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Bonus: Refuge, Refusal, Rights

In this episode, we share a conversation with Dr. Lamis Abdelaaty and Dr. Rebecca Hamlin about refugee status in policy and in discourse, and more broadly about the categories and labels we use to talk about migration. We talked to Lamis and Rebecca last fall on Cornell’s campus after an event where they presented from their new books.

With this episode, we’re rounding out our season on waiting. Thank you for listening as we have reflected on experiences of limbo from the U.S.-Mexico border, to the Underground Railroad, to Palestinian camps, to Tibetan exile here in Ithaca, NY. Limbo and questions of time haunt nearly every conversation about border crossing and asylum. You’ll hear some of that nuance in our conversation today.

Guests

Links

Refuge, Refusal, Rights: A Conversation with Lamis Abdelaaty and Rebecca Hamlin in fall 2021

Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move by Rebecca Hamlin

Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees by Lamis Abdelaaty

Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, Volume 20, Issue 2 (2022) edited with an introduction by Lamis Abdelaaty and Rebecca Hamlin

Transcript

Eleanor Paynter  00:05

Welcome to Migrations: A World on the Move, a series brought to you by Cornell University's Migrations initiative. I'm Eleanor Paynter, postdoctoral associate in Migrations and your host for this podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it. In this episode, I'm thrilled to share a conversation with Dr. Lamis Abdelaaty and Dr. Rebecca Hamlin about refugee status in policy and in discourse, and more broadly about the categories and labels we use to talk about migration.

We spoke with Lamis and Rebecca last fall on Cornell's campus after an event where they presented from their new books. Lamis Abdelaaty is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees from Oxford University Press. And Rebecca Hamlin is the author of Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move out of Stanford University Press. Both our guests in this episode are doing work that offers insights into historical responses to asylum seeking, and that feels especially timely. We continue to see headlines about restrictive policies, debates about how governments determine who deserves humanitarian protection, and what happens to those deemed undeserving. I'm thinking about the UK’s recent attempt to outsource asylum processing to Rwanda and ongoing debates in the US about policies implemented during the pandemic, like Title 42, and questions of who should be allowed to cross from Mexico.

You can also learn more about debates around the category of the refugee in a new special issue of the Journal of immigrant & Refugee Studies, co-edited by Rebecca and Lamis. This special issue takes up the politics of the migrant/refugee binary, and is very tied to these questions of status recognition, deservingness, and rhetoric about migration and mobility. Writing for the special issue is actually how I first connected with our guests. It's a rich set of articles, including the introduction written by Rebecca and Lamis, and we’ll link to it in our show notes. We’ll also link there to the Cornell event where they presented.

With this episode, we're rounding out our season on waiting. Thank you for listening as we've reflected on experiences of limbo from the U.S.-Mexico border, to the Underground Railroad, to Palestinian camps, to Tibetan exile here in Ithaca, New York. Limbo and questions of time haunt nearly every conversation about border crossing and asylum. You'll hear some of that nuance in this conversation.

Lamis Abdelaaty  02:45

Hi, I'm Lamis Abdelaaty. I'm an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. I specialize in international refugee politics and my research uses a variety of methods to try to investigate three themes. I have work on refugee rights and policy, including a book which we're going to be talking about in a little bit. I have some research on individual attitudes towards refugees. And then my forthcoming book, which is the third theme that I have been working on, is about global refugee crises—what constitutes a refugee crisis and how the designation of a situation as a refugee crisis shapes the behavior of state and non-state actors with consequences for refugees.

Rebecca Hamlin  03:36

Hi, I'm Rebecca Hamlin. I'm an associate professor of political science and legal studies at UMass Amherst. And my work has looked a lot at the concept of a refugee, the ways in which people are assessed for fit with the refugee definition/refugee status determination. And I'm working on two current projects related to this theme of migration. One is looking at admissions or border/bordering practices to try to screen out human rights violators and war criminals—so the perpetrators so to speak—looking at the hardest cases of the people we might all agree should be kept out, and how messy and complicated those practices are. And then my other project is looking at mobility, migration, and indigeneity. And it's much more of a historical project looking at the United States as a settler/colonialist state.

