240015 VO Anthropology of Forced Migration and (Im)mobility (3.2.2) (2018W)

Course description
In 2015, Europe recorded 1.190.835 first-time asylum requests. As large groups of asylum seekers moved toward Europe in the second half of the year, the media, the European Union and many European governments quickly proclaimed a 'European refugee crisis'. According to this rhetoric, the coming of refugees and immigrants would represent the suspension of the current European political order and way of life, frequently thought as a point of no return. Is Europe indeed facing a crisis and, if so, what is its nature? This course aims at illustrating the large spectrum of forces shaping the contemporary fluxes of refugees in the world. It proposes putting the so-called 'refugee crisis in Europe' in geographical and historical perspective as a means to illustrate how the anthropology of forced migration can be an effective tool to understand processes of forced migration. It will also show how forced migration has been constituted as a field in itself with its own literary tradition distinct from that of migration studies, even if the empirical phenomena analysed by these two fields often overlap in practice. It will illustrate how, when dealing with refugees and asylum seekers, mobility and immobility are two sides of the same coin, despite the overwhelming emphasis of the social sciences on mobility studies in detriment of immobility.
In line with the above, the course’s literature will tackle more specifically the following questions: a) if not in Europe, then where are the majority of the world’s refugees and refugee camps? b) is Europe at the brink of a state of exception? c) is the refugee camp a space of exception as Michel Agier suggests? d) Should we understand the refugee camp as part of a city or as a sort of 'city' or 'citadel' in itself as Agier claims? e) What is the difference between a refugee, an internally displaced person, an asylum seeker, and a migrant? f) how can we understand cases of protracted refugee, like the Palestinian, if the very essence of the concept of refugeeness is its transient character? g) What is the role of humanitarianism and humanitarian actors vis-à-vis host states and what Liisa Malkki calls 'the national order of the world'? h) what does integration mean, and is this a good concept to frame anthropological research on refugees?