Books and Papers by Barak Kalir
This afterword calls on white-privileged academics like myself to rethink and possibly stop resea... more This afterword calls on white-privileged academics like myself to rethink and possibly stop researching deportation. We critically study deportation to drastically reform or even entirely abolish it. Admittedly, the knowledge we produce mostly ends up serving us in advancing our own white privilege through class and status reproduction within the middle-class and racially segregated university system. Recognizing that conducting academic research is not always the best intervention, we should shun conservative funding schemes, stop publishing articles nobody reads, fight for research and teaching on deportation to be conducted away from the ‘white gaze’, and dedicate our skills to creative collaborations with activists fighting for change.
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State Crime Journal 11(1):70-89, 2022
On 15 March 2018, Mame Mbaye, a 35-year-old migrant from Senegal who lived in Spain for 11 years,... more On 15 March 2018, Mame Mbaye, a 35-year-old migrant from Senegal who lived in Spain for 11 years, died on a street in the centre of Madrid. A police raid on unauthorized street vendors caused panic among illegalized migrants, who ran away trying to avoid an arrest that could have led to their detention and deportation. Mbaye ran towards his home, located a few hundred meters down the road, but he never made it. The official version, endorsed by the Spanish court, is that Mbaye suffered a fatal cardiac failure. Some eyewitnesses claim the police suffocated him to death. The article explores how the pervasive and perverse exercise of racism on different levels against illegalized migrants results in their social and in some cases literal death. To fully grasp the tenacity with which racism and racial cruelty are applied in the immigration field, we must recognize that most other arenas that have historically served as breeding grounds for advancing racialism in western societies have been legally proscribed. In contrast, the antiimmigration arena allows for acting practically, discursively and politically in racializing and racist manners against some of the most vulnerable members in society: so-called 'irregular' migrants, 'failed' asylum seekers and 'non-real' refugees. The immigration field thus serves as a crucial, and perhaps the last, frontier for advancing racialism more holistically in western societies. Animating racialism as an operative ideology informs-consciously or not-those who staff the state apparatus, and society more broadly, to believe in and act upon racialized categories of othered people. In so doing, racialism legitimizes the social production and justifies the social death of illegalized migrants. The ultimate goal of this vicious dynamic, of inhumane treatment and judicial impunity, is to keep operational the racist notion that the lives of some people matter less than others.
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Ethnography, 2020
This article analyses the unprecedented decision taken by the Israeli state in 2005 to legalize t... more This article analyses the unprecedented decision taken by the Israeli state in 2005 to legalize the status of non-Jewish undocumented migrants' children. In explaining how the plight of culturally assimilated non-Jewish children succeeded in penetrating the hermetic ethno-religious definition of citizenship in Israel, the article focuses on the subtle yet critical influence of kinship on modern state-making and the affective fashioning of national belonging. By insisting on treating culturally assimilated non-Jewish children as Others, Israel increasingly ran the risk of unveiling the feeble construction of the Jewish nation in terms of kinship as 'one big family'. The Israeli media increasingly began to question the refusal of the state to recognize children who were evidently 'Israelis in every way'. Such a development, as some Israeli politicians undoubtedly realized, could have potentially been more detrimental to the mythological foundations of the Jewish state than the 'adoption' of a few hundred non-Jewish children.
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RUNA, 2020
Este artículo propone el término departheid para designar la opresión sistémica y la gestión espa... more Este artículo propone el término departheid para designar la opresión sistémica y la gestión espacial de los inmigrantes ilegalizados en los Estados liberales occidentales. Como concepto, departheid apunta a ir más allá de los instrumentos de ilegalización de la migración para comprender la persistencia con que se implementan estas medidas opresivas, a pesar de una creciente evidencia sobre su inutilidad en la gestión de la movilidad humana y del daño que causan a millones de personas. El artículo destaca la continuidad entre los actuales regímenes migratorios opresivos y las configuraciones coloniales del pasado para controlar la movilidad de aquellos a quienes Hannah Arendt denominó las “razas sometidas”. Haciendo uso de similitudes con el apartheid como ideología
dominante basada en la racialización, la segregación y la deportación,
sostengo que el departheid viene motivado también por un sentido de superioridad moral enraizado en la fantasía de la supremacía blanca.
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The Viral Condition: Identities Virtual Symposium, 2020
Illegalised migrants-people who are denoted an illegal status by the state authorities and are th... more Illegalised migrants-people who are denoted an illegal status by the state authorities and are thereby rendered deportable (undocumented/irregular migrants and so-called failed or bogus asylum seekers)-mostly find work in notorious 3D jobs: dirty, dangerous and demanding. An oppressive treatment of illegalised migrants by the authorities presents this already marginalised and weak population with 3D threats: desertion, detention and deportation. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemia these threats take on new dimensions in placing illegalised migrants under increased and palpable risk for their lives. Declaring people's status 'illegal', state institutions often deny them access to healthcare services, shelter and other basic needs. The new realities of the COVID-19 pandemia throw into question the institutional approach in managing illegalised migrants. Beyond the inhumanity implicit in abandoning tens of thousands of people within states' sovereign territory, can states now afford not knowing the whereabouts of illegalised migrants and their health 3D threats to illegalised migrants-desertion, detention, deportation 1
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Crisis Magazine, 2020
The European Union funds extensive academic research with the potential to inform humane and effe... more The European Union funds extensive academic research with the potential to inform humane and effective border policies. Yet evidence-based immigration policy is undermined by the EU’s increasingly repressive border regime. How do we make sense of this contradiction? And which transformations are needed to address it?
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This workshop aims to bring together researchers from language and social sciences with a shared ... more This workshop aims to bring together researchers from language and social sciences with a shared interest in the communicative, political and social aspects of asylum determination procedures. Asylum encounters have been studied within a variety of social and language sciences. Unfortunately, there are very few common forums where disciplinary boundaries can be breached and perspectives can cross-fertilize. The objective of this workshop is to gather prominent researchers working within different research traditions and having a shared interest in asylum encounters as communicative, social, and political practices. The workshop focuses on three key aspects: language, asymmetries and identities. The first area concerns language(s) and languaging. Here, possibilities and limitations coming with interpreter-mediated interaction, issues of interpreting strategies, differences between spoken and written language, multilingualism and multimodal social interaction are scrutinized. Why and how is language important in asylum encounters? The second area deals with asymmetries between participants in the process-asylum applicants, case workers, legal counsels, decision-makers, voluntary supporters, activists, and interpreters. Here, questions about how political considerations, regulations and discretionary routines either challenge or reproduce a certain power imbalance are essential. How are power relations entangled in these encounters? The third area concerns how identities are constructed in the encounters between asylum applicants and case workers. The asylum determination process is ultimately about who is perceived as a genuine refugee and who is dismissed as merely a fortune-seeker or economic migrant. How are identities created, (re)negotiated and restricted in and through interaction? We invite scholars interested in these topics to a two-days' workshop at Stockholm University. The ambition is to work towards a publication reflecting the mutual exchange of ideas, theories, and methods between the different perspectives. In order to create the best possible conditions for exchanges between participants, we keep the format limited to maximum 20 participants. During the workshop, we will discuss the participants' draft papers on the topics outlined above.
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Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment, 2020
I will know what I precisely want to say in this piece only when I finish writing it.
This enigma... more I will know what I precisely want to say in this piece only when I finish writing it.
This enigmatic sentence is not meant as an alluring opening statement,
nor is it a sign for an experimental literary method that I will be employing
in this essay. For what it’s worth, this sentence captures my principal insight into the process of writing. It is an insight that I gained after
years of experiencing much frustration with writing, after producing endless drafts of the same text, after nights and days spent on trying “to get it right,” after struggling not to lose my focus, not to get lost in the texts I tried so hard to write.
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International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 2019
Focusing on the particularities of migration management and bordering in Portugal, contributions ... more Focusing on the particularities of migration management and bordering in Portugal, contributions to this Special Issue inevitably raise our awareness about a more universal form that increasingly structures the management of mobility in states across Europe and beyond. This universal form that dominates migration management is colonial in its constitution, global in its reach, technologically advanced in its control, dehumanising in its implementation, and oppressive in its essence. Inspired by articles in this Special Issue, this Afterword suggests that a key for studying critically the spread of the universal form in its particular instantiation is a reorientation of the ethnographic gaze towards moral subjectivities of bureaucrats and policymakers in institutions that implement oppressive migration policies. We must attempt to trace, analyse and understand how state actors justify servicing a blatant new form of an Arendtian 'banality of evil' that leads to the dehumanisation and exclusion of illegalised migrants and refugees.
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Conflict & Society, 2019
This article proposes the term Departheid to capture the systemic oppression and spatial manageme... more This article proposes the term Departheid to capture the systemic oppression and spatial management of illegalized migrants in Western liberal states. As a concept, Departheid aims to move beyond the instrumentality of illegalizing migration in order to comprehend the tenacity with which oppressive measures are implemented even in the face of accumulating evidence for their futility in managing migration flows and the harm they cause to millions of people. The article highlights continuities between present oppressive migration regimes and past colonial configurations for controlling the mobility of what Hannah Arendt has called “subject races.” By drawing on similarities with Apartheid as a governing ideology based on racialization, segregation, and deportation, I argue that Departheid, too, is animated by a sense of moral superiority that is rooted in a fantasy of White supremacy.
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The treatment of illegalized migrants in Western liberal states has been often characterized by a... more The treatment of illegalized migrants in Western liberal states has been often characterized by a duality of compassion and repression. Within this dyad, repression is said to be applied with the right hand of the state by the police, border control, refugee status determination units, etc., and compassion with its left hand by social workers, medical staff, as well as civil society organizations and humanitarian agencies. Drawing on the toil of deportation caseworkers in the Netherlands, this article argues that compassion is prevalent not only among those who show benevolence and support illegalized migrants but also among many who work on the repressive side of the divide. However, expressions of compassion by deportation caseworkers do not seem to mitigate an otherwise repressive bureaucratic work. Instead, compassion often helps caseworkers to furnish a comfort zone in which emotions can be discharged and from which caseworkers neutralize potentially disruptive affective dynamics by experiencing them as intrinsic to the law they implement. Compassion not only fails to produce vertical commonality with deportable migrants in vulnerable positions; it also willfully fosters the self-image of civil servants as humane and sensitive actors as they effectively implement controversial state policies.
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Social Anthropology, 2019
Methodological accounts often deliberately omit the role that luck plays in getting access to cha... more Methodological accounts often deliberately omit the role that luck plays in getting access to challenging research sites. Indeed, it sounds unprofessional and feels unsatisfying to attribute luck to our work. 'I hope to get lucky' will not go down well with most supervisors or as part of any grant proposal. We should, however , consider that luck literally stands for the probability that certain events might take place under certain circumstances. Reflecting on our luck can therefore help us to expound important features that structure the probability of getting access. In my case, getting access to the Spanish state deportation regime could never be anticipated or secured simply in line with the importance of my project or my academic credentials. Obtaining formal approval from the Spanish authorities proved to be impossible, but I eventually achieved access in a messy way that involved many informal interactions and much uncertainty. Accounting for my months-long attempts, I show how luck sensitised me to officials' ample discretionary power and pervasive sense of impunity in producing an image of 'the state' as unpredictable and opaque. This image induced the strong sensation that my fieldwork crucially depended on the whims of particular officials.
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Social Anthropology, 2019
Contributors to this special issue realised that reflecting on experiences of getting access (or ... more Contributors to this special issue realised that reflecting on experiences of getting access (or not) can tell us something important about the institutions we aimed to study and, more broadly, about the migration control field. Put differently, attempts at approaching and approximating state actors within a charged field exposed us to some of its most fundamental organising principles. We have, therefore, set ourselves the task in this issue of SA/AS to ask and answer the following question: What do attempts at studying migration control tell us about the state? Our exercise is, thus, squarely set as an attempt to intervene in a burgeoning debate around the ways in which the 'anthropology of the state' can develop. Both the issues at stake-the management of undesired others-and the field in which we conduct our studies, migration control administrations, are indeed changing to become acutely central to the governing of our societies. By gathering findings from different research projects across Europe, this special issue offers a comparative perspective on some of the most salient features of the migration control field from the eyes of ethnographic researchers in search of access.
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Each year the Dutch authorities categorize scores of people as being “out of procedure” (uitgepro... more Each year the Dutch authorities categorize scores of people as being “out of procedure” (uitgeprocedeerd). These are mostly “failed asylum seekers” who have exhausted all legal appeals in search of regularizing their status in the Netherlands. Out-of-procedure subjects, or OOPSs, have no formal rights and receive no state provision. They must leave the country voluntarily within one month or risk deportation. Many OOPSs who spent weeks or even months in Dutch detention centers are eventually released onto the streets, as the authorities cannot manage to deport them. This article interrogates the production and treatment of OOPSs as nonexistent human beings who are no longer considered by the state as “aliens” but merely as illegalized bodies. This intriguing case of the state deserting certain people within its sovereign territory is realized through a process of derecording OOPSs and formally pretending that they are not part of the governed population.
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Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 77 (2017), 1-7.
Free access
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Social Identities, 2018
In Spain, the national and local authorities boast in recent years
about their progressive progra... more In Spain, the national and local authorities boast in recent years
about their progressive programs for the integration of Roma
migrants from Romania. Many state efforts to work with Roma on
their integration are specifically directed at women. Economic
integration into the waged labor market is considered a major
goal as it, supposedly, leads to the empowerment of Roma
migrant women while also securing decent standards of living for
entire families. This article argues that integration programs
adversely result in the further discrimination and exclusion of
those they pretend to relief. This adverse result is produced
through a two-tier intervention in the lives of Roma families. The
caring state works with a general category of ‘vulnerability’ for
targeting populations, in which Roma migrant women are
specifically incorporated through designated social programs. The
performance of Roma as the subject–object of these programs is
carefully evaluated. According to these evaluations, Roma women
often fail to meet the normative standards of ‘good mothers’,
‘decent wives’, and ‘diligent workers’. Subsequently, to deal with
‘failing subjects’, the disciplining state, a-la Foucault, inflicts an
array of penalties on Roma women and their families: cut-offs of
social benefits, evictions from poor dwellings, withdrawal of
children’s custody, and forced removals to Romania. We thus
argue that initiatives by the caring state (and civil society) often
prescribe or go hand-in-hand with repression from the correcting
state. In welfare states, social programs can thus conclusively
‘evidence’ existing stereotypes about marginalized Roma families
and about women in particular.
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This chapter, focuses on Spain as a case study, draws attention to two cunning elements that are ... more This chapter, focuses on Spain as a case study, draws attention to two cunning elements that are characteristic to programs of assisted voluntary return (AVR) across Europe: first, the very classification of these programs as being based in the voluntarism of the migrants; second, the implicit formulation with respect to a return of migrants to their ‘home’ (country). At first instance, the chapter demonstrates that these two guileful elements are problematical in their claims and manipulative in their formulation. Yet, the greater goal of the chapter is to argue that the couching of migrants’ assisted return in the language of voluntarism, patterned on positive notions of ‘home’, reveals the deeper neo-liberal ideological underpinnings of such programs as part of the ‘migration apparatus’ (Feldman 2012). Accordingly, I contend that so-called ‘voluntary return programs’ are based on the exact same logic that champions state sovereignty in justifying forced removals and violent deportations. I thus coin ‘soft deportation’ as a more appropriate term for referring to such programs, which are, de facto, an integral part of the overall bio-political scheme that absolves the territorial removal of illegalized subjects under state sovereignty.
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Law & Society Review, 2019
In many countries, the law permits state authorities to detain noncitizens before deportation. Ty... more In many countries, the law permits state authorities to detain noncitizens before deportation. Typically judicial decisions about preremoval detention must be made within a short period of time during which deportable noncitizens are held in police premises, and depending on the country detention may last just one month (e.g., France) or up to 18 months (the Netherlands). While previous research has explored various dimensions of noncitizen detention including the legal procedure, health consequences, the condition of detention centers, and the lives of deportable noncitizens, the empirical assessment of the determinants of decisions on preremoval detention are largely unexplored. Using data from court proceedings of police petitions of detention in Spain and a quantitative strategy, in this article we undertake an empirical analysis of noncitizen detention combining personal background of deportable noncitizens, legal factors of the case, and the behavior of different actors involved in the procedure. To do it, we fit models that take into account variation occurred at judicial district levels. Results indicate, on the one hand, that relevant actors involved in the procedure use different informational cues to decide on cases. On the other hand, the role of prosecutors and attorneys during hearings proves also relevant to predict detention.
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Since 2005 around 60,000 asylum seekers, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan, have entered Israel by cr... more Since 2005 around 60,000 asylum seekers, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan, have entered Israel by crossing the border from Egypt. Notwithstanding the Jewish history of persecution, and Israel being a signatory to the UN Convention for the protection of refugees, modern Israel systematically refuses to grant a refugee status to asylum seekers. Since 2012, the tenacious hostile approach of Israeli policy-makers and state-agents towards asylum seekers has resulted in an outburst of racist verbal and physical attacks against them. This article analyses the socio-legal location of asylum seekers in Israel by examining how their position is articulated by different parties, deploying competing discourses of human rights, citizenship, security and sovereignty. The article advances that appeals—mostly made by critical non-governmental organisations (NGOs), journalists and academics—to human rights, Jewish morals and historic sensitivities are beguiling; while they arouse hopes for compassion and moral obligation, they are also used by mainstream Israeli politicians to justify the exclusion and deportation of so-called ‘African infiltrators’. A hegemonic ideology of ‘fearism’—which brands the Israeli national narrative and informs the notion of citizenship among Jewish Israelis—leads to the construction of asylum seekers as abject Others, who pose a threat to the Jewish state and to Jews' own right for secured citizenship.
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FREE DIGITAL COPY OF THE ARTICLE CAN BE DOWNLOADED AT:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7dyngKUG... more FREE DIGITAL COPY OF THE ARTICLE CAN BE DOWNLOADED AT:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7dyngKUGRTyrf7sITvit/full
The social field in which deportations of illegalized migrants are operationalized is often perceived to be comprised of two opposing sides that together form a deportation regime: on the one side, street-level state agents, on the other side, civil-society actors. Focusing ethnographically on deportation case managers and NGO workers in the Netherlands, a country known for its consensus politics, our study reveals significant convergences in the manners that illegalized migrants are treated by both sides in usage of terminology, handling of face-to-face interactions and worldviews on issues like belonging and justice. Given these convergences, we argue that the field in which deportation is being negotiated and practiced amounts to a continuum formed by state agents and NGO actors. We argue that a deportation continuum is underlined by shared political subjectivities and creates a sealed-off political realm that restricts the initiatives of activist citizens, imaginaries of citizenship and alternatives for deportation policies.
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Books and Papers by Barak Kalir
dominante basada en la racialización, la segregación y la deportación,
sostengo que el departheid viene motivado también por un sentido de superioridad moral enraizado en la fantasía de la supremacía blanca.
This enigmatic sentence is not meant as an alluring opening statement,
nor is it a sign for an experimental literary method that I will be employing
in this essay. For what it’s worth, this sentence captures my principal insight into the process of writing. It is an insight that I gained after
years of experiencing much frustration with writing, after producing endless drafts of the same text, after nights and days spent on trying “to get it right,” after struggling not to lose my focus, not to get lost in the texts I tried so hard to write.
about their progressive programs for the integration of Roma
migrants from Romania. Many state efforts to work with Roma on
their integration are specifically directed at women. Economic
integration into the waged labor market is considered a major
goal as it, supposedly, leads to the empowerment of Roma
migrant women while also securing decent standards of living for
entire families. This article argues that integration programs
adversely result in the further discrimination and exclusion of
those they pretend to relief. This adverse result is produced
through a two-tier intervention in the lives of Roma families. The
caring state works with a general category of ‘vulnerability’ for
targeting populations, in which Roma migrant women are
specifically incorporated through designated social programs. The
performance of Roma as the subject–object of these programs is
carefully evaluated. According to these evaluations, Roma women
often fail to meet the normative standards of ‘good mothers’,
‘decent wives’, and ‘diligent workers’. Subsequently, to deal with
‘failing subjects’, the disciplining state, a-la Foucault, inflicts an
array of penalties on Roma women and their families: cut-offs of
social benefits, evictions from poor dwellings, withdrawal of
children’s custody, and forced removals to Romania. We thus
argue that initiatives by the caring state (and civil society) often
prescribe or go hand-in-hand with repression from the correcting
state. In welfare states, social programs can thus conclusively
‘evidence’ existing stereotypes about marginalized Roma families
and about women in particular.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7dyngKUGRTyrf7sITvit/full
The social field in which deportations of illegalized migrants are operationalized is often perceived to be comprised of two opposing sides that together form a deportation regime: on the one side, street-level state agents, on the other side, civil-society actors. Focusing ethnographically on deportation case managers and NGO workers in the Netherlands, a country known for its consensus politics, our study reveals significant convergences in the manners that illegalized migrants are treated by both sides in usage of terminology, handling of face-to-face interactions and worldviews on issues like belonging and justice. Given these convergences, we argue that the field in which deportation is being negotiated and practiced amounts to a continuum formed by state agents and NGO actors. We argue that a deportation continuum is underlined by shared political subjectivities and creates a sealed-off political realm that restricts the initiatives of activist citizens, imaginaries of citizenship and alternatives for deportation policies.
dominante basada en la racialización, la segregación y la deportación,
sostengo que el departheid viene motivado también por un sentido de superioridad moral enraizado en la fantasía de la supremacía blanca.
This enigmatic sentence is not meant as an alluring opening statement,
nor is it a sign for an experimental literary method that I will be employing
in this essay. For what it’s worth, this sentence captures my principal insight into the process of writing. It is an insight that I gained after
years of experiencing much frustration with writing, after producing endless drafts of the same text, after nights and days spent on trying “to get it right,” after struggling not to lose my focus, not to get lost in the texts I tried so hard to write.
about their progressive programs for the integration of Roma
migrants from Romania. Many state efforts to work with Roma on
their integration are specifically directed at women. Economic
integration into the waged labor market is considered a major
goal as it, supposedly, leads to the empowerment of Roma
migrant women while also securing decent standards of living for
entire families. This article argues that integration programs
adversely result in the further discrimination and exclusion of
those they pretend to relief. This adverse result is produced
through a two-tier intervention in the lives of Roma families. The
caring state works with a general category of ‘vulnerability’ for
targeting populations, in which Roma migrant women are
specifically incorporated through designated social programs. The
performance of Roma as the subject–object of these programs is
carefully evaluated. According to these evaluations, Roma women
often fail to meet the normative standards of ‘good mothers’,
‘decent wives’, and ‘diligent workers’. Subsequently, to deal with
‘failing subjects’, the disciplining state, a-la Foucault, inflicts an
array of penalties on Roma women and their families: cut-offs of
social benefits, evictions from poor dwellings, withdrawal of
children’s custody, and forced removals to Romania. We thus
argue that initiatives by the caring state (and civil society) often
prescribe or go hand-in-hand with repression from the correcting
state. In welfare states, social programs can thus conclusively
‘evidence’ existing stereotypes about marginalized Roma families
and about women in particular.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7dyngKUGRTyrf7sITvit/full
The social field in which deportations of illegalized migrants are operationalized is often perceived to be comprised of two opposing sides that together form a deportation regime: on the one side, street-level state agents, on the other side, civil-society actors. Focusing ethnographically on deportation case managers and NGO workers in the Netherlands, a country known for its consensus politics, our study reveals significant convergences in the manners that illegalized migrants are treated by both sides in usage of terminology, handling of face-to-face interactions and worldviews on issues like belonging and justice. Given these convergences, we argue that the field in which deportation is being negotiated and practiced amounts to a continuum formed by state agents and NGO actors. We argue that a deportation continuum is underlined by shared political subjectivities and creates a sealed-off political realm that restricts the initiatives of activist citizens, imaginaries of citizenship and alternatives for deportation policies.
In this third edition of the Great Thinkers Seminar Series, Barak Kalir will introduce some of Arendt’s most important insights into political life, the wielding of power, and resistance. He will do so by drawing closely on some of the empirical work that is being conducted within the research project on the Social Life of State Deportation Regimes in Europe and beyond.
Long abstract: States around the world are openly cultivating 'hostile environments' toward non-citizens in efforts to root out individuals who have entered illegally, overstayed visas and/or committed certain criminal offenses. But what happens to society when such deportable individuals are bound up in social and family networks that consist of settled migrants and citizens? This panel will explore the impacts of deportability on the process of settling in 'hostile environments,' and how this affects citizens, as well as non-citizens. Unlike deportation itself, deportability (the threat of removal from a state) does not necessarily exclude migrants physically, but instead includes them socially, under conditions of protracted vulnerability. There is debate in the anthropological literature about whether deportable migrants are abject or autonomous subjects and whether deportability leads to health disadvantages or effective coping strategies. The economic hardships and anxieties that deportable migrants endure can manifest as illness and become visibly embodied as scars, tumors, etc. While active participation in collectives (religious groups, social movements, etc.) can be a way for deportable migrants to transcend abjection, there is also evidence that negative effects of deportability extend to migrants who are legally settled or even to children and spouses who are citizens of the host country. We invite contributions that address (but are not limited to) the following topics: experiences of structural violence among deportable migrants and citizens; spirituality and resistance to deportability; deportability and health in diaspora families; surviving/recovering from deportability.