Eleanor Paynter  04:44

Thanks so much. You both focus on the uses of particular categories of movement and their implications for border crossers. (And here I'm very intentionally adopting a term that Rebecca, that you introduce in your book, which I'm finding very useful in my own work.) So, thinking about using particular categories, how this affects how we understand movement, how we think about people on the move, and also to think about migration and asylum regimes more broadly. So, you also both incorporate historical perspectives in your work. But I want to start with a question about the present. So why are questions of categories and labels so important—now, in this particular moment?

Rebecca Hamlin  05:31

I think categories and labels are extremely important in the current moment, because they've come to serve as a shorthand for how much care and consideration different types of people who are crossing borders should get. And so, on the one hand, we have legal categories that are the official legal definitions of terms that some—for visa categories—that some people may qualify for and others may not. But when we think about the way in which these terms are deployed in regular parlance, in public debate and media coverage, in advocacy circles… they're used much more sociologically. They're used in ways that don't necessarily match the exact legal definitions that are attached to those phrases. And they're used in ways that serve as a shorthand to really imply that some people are deserving, and others are not. And so, I think that's why I've honed in on the use of labels and categories in my work.

Eleanor Paynter  06:44

And could you give a couple of examples of some of these… your questioning of some of these labels.

Rebecca Hamlin  06:50

So very often, we'll hear people say, call people ‘migrants,’ and do that purposefully to try to articulate the fact that they're not refugees. And so, this is done in a way. And it's become something that's explicitly discussed in Europe (and I talk about this in my book), but it’s something that's been debated in Europe, in terms of what labels we should use; and it's gone back and forth; and media outlets have been pressured to use the word ‘refugees’ instead of the word ‘migrants’ to describe people coming across the Mediterranean during the latest set of arrivals. And the BBC, for example, responded by saying no, we're going to use the word ‘migrant’ because it is an umbrella category. But it's very clear in the way that these debates play out that it's not often understood as an umbrella category, it's often understood as the other side of the coin as a ‘not refugee.’ And so, this is where UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, has gotten involved with their Words Matter campaign, where they've said, it matters that we call these people refugees, because that calling them refugees is in and of itself a form of advocacy.

Lamis Abdelaaty  08:15

And I want to sort of push back against the question a little bit, because I think that this question of categories and labels has always been important, right? I don't know whether it's more important now. Or maybe it's important in a different way. You know? I'm not certain, but I know that it's a question that's new to many people, because there are many people who only began paying attention to these kinds of issues with the 2015 movement of large numbers of people into Europe. Right. But as Rebecca points out in her book, right, there's a much longer history to these labels and categories. And so, I think, in my research, it seems like that there are various countries around the world that have been very strategic and very savvy in their use of these labels and categories. (In previous eras, right?) And so, you know, one of the things that I that I do in the book is I have a statistical analysis that looks at refugee status, trying to see why countries delegate decision-making on asylum applications to the UN, and why countries accept or reject individual applicants. And I basically find each government varies its treatment of asylum applicants over time, depending on the origin and the identity of these refugees. And this really sort of hammers home the implication that the granting of refugee status is a political act and I think it’s always been a political act.

Eleanor Paynter  09:48

I think that… thank you. I mean, your answer makes me think also that one of the… both your answers really are reminders that cultural memory can be very short. And so, thinking about the ‘why now?’ question is, as you say Lamis, it's also a reminder that thinking about the ways that we talk about migration—I'm shifting into this question of crisis, too, that we think about crisis, meaning that migrants are suddenly or people are suddenly arriving to the borders as if this hasn’t happened before, as if we haven’t had to deal with these issues before, as if there is no history to turn back to for guidance or perspective on what's happening—and I think your answer is a real call to actually to turn to history to understand that these aren't new questions, even if they are being asked in contexts that are maybe constantly changing, as the world changes.

You both also mentioned the end of asylum. And I think this is why maybe the question of now seems especially pertinent for people who are really invested in this moment as potentially marking the end of asylum regimes. And I think… so, there are claims being made that because of border closures or increasing deportations, or increasingly restrictive border policies—I mean, we can think immediately about the U.S.-Mexico border about the Mediterranean Sea, but of course, these are not the only examples we could or should be citing in these cases—that because of this, perhaps asylum itself, or the figure of the “refugee,” if I can use scare quotes, is under threat. And you both in your books, talk about… you address this. But I think also, and I'm wondering if this is fair to say, that you sort of question this (this discourse) at least by saying that it's certainly perhaps more complicated than just the end of asylum—that there's a lot more going on in the dynamics behind what's happening to asylum and what's happening to our understanding of borders and rights. I wondered if you wanted to comment on that.

Lamis Abdelaaty  11:59

I think Eleanor, that is a that is a fair characterization of my book, at least. I don't want to speak sort of on Rebecca’s behalf. But yeah, I think one of the things that I push back against in the book is, I push back against this notion at the ‘end of asylum,’ and I push back against the sort of another strand in the literature, which is the ‘losing control’ strand, right? So there's, there's work on this notion that countries are sort of uniformly putting their foot down when it comes to population flows, and that, that our refugee, you know, the international refugee protection regime is being eroded. In that, you know, that there’s sort of this gradual deterioration in countries’ respect for the rights of refugees. So that's one strand of the literature. And then there's another literature that's about countries under siege from globalizing forces, they’re under siege from large population movements, so that governments are unable to “hold back the tide” in scare quotes, as it were, that countries are facing no choice but to admit people, etc.

And I think… in the book, I’m arguing against both of these trends, that what we're seeing when we look at empirical patterns in the ways that governments treat refugees, we're not seeing the end of asylum and we're also not seeing states losing control. What we're seeing is, and this is, in the title of my book, is we're seeing discrimination. Right. We're seeing some refugee groups being treated well, and other groups being treated, treated poorly. And I think that these sort of broad-brush narratives, and our tendency to want to characterize each state as having a single asylum regime, you know, brushes over all of the nuance and all of the complexity that actually characterizes different refugees’ experiences on the ground. Right. And we even see this, you know, in the United States, where when the Trump administration—which is, for good reason regarded as, you know, an administration that took a much harder line when it came to immigration and refugee rights—admitted some refugees, right, and was especially committed to admitting Christian refugees over other groups. So, I think it's important to keep in mind that really…that the story is much more complex.

Rebecca Hamlin  14:37

So, I guess my response to this question is to say that it very much resonates with me that we need to get away from a presentist mindset that focuses on characterizing the current moment as an unprecedented moment in refugee history. A lot of the work that I’ve been frustrated by, and that I have in mind when I’m writing my… when I wrote this book, was work that sort of starts out by saying there's more displaced people in the world than ever before in human history—and then… if they cite anything to support that claim, it's going to be the statistics of UNHCR—and we actually don't know that that is true. (Or sometimes they say, since World War II.)  But…these statistics are only accurate if we ignore a lot of displacements that are going to remain uncounted and unaccounted for in human history, right? We actually don't know how many people / if today would be the most displaced in human history, if we were to have actually ever considered people displaced—for example, by partition of India and Pakistan, as refugees, they were not ever counted as part of those numbers; people displaced by the drawing of colonial boundaries in Africa and other places; people, indigenous people displaced by settler colonialism. We don't have accurate records on that. And so, it often, because it's not in the record, doesn't get told as part of the story. So that is something that I'm really trying to push hard against in the book.

Who does it serve to say that this is an unprecedented moment for displacement? It's done, by some people, to work us up into a frenzy of panic. And I think climate change displacement is going to fall victim to this exact type of rhetoric as well, like ‘they're coming’ and that's why we should care about climate change, right? That's not why we should care about climate change. And anyway, they're…most people are going to be displaced in their regions. But the other side of the coin is people who try to invoke these unprecedented numbers in order to try to get sympathy to raise money to help, but I'm increasingly feeling that they inadvertently also feed into this panic and crisis narrative. So, I'm concerned about the way that the numbers are being used.

Eleanor Paynter  17:24

This is, your sort of gesturing to the idea that people on the move are positioned as either criminal or threatening, or as super vulnerable. And either way, it can, as you say, feed this panic. I want to now get a little bit more into your books. And so, I'll turn to Lamis first. Your work really exemplifies how a comparative approach can illuminate nuances and reveal broader trends. You observe this by looking at, as your title says, discrimination and delegation across several countries, and as you articulate, what you term, the selective use of sovereignty. So, I wondered if you could talk about, really in broad terms, what your comparisons across these cases you take up, specifically of Egypt, Turkey, and Kenya, what these comparisons enable us to better understand about state responses to refugees.

