Author: Emily

Access to healthcare: human right or civil liberty?

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By Ella Barclay.

A right to health is enshrined in many international agreements, indicating the perceived importance of wellness and accessible healthcare for the development and flourishing of individuals (UDHR, Art. 25:1; ICESCR, Art. 12.1; CEDAW, 12:1; CRC, Art. 24:1). Despite this, one of the main sites of immigration control targeted within the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ is the NHS, with the healthcare rights of undocumented migrants being largely compromised following the implementation of the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts. Such policies constitute an intentional appeal to the public perception of migration as a strain on the UK’s public services. In framing these individuals as ‘criminals’ or ‘deviants’, it is far easier to justify their restriction of rights. However, the nation-state’s freedom to deny access to such rights for undocumented persons leads us to question whether these supposedly universal rights may actually be mere civil liberties.

The National Health Service (Charges to Overseas Visitors) Regulations (2015) introduced NHS charges for all those not ‘ordinarily resident’  within the UK, despite the NHS constitution outlining that access to care should be based on clinical need, not an individual’s ability to pay. To be ‘ordinarily resident’ one must reside within the UK voluntarily, legally and with the intention of remaining for a prolonged period (DHSC, 2022). Healthcare providers establish the charging eligibility of patients through a screening process, involving questions about residency and migrant status. If an individual is found to be eligible for NHS charges, this information will be passed onto that NHS trust’s Overseas Visitor Manager (OVM), who will pursue them for payment. Crucially, the actions of the OVM are dependent on the information gathered by healthcare providers, meaning the administrative burden and moral responsibility effectively fall on clinical staff.

(Image: Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash)

While primary care, including emergency services, GP registration and vaccinations, is always free of charge and cannot be denied to any individual, all other care is chargeable at a rate of 150%, which must be paid before treatment can be provided. Maternity care constitutes an exception to this policy, defined as ‘immediately necessary’, meaning individuals are not required to pay prior to receiving care but are instead billed after the fact. If an individual is unable to pay for their care after receiving it, their residency status will be shared with the Home Office, thereby alerting immigration officers to the potentially undocumented status of the patient.

Many scholars have argued that this practice of data-sharing conflicts with the NHS’s Caldicott Principles, which emphasise confidentiality and privacy in the interests of both the individual and the institution (Papageorgiou et al., 2020; Reynolds and Mitchell, 2019; Robinson et al., 2018). However, where undocumented migrants in the UK are presented as criminals and their mere existence presented as a threat to state security, this violation of an inherent NHS value is seemingly justified. More specifically, the principles of the Data Protection Act (2018) can be revoked where withholding data is seen to place public interests at risk. Withholding data is therefore seen to hinder effective immigration control: in other words, these individuals are considered not to have a right to privacy (Crépeau and Hastie, 2015; Kulakiewicz et al., 2022; Van Durme, 2017). Once the Home Office has been notified that an individual is residing without the correct authorisation, not only can they choose to deport the individual, they can also keep such ‘deviance’ on record, which will be taken into consideration if the undocumented individual were ever to apply for a visa. This forces undocumented individuals into a ‘rights trap’; they must either incriminate themselves to receive the safe care they are owed under international legislation or go without healthcare they may dearly need (Gentleman, 2018; Hermansson et al., 2020).

Although the impact of such policies on the wellbeing of migrants is well-documented (DOTW, 2017; Hamada et al., 2021; Pellegrino et al., 2021; Westwood et al., 2016), restricting the accessibility of healthcare for a substantial portion of our population has further-reaching consequences. Even where primary services may be free of charge, threats of data-sharing prevent undocumented individuals from exercising their rights to such care, which undermines public health and herd immunity (BMA, 2021; Bulman, 2020; Weller and Aldridge, 2019). Similarly, the deterrent effect of charging policies costs the NHS more than the initial price of providing treatment to all. De Jong et al. (2017), Jones et al. (2019) and WHO (2018) report that undocumented persons are often hospitalised for longer after pregnancy and for otherwise treatable illnesses as a result of their decisions not to seek care due to fears of detection. Preventative care is not only more effective but also more cost-efficient than remedial care, indicating that current policies are not only discriminatory and detrimental to individual and public wellbeing, but also counterproductive for the NHS and the economy (McHale and Speakman, 2020; Norris, 2022).

Charging those not ‘ordinarily resident’ for healthcare also has a serious impact on the NHS. The British Medical Association (2019) reports that a large proportion of healthcare staff find their workload to have increased significantly following the implementation of charging policies. Similarly, NHS staff are working outside of their billed hours to provide informal help to undocumented migrants, as they are not able to support them fully within appointments. This support ranges from signposting and advocacy to financial support and even forging documents (Feldman et al., 2019).

Documenting the far-reaching impacts of this hostile environment policy exposes the irrationality of charging practices, and denying this human right in the name of securitisation sets a dangerous precedent for nation-states’ treatment of vulnerable persons. The UK cannot be said to be upholding their pledges to international legislation when individuals residing within its borders are unable to access basic healthcare. Where international policies can be manipulated and shaped to fit a nation-state’s own agenda we must question who can hold these states accountable, and who will protect the rights of our undocumented populations.

Ella Barclay is a first-year PhD student in Sociology at the University of the West of England. Her research takes an ethnographic approach to understand the experiences of pregnancy, labour and early motherhood for undocumented migrant women within the UK’s hostile environment. Ella completed the MSc in Migration and Mobility Studies at the University of Bristol in 2020 and is an MMB Alumni Ambassador.

‘An asylum ban’: why the Illegal Migration Bill must be stopped

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By Bridget Anderson.

The Athenian Laws introduced by Draco c. 621 BCE were said to be written not in ink but blood. This government’s Illegal Migration Bill currently going through the UK Parliament, is draconian. It is aimed at people who arrive irregularly – people who the government calls ‘illegal migrants’, but who might better be described as illegalised migrants. There is not some pre-existing category of illegal people who migrate, rather people are illegalised by borders and thereby rendered vulnerable to state and personal power.

The Bill places a duty on the Home Secretary to make arrangements to remove people who do not arrive via state approved routes (backdated to 7th March 2023) and who have not come directly from the country they are fleeing. The Home Secretary also has a duty to rule their asylum and certain human rights claims inadmissible. Because they are ruled inadmissible rather than refused there is no right of appeal. These people will be permanently banned from claiming asylum and from the removal protections of the Modern Slavery Act. They are an ‘ineligible person’ meaning they will never be eligible for any form of legal status or citizenship, or legal entry to the UK and neither will their family members including children yet to be born.

