What’s in a Category? The Politics of Not Being a Refugee

Abstract

How are refugees perceived and governed in contemporary politics? What sort of sovereign responses has been advanced to govern and discipline the movement of people in a globalizing world? The article discusses how the ‘figure of the refugee’ (Scheel and Squire, 2014) or the ‘refugee label’ (Zetter, 1991, 2007) has changed once the Cold War ended and growing numbers of asylum seekers from the global South began searching for protection in the North. It attributes the restrictive character of contemporary asylum politics both to a perception of refugees as abject masses from the South and to sovereign states’ responses to a globalizing reality. In this context, I argue that access to asylum has been restricted both through the mobilization of new sovereign borders that seek to contain the mobility of asylum seekers perceived as villains, and through the creation of new categories or legal limits, in the form of temporary protection statuses to those perceived as passive victims. By focusing on the latter strategy, I briefly explore how Haitian asylum seekers have been labelled as ‘humanitarian immigrants’ in Brazil, highlighting the productivity of this legal limit.

Beyond Simply ‘Return’: How IDP Mobility, Agency and Self-Identification Contradict the Underpinnings of Refugee Policy

“…Nyers (2006) has written extensively on this subject, examining how states create categories to enable them to mark certain limits and form artificial boundaries to suit their respective agendas. Thomaz (2017) shows, as this paper obviously attests to, that the current ways of classifying refugees "does not correspond to an actual description of the different motivations and experiences of mobility at stake". Her article depicts how states seek to 'monopolise' what they deem as legitimate forms of movement, enabling them to politicise certain people according to how they fit into their own, often rather arbitrary, definition of sovereignty.…”

The Event in Migrant Categorization: Exploring Eventfulness Across the Americas

“…Thousands of Haitians waiting days and sometimes weeks in the small town of Brasiléia, in the state of Acre, created a camp-like situation; the related social and hygienic precariousness attracted substantial media attention. So many (primarily) Haitian migrants in this transit zone turned the Haitian condition, once more, into a crisis (Thomaz 2018).…”

“…Beyond the instability of migration categories, the numerous variants of "temporary protection status" present their own challenge; these labels have been standardized within the contemporary global migration regime, especially in the context of access to asylum or permanent residency (Squire 2011). Against this background, Thomaz (2018) interprets the proliferation of temporary protection statuses as a new boundary practice that restricts access to asylum and hollows out regular forms of entry, migrant rights, and government responsibilities. Building on Zetter (2007), who has problematized the increasing fragmentation of the refugee label, Thomaz draws attention to "the creation of new limits, novel legal categories that allow for entrance and permanence but under provisional terms."…”

Humanitarian exploits: Ordinary displacement and the political economy of the global refugee regime

“… 1 I am using the term ‘refugee’ here as both a distinct category of displaced person that is recognised in international law and as a discursive figure that signals particular socio-cultural meanings, including, as I describe and challenge in this article, an exceptional status that is supposed to automatically distinguish their experiences from that of citizens. For more nuanced attention to the ways that the ‘refugee’ label is contested and strategically employed discursively, symbolically, legally and by refugees themselves, please consider the following sources: Bakewell (2008), Sigona (2017), Tomaz (2017), Turner (2004), Zetter (1991, 2007). …”