Lamis Abdelaaty  18:23

Thank you, Eleanor. That's a great question. So let me first of all clarify or maybe talk a little bit about why it is that I selected these three cases—Egypt, Turkey, and Kenya. Part of my concern, as I was starting this project, and really one of the sort of initial obstacles that I ran up against is that most of the literature that we have that looks at immigration and asylum policy is focused on the global north—and really a handful of countries within the global north, right? But, that's not where most of the world's refugees reside. Right? And so, I think part of my motivation for the project was really trying to shed light on asylum policies in the countries that are actually hosting most of the world's refugees. Right. And we, I think we should always take UNHCR statistics with a grain of salt for various reasons that Rebecca just hinted at, but UNHCR tells us that 85% of the world's refugees live in developing countries. Right. And so, part of what I'm trying to do in the book is really try to reorient our attention, right, towards those places where, again, you know, if we're interested in the ways that refugees are treated, then we should be looking at the places where most refugees live, right, especially if we're trying to come up with, you know, generalizable statements or trying to come up with a broad understanding.

So, I chose Egypt, Turkey, and Kenya for various reasons that are outlined in the book. But one thing that’s sort of useful about this comparison is that they’re three very, very different countries, right? They’re very different in terms of their regime type. They’re different in terms of their economic performance. And they’re also very different in terms of their responses to refugees. So, for example, Egypt, through the entire period that I'm studying, never establishes refugee camps. Kenya adopts a strict encampment policy for all refugees on its territory starting in the early 1990s. In Turkey, it occasionally establishes refugee camps for some refugee groups. Right. So, we're comparing three countries that are very, very different from each other. But I think what's useful, or part of what's useful about this comparison is that when I find similar patterns across three very different countries, that allows me to at least speculate that similar patterns may operate elsewhere, as well, beyond these countries.

And so in the book, I basically argue that if we want to understand discrimination and delegation, right, why does the country treat different refugee groups kind of differently? And why is it that countries sometimes outsource asylum policy to the UN? We need to be paying attention to foreign policy and ethnic identity; we need to be paying attention to relations between the country that's receiving refugees and the country those refugees are coming from; and we need to pay attention to whether policymakers in a refugee-receiving country perceive refugees as ethnic kin. And in some cases, incentives coming from these two factors will lead policymakers to be more inclusive towards a certain group or more restrictive towards a certain refugee group.

And then, in other cases, conflicting incentives will lead them to delegate to the UN as a way to avoid antagonizing refugee-sending countries or domestic constituencies. I think looking at the three countries sort of helps me elaborate this argument with a lot of very specific, detailed examples to show that there really are differences in the ways that a single government will treat different refugee groups and to show, drawing on evidence from archives and evidence from interviews, that these differences in treatment a) do seem to stem from sort of these foreign policy and ethnic identity concerns, but b) have very serious and real consequences for the experiences of refugees themselves on the ground. Does that answer your question?

Eleanor Paynter  22:50

Yeah, thanks. That’s great, really helpful to think about…also, the possibilities that are opened up by this kind of comparative work as a sort of broader point. I'll turn to you now, then, Rebecca. Like Lamis, you're observing significant state-level variation and refugee status determination. (You also brought this up a little bit earlier in our conversation.) You're thinking about this as shedding light on how deservingness functions, how it operates in these decisions, and how it affects people in the move in our understanding of migration, border crossing. So, could you describe deservingness, kind of define deservingness, and talk about how it operates differently for different groups? I'm really interested in this concept as a way of thinking about both how these decisions affect individual people, and also how they operate discursively in broader publics or by state actors to sort of conceptualize who deserves asylum or who doesn't or… Yeah, I'll let you define it for us.

Rebecca Hamlin  24:04

It's, I mean, it's such a fascinating question and a big question, but I'll do my best. I think that on the one hand, there are people who would say, we don't have to assess individual’s deservingness because the definitions already exist. And so, all we're doing is assessing fit with the definitions. And the work has already been done to lay out the definition that will qualify people or not for protection or residency, or whatever is being offered at that state. So, there's definitely people who would, sort of, I guess, I would call a positivist outlook, that like deservingness, and debates about deservingness have been sidelined because the legal definitions exist and we just have to rely on them and do this processing that's quite bureaucratic. And then, I guess my intervention into this is that it's much more complicated than that. And that even for people who are engaging in the process of individualized assessment with a refugee definition—there's something I talk about a lot more in my first book, Let Me Be a Refugee, than I do in this book—there's a certain performance that is expected, right, a performance of a very particular type of suffering that people are trying to present to a decision maker in order to make, whatever their very complicated life experience and life story is, legible to people who are using this lens of refugee definition.

