Studying Migrations and Borders from a Pluridisciplinary Perspective

Even though my research is that of a EU law professor, I chose for years to consider migrations and borders from a pluridisciplinary perspective, so much so I have to dive into complexity (for an example of a recent publication of mine, see here; see also the MOEBIUS project I am leading as senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France on “Sovereignty Ordering Migrations Inside European Borders: Uses v. Ethics”). Such a pluridisciplinary approach reveals to be demanding: it needs both to be developed with discipline (see Antoine Bailleux’s paper in this series), and to be opened to wanderings (thanks Alain Supiot and François Ost for the advice). You have to accept to be confronted with personal controversies, to be faced with internal discourse on the method.

Indeed, there are a multiplicity of legal disciplines that must be mobilised: migration law, refugee law, human rights law, EU law, international law, domestic law, comparative law, labour law, family law, maritime law, digital law, and so forth. Yet and furthermore I have been thinking really constructive to venture in other disciplinary fields: political philosophy, ethics, geography, history, political science, geopolitics, sociology, critical migration studies, critical border studies. Trying to embrace everything these different scientific areas can offer supposes to adapt to their specific vocabulary and grammar, to build bridges with both rigor and flexibility. Being able to adapt oneself in order to read properly the research in other disciplines and to exploit them accurately is necessary, meanwhile keeping in mind the indispensable modesty an outsider must maintain.

Embracing complexity to consider migrations and borders: the context

All this was not really a choice. Such an approach was required by my ambition to understand and to question the current restrictive migration and asylum policies the EU deploys (see for instance some thoughts on the absence of the recognition of Frontex responsibility for violations of human rights of migrants during return operations here, here, here, here, here and here; or the debate on the digitalisation of border control that was published in this blog here). The examination of the different instruments of the EU pact on migration and asylum illustrates it particularly (see for instance here, here, here, and here). As far as the object under study is complex, embracing complexity is imposed: it is needed to use compound approaches using multifaceted notions to understand in general a world that is in itself multifarious, and in particular a policy that is multiple. The temptation to confide in simple notions is dangerous, as it flattens, crushes, misses the reality. Such a reduction is in itself constitutive of a sort of violence (political, social, legal) that can be illustrated by the simplistic discourses the politicians spill over on borders, migrations, sovereignty.

Complexity is part of what borders genuinely are. Etienne Balibar expresses it with such an accuracy that I want to refer to its paper “Qu’est-ce qu’une frontière?”. According to the philosopher, drawing a border consists precisely in defining a territory, in delimitating it, in giving an identity to the community. Yet, conversely, defining or identifying entails nothing else than drawing a border, posting limits. Balibar concludes that the representation of the border is the condition of any definition. Here starts the moebius strip that gives its name to my current research project.

Migrations are also characterised by complexity. Considering migrations in the borders, inside the borders, within the borders, envisaging the thickness of the borders, leads to explore a doubly reflexive delimitation and differentiation. Meanwhile the process of identification constitutes a personal course of definition of the self by the self itself; the management of migrations reveal processes of categorisations that correspond to an apparatus of assignment to the self by a third-party (the national authorities). This apparatus stems from the implementation of the legal measures the public policies induce and develop though practical uses, and impose to migrants the un-reciprocal appropriation of their selves by the state, by the bias of the territory and the borders. Here lies the simplifying force that reduces the individual from subject to object of law, tackled down as he is by a political, social and legal violence. This is exemplified by the politiques of non-entrée (see the researches of James Hathaway and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen for instance), and by the “shifting border” (see the researches of Ayelet Shachar for instance).

It is useful to underscore that sovereignty is a complex notion too. Of course, sovereignty seems to be mostly reduced by national authorities and political discourses to the very territorial control, to the discretionary power to decide who may and who may not enter the national territory. It is known that such an apprehension of the notion let henceforward authorities to justify and cover up the infringements of their international, regional and even national obligations of human rights protection. However, a renewed and enriched conception of the notion can be considered – it is one of the focal points of my research. Sovereignty could be understood, not as the domination of what separates the national from the alien, but as the authority of what unites the particular to the universal of humanity, of what submits itself to the ethical and legal obligations of fundamental rights guarantee.

In addition to the density of the materials studied that is induced by the multiplicity of the mobilized disciplines, the research object reveals to be fluid, liquid, labile. Migrations are, by definition, flux of mobile people. Borders are by construction variable as they are projected outward by the national authorities that subcontract their control to third countries authorities and to private operators, and as they are developed inward by legal fictions of non-entrée.– Such fictions consider third country nationals not being entered in the legal territory even though they are present on the physical territory (see the Australian excision policy, or the 100 miles border zone that covers two third of the population of the United States).

