The Making of Migration by Martina Tazzioli

Author:Martina Tazzioli [Tazzioli, Martina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526464040
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2019-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Antinomies of Freedom and Autonomy

Migrants who claim asylum are seen as subjects who should be available in giving away their freedom in exchange for protection. While such an account certainly clashes with the definition of the refugee enshrined in the Geneva Convention, asylum seekers are increasingly seen as the counterpart of the subject with rights. In this regard, some scholars have critically pointed to the fact that the refugee is coalesced into the figure of the victim (Ticktin, 2017). The victimisation of refugees should be situated as part of this antinomy between protection and freedom that affects those who claim asylum. However, the paradoxical opposition between freedom and protection that the state’s narrative on asylum strengthens does not concern only those who are treated as victims but, rather, refugees as such. In a similar vein to discourses on protection, freedom of movement also disappears from the narrative on refugees’ autonomy. In fact, autonomy has moved centre stage in UNHCR and NGO documents, as well as in development agencies’ discourses.

Yet, autonomy is strikingly assumed as disjoined from freedom, as it is eminently conceived in economic terms, which corresponds to the capacity of managing oneself, or better as the possibility to choose the products to buy. In particular, it is in the field of refugee governmentality that autonomy has become a catchword mobilised by states and non-state actors to designate the new frontier of humanitarianism. If the intertwining of protection and autonomy could appear as an oxymoron, the redefinition of the former in light of the latter currently represents one of the tenets of refugee politics. In practice, according to the UNHCR discourse, refugees’ autonomy is boosted through the implementation of financial tools and digital technologies. The partial autonomisation of asylum seekers from forms of humanitarian “care and control” (Pallister-Wilkins, 2015) ultimately consists of the possibility to select what to buy. In reality, the delivery of the debit cards fostered the dependence of asylum seekers on humanitarian actors and on the spatial disciplining that is imposed on them. In this regard, the subtle nexus between autonomy and vulnerability is noticeable in the odd terrain on which refugees’ autonomy is itself predicated. Indeed, de facto those migrants who are deemed to be vulnerable by the Greek authorities and who remain inside the institutional channels of the asylum – e.g. living in refugee camps – are granted faster and smoother access than others to the cash assistance programme.

Thus, according to the humanitarian logics, what does it mean to strive for autonomy? What does refugee autonomy look like? In the end, autonomy is conceived as the possibility to behave like a consumer and like a citizen without in fact being either of these. Thus, autonomy appears as an apprenticeship to resilience that, paradoxically, refugees should forge by complying with disciplinary and spatial rules and technological obstacles that are protracted in time. For instance, asylum seekers who benefit from the cash assistance in Greece are subjected to spatial fixation, as they are not entitled to

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