What I talk about much more in the second book, in Crossing, is the way in which these categories and concepts are deployed to sort of paint whole massive groups of people as deserving or undeserving, by almost giving them the status or not, using words as we describe them. And that is something that these words ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ carry with a lot of weight around deservingness. When you choose to refer to someone as a refugee, you are, in many ways, trying to say that they have a compelling case for being able to stay in this country, and when you choose to refer to someone as a migrant, you're implying that they do not have a compelling case.

And this gets very, you know, in the weeds about, you know, what types of suffering the traditional international definition of a refugee has enshrined. But it's a very liberal way, it’s a very liberal framework, that assumes that the prototypical refugee is going to be someone who is ideologically persecuted, persecuted for some aspect of their identity that they can't change. It's highly individualized. And it's highly liberal in a classical sense. It privileges civil and political rights above all others, and it really doesn't provide a lot of space for thinking about economic forces as forces that compel people to move, or the forces of our climate as forces that compel people to move.

But even thinking about these things as separate strands, as saying there's politically motivated people, economically motivated people, and climate motivated people, misunderstands what's going on, because in so many cases, these strands are intertwined and feed into and affect one another. And so, just to get back to your original question about deservingness, it is a shorthand that is not one that, in my view, accurately helps us to understand which people may be abjectly suffering, which people may have no other choice but to move and to bring their family with them. And so, it's an insidious shorthand. It's not just a shorthand, it's one that actually does a lot of damage by painting so many people as sort of automatically undeserved.

Eleanor Paynter  28:24

Yeah, and it makes me think about how people themselves, who are applying for asylum, then have to figure out how to tell their stories in ways that will align with authorities’ understandings of this kind of deservingness, that are in alignment with the definitions in ways that may not come naturally to people because it doesn't necessarily match how they even label groups in their home countries or understand certain dynamics. And I'm thinking, and I wonder if this resonates with both of you, I'm thinking about, in my own work with people who have come from many different countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and made their way through Libya, and then crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. They may have left their home countries years ago. And then for them, the immediate reason that they feel that they need protection by the Italian state or by somebody in Europe is because they had to get out of Libya, and for many of them, getting on a boat was really their only, the only, option available to them. And you know, then they risked their lives crossing the sea, and we don't have a way of recognizing that. Or it gets very complicated to do so because they're meant, then, to talk about why they left their original country, home country, country of origin.

Rebecca Hamlin  29:44

I mean, I was… my mind went to a place that I had actually flagged earlier in our conversation to come back to in regards to this question of the end of asylum, which I don't think I talked about yet. But you know, in some ways, there are so many people who are now not even given the opportunity to try to present their case, even the chance to try to tell their story and to make it fit with the definition. Right. There's [sic] actually more and more incredibly elaborate efforts being made by Global North, wealthy countries to prevent people from even being able to access those processes and make those claims. And I think maybe here is a slight difference between some of the Global South states that Lamis is studying in her book, who may not have the capacity to keep people at arm's length, and Global North states, which are able to invest extremely heavily in what many people are called ‘exporter externalization.’

Because those people aren't, are never given a chance. People who are being kept away from countries that do offer refugee status determination as an individualized process (to people who are able to get their feet on the land) are being increasingly kept away. And I don't know how close that gets us to the end of asylum, but I do think, you know, Lamis’ point about this not being a uniform global trend, but rather an uneven one, is absolutely right. I think it is showing up more among the countries that can afford to do so. They can afford to try to keep people at arm's length, which of course, puts an extra burden on the global—and I hate using that word burden, because people shouldn't be described as burdens—but it places a huge cost on countries in the Global South who end up doing a great deal more hosting, because massive amounts of money are being spent to keep people away.