(Image: UnSplash)

People falling under this legislation will likely be detained for 28 days, which can be extended if the Secretary of State believes there is a ‘reasonable prospect’ of removal. There are three options for where they will be removed to. If they are from EEA countries or Albania they will be returned to their country of origin. If they are not from those states, they will not be returned to their country of origin, but, if there is an appropriate returns agreement, to the country which they left before coming to the UK. However, UK geography means this is likely to be France, so this is not currently an option. (In her response to the Bill suggesting the Labour Party’s direction of travel, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper made it clear that negotiating a returns agreement with France and other European countries would be a Labour Government priority). Non-EEA/non-Albanian nationals will therefore be sent to other states listed in the schedule of the Bill (note some of those listed are deemed appropriate only for men). The list includes Rwanda. As yet, there are no removal agreements with any of the other countries on that list.

The Bill’s preface acknowledges that its provisions may not be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. It is likely to be not compliant with the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, and the UN Refugee Agency has asserted that it is in breach of the Refugee Convention:

‘The legislation, if passed, would amount to an asylum ban – extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in the United Kingdom for those who arrive irregularly, no matter how genuine and compelling their claim may be, and with no consideration of their individual circumstances’ (UNHCR, 7 March 2023).

The UK is effectively slamming the country shut to all those fleeing war and persecution, regardless of their circumstances. This is an end to the asylum system as we know it. Asylum seekers do not typically fly to the UK directly from their countries of origin – not least because years of carrier sanctions have closed that possibility. Most apply via the UK’s in-country application process having made long and dangerous journeys through several other countries. Should this Bill become law, the principal means of being granted refugee status will be via specific government-approved routes. The Bill requires that the Home Secretary set an annual cap on the numbers of people entering through these so-called ‘safe and legal routes’. The UK government may have set out ‘legal’ routes, but they are not necessarily ‘safe’. The MoD recently had to apologise for telling applicants to the Afghan relocations and assistance policy scheme (ARAP), which relocates MoD approved Afghans at risk of reprisals for working with the UK government in Afghanistan, that their documents needed to be approved by the Taliban to be successful.

There has been a chorus of criticism directed at the Bill. The opposition Labour Party is leading the charge with claims that it is unworkable and will not achieve the objectives of stopping the ‘small boats’. Human rights organisations, charities, religious groups and some lawyers are also challenging the ethics of the Bill – ‘cruelty without purpose’ as the Archbishop of York described it. Sections of the commentariat argue that whether it achieves its aims is a secondary issue (see, for example, The News Agents 2023; Dunt 2023). As Colin Yeo’s helpful analysis of the Bill puts it: ‘It is wishful thinking in legislative form.’

This is performance and the government is looking for a pre-election ‘wedge issue’. The Bill is cunningly drafted in such a way as to make legal challenge both difficult and limited. But challenged it will be, and we can anticipate more attacks on ‘lefty lawyers’ scapegoated for making unworkable legislation well, unworkable. The Explanatory Notes to the Bill set out the number of asylum claims (74,751 in 2022) in clause 9, followed by the ballooning cost of the asylum system (now £3 billion annually) in clause 10. But the cost of the system is not rising simply because of increasing numbers of claims, and there is no reason to think that this legislation will reduce costs.

Meanwhile, it is worth pausing to reflect on the irreparable harm to thousands of people that will be done by this performance piece. Forcible removals of desperate people will require systematic and institutionalised violence. The Home Office has said that ‘Using force on children in family groups may, unfortunately, be necessary if a family is resisting removal.’ There will be a new category of ‘ineligible person’ begging on our streets, permanently shut out of labour protections and services, and this status will be passed on from parents to children. It is estimated that there are over 200,000 undocumented children in the UK, many of whom were born here. This Bill will significantly add to this long-term undocumented population. Should a future government not repeal this Bill large numbers of people will be consigned to illegality, with all the vulnerability and potential for abuse that entails, for their entire lives.

Claims of unworkability sidestep the question of whether workability is desirable. Do we want removal agreements so that people can be efficiently sent to countries with which they have absolutely no connection? Sustained pressure must be put on the Labour Party, should it come to Government, to commit to repealing the entirety of this Bill and to mitigating the harms it will have already done. At a minimum this would mean regularising and expediting the asylum claims of all those caught up by the Bill wherever in the world they may be. This is not only because it is a vicious attack on the rights of people seeking to enter the UK, but it is also an attack on our shared futures. It attacks the rights of future children, and anyone who falls in love with them or wants to work with them or otherwise wishes to spend time with them in the UK. It undermines the global refugee regime. It will create a super exploitable workforce. It will exacerbate divisions in an already divided country. We are already seeing an increase in the criminalisation of those deemed to be assisting undocumented migrants, and more burdensome documentary checking required across employers and the public sector, with all of the racism that stokes. As the undocumented population increases, arguments for ID cards will sound more reasonable. The current government is good at three-word slogans. I have one for them: Stop The Bill.

Bridget Anderson is Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol.

Further resources for understanding the impact and ramifications of the Illegal Migration Bill can be found on our webpage here, and a recording of our online emergency discussion about the Bill on 31st March can be seen here.

The ‘Rwanda Solution’: using Australia’s playbook

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By Juan Zhang.

On 19th March, 2023, British Home Secretary Suella Braverman caused yet another controversy during her two-day visit to Kigali, Rwanda, with a photo of her laughing at the building site of future housing intended for asylum seekers to be deported from the UK to Rwanda. This visit drew new criticism from both mainstream and social media, which continued to challenge the Rwanda deportation scheme and the associated Illegal Migration Bill that could potentially violate both the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Publicity for the Australian Government’s Operation Sovereign Borders, aimed at stopping all maritime arrivals of asylum seekers, 2013 (image: Wikimedia Foundation)

This controversial deportation scheme, seen as the Conservative government’s ‘vanity project’, faced strong public condemnation and resistance since it was first announced in April 2022. Observers at the time already pointed out the uncanny similarities between the UK-Rwanda deal and the Australian ‘stop the boats’ policy with its infamous offshore processing scheme. It seems that Australia’s past mistakes and systematic failures at ‘stopping the boats’ for at least two decades offer no deterrence to the UK to pick up the same playbook, when the UK Home Office takes Australia’s harsh zero-tolerance approach as an example of achievement instead of a hard lesson to be learned (see Gleeson 2021, Tubakovic, Murray and Matera 2023).