The connexions between migrations and borders are so intricate that some authors are compelled to use neologisms to make understand their analysis: think of notions such as “crimmigration” (Juliet Stumpf), “nécropolitique” (Achille Mbembé), “zoopolitique” (Neil Vaughan-Williams), “subhumans” (Zygmunt Bauman). If I have not been conducted to invent neologisms, I am indeed steered at pursuing a delicate objective: considering migrations inside borders, how migrations are managed by authorities in the thickness of borders. This requires exploring the practices and the uses of the norms in one hand, and to explore the requirements the ethics and the law impose in another hand. It leads to confront them in order to propose some alternative way of thinking. Such an objective leads to deploy an approach to law that is both pragmatic (by observing the actual implementation of legal norms) and ontological (by considering a reorganizing perspective of normative dynamics).

Proposing a complex approach of migrations and borders: the objective

The challenge resides in the necessity to analyse the relations between research on power, migrations, borders, ethics; in the objective to make them dialogue beyond the disciplinary barriers and the analytical postures; in the purpose to apprehend the implications interplay and the reciprocal interferences between sovereignty, migrations and borders, that is highlighted by an examination of the uses of states and the demands of ethics. The analyses of the norms adopted and the practices deployed by public authorities highlight the uses made of sovereignty when reduced to surveillance and selection in order to manage and control the entry of third country nationals. The assessment of these norms and practices with regard to the requirements of the law that they must respect and the rights that they must guarantee reveals in negative the ethical imperatives of sovereignty, when it is seized in its theoretical and legal intensity, as an authority that submits itself to the legal obligations of rights guarantee.

In the article mentioned at the beginning of this paper, I propose to consider borders as heterotopias of dissolution where migrants are deprived of their subjectivity, of their status as a person before the law (remember Article 16 of the International Covenant of Political and Civil Rights, see the work of Delphine Rodrik on pushbacks). Borders are not just the territorial contours of states, as international law defines them; they are much more, for they can be, and must be seen as “viscous spatio-temporal zones” (Etienne Balibar), as “assemblages” (Gilles Deleuze), as “rhizomes” (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari), as “landscapes” (Michel Agier), as “apparatus” (Michel Foucault). Fundamental contradictions are highlighted hence: oppositions between the control approaches that a security-focused understanding of borders generates and the demands for the protection of rights that international and regional legal instruments impose; distortions between the rule of law societies that EU member states claim to be and the situations of exception that European immigration and asylum policies generate.

I argue that sovereignty should correspond to authority according to a legal theory and ethical philosophy approach, meanwhile the expressions of sovereignty that states display and deploy within European borders seem to consist of domination, control, and violence (see the research of Giorgio Agamben, Reeces Jones, Vicky Squire). In view of the contrast between what sovereignty should be in theory and what it is in practice, my research proposes to consider that sovereignty is deviated in the borders’ thickness: it is diffracted, degraded, denegated. The methods that state authorities develop in border spaces are studied, basing the analysis on the concept of heteroropia Michel Foucault forged. This tool coming from the philosophy allows to emphasize that states construct and exploit borders as useful margins, as political and legal devices, with the aim of dehumanizing migrants, of desubjectivizating them (on the notion of desubjectivisation you can see here).

In order to apprehend the considered methods, I refer to three types of operations that are deployed by state authorities in the borders. These ones incorporate migrants in order to control them, through identification and registration procedures (extraction) (see Claudia Araudau and Martina Tazzioli); they differentiate migrants, in order to select and categorize them according to their country of origin and their degree of desirability (classification) (See the seminal article wrote by  Ségolène Barbou des Places); they distance migrants from their rights, by removing them or making them invisible, via deportation, detention or dispersion (obliteration) (see the documentary of David Fedele The Land Between). Using the malleability of soft law, administrative arrangements and infra-law, and exploiting the relativity of compliance with norms in practice, the law is exploited to authorize violations of migrants’ human rights and to circumvent the international, European and national obligations imposed by legal instruments of rights protection.

In other words, apprehending borders as heterotopias for migrants underscores that they are not only spaces of marginalization under control, but more broadly and profoundly methods of control and methodologies of domination: border as a method to quote the title of the book Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nielsen published. It appears to me that borders are thickened to manage migrants, to prevent them from entering the territory, to deter them as early as possible in their migratory journey. The research of geographers have been tremendously important for me in identifying this process (see, among many others, Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary or Martina Tazzioli). The thickness of the boundary stripe, the consistency of the boundary field is differentiated; it is differing for the desirable and the undesirable, it is differing according to the type of othering, according to who third country nationals are:  a simple line to be crossed that marks privileged status for the desirable, a viscid spatio-temporal zone from which one cannot extract oneself for the undesirable.

In order to dive into the complexity, MOEBIUS will study this year the interactions between sovereignty, migrations, and borders in the political theory (see the program), before consecrating the years to come to the analysis of the legal thickness of borders, of the international and European governance of migrations, of the domination exercised by states inside European borders, and of the imperatives an approach based upon the ethical internationalisation deploy. While the approach I am developing aims to give an account of what is happening at the margins of our societies, its analytical potential may also be useful in deconstructing what is perceived as the core of the European project.