Lamis Abdelaaty  31:56

So I just wanted to follow up on something that Rebecca just mentioned. I think, even though I generally agree with your point, Rebecca, I think we should also be careful in thinking about questions of capacity and distinctions between Global North and Global South countries. Because I think there is a sort of a generally accepted narrative that countries in the Global South, you know, they lack capacity, they have no choice but to admit large numbers of refugees, that they're generally sort of at the international community's mercy. And that, you know, it has some truth to it. But I think it's also important to recognize that within countries of the Global South, some of these governments are extremely powerful and are able to exercise a very large degree of control over refugee experiences and over the ways that UNHCR operates on their territory, right. So even a country like, and I discussed this in my book, even a country like Kenya, a low income country, you know, with long, porous borders, with a civil war sort of on the other side of the border, etc. That's a country that's still able to exercise a large degree of control to determine what sorts of rights refugees on its territory are going to be able to access; to determine where it is that they're going to live; to determine what UNHCR will and will not be able to do. Right. So, I think it's important to keep in mind that question. (This is not, sort of, disagreeing. Right. This is just sort of adding additional nuance. Yeah.) It’s that even in countries of the Global South, there is still that, there's sufficient capacity, right, for governments to still discriminate amongst different refugee groups.

And I think one of the reasons that I push back against this end of asylum claim is that I think that even in countries in the Global North, right, we might be able to say that there is, that we're moving towards the end of asylum as a general trend, but I think, even in cases where countries have worked on sort of externalization, and remote control, and on trade regimes, etc., there are still some refugee groups that are treated better than others. Right. There're still some groups that are, I hesitate to use the term, privileged, right, because even those who are treated relatively better are still not treated as well as we might desire. But, you know, we've seen various countries in Europe decide that Syrian refugees were more deserving than Afghan refugees, for example. Right. So, I think I would just want to emphasize that, you know, these kinds of generalizations can be useful. But I think it's also interesting and valuable to kind of dig in and think about the nuance and the ways that different, that you know, and this is really what I focus on in the book, is that there's refugee groups-specific variation. It's really interesting to look at.

Rebecca Hamlin  35:08

I think that's such a helpful intervention and clarification. So, thank you for saying that. I think it's, to me, it's particularly disturbing or shocking when you see the vast amounts of money, like vast amounts of money that wealthy states spend, to keep many, many people at arm's length and then still reserve the right to handpick and selectively admit others. That juxtaposition, you know, I think strengthens/helps to show how your argument is, in many ways applicable outside of the Global South to Global North countries as well, who are also engaging directly in discrimination. But yeah, it's also just disturbing because it shows that they can be generous if they choose to be, right, but they're just being very, very selective about when and how and maintaining control over the situation.

Lamis Abdelaaty  36:05

100% and I think it relates to Eleanor's work on, sort of, conceptions of crisis, right, that really—I mean, this is something that I'm interested in for my next project—but you know, when we talk about a crisis, who is it a crisis for? Right, when, you know, the world's largest, like, wealthiest economic bloc with a huge population is confronted by 1 million people, is that truly a crisis? For them? Right? For the Europeans? For the EU?

Eleanor Paynter  36:40

Yeah, I would love to hear more about this next project. Obviously, I'm super invested in these questions. But it seems to me that it is largely these movements that, again, don't represent the majority of border crossings, but they get framed as a crisis. When we talked earlier in this conversation about, sort of, historical erasure and short cultural memory, and all of that, to me, feeds into the production of crisis, or the pervasive notion that certain people represent a crisis, their presence causes a crisis, or even their approach represents a threat to national security or a threat to cultural ways of life. I wonder if you both also want to weigh in on how crisis is operating?

Let me say we’d love to hear how you’re thinking about it for your book.

Lamis Abdelaaty  37:34

So, um, so this book is at sort of… it's very, very initial stages. But I think there's a lot that you're saying, Eleanor, that really rings true to me, One of the things that was just so frustrating to me was how the Syrian war became a crisis in 2015, when people started approaching Europe, and not in 2011, when large numbers of people were moving to neighboring countries. Right. That it, you know, if—I know that you're you Eleanor interested in sort of questioning whether the term crisis itself is even a term that we ought to be using. But you know—if there was a crisis, maybe it's a crisis for the Syrians first, and then after the Syrians, maybe it's a crisis for Lebanon, and for Turkey; long before it, sort of, becomes this European crisis. And it’s also like, it’s interesting to me how the explosion of research on refugees that took place after 2015, so within my own field of political science, right, that people, that again, like this only becomes a subject that is worthy of study once it starts impacting countries of the Global North, right. So, that’s something that I’ve long been frustrated with.

But I think for my next project, what I’m aiming to do is, I'm aiming to, to the extent that I'm able, right, if my skills are able to carry me that far, is I really want to interrogate this conception of crisis. And I'd like to take, sort of, a really kind of interdisciplinary view and think about sort of representations of prices, including artistic, sort of, representations. And then we will try to think about what happens when we privilege the experiences of refugees rather than the experiences of a host countries. Right? Does our conception of crisis change when we think, when we sort of center and prioritize refugee experiences, because insofar as there is a crisis, it was a crisis first and foremost for the refugees themselves. Right.

So, for this next book, which again, is sort of very initial stages…Part of it, I think, is going to focus on this this notion of conceptions of crisis and trying to reorient our attention towards refugee experiences versus host country experiences. And then also trying to think about how designating, I said this earlier, how designating a situation as a crisis changes the behavior of donors, changes the behavior of UNHCR, you know, changes the behavior of potential resettlement countries, right? So, it's really kind of looking at this question of why we designate certain situations as crises and not others, and what the effect of this designation of crisis is, for all of these different actors, and then the consequences, obviously, for refugees.

Eleanor Paynter  40:46

That's fascinating. I'm really, I would love to stay in conversation with you about that.

Lamis Abdelaaty  40:52

We…I would love to have a long conversation with you because I think that you've been thinking about these questions for much longer than I have.

Eleanor Paynter  40:58

Your comment reminds me too—and this, I was thinking that this is probably also historically the case—but of course, crises don't happen on their own. And we've seen in this recent moment that, you know, so called border crises or migration crises coincide with a pandemic, global health crisis, and many others, you know, climate crisis. So, I think it's also really, really important to be thinking through these questions because they will shed light on how we understand the relationship between all of these different phenomena that are really shaping the world right now. So yeah, I look forward to continuing that conversation with you. Rebecca, did you want to comment on the question of crisis?

Rebecca Hamlin  41:42

I think this is where I find like intersectional feminist scholarship to be so helpful because they help, people like Bell Hooks and other feminist scholars, have helped me to remember the people aren’t the crisis. It’s the structures and institutions that place people in crisis that are the crisis, right? It’s the long, historically embedded power imbalances in the world that have led to these crises; and thinking about crisis as a structural issue, rather than the individual people who may find themselves in distress and reframing the crisis as one that's, like deep, structurally and deeply embedded; and unfortunately, they are for much more difficult to fix…than the way that we often think about crisis, which is like this individual in front of me is in crisis. I can give them a tent. I can give them food. But the crisis is so much deeper and broader than that. And for some reason, I find that helpful, even though it's incredibly depressing.

Eleanor Paynter  42:53

It is helpful, but it's, it's so hard because that means that if the crisis is structural or institutional, then to address the crisis means we need structural change, we need systemic, something more drastic. We do need

Rebecca Hamlin  43:10

Unfortunately or fortunately. But we do need it. How many structures need to be examined for their role in creating crises?

Eleanor Paynter  43:21

So for this, I'm just going to shift to a last question and then we can also take a minute if there are things that we didn't get to, but I wanted to make time for this last question to see if you're interested in going there, because we're thinking in this second podcast season about WAITING, which I mean in many different ways. So, in a broad sense, it's a way of thinking about how questions of time, power, and agency all shape people's experiences of border crossing, and also might help us, in a way, how focusing on migration and mobility help us understand also bigger questions of the intersections of power and time.

So I'm thinking both about, we've been talking today about, in a way, discourses of urgency, in a sense. And so, we could think about the urgency that an individual feels or that we impose on a on a set of circumstances, through label crisis, for example. But then also questions of delay and how they operate because people are kept in limbo; because we're waiting for laws to change; because we want revolution or structural reform. And so, I just wanted to offer space for you to think out loud about how questions of waiting resonate with your work, or what they make you think about differently.

Rebecca Hamlin  44:50

I mean, I feel like it's not something that is centered in my book, because I’m thinking about a lot of other things, but it’s also there on every page in a way, because there is no way to understand the process of seeking asylum or seeking refuge without understanding it as a process that creates limbo, and puts people in limbo, and in many cases, very extended experiences of precarity. It’s almost that the system is designed, like I was just saying, to create precarity and limbo. I’m certainly not the only person to have said this, or— you know, I think a lot about the anthropologist Heath Cabot, who’s written a lot about how asylum processing keeps people in limbo, and that the damage that that does—in my first book, I also talked about how just when the process is drawn out to a certain degree, you can't call it a just process, even if the outcome is just because it just… it's already done so much damage.

And I have a piece forthcoming in the BU Journal of International Law talking about how much of the damage done under the Trump administration can be unraveled and how much of it just simply can't be undone because making people wait, making people suffer is not something that you can fix even if the outcome at the end is one that is the one that they had sought because of how much pain and suffering and family separation is experienced in the meantime. Molly Fee at UCLA, I think a grad student in sociology, has written some excellent work thinking about time and refugee policy. She's someone I highly recommend. And then of course, Elizabeth Cohen, who is a colleague of Lamis’ at Syracuse, has written this great book about the politics of time and looks at immigration policymaking and she has a case study there. So, there's a lot of really great stuff out there in terms of thinking about waiting. But yes, it's undeniably such a major part of the violence that is done by these institutional structures.

Eleanor Paynter  47:01

Thanks.

Lamis Abdelaaty  47:05

So I think quite like Rebekah, it's also not a theme that I sent her in my book, but you said it so well, Rebecca, it is also on every page. When I think about the three countries that I look at, in addition to my sort of statistical analysis, and the in those three countries, Egypt, Turkey, and Kenya, basically, all of the refugee groups that I'm talking about, with the exception of like the, you know, the rare, like the rare exception that has a quick path to citizenship (like the Bulgarian Kurds in Turkey), most of the refugee groups that I'm talking about are living in countries where there's very little prospect of local integration. There's a tiny, tiny, tiny chance of resettlement. And then, there’s no way for them to safely go home. Right. So, they're all really refugee groups that are waiting for a solution. Right?

I'm thinking, for example of, sort of, the Somalis in Kenya. Right. People who have been required to live in camps for decades, right, who are not allowed to work legally in the formal labor market. The kind of forced dependency on international aid. For them, there's zero prospect of them, you know, integrating locally and becoming Kenyan citizens. A very small number of them might be resettled, but we know that globally—what's the figure? like less than 1% of the world's refugees are resettled. Right. And then in Kenya, they're constantly threatened with being sent back home, right? Every time there's an election, or, you know, there's a statement that, you know, we're gonna close down the camps and send all the Somalis back home, and they're there. So, they're really just in limbo for their entire experience of being refugees, right?

Rebecca Hamlin  48:59

And Palestinians too is another classic case, new generations of children being born in this place.

Lamis Abdelaaty  49:05

One hundred percent. So, I'm thinking about really all of the groups that I talked about in the book, right? So, there’s Palestinians in Egypt, the Sudanese in Egypt, the Somalis, the Eritreans, Ethiopians in Egypt, all of them, right. In Turkey, the Iraqis, the Afghans, right? And then in Kenya, Somalia, Sudanese right? Really, all of these refugee groups are groups that are in limbo in this way that I just described. I don't really know. I'm kind of trying to think of some positive note to end on, but I'm not really sure there is one right that it's really disheartening, but really, you know, I think that waiting is such an excellent and appropriate theme for this second season because of this, because I think it's so aptly describes the experiences of so many people around the world.

Eleanor Paynter  50:08

Thanks again for listening to our season on waiting. We're taking a summer break, but we'll be back in the fall with new episodes. To stay updated about our next season. Follow us on Twitter at @CornellMig.

Thanks for listening to Migrations: A World on The Move, a podcast produced by Global Cornell's Migrations Global Grand Challenge, a cross disciplinary multispecies initiative that studies how the movements of people, animals, microbes, resources, ideas, and more shape our world. You can learn more about the initiative at migrations.cornell.edu, where you'll also find relevant links from this episode. Follow us on Twitter @CornellMig. This podcast is hosted by Eleanor Paynter, Migrations postdoctoral associate with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and produced by Megan DeMint. Much of the podcast was produced at Cornell University on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ', the Cayuga Nation, and we recognize the nation's sovereignty and the indigenous peoples who have lived and continue to live on this land. Our music is "Basically Really" by Steve Fawcett.