The Australian offshore asylum programme, introduced in 2001 as the ‘Pacific Solution’ to unauthorised immigration by the Howard Coalition government, targeted people entering Australian waters via ocean crossings and arriving by boat. This programme was closed in 2007 by the Labour government (under Kevin Rudd), but revived again in 2012 as ‘Pacific Solution Mark II’ with a hard-line approach to ‘stop the boats’ (see Bakshi 2020 for a full account). The suffering and inhumanity found in Australia’s offshore detention programme caused worldwide concern and criticism on how Australia ‘privileged migration deterrence goals over human rights considerations’, and how it deliberately normalised ‘moral disengagement from the pain and suffering of people in detention’ for populist political gains (see Barnes 2022). It is therefore bewildering to see such a notorious policy, known for being ‘cruel, costly and ineffective’ for 20 years (Gleeson and Yacoub 2021), now being embraced by the UK government as inspiration for how to manage asylum seekers. The Melbourne-based organisation Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) expressed a profound sense of concern to the Australian broadcaster SBS:

‘It’s appalling that, despite a decade of cruelty that has led to severe harm, death, compensation pay-outs by the government, third-country deals, medical transfers, and international notoriety, the Australian model has influenced global policy.’  

There are already extensive reports and analysis that question whether the UK can actually ‘stop the boats’ with its adapted Australian model (for example, Gleeson 2021, Koser 2022). Apart from the legal obstacles the UK has to deal with, different political as well as geographical contexts also suggest that the Rwanda deportation plan is unlikely to proceed smoothly or result in the same kind of outcome as seen in Australia. Moreover, the ‘Rwanda Solution’ – if we can call it that – provokes deeper concerns over legacies of imperialism, colonialism and entrenching patterns of global inequalities. It is effectively outsourcing border control in a way that perpetuates forced displacement, instituting a form of structural violence that holds life in a ‘permanent state of injury outside any realms of protection and political intelligibility’ (Phipps and Yohannes 2022). The Rwanda scheme has already caused toxic social and political divisions both within the UK and beyond before any individual could be sent on a deportation flight. But the government remains determined despite challenges coming from all fronts. Braverman’s Rwanda tour at this moment seems particularly tone deaf to the wider public debate demanding a compassionate and more ethical process with regard to unauthorised Channel crossing.

Whether the UK manages to ‘stop the boats’ when (and if) the Rwanda scheme is in full play remains to be seen. But this much is clear – the number of people crossing the English Channel on small boats has continued to increase in 2022, despite stern messages that the UK will ‘detain and deport you’. These boat arrivals are played up in the current corrosive narratives on the UK’s state of emergency caused by migrant illegality and compromised border security. The Rwanda solution, then, seems very much like a production of ‘xenophobic spectacle’ (Koram 2022) that distracts the public from deeper problems and crises at home. Braverman seems optimistic that, with this visit, the deportation flights between the UK and Rwanda will take off by summer 2023, when legal loopholes and courtroom battles are finally settled. By then, the public is led to believe, all problems with the small boats will magically disappear. But this short-term, single-minded agenda on deportation and offshore processing creates nothing more than a tunnel vision approach that Australia has tried and failed. What gives the UK government the conviction that the Rwanda solution will deliver a better result?   

Juan Zhang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol. Her research explores borders and transnational migration with particular interest in Asian borderlands, migrant im/mobilities and transnationalism, cross-border cultural politics and China. She is the co-ordinator of the MMB research challenge, Bodies, Things, Capital.

For more information about the 2023 Illegal Migration Bill see the list of resources on our webpage.

No Recourse to Public Funds: The Big Issue tackles vulnerability to NRPF in Bristol

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By Paula Gombos.

The Big Issue is a street magazine founded 30 years ago that tackles homelessness and social exclusion in the UK. It also supports individuals to earn an income by selling the magazine, and there are more than 50 active sellers in Bristol. A significant proportion of these vendors are Romanian Roma, many of who are subject to ‘NRPF’ rules. NRPF stands for ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ meaning they are not eligible for many benefits, including Universal Credit, Social Fund payments, Housing Benefit and social housing and education. It is usually associated with asylum seekers and non-EEA (European Economic Area) citizens. However, European migrants too can be affected, usually while they are waiting for the Home Office decision on their application to the EU Settlement Scheme, or if they have not applied in time for Settled Status or Indefinite Leave to Remain.

In early 2022 the Big Issue was given a small grant from the University of Bristol’s ESRC-funded Everyday Integration project to investigate the consequences of NRPF from the perspective of our essential frontline workers. We also wanted to see how we can take steps locally to ensure better support and inclusion for people who fall under NRPF rules. In December we published our report on the project, ‘How Can Big Issue Sellers With or Vulnerable to NRPF Build a Good Life in Bristol’. Here I introduce its key points.

Big Issue jacket worn by a vendor in Birmingham
(Images: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on Flickr)

We were very happy to be supported throughout the process by Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and ACH. MMB Director Bridget Anderson first helped us to identify our research question and methods and potential ethical issues. We then held a vendor engagement workshop in our Big Issue Bristol office. Vendors participated in a set of activities and discussed their motivations for moving to the UK, their values and aspirations and the accessibility of services to them. We then devised an interview schedule to explore what participants felt made a ‘good life’, and the barriers that stop them from moving towards this. Together we explored options and used Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the Bristol Model to facilitate a dialogue with participants. Finally, we held conversations with other agencies who work with NRPF migrants in Bristol.

The research was small scale, working with ten Big Issue sellers aged between 38 and 60, nine from the Romanian Roma community (three women and six men), and one male Jamaican national. It found that anxieties about housing, personal safety and sustenance had significantly negative effects, and the NRPF condition exacerbated these, making vendors feel disempowered. Their responses showed how it leaves people destitute and unmotivated. Some people end up begging or turning to alcohol and substance misuse, which affects their mental health and general wellbeing. However, together with a range of Bristol based organisations, we came up with ideas that could significantly improve their quality of life.

At a national level, Big Issue argues that the NRPF condition should be scrapped and policies changed so people can secure suitable accommodation, become economically active and be able to access mainstream benefits. We hope that Bristol City Council will play an active role in supporting this demand. However, the project focused mainly on the significant steps that can be taken locally, including funding for services that work with NRPF and support for issues including employability, education, immigration and alternative housing options. More specifically the participants suggested:

  • Improving English skills and learning how to read and write.
  • Accessible employment for people with limited numeracy, literacy, digital skills or for people in poor health.
  • Having a voice and being actively involved in local decision-making processes.
  • Advocacy and legal representation at a local level.
  • Better care and triage system within local provisions.
  • Regular access to interpreters when attending appointments at local services.
  • Less prejudice and less bureaucracy for individuals with very little documentation.
  • Safer, cleaner and more suitable housing provisions.
  • Better protection and safety from Bristol police.
  • ‘City work platform’ – daily jobs for the City Council, such as cleaning, recycling and gardening, distributed amongst rough sleepers to help them contribute to the city and solve anti-social behavior.

These are some of the ways of building local support for individuals with or vulnerable to NRPF, which would positively impact their lives in the city. Housing, in particular, is a priority for safety, wellbeing and civic engagement.

Besides the obvious need for improved local support and changes to national policies, we must remember that our vendors want to be seen and heard, and to have a sense of accomplishment and purpose in their lives. The Big Issue will carry on fighting against social exclusion and poverty and we pledge to continue supporting the most marginalised and vulnerable people in the community. But all of us living in Bristol are responsible for making this city a better place for others.

Paula Gombos is a Sales and Support Worker and Vendor Data Lead for the Big Issue Bristol. She is also a certified Romanian community interpreter and translator for community projects. The full Big Issue report ‘How Can Big Issue Sellers With or Vulnerable to NRPF Build a Good Life in Bristol’ can be read here.

The violence of postcolonial border making

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By Maya Goodfellow.

In June 2022 Maya Goodfellow was the discussant for our public lecture ‘Are immigration controls racist? Lessons from history’ by Nandita Sharma. Here we publish her response to Nandita’s lecture.

On the evening of 27th June 2022, they were found on a sideroad in Texas. Fifty-three people in the back of a scorching-hot van. Some of their screams alerted a nearby worker to the abandoned vehicle, which had been left on the side of the road. It was here that they had died – pulled up alongside a railway line and next to Interstate 35, which stretches from a town near the Mexican border right up to the north, close to Canada.

Three days prior, over 5,000 miles away, after ongoing police harassment, 23 people died trying to scale the iron fence that separates Morocco from Spain, many killed in the crush to get over. And 3,000 miles away from here, since the start of the year, 214 people were either dead or had gone missing attempting to cross between Afghanistan and Iran.

Across the world, it is a function of borders that people die trying to cross them. And it is one of their functions that people are killed when they are enforced within countries. 

(Image by Ed Hincliffe on UnSplash)

The response and the counter-reply to such untold death always manage to miss the heart of the problem. In a well-rehearsed sleight of hand, across Europe and the US, politicians loudly and confidently name one foe: people smugglers. Exploitative and violent though this business is, this logic is deeply misleading. A much smaller chorus point out that it ignores the real culprit, which are border policies. Policies celebrated and applied by those same politicians. Few safe routes of travel, pushbacks and restrictive visa regimes. They may not provide as clear an enemy as the ‘smuggler’, but these are the things that produce death and violence.

Discomfort lurks in this counterclaim too. If you look close enough, you can see where it could lead; discussions over how tough the exclusions are, not the reasons why there are exclusions to begin with. Because ultimately, how useful is a country’s border if it doesn’t exclude in some way or another.

Why, too few ask, is bordering obligatory in the first place? People do not die crossing borders just because of border regimes; there is a machinery and process of legitimation that makes bordering possible. That makes it necessary. This is where Nandita Sharma’s Home Rule (2020) takes us. Our attention, she explains, should be on the nation state. Without looking here, we risk reproducing what we seek to dismantle. ‘From the 1950s,’ she writes:

‘the kind of racism resting on pseudoscientific typologies, the kind that normalized atrocities leading up to and including the fascist holocausts of WWII, was made anathema. People did anything to declare they were not racists. However, just as imperial states were replaced by national ones, postcolonialism was also productive of a new, largely normalized, horizontal form of racism. It is best to call this form of racism postcolonial racism, because it depended on ideas of distinct and separate “national cultures,” each with its own territorial claims’ (Sharma, 2020, p. 279).

The nation state ceases to make sense if it is not anchored in the idea that certain territory belongs to a people; the national-natives are distinct from the migrants. How we relate to nation states is organised by these categories. There is a ‘true people’ and this, she argues, is racially encoded.

However much this analysis might apply to Europe and America, this is not where Sharma focuses her attention. Rather, it is to the formerly colonised. Instead of true freedom in decolonisation, there were demands for national sovereignty. And so a system of nation states was born, where the idea of native – thought to have disappeared with colonialism – has persisted. This is one of the ways claims to sovereignty and rights are grounded.  Postcolonialism did not end violent relationships but refashioned them into nationalist subjectivities. Anti-immigration politics is common globally, she shows, including in the so-called ‘poor world’.

This is where the Western left is, arguably, less confident. Used to criticising overtly right-wing, anti-immigrant politics or to challenging liberal nationalism, it shies away from thinking through the ways it supports territorialised, racialised and nationalist politics around the world. This matters because if there is a nation-state there will be an immigration regime, and there will be exclusion.

But there are still questions we must ask: what does the ability of certain migrants, nationalities or racial groups to become ‘part of’ the nation, even if in a precarious way, mean for how we might understand race? Not all groups experience bordering in the same way or continue to experience it in the same way across time, and not all of this maps neatly onto race as a physical identifier.

And perhaps most obviously: what is our way forward?

By spotlighting the nation state, Home Rule gives us an important step to answering this – encouraging us to think about how to create another world altogether.

Maya Goodfellow is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute. Her research looks at the relationship between capitalism, racism and immigration. She is the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (2020), available from Verso at a 30% discount.

 

Filmmaking from my father’s memories

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By Nariman Massoumi.

I never talked to my father about his experience of arriving in the UK until I made a film about it. Baba 1989 is about his memories of arrival following four years of separation from me, my mother and siblings. We left Iran as refugees in 1985 during the Iran–Iraq war and sought asylum here. My father could not get a visa and had to live in Germany for two years. Without the pretext of making a film, it would have been difficult for either of us to have a conversation on the subject. In the film he describes painful memories of trying to reintegrate into the family, our estrangement from him, the language barriers, lack of work and money, our dire living conditions and his inability to connect to anyone.

Film equipment can often be seen as a barrier to achieving intimacy with a subject. In producing films about one’s parents or family members, the reverse is often the case. When interviewing my father, the presence of the audio recording device introduced a witness, an imagined audience beyond the confines of my parents’ home that allowed him to recall memories of emotionally fraught past events to me for the first time through a performance for others – and for me to vicariously recall my own childhood memories of the same events (as a nine-year-old) through his recollection. He spoke mostly in English and in third person (‘my children’) and only intermittently slipping into second person (‘you’ or ‘your mum’). Perhaps the desire to distance himself from the events resulted in this shifting mode of address.

Still from Baba 1989 (image: author’s own)

My documentary film practice has explored my family’s personal experiences of migration, our resettlement in Britain and its relationship to the history of the Iranian diaspora, the Iranian revolution of 1979 and Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. Documentary filmmaking that engages the participation of a filmmaker’s own family or kin as central subject is what Michael Renov (2004) terms ‘domestic ethnography’. The reciprocity and interplay entailed by a close family tie by this mode of documentary filmmaking plays at the boundaries of self and other, filmmaker and subject in a unique way. A fragile balance exists between ethnographic exploration and an autobiographical pursuit for self-knowledge and cannot be strictly reduced to either. The filmmaker and subject’s intimate connection renders an outsider position difficult (if not impossible), and yet a degree of separation between subject and filmmaker is still retained.

For second generation migrant filmmakers like myself, a parent or grandparent embodies a particular cultural history of migration (Russell 1999) meaning domestic ethnography becomes ‘charged with anxieties about losing access to the parents’ past as a consequence of displacement’ (Berghahn 2013, p. 90). To that end, family photographs, home movies and videos become privileged cultural artefacts due to their role in articulating and mediating memories across generations offering evidence of people and places, kinship and continuity. You can see this in a wide range of films such as Italianamerican (Martin Scorsese, 1974), The Way to My Father’s Village (Richard Fung, 1988), History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (Rea Tajiri, 1991) or I for India (Sandhya Suri, 2005). Family visual archives take on an increased significance for migrants who have experienced involuntary displacement where the continuities of family life and memory have been disrupted by social upheavals or where the range of available sources are scarcer, and susceptible to loss or obliteration. Yet as highly coded and selective forms of visual communication that focus on the ‘high points’ of family life, they are also unreliable records of family history, reasserting the image the family has of itself and its own unity in order to reinforce its own integration (Bourdieu 1990). Domestic ethnography therefore involves ‘memory-work’ (Kuhn 2002), a form of archaeological detective work to investigate the coded or hidden meanings of family photographs or home movies.

Memory-work takes on significance when engaging with visual archives of historical events I did not directly experience that still conjure up emotional ‘memories’. For example, Baba (2011), an earlier film I made about my father, centres on an iconic photograph of him and my uncle on their release from prison as political prisoners under the Shah’s military dictatorship in 1978 during the Iranian Revolution. The poster behind them is a socialist realist painting called Raising the Banner by the Russian painter Geli Korzhev (1925 – 2002), adopted by an Iranian Marxist guerrilla group. While the photograph was taken before my birth, it stirs up deep feelings in me and connects me to the historical moment through my relationship with the men photographed and what Marianne Hirsch (1997) terms ‘postmemory’ – an affiliative form of memory passed on between family generations ‘by means of the stories, images, and behaviours’ and through ‘imaginative investment and creation’ rather than direct experience. The photograph evokes the unrealised hopes and aspirations of a revolutionary generation, a ‘subjunctive nostalgia’ (Malek 2019), an imaginative reflection on what could have been. It is also shaped by knowledge of political defeat and what is not apparent in the photograph: my father’s incarceration, detention, experience of political violence and psychological trauma written on his body in the present.

Photograph of author’s father and uncle in Baba (2011) (image: author’s own)

In what she terms ‘intercultural cinema’ Laura Marks (2000) identifies a ‘haptic visuality’, a way of conveying cultural memory through a tactile and physical sensibility, which she sees as evident in the work of diasporic filmmakers responding to the gaps and silences in recorded history. In that sense, the investigation and disclosure of my family memories through domestic ethnography is not simply driven by a personal investigation or the anxiety of my parents’ histories being lost into oblivion. The privileging of migrant family memories has a wider political intention, as Berghahn argues, responding to ‘inequities of power and visibility’ through an ‘impassioned plea for the inclusion of memories of the marginalised and the pluralisation of the cultural memory of the host nation’ (2013, p. 116).

Nariman Massoumi is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol, and Co-ordinator of the MMB Research Challenge Representation, Belonging, Futures. His filmmaking practice and research centres on histories of colonialism and migration with a specific focus on the British/Iranian context through ethnographic and archive-based documentary film practices.

Working with the Colombian Truth Commission on illegal drug economies

Posted on by Emily

By Mary Ryder.

In June 2022 the Colombian Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition launched its final report, Hay Futuro Si Hay Verdad: Hallazgos y Recomendaciones (There is a Future if There is Truth: Findings and Recommendations). This was the culmination of three and half years of work investigating the causes and consequences of decades of armed conflict in the country, developing a wide-ranging set of recommendations to support the transition to peace.

Colombia’s Truth Commission had a hugely ambitious mandate and introduced a number of innovations, including working with pedagogy as an operational pillar, integrating feminist methodologies, exploring the mobilities of drugs and money in the conflict, and collecting testimonies beyond the borders of the nation. It faced myriad political challenges and ran throughout the global pandemic. The release of its final report and its acceptance by Colombia’s new President, Gustavo Petro, renew prospects for peace in the country and signal the enormous responsibility for Colombian society to widely acknowledge the truths the final report presents and work towards its recommendations.

‘There is a Future if There is Truth’ (image: Colombian Truth Commission)

Colleagues from the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies and the School of Education at the University of Bristol have been working with the Colombian Truth Commission since its inception, supporting the innovative work described above. Funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Bristol and support from the MEMPAZ and EdJAM projects have enabled the development of gender-sensitive methodologies for collecting testimonies and the collection and transcription of thousands of testimonies from women and LGTBQI+ people affected by conflict. Commissioners Alejandra Miller, who led the Commission’s innovative work on gender, and Carlos Beristain, who led its work collecting testimonies from Colombians in exile, both visited the university in 2019, as did members of the pedagogy and gender working groups (see more here).

Along with another University of Bristol doctoral researcher, Laura Hankin, I have worked closely with the Truth Commission throughout its operation. Here I reflect upon the key role of the drugs working group, to which I contributed, and the importance of understanding the complex relationship between the movement of drugs – and of capital generated by the illegal trade – and the armed conflict in Colombia.

Drugs in the Truth Commission

The Colombian Truth Commission is the first in the world to meaningfully investigate the role of illegal drug economies in an armed conflict, and to dispute the continuation of UN conventions on international drug prohibition by recognising their damaging and counter-productive impact on Colombia’s transition from war to peace.

Drug economies were central to the Commission’s mandate, which explicitly called for an investigation into the relationship between Colombia’s armed conflict and the cultivation of illegal crops, the production and commercialisation of illegal drugs, and the laundering of assets derived from drug trafficking.

The team responsible for this work sought to expand upon existing literature and research that has tended to reduce illegal drugs-trafficking to a means of financing Colombia’s armed conflict, and to contest a longstanding political discourse that blames illegal drugs-trafficking as the source of all problems in Colombia. A deliberate choice was made to focus not just on drugs-trafficking but on understanding the dynamics of regional drug economies – of which trafficking is just one part – and how these interact with the conflict. We also took a broad view of who is involved – from citizens, police, guerrilla and paramilitary groups to politicians and local authorities – who is benefitting from them, and who is suffering because of them.

For more than three years we delved into the Truth Commission’s archives to explore the regulations and controls that different armed groups in Colombia held over drug production, trafficking and consumption in the regions under their control; the conflation of counter-insurgency efforts with counter-drug policy efforts, and the militarisation of state-citizen relations in these regions; the impact of forced eradication and aerial spraying of glyphosate on campesinos, different ethnic groups and on the movement of money in Colombian territories; and campaign financing and the corruption of politics and public institutions through incomes from the illegal drug trade, among other dynamics.

The Commission’s findings reveal a complex web of entangled networks, comprised of political, armed and civilian members involved in the production, supply or use of illegal drugs, which varied widely across the different regions of Colombia and at different moments of the armed conflict. The report describes how the circulation of drugs became a means of accumulating wealth and power for these different actors, which generated violence on Colombian society and caused corruption in many institutions and politics.

Another key conclusion of the final report is that Colombia’s traditional political conflict was exacerbated and degraded by the punitive, prohibitionist ‘war on drugs’. Drug prohibition criminalised anyone involved in the production, supply or use of illegal drugs, which stigmatised their behaviour as ‘wrong’ or ‘immoral’ and in turn justified acts of violence against them. For example, systematic human rights violations were exercised against drug users by armed actors as a mechanism to gain acceptance among the wider population, many of whom deemed it a valid and desirable way to deal with people considered ‘disposable’, ‘flawed’ and ‘dangerous’.

The ‘war on drugs’ also resulted in the transformation of the armed forces, whose attention was diverted from citizen protection to destroying coca fields and drug laboratories and pursuing drugs-traffickers, often against the will of many rural communities whose livelihoods depended on illegal crop production. These prohibitionist policies not only failed to shut down these illegal economies, but they played a key role in scaling up the violence.

The Commission’s recommendations for the non-repetition of violence state that Colombian leaders must now recognise how drug economies have penetrated the country’s culture, economy and politics and how the global ‘war on drugs’ is continuing to drive its armed conflict in the present. In particular, it recommends that the new Colombian government leads and promotes an international debate to reform drug policy in cooperation with the United States and to move toward legal regulation. The report is unequivocal that this change is urgent and necessary to eliminate one of the key structural drivers of conflict in the country.

The work discussed above is presented in chapter 6 of the final report Hay Futuro Si Hay Verdad and in three case studies which expose, first, the repression and stigmatisation of coca-growing farmers in the armed conflict, second, the militarisation of Colombia’s Macarena region under the logic of the ‘war on drugs’, and third, the victimisation of people using drugs.

Mary Ryder is a PhD student in the School of Education at the University of Bristol. Her research explores how Colombians’ experiences and memories of conflict have been shaped by counter-drug and security policies. She is broadly interested in drug policy reform, transitional justice and memory within the context of conflict and peace.

Looking back to ‘The Postcolonial Age of Migration’: a post-pandemic view

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Ranabir Samaddar.

My book The Postcolonial Age of Migration was published in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic raged in India and elsewhere. Global mobility had screeched to a halt, as had mobility within India. Locked down in my house when I received a copy, I was driven to reflecting on what I had written: did I do justice to our age in describing it as the postcolonial age of migration?

While writing the book I was aware of the importance of historical sensitivity in making sense of our postcolonial age. Time and again the book goes back to colonial histories of war, plunder, changes in land use, peasant dispossession, ecological marginality, primitive accumulation and the continuities of all these themes in our time. With this backdrop the book discussed colonial practices of violence and border-making exercises and how they were being reproduced today on a global scale. It argued that wars, famines and ecological changes accounted in a big way for today’s migrations and forced migration flows and influenced patterns of labour mobility. This was also the context of the emergence of modern humanitarianism with its specific doctrine of protection. In brief, the book analysed the imprints of the colonial roots of modern humanitarianism and protection.

Yet, as I reflected on the book in the midst of the pandemic, it dawned on me that it was silent on one of the most important realities of our time. The overwhelming presence of COVID-19 made me realise that it did not take into account epidemiological disasters as integral to the colonial history of migration and the postcolonial age of migration. The absence of any concern for migrant workers and refugees in the structure of global public health concerns should have been noted. The book discusses camps and speaks of health concerns of the refugees in camps, but the larger perspective of public health was absent.

India’s history of epidemics offers insights into the country’s poor public health infrastructure. The history of the 1897 outbreak of bubonic plague in colonial Bombay is well known and the present situation of COVID-19 has evoked comparisons. Thousands fled the city in the closing years of the 19th century, spreading the disease in the process. Public health infrastructure was zero. Residents locked themselves up in their houses in fear of plague-control officers who could pick anyone up, quarantine them, and separate children from their families.

A refugee Hindu family during the 1897 bubonic plague, Bombay (Image: Wellcome Images)

In the following 20 years about 10 million people died of the disease across India. Plague was accompanied by other infectious diseases such as cholera, smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis and influenza. Malaria killed millions through the years, and an estimated five per cent of the country’s population perished in the influenza epidemic of 1918-19. As one commentator put it, of all these diseases, it was only the bubonic plague that was declared as crisis. ‘Then, as now, only one out of a handful of deadly afflictions, the one that most directly threatened commerce, trade, and the accumulation of capital—was identified as a crisis.’ The plague became the Bombay government’s priority for the next two decades. As capital and labour began fleeing the city in the wake of the disease, the government implemented massive efforts to bring them back in. We are probably witnessing today something similar to what happened in the past.

The countrywide lockdown of 2020 reminded us of these earlier eras as the country witnessed masses of migrants returning home on foot, a growing hunger crisis, stockyards and storages overflowing with millions of tons of surplus food, and arbitrary powers being exercised across the nation. This was a call back to the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897. In the outbreak of the plague the city of Mumbai (then Bombay) came to a halt. Thousands of workers (according to some estimates 300,000) left the city. This only sharpened the crisis further. The Bombay Improvement Trust was formed to restore the city’s ‘reputation’ of cleanliness. Yet in those efforts, the policy focus was on making the city ‘clean’ rather than setting up and improving public health infrastructure. Cleaning the city was a ‘public’ purpose; ensuring health of the people was less of a priority. We still do not know, as we did not know in 1896-98, if draconian measures such as the sudden and total lockdown can stop or control contagion. So far, we have waited and tolerated a ‘minimum number of deaths’ (including collateral deaths such as of migrants on the roads or rail tracks) to allow the pandemic to pass away. Social Darwinism matched perfectly the economic policies that were to follow the pandemic.

Disease does not act alone. It acts in unison with a policy of eroding public health infrastructure. Pushing refugees and migrant workers to the fence and robbing them of access to the public distribution of food, public health provisions and employment in public works became wittingly or unwittingly a part of disease control measure. In many ways independent India followed the colonial approach.  

In this context the migrant is seen, like the virus, to spread disease. The migrant’s body is considered suspect. Like the virus, in country after country, the migrant has been symbolised as the enemy from outside. We are now accustomed to the idea that our civilisation is at war with a new kind of external enemy. Like a parasite it breeds in the most vulnerable areas of human life, waiting for the moment to release a pathological violence upon its otherwise oblivious prey. The colony also represented this threat to the metropolitan world. Colonies brought ‘tropical diseases’ and were the source of mysterious illnesses and dangers. 

Political society has long held the belief that viruses and migrant workers both belong to the outside. The outbreak of the epidemic and the sudden emergence of thousands upon thousands of migrant workers on the roads in India trying to escape the trap of lockdown signalled the end of the mythical safety of a society of settled population groups and of the state that guards this insularity. The range of policy problems and debacles in coping with the pandemic arose from the ignorance of the phenomenon of mobility – of both pathogens and workers. There is no doubt that any account of postcolonial imprints on the current age of migration will be incomplete without an examination of the interrelated notions of public health and refugee and migration flows.

Ranabir Samaddar is the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group. His research focuses on migration and refugee studies, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. His book The Postcolonial Age of Migration was published in 2020 by Routledge and you can watch an interview with him about the book on the MMB Insights and Sounds 2022 series.

Bad intentions: the UK government and migrants

Posted on by Emily

By Ryan Lutz.

At the MMB postgraduate workshop in July, ‘How Not to Think Like a State,’ visiting scholar Nandita Sharma talked to us about the throughlines of her research. One of these, in particular, gripped me: ‘Anti-immigrant sentiments,’ she said, ‘are used as the basis for fascism.’

I am a migrant PhD student in the UK studying migrant integration and how local-level organisations and the City Council in Bristol resist the draconian policies of the UK government, such as the 2021 Nationality and Borders Bill and 2016 Policing and Crime Act. Despite the government’s policies, the council and local organisations in Bristol are striving to provide a safe and welcoming environment for migrants. The city has a long history of fighting against oppression and racism, including the Bristol Bus Boycotts of 1963, the St Paul’s uprisings of the 1980s, the toppling of the Colston statue in 2020 and the Kill the Bill uprisings of 2021. Additionally, Bristol attracted many migrants from colonised countries during the post-colonial period, meaning there is a history of migrants and ethnic minorities in the city who have been a part of integration services and have successfully built their lives here.

Mural in St Pauls, Bristol (image: Gioconda Beekman on Flickr)

At the beginning of my journey as a PhD student, I thought migrant integration could undercut or potentially combat the use of anti-immigrant sentiment as a vehicle for fascism. Given my lived experience with immigration, nationalism and racism in the United States, I assumed that a lack of exposure led people and the systems they created to be hostile towards outsiders. Through our discussions with Nandita in the postgraduate workshop, my worldview was challenged and complicated in the best possible way.

Historically, integration has been seen as equal access to resources, acquisition of national languages and active participation in society. But this approach rarely asks how migrants experience integration as individuals and fails to question what ‘society’ is and at what spatial or ideological level migrants are integrating. In somewhere like Bristol, where 15% of the population is born outside the UK and 22% self-identify as nonwhite, a wide array of socio-economic realities co-exist. Despite its affluent city centre, Bristol has some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country and ranks 341 out of 348 for inequalities experienced by ethnic minorities.

I had always known that integration was a very political issue. Still, through the workshop with Nandita, I began to see how the anti-immigrant rhetoric is now in fact co-opting the integration process in the UK: at a base level, integration plays a crucial role in problematising migrants as others. It situates migrants as apart from the rest of a population, needing to integrate into one unified host society even though, in a country like the UK, there is no single harmonious society to integrate into. The rhetoric that migrants must adapt, integrate and adopt British values places all the blame and burden onto them. And it fails to take into account all of the structural barriers and inequalities they have to navigate daily. Through the increasingly restrictive national immigration policies passed in the UK, integrating becomes more of a pipedream for migrants each year.

The UK government has been described as an ‘iron rod welfare system‘ when it comes to migrants: they either fall foul of it and are deported or receive legal status and comprehensive social rights. However, the ability to gain that legal status and integrate into a new community has become increasingly circumscribed under the Conservative government – now in power since 2010.

Anti-immigrant sentiments have been an integral part of the fabric of the UK since its inception. In recent decades it has become enshrined in laws such as the 1987 Immigration (Carriers’ Liability) Act, which extended document and border checks to airlines and other carriers, making it their responsibility to keep people out who fell on the wrong side of the iron rod. More recently, the UK government has criminalised seeking asylum from within the UK, awarded more funding to Immigrant Detention Centres and extended the length of time migrants can be held in these centres through the Nationality and Borders Bill. The most recent examples are the Manston migrant centre, which has been described as a zoo by inhabitants, and the firebombing of an immigration processing centre in Dover, which was driven by far-right ideologies. Meanwhile, the Conservative government introduced the Rwanda Plan earlier this year, which has had a host of negative externalities for migrants such as restricting their access to claim asylum, taking away their agency to work or where to live once they are in the system, and making the hostile environment worse.

I wholeheartedly agree with Nandita that, at a national level, the UK completely fits her view of anti-immigration as a base for fascism. But given Bristol’s progressive and radical past, I wanted to believe that there was more than just a harmful system at play. Bristol goes beyond other UK cities with its Refugee and Asylum Seeker Inclusion Strategy, run by the City Council. And there is a robust system of migrant and refugee welfare charities that make up the Bristol Refugee and Asylum Seeker Partnership. These organisations offer services that help to fill the gaps left by the iron rod welfare system of the UK government.

The workshop with Nandita raised many questions about the current Conservative government’s everyday functioning. Namely, as the UK moves further and further towards solidifying its borders and making life as a migrant here a traumatising experience, is the vital work of the migrant organisations in Bristol actually enabling the government’s lack of response? Early research has shown that the government’s anti-immigrant policies increase the workload for charities, which prevents them from campaigning. So now my question is, does this integration work by city-wide collaborations in Bristol help the migrant community? Or are the harmful policies of the national government too much for local welfare systems to overcome?

Overall, the workshop with Nandita was extraordinarily thought-provoking and challenged some of the romantic views I held about the function of government. Most importantly, though, it raised questions about the function of my research as a PhD student and the best path forward for an equitable immigration system.

Ryan Lutz is a PhD Student in Social Policy at the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol.

Researching Western privilege in Dubai: a conversation with Saba A. Le Renard

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

This is an edited version of an interview with Saba A. Le Renard in Jadaliyya* about their recent book Western Privilege. Work, Intimacy, and Postcolonial Hierarchies in Dubai (Stanford University Press, 2021).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write the book?

Saba A. Le Renard (SLR): When I was doing my PhD fieldwork about the transforming femininities of young Saudi women fifteen years ago, I was shocked by the stereotypical discourses many French residents I met there held on Saudi people. After finishing my PhD, I started working on the statuses, self-identifications, and practices of Western passport holders, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Dubai. During the courses I had followed in Middle East studies, the statuses of Western passport holders had never been a topic, despite many of this group occupying dominant positions in firms and various administrations of the region. My research started with a willingness to question this status, to make ‘Westerner’ the object rather than the implicit subject of knowledge.

In Dubai, as in many places of the world, having or not having a Western passport produces a clear split. Having one facilitates passage across national borders and represents an important differentiator and ranking criterion within the globalised job market, though how and how much one benefits from it differ, notably, depending on one’s position in gender, class and race hierarchies. The book explores how men and women, white and non-white Western passport holders inhabit the privileged status of ‘Westerner.’ It shows how they perceive Dubai’s social order differently depending on their trajectories, and how they nevertheless participate in reproducing it, for instance by implementing salary differentiation when recruiting, or by routinely racialising other inhabitants, described as ‘locals,’ ‘Arabs,’ Filipinos’ or ‘Indian.’ 

J: What particular topics, issues and literatures does the book address? 

SLR: First, the book contributes to what could be called a postcolonial turn in studies of the Arabian Peninsula, breaking with the longstanding tendency to ignore the imperial history of the region. In this book, I study Westerners not only as privileged migrants but also as local elites, playing a role in the perpetuation of nationality, race, class and gender hierarchies. I deconstruct the discourse presenting Westerners in the Arabian Peninsula as outsiders, having no role in the perpetuation of inequality; this belief is central, I argue, to the construction of their privileged subjectivities. For instance, some parents I interviewed told me that Dubai was great with young kids as it is very practical to have a live-in nanny, but that they planned to leave when their kids would become teenagers, because they did not want the latter to ‘see’ such blatant social injustice. I analysed this need to distance themselves from Dubai’s social order while benefitting from it as a salient element of distinctive Western subjectivities. 

Second, the book aims to contribute to race and migration studies. In the last decade, several authors have criticised the lack of attention for privileged migrants in migration studies. Postcolonial approaches of expatriation, which have shown how whiteness is transformed through migrations, have been very useful to understanding the distinctive subjectivities of Western residents in Dubai. The originality of my approach lies in my choice to compare the trajectories, practices and discourses of white and non-white Western passport holders. It enabled me to identify the specificity of whiteness as a privileged status among Western passport holders (because whiteness, in practice, does remain a privileged position among them), and to make visible the trajectories of non-white Western passport holders that benefit, to a lesser extent, from Western privilege, while also facing forms of stigmatisation and marginalisation. Beyond this, the similarities and contrasts between the two groups reveal how Dubai’s neoliberal discourse on multiculturalism, combined with the use of whiteness in the city’s branding, impact racial categories and produce conditional and limited inclusions. Such reflection echoes works on neoliberalism, multiculturalism and selective inclusions in other contexts, especially the United States and some European countries.

Third, the book is grounded on gender and sexuality studies; it documents how the formation of Westerners as a social group interlocks race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality. Postcolonial feminism as well as intersectionality are important inspirations for such approach. I argue that beside professional aspects, Western distinction lies on specific forms of heteronormativity. On the one hand, Western, white, upper-class couples, in spite of a clear labour division among spouses, identify with gender equality and women’s emancipation in contrast with ‘others’ represented as oppressed or sexist, or as frustrated sexual predators. On the other hand, single Westerners often long for serious, authentic relations, which they present as impossible in Dubai. Many associate authentic love with the West and Westerners, in contrast to Dubai’s so-called materialism and superficiality. By analysing specific models of heteronormativity among Western residents and how they participate in making boundaries between them and ‘others,’ I hope this book brings a contribution to Middle East feminist studies, which have been developing postcolonial and queer approaches in the last decades. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have? 

SLR: I hope people interested in the Middle East, in race and migration studies, and in gender and feminist studies will read the book. I think it could help question how Western researchers position themselves while in the field, and also nourish the wider discussion that is currently developing about racialisation in the region.

Since the book is also inspired by race and migration studies and gender and sexuality studies focused on other contexts, I hope it will interest people working in these fields beyond the Middle East. While Dubai has an awful reputation among many intellectual bourgeoisies, some Western passport holders experience it as less racist than their home societies (for instance, France or the United States) and many women consider its streets as more secure than their home cities. As these two elements suggest, Dubai is an interesting society to better understand transnational racial formations, structural racism, gender regimes and the policing of public spaces—impacting gender, race, class, sexuality and nationality hierarchies.

Saba A. Le Renard is a Researcher in Sociology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. They are currently researching the place of ‘Westerners’ in the multinational professional worlds of Riyadh and Dubai. You can see them interviewed about their book Western Privilege in the MMB Insights and Sounds 2022 series.

* This interview has been edited and republished here with kind permission of Jadaliyya, the independent ezine produced by the Arab Studies Institute. The original, longer version, published in November 2021 and including an excerpt from Western Privilege, can be found here. Please note that Saba’s book was published under a first name that they no longer use.