(the production of) Who is a refugee? by Paolo Novak Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London A thesis submitted to the University of London in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Development Studies ProQuest Number: 10673001 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely ev e n t that the author did not send a co m p le te manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10673001 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C o d e Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 I undertake that all material presented for examination is my own and has not been written for me, in whole or in part, by any other person(s). I also undertake that any quotation or paraphrase from published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged in the work which I present for examination. Paolo Novak a / per Nicola Abstract The question “who is a refugee?n -the key research question of this thesis- is ambiguous since it conflates distinct analytical perspectives. It may be answered in reference to subjective beliefs or claims (he is/I am a refugee), prescriptively (who should be considered a refugee, universally or in specific contexts), on the basis of existing legal apparatuses (who has been recognised as a refugee according to international, regional or domestic law) or of alternative conceptualisations of world order, migration and solidarity (e.g. according to religious beliefs, vis-a-vis tribal solidarity, as defined in the mission and discourse of non-state-based humanitarian organisations), etc. Each of these perspectives is premised on different ontological orders, and conceptualises the migrant as a member of different types of social formation. The thesis attempts to answer the question “who is a refugee?” in the context of Afghan migration to Pakistan. First, it postulates the research question in methodological terms, setting in conversation key bibliographic references and a series of context-based issues and perspectives. Second, it develops a framework for the study of refugee protection and assistance that draws upon and expands govemmentality approaches for the study of regimes. The framework highlights, and is concerned with, the overlap of a variety of such regimes simultaneously exercising claims over the same group of people. Third, its core chapters put to the test such framework, by studying three constitutive elements of the modem refugee regime: borders, defining its territoriality; legal status, defining the object of protection and assistance interventions; Afghan NGOs, as an example of the intergovernmental regimentation of such activities. As a central contribution, the thesis offers a coeval understanding of the term “refugee”. It is argued that, in order to define who is a refugee, it is necessary to unpack: a) the simultaneity of processes co-determining who is a refugee, in a particular time and place; b) the meaningful simultaneity of spatially separated events, which have repercussions on such processes; c) their contemporaneity with other processes talcing place in the historical moment under study. A coeval methodology for the study of refugee migration, protection and assistance suggests a radically expanded context of analysis, one that collapses distinctions between scales (e.g. the “global” and the “local”), societies and systems of authority (e.g. “modem” and “traditional”), or between structural and subjective dimensions of power. Such methodology conceptualises “the refugee” as a dynamic and undetermined process of social production, performed by a variety of heterogeneous agents: the production of objects to be governed following exclusionary logics, and their social re-production, which is necessarily mediated, in a contingent and dynamic fashion. Table of Contents Abstract 4 Prologue - The Field a) Trans-Formations 8 b) Tensions 9 c) Order 16 d) The Question 24 e) Appendix — Data Collection 30 Chapter 1 - Who is a refugee? 1.1 Refugees ’ questionable ontology 54 1.2 S2 Refugees 65 1.3 S3 Refugees 76 1A Who produces the refugee? 8 8 Chapter 2 - Who is an Afghan? 2.1 Refractions 94 2.2 Abstract and material boundaries 102 23 Flexible porosity 117 2.4 Borders 128 Chapter 3 - Who is an Afghan refugee in Pakistan? 3.1 The force o f refuge 13 3 3.2 Reaching beneficiaries 146 3.3 Flexible subjects 157 3.4 Regimes 168 Chapter 4 - Who is humanitarian? 4.1 The NGO culture 172 4.2 ANGOs as an object of thought 186 4.3 Flexible agents 197 4.4 We are all humanitarians 217 Chapter 5 - Producing the refugee 5.1 Expanding the context 223 5.2 Who is a refugee? 231 5.3 The production o f the refugee 246 5.4 Future research 253 References 256 Prologue - The Field a) Trans-formations The Eurocentrism of my own experience of “globalisation” was brought to the fore in 2001, when I first arrived in Pakistan, for the purposes of field research. Such Eurocentrism was both geographical (for a fall minute, I wondered why “in Pakistan” they pray to the West, if Mecca is in the East), and, perhaps most worryingly for my research purposes, of knowledge. Such realisation developed through reference readings of “history” and “society” when I first arrived there, but also through encounters, in Islamabad, with retired civil servants or former workers in the Gulf who had now set up shop there. The precision and interest of their knowledge of and questions about “my” history and geographical perception left me disconcerted not only because, at times, of far deeper quality than my own, but also because it opened up a view on how they themselves could possibly conceive their own history and social geography1. More simply, and perhaps for that reason more vividly, such realisation was the result of daily interactions everywhere else with all sorts of people: their disciplining familiarity with what could be perceived as my needs and desires, was a constant reminder that they knew much more about me than vice versa. Globalisation, which for me and most of the people I shared time with, before my PhD, was a process of our time, looked like an all-pervasive dimension of history, from the perspective of a post-colonial “developing” country. The first reaction to that consideration, which lasted about six months, was one of despair for the task that almost accidentally I was about to undertake. The second, more reflexive, was the astonishment related to the possibility that, a person like me2, could attentively follow mainstream newspaper news about “Pakistan”, or “Asia” rather, have opinions on related subjects, and concur to the process of translating those opinions into actions, without in reality knowing much about “it”. From this See Appendix to Ch. 1: being the object of study of my object of study. 2 I refer to my “performance”, at the time I began my journey in SO AS, vis-a-vis most indicators of personal success in the “world” I was living in: money, social popularity, formal education, two decades of (western) intercontinental mobility, knowledge, asset ownership, prospects, etc. 8 perspective, globalisation seemed more of a process that encompassed certain social strata over the last two or three decades, and seemed decisively Eurocentric. Similar considerations, though often more intense and frustrating, shaped and profoundly changed the perception I had of myself in the world, as well as, logically, research assumptions and hypotheses. At the level of identity, the most interesting trans-formation occurred during field research was the progressive realisation that they were not other people living in another time, out of whom I had to extract data and information for the successful completion of my PhD; rather, we were profoundly different individuals facing each other in the same world-historical moment. Academically, such considerations trans­ formed what was originally intended to be a study of relations between different a ctors of the humanitarian assistance regime, into a methodological quest for the most appropriate way to conceptualise the simultaneous existence of profoundly different agents shaping and being shaped by their institutionally-regulated interactions. The (provisional and arbitrarily fixed in time) outcome of such processes is expressed in the following pages, which attempt to articulate these two trans-formative tensions. b) Tensions A (by now trite) supposedly witty comment I often deployed upon my return from Pakistan to avoid questions about my PhD, which at that time was in a sorry state, is that I started field research on “ten eleven”. In fact, though I do not remember the exact date, I set foot in Islamabad for the purposes of field research at the beginning of October 2001. The point I was trying to make related to the significance of being there at that time, which could only be gauged by reference to events occurred on “911” miles away -and the reactions they produced. Such interrelation was not exclusively confined to the “abstract” level of world politics and the beginning of the War on Terror, but was very materially experienced in my daily pre-occupations. Front page news of English- (though presumably also Urdu- and Pashto-) language Pakistani newspapers, as much as those in UK and Italian ones consulted over the internet, were all devoted to those events and to the possible repercussions in Afghanistan.