In so doing, the article concludes by suggesting that contemporary ‘migration crises’ are better understood in terms of the crisis of modern humanism, grounded in Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian traditions, which can no longer deny its implication in practices of governing migration through death.

Europe, Knowledge, Politics — Engaging with the Limits: The c.a.s.e. collective Responds

HAVING ONE’S WORK closely read and critically debated is a rare pleasure. It was thus with great joy that we saw that our collective article ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) provoked several thoughtful responses to the theoretical premises of the manifesto and its intellectual and political ramifications. The replies to the manifesto created a new space of selfinterrogation in which the c.a.s.e. collective grappled with some of the limits that our critics addressed. Before we address some of these more directly, it may be useful to restate the original objective of the collective manifesto. First, the authors that were part of the collective had a desire to push critical innovations in security studies beyond the framing of critical security studies in terms of schools. The aim of working and writing as a collective, as a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, was based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamics of individualist research agendas. Alluding to the emancipatory connotations of the word ‘manifesto’, the aim of the article was to carve out and open up an intellectual space for critical thinking – both in the disciplinary sense of formulating an alternative space to mainstream security studies and in the political sense of thinking through the ethico-political implications of security and securitizationHAVING ONE’S WORK closely read and critically debated is a rare pleasure. It was thus with great joy that we saw that our collective article ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) provoked several thoughtful responses to the theoretical premises of the manifesto and its intellectual and political ramifications. The replies to the manifesto created a new space of selfinterrogation in which the c.a.s.e. collective grappled with some of the limits that our critics addressed. Before we address some of these more directly, it may be useful to restate the original objective of the collective manifesto. First, the authors that were part of the collective had a desire to push critical innovations in security studies beyond the framing of critical security studies in terms of schools. The aim of working and writing as a collective, as a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, was based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamics of individualist research agendas. Alluding to the emancipatory connotations of the word ‘manifesto’,1 the aim of the article was to carve out and open up an intellectual space for critical thinking – both in the disciplinary sense of formulating an alternative space to mainstream security studies and in the political sense of thinking through the ethico-political implications of security and securitization. If, in this sense, the article can be read as a manifesto (with, we should note, the important prefix ‘networked’), we did not assert, as Andreas Behnke Rejoinder

Irregular migration struggles and active subjects of trans-border politics : new research strategies for interrogating the agency of the marginalised

The politics of migration has become increasingly prominent as a site of struggle. However, the active subjecthood of people on the move in precarious situations is often overlooked. Irregular migration struggles raise questions about how to understand the agency of people who are marginalised. What does it mean to engage people produced as ‘irregular’ as active subjects of trans-border politics? And what new research strategies can we employ to this end? The articles presented in this Special Issue of Politics each differently explore how actions by or on behalf of irregular/ised migrants involve processes of subjectivity formation that imply a form of agency. Collectively we explore how irregular migration struggles feature as a site marked by active subjects of trans-border politics. We propose a research agenda based on tracing those processes – both regulatory, activist, and everyday – that negotiate and contest how an individual is positioned as an ‘irregular migrant’. The ethos behind such research is to explore how the most marginalised individuals reclaim or reconfigure subjecthood in ambiguous terms.

Researching precarious migrations: Qualitative strategies towards a positive transformation of the politics of migration:

How can research contribute to a positive transformation of the politics of migration? This article addresses the question with reference to a recent research project, Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by Boat, which maps and documents the journeys and experiences of people on the move across the Mediterranean. It explores how qualitative research engaging research participants as people with the authority to speak can affect change by exposing claims and demands that compel ‘receiving communities’ to bear witness to the contemporary violence of policies and practices. Exploring the dissemination strategy of sharing stories through interactive maps and research–art collaboration, the article emphasises the importance of strategies that foster constructive connections between diverse constituencies. This development, the article argues, involves a process of translation that goes beyond a form of passive empathy and that works towards positive transformation of a slower duration, albeit in terms that remain discomforting.