Category: Bordering control justice

Looking for the ‘state’ in statelessness research

Posted on by Emily

By Natalie Brinham.

Eight months after Myanmar’s genocidal violence in 2017, which saw more than a million Rohingyas driven into Bangladesh, 55-year-old Rafique (not his real name) welcomed me into his shelter in a busy section of the refugee camp. He served me tea and asked me to wait – he wanted to show me something important that would explain ‘everything I wanted to know’ about Rohingya statelessness in Myanmar.

After some time, he emerged from behind the blanket that had been hung as a make-shift wall. He placed a metal cash box on the bamboo floor. Opening it with a key, he revealed a stack of papers, cards and photos – tattered ones, faded ones and plastic covered ones. Very carefully, he unfolded and displayed the contents across the length of the floor in front of me and my young Rohingya ‘fixer’. Methodically, he placed them in date order with the oldest closest to him. There were ID cards from his parents, grandparents, uncles, aunties and children – fraying blue and pink ones from the 1950s, white ones for the 1990s and one new turquoise one; registration documents listing every family member from the 1970s to the 2010s complete with crossings out, alterations and comments added by officials; joint-mugshots of the family holding a board with their registration number; repatriation documents from the 1970s and 1990s; and piles of land registration papers going back to the early years of independence in the 1950s.

‘But Uncle,’ said my fixer in amazement, ‘This must be one of the most complete collections in the whole camp! How on earth did you manage to keep hold of all these documents?’

Other Rohingya refugees had told us how their documents had been confiscated, seized, destroyed and burnt by state officials. Rafique explained how he would wrap the papers and cards in plastic, secure them in a metal box and bury them deep underground. Each year for almost 30 years, he would dig them up, rewrap them and bury them somewhere else. His brother was well connected; when authorities demanded he relinquish old ID cards, he would say they were lost and offered bribes of food, farm produce, favours or money.

The word ‘Rohingya’ is pointed out on a household registration list from Myanmar, saved in the camps of Bangladesh for proof of Rohingya identity (image: Natalie Brinham, 2019)

Pointing to the documents in turn, Rafique explained – over three hours – how successive regimes in Myanmar had slowly destroyed Rohingya identity as a group belonging to the Rakhine region of the country. He kept the papers, he said, to evidence Rohingya history in Myanmar. He re-told the stories of belonging of his relatives; three mass expulsions and forced repatriations since independence; slow denationalisation; violent encounters with state authorities. Finally, he talked about his determination to resist the current state ID scheme, which ‘makes Rohingya into foreigners’. Group resistance, he reasoned, was intricately connected to the mass violence, killings and expulsions that had landed him in this refugee camp in 2017. Myanmar, he said, would not be a safe place to return to until Rohingyas were ‘given back’ their citizenship.

Invisible people or invisible states?

At a global level, citizenship has been compared to a giant filing system. Each individual human is assigned at least one nationality and filed ‘according to their return address’ or where they can be deported to. From a statist point of view, stateless people – or people without any legal citizenship – are an aberration in that filing system. They have no return address, so cannot be formally deported or expelled.

Human rights advocates take a different view. Those un-filed people are an ‘anomaly’ in an international rights system that is supposed to apply universally to all humans. It’s impossible for people to realise their rights if no state is responsible for protecting or providing for them. As such, stateless people are often described as legally and administratively ‘invisible’. They struggle to access legal protections, education, healthcare, work and financial services. Further, they are unable to benefit from international development and aid interventions.

Though statist concerns over deportability and human rights concerns over rightlessness seem to be ideologically opposed to one another, proposed solutions to the problems of statelessness often align. Administrative invisibility is generally tackled by proposing more state registration, more documentation, more efficiency, more digitisation and more biometrics. Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, which commits to providing a ‘legal identity for all’ by 2030, has become a rallying cry for international development organisations, refugee and migration management agencies, multinational tech companies and NGOs alike.

Yet, these approaches to statelessness by-pass fundamental issues relating to state abuses of power. State authorities consolidate their power through identification technologies and ID schemes, and can misuse these powers to exclude and expel. Few people in the world are actually completely undocumented. More people lack the right documents to be able to live legally in their homes, move freely within their own country, find regulated work or use banking systems. Other people are wrongly documented/registered by state authorities as foreign. The wrong kinds of registration can make things worse.

Despite being hailed as the harbingers of social inclusion, digital ID schemes can harden the boundaries of citizenship, excluding minorities and making it more difficult for people of uncertain citizenship to function in society. As Rafique’s account shows, the implementation of ID systems can be intricately linked to citizenship stripping and mass atrocities. Analysis of how power functions (differently) in particular states and societies, and how it functions through citizenship regimes and ID systems, is absent in ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to delivering ‘legal identities for all’. ID schemes are often misconceived as neutral processes in which sets of biological and/or biographical facts about individuals are recorded. In fact, they are imbued with power and profoundly impact social relations.

In initiatives to lift ‘stateless people’ out of a state of invisibility – to count them and document them – we fail to look properly at the perpetrating states. States are not identical containers that will function once filled up with international policy recommendations, capacity development and technical advice. Rafique’s oral history, which covered a period of 30 years of UN presence in his homelands, tells a story not of the invisibility of stateless Rohingya, but of how international actors have failed to look at the criminal intent of the state relating to their ID schemes and registration processes.

Statelessness studies often grapple with how to research ‘invisible’ populations. It’s equally important to grapple with how and why state violence has been invisibilised in anti-statelessness work. The very best starting point is to listen properly to survivors of state violence. Rafique’s account is just one of many. Rohingyas and many other stateless people are not really ‘invisible’. It’s just that if we look for them through state-tinted lenses, we tend to look right through the structures that were built to incarcerate them.

Natalie Brinham is an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol, working with MMB and the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies. Her research project is titled ‘IDs for Rohingyas: Pathways to Citizenship or Instruments of Genocide?’ She was previously a Senior Programme Lead at the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion.

Bad cases make bad law: the unintended consequences of denaturalising bad guys

Posted on by Emily

By Colin Yeo.

The power to denaturalise a British subject on the basis of their behaviour was first introduced by legislation in 1918. With some adjustments, the power remained broadly the same until as late as 2002. Essentially, only a person who had naturalised as British could be stripped of their citizenship and the main grounds for doing so involved disloyalty or disaffection to the Crown, assisting an enemy or proven criminal conduct. These powers were exercised against some German and allied nationals who had naturalised as British but fell into abeyance. The last denaturalisation under this legal regime occurred in 1973.

After 80 years of legal continuity, a period which included a second world war, the Cold War and The Troubles, amongst other external-internal existential security threats, a series of fundamental changes to the law on denaturalisation began in 2002. Why?

The evolution over the last twenty years of British law on denaturalisation — or citizenship stripping — is a case study in bad cases making bad law. The law was changed repeatedly between 2002 and 2006 specifically to enable the government to strip the citizenship of particular high profile individuals.[1] Relatively restrained use was initially made of these new powers, with only those high profile individuals targeted for denaturalisation. A change in government in 2010 introduced changed attitudes to the value and meaning of citizenship. The new government found itself in possession of very considerable discretionary powers and set about making extensive use of them.

The governments and ministers that introduced the initial changes to the law between 2002 and 2006 were relatively restrained in making use of them. The numbers of denaturalisations remained very low until 2010, when there was a change of government and a change of approach. For the incoming government, citizenship was a privilege not a right.

The problem is that when very low legal thresholds for draconian actions are introduced, ministers and civil servants are handed huge freedom of action. Particularly in the field of immigration and asylum law, they are subject to huge political and media pressures. It should be no surprise if they are inconsistent in their use of the very considerable powers with which they have been entrusted by an earlier parliament. It should also be no surprise that unconscious bias asserts itself in these circumstances.

Behaviour-based denaturalisations peaked in 2017 at around the time that the territorial area in Iraq and Syria controlled by the ISIS or Islamic State group was collapsing. British citizens who had associated with the group were looking to escape and return home. The Home Secretary at the time was Amber Rudd, but it is her successor, Sajid Javid, who has provided the most detailed public justification for denaturalisation action.

Speaking on breakfast television about Shamima Begum in 2021, several years after his time as Home Secretary, he claimed that ‘[i]f you did know what I knew, as I say because you are sensible, responsible people, you would have made exactly the same decision, of that I have no doubt.’ Javid retrospectively framed the decision as one involving risk to the British public, essentially.

He has also, however, stated a very different justification for denaturalisation. At a party conference speech in 2018, when he was still Home Secretary, he boasted of expanding use of citizenship deprivation powers to ‘those who are convicted of the most grave criminal offences. This applies to some of the despicable men involved in gang-based child sexual exploitation.’ There is a clear moral dimension to this statement.

A few months later, also in 2018, he discussed the denaturalisation of a group of dual national Pakistani-British men convicted of sexual offences. Pressed on the risk to citizens of Pakistan once they were removed there, Javid he reverted to suggesting it was all a matter of risk, albeit only of risk to the British public: ‘[m]y job is to protect the British public and to do what I think is right to protect the British public.’

More recently, lawyers have reported that denaturalisation action is now being pursued against individuals convicted of human trafficking offences. It is hard to see how removing a person to a country from which they have previously trafficked others reduces risk to either the citizens of that country or the United Kingdom.

The expansion in the use of denaturalisation powers from threats to national security to very serious crimes would have been impossible without the reforms to citizenship deprivation law enacted in 2006 in response to the case of David Hicks. It is not realistically possible to argue that serious sexual offences or human trafficking amount to acts seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom. It clearly is possible successfully to argue that such conduct is sufficient for the Home Secretary to be satisfied that denaturalisation is conducive to the public good. After all, the Rochdale sex offenders lost their legal challenge: Aziz & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] EWCA Civ 1884.

The fact that every known case of behaviour-based denaturalisation involves a Muslim has not gone without comment. There has undoubtedly been a serious threat to public safety from some individuals who are Muslim but it would be entirely unrealistic to suggest that the threat is uniquely posed by Muslims. Denaturalisation has never been pursued against Irish nationalists, adherents of right-wing terror groups, anarchists or other dual foreign nationals representing a threat to national security. It is possible that no such individuals were identified who held dual citizenship and were thus eligible for denaturalisation but this seems inherently unlikely.

The discrimination becomes even more stark when the case of the Rochdale sex offenders is considered. The men who were denaturalised were all Muslