Thanks to Dorothea Hilhorst, IHSA President, for her agreement to publish this speech.
- 1 See Michel Agier, 2011.
1A few years ago, after seven years of investigations in refugee camps mainly in Africa, I could not imagine a better way to give a generic meaning and horizon to these ethnographic situations than by designing the dystopya of a world organization, fictitious certainly but nevertheless only composed of real facts. This fiction was made of an official and visible world, and another one remaining invisible, although its existence would not be totally ignored. Behind very high walls, barriers and across long stretches of deserts and seas, forests and camps, some charitable organizations would be responsible for keeping these remnants alive, alarming permanently about their distress… Sometimes people come into the “world” for short stays. They enter and exit through narrow corridors, filtered by cameras, finger scanners, weapons and virus detectors. Those who succeed to go throw spend the day working in the works of building, maintaining and cleaning the cities of the “world” and their houses and inhabitants, before going back to their enclosure… This fiction appears in the Introduction of my work on the ethnography of refugees’ camps1.
2Then I gave up on this fiction, having the sad impression of building a dystopia without inventing anything, or almost nothing, just putting together several scattered observations. My investigations in the refugee, undocumented and displaced persons camps and encampements led me to conclusions that were quite close.
3“Everything happens as if” the imaginations of this world divided between desired and protected lives on the one hand, desserving a good life, receiving recognition and identity, and on the other hand undesirable and voiceless populations, was seeking to achieve a dystopia.
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- 2 See Karen Akoka and Aubépine Dahan, 2021. Translations from French to English in the text have been (...)
4Various notions exist to discribe the “wasted lives” (Zygmunt Bauman), “stateless” persons (Hannah Arendt) lincked with “human superfluity” (Arendt and philosopher Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp), or the “supernumeraries” (Mike Davis or, again, Bauman). That is to say, people in excess in general, humanity in excess. About excess, note that the repeated destructions of nearly 70 street encampments since 2015 in Paris can be analysed now as a “mise en scène” of an excess population: their deportation is supposed to demonstrate that there is no available place for them, therefore that they are in excess, overnumerary2. How to name this repeated image of a supernumerary population? How to consider it or not? We need to complicate the description and complexify the conception of this condition, with dimensions in the same time spatial, social, emotional and political.
- 3 See the web site of Critical lexicon of political concepts, URL : http://www.politicalconcepts.org/ (...)
5I suggest we need now a concept, a political concept, that is to say, considered as a key-notion to understand imaginary and practice of the political3, based on history and anthropology, to design this condition within the global context of world-politcs and humanitarian intervention.
6This condition is much more than a socioeconomic or institutional category, we speak symbolically of another “world” (or “rest of the world” as in my fiction). It is directly or undirectly “racialized” (skeans, bodies and appearences as defining essentially and absolutly undesirability); it is kept away by various political and logistical means. It is polluted and dangerous. We know now after covid-19 crisis, that imunity goes together with security and reinforces the fear of others, near or far others. But now, today, security plus imunity are stronger and enough to reinforce borders, and can even exempt the use of humanitarian rhetoric.
- 4 See the web site of Forensic Architecture, URL : https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/th (...)
7I’ll give a brief example of this, precisely dated. In the first days of March 2020, against a background of confused concern about the cross-border spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and the simultaneous repetition of official comments and images of intrusion of migrants into Europe, all fears seemed to come together in a constricted space-time. What happened then was a very quick outburst of hyper-security measures against migrants. In early March 2020, when Turkey cynically threatened to let “millions of refugees” pass to Greece because Europe was not helping it in its conflict with Syria, European leaders gave up all restraint in their official comments about migrants, in which the humanitarian argument (usally presented as a nuance or as a justification in previous decades) had completely disappeared: “the border is closed, go away”, “the migrants put themselves in danger” if they take one more step, Greece is the “shield” of Europe, we have heard from Greeck and European leaders, putting more barriers and police front to these few thousand refugees wandering at its gates (less than 10,000, and not the “million” as announced by Turkey a few weeks earlier). At the risk of “letting them die” (retaking famous foucaldian words), when not “letting them get killed”. This was shown by a careful investigation by the Forensic Architecture group which was able to prove that on March 4th, live ammunition had been fired against the migrants at the Greek border: seven of them had been injured and one killed, Muhammad Gulzar, from Greek police or army shootings4.
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8We have to take in account, of course the growing number of refugees, internally displaced persons, clandestine migrants, asylum seakers or stateless persons (that is to say more than 80 million individuals nowadays, according to UNHCR), and more especially their perenisation as a “systemic” position in the world. We have to think with the perenity of this supposed exception and in the same time with the growing brutality of the political that produces it.
9Significantly, on the recent period, some historians began to investigate the history of the word “undesirable” questionning it as a “category of public action”. The historian Emmanuel Blanchard (2013) shows that the expression qualifies successively “the ‘nomads’ (gypsies) of the years 1910-1920, the Jews of the 1930-1940s and then the Algerians of the 1950-1960s” (p. 17). Quite systematically, the camp, or more generally the sidelining, are associated with this identification. The term appears in common vocabulary and in administrative and political discourses (in the 20’s and 30’s) in association with migration and racial issues and with the status of foreigner. In this period, the term became, says Blanchard, “euphemistic, avoiding having to resort to explicitly racial categories” (p. 20). In 1939, “undesirable” will designate the Spanish Republican refugees, who will be that year, for the most part of them, placed in camps in the South of France. For historian Aurélie Audeval (2013) this category comes up again and again in administrative archives in the 1930s and 1940s in decrees, circulars and other documents as, she says, a “real obsession of public authorities” without giving any clear definition (in terms of nationality, religion, etc.) (p. 17).
10More recently, since the 90’s, the term is mobilized in migration studies and urban studies. In both cases, it refers to the “regrouping of undesirable populations, which are thus sidelined” (Estebanez, Raad, 2016, p.7). In the context of urban “gentrification”, social control, security policies, police repression against minorities, criminalization of the homeless, and eviction of unwanted people are part of urbanization project, and more widely of “urban pacification”. Undesirabilty is then defined as essentially a question of policing public space, “urban ordering”. Geographers Jean Estebanez and Lina Raad bring together migration and urban studies to defend the idea that “Undesirability is not an intrinsic property of the people who are thus qualified, but the result of an assignment to identity: it is the relations of domination that produce undesirable people and constantly contribute to redefine them” throw forms of “Illegitimacy, deviance or stigma” in concrete and practical situations (Ibid., p. 9). Making a bridge between history and sociology of sidelining undesirables, Marc Bernardot links the two criteria of nuisance and threat, and the two points of view of “state security” and “public order” (2005). Therefore, undesirables are as much “foreigners whose presence on the territory is considered a threat” as “nationals whom the apprehension essentialized by the authorities or public opinion, presents as ‘suspects’”.
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11Of course, social scientist, politist and philosophers have already another important concept, that of subalternity. Actually, undesirability has much to do with the subalternity that Gayatri Spivak talks about. In fact, undesirables are the result of the same “epistemic violence” as that through which, according to Spivak, Europe imagined the extreme radicality of “the other” as subalterns in the guise of the “colonial subject” (2009, p. 27). Both are political and relative definitions, and depends on the contexts and circumstances which generate these categories of public policies.
12The view and knowledge carried by dominant Europe on and about “other” territories and populations have been formed over the centuries of conquest, colonization, exploitation and maintaining apart. In the succesion of these words, one can see that desire (with conquest, colonisation) and rejection (with exclusion, maintaining apart) are in a permanent tension as two different forms of a same principle of domination.
13This epistemology creates in these past dominations, the most radical “other” at the lower limit of humanity: the slave body and colonial subject first. Then it renews him/her in the present domination, that is, the racial subject of the apartheid and the postcolonial migrant or refugee of nowadays. After that, expanding to the bodies of all undesirables generically in the global world.
14Yet undesirability has a distinct meaning because a separate space and therefore a separate social life are supposed to correspond to this ideological (dis)qualification. See, at the level of the governance of territories and population, the bantustan (separate pseudo “country”, creation of apartheid) or the senzala (group habitation of rural slaves in Brazil in 16th-19th centuries), compared with slavery or apartheid in general. They embodie pure social/spatial distancing together with the more violent work force exploitation. Undesirability (anthropological, spatial and political position) may coexist then or alternate with subalternity (economical and sociological position) in the life of the same persons.
15The concept of undesirable tells us more about those who name than those who are so named. And you don’t have to use the term to mean it. The violence of migration policies, the brutality that accompanies the discourses and practices of the treatment of foreigners stopped at the borders, are sufficient to worry anthropology… the brutality of politics nowadays and in general is a sign of an increasing risk for the life of undesirable persons.
16I wish now to conclude with a last question. Why this discussion, which gives very few consideration to the humanitarian intervention itself? First, to propose a form of decentring from the usual conception of humanitarianism as a response to vulnerability, and pointing then that the spaces and actions in name of vulnerability actually are or always may be a form of government of undesirables, when we situate this necessary reflexivity in its permanent and political context.
17Secondly, if desire is an energy turned towards others and the world, helping to build the Subject (in lacanian thought), undesirability refers to emotions of disgust, rejection and fear of the others. The fear to be transformed by the presence of undesirable intruders legitimates their confinment apart, and grows with the growing articulation of imunity with security.
18This politic of non-desire leads to the question of borders and their false evidence. For the anthropologist, it is about understanding how and in what contexts borders between humans are constructed, deconstructed, displaced, changed.
19Finally, this reflexion leads the political question, by paraphrasing and diverting the words of Gayatri Spivak (who questioned if “subalterns can speak?”), and by situating it in the humanitarian context or more generally in the contemporary world: “Can undesirables speak?”.
20Even as undesirables, their proper desire towards the world make then possible subjects of their life and politics.