The institutional incompleteness of empire

Abstract

Afghanistan's territory and populations have long been crucial nodes for the assertion of regional and global projects of domination. In order to gain analytical insight into the identity and dispositions of such projects, the paper studies one significant episode of intervention over Afghan populations: the three-decade long protection and assistance practices in support of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The paper has three objectives. First, it highlights the enabling aspects of Afghan refugee movement, that is, as constitutive and generative of complex politico-institutional orders and of social hierarchies, at a variety of scales. Second, it locates the analytical understanding of such orders and hierarchies within academic narratives that postulate a relation between refugee interventions and imperial politico-institutional orders. Third, it challenges some of the analytical tenets of such narratives by foregrounding the incompleteness and overlap of such institutional orders. On these bases, the article offers a nuanced and contextualized understanding of 'imperial order' as a form of rule that is premised on the continuous attempt to establish hierarchies out of a context of institutional disorder.

Refugees and Empire

“…Implicitly or explicitly, this connection is seen as unidirectional, unfolding in a top-down way: the multiple contingencies and contextual occurrences through which such connection concretely takes shape across the world, are the result of the more or less resisted but nonetheless direct consequence of imperial projects, and the more or less coercive power of their key agents. Such contingencies and occurrences, in other words, are treated as "parochial": they occupy a second-order rung in the analytical scaffolding of contemporary imperial theorisations (Novak, 2011). All episodes of refugee displacement, protection and assistance, thus, can ultimately be explained by an always already existing imperial project, and identifying the most convincing of these theorisations becomes a matter of (intellectual and political) faith.…”

“…Foregrounding the limits of such imperial politico-institutional orders, i.e. the contextually mediated ways in which these "orders" dynamically and concretely take shape in different contexts, renders the relation between imperialism, empire and the refugee always incomplete (Novak, 2011).…”

Political economy of refugees

“…While shaped by the hierarchies and inequalities characterising the context in which it is produced, the refugee institution concurs to their reproduction: it renders such forces concrete, tangible and observable, in their attempt to shape the implications and effects of the refugee regime (Novak, 2011).…”

Between Fear and Vulnerability: The Emergence of the Humanitarian-Security Nexus in the Canadian Refugee Protection Regime

“…Critics point out that the human security agenda, reflected in (humanitarian) development and military interventions, is utilized to sustain Western hegemony (Chimni 2000), preserve the Empire by shaping a new form of political ruling (Hardt and Negri, 2002), establish an imperial order (Novak, 2011), create 'a neo-colonial form of liberal imperialism' (Duffield, 2001), and entrench new geopolitical and neoliberal realities (Hyndman, 2000). It is largely concerned with Western states' security, and managing threats to global security stemming from the Global South (Vaughan-Williams, 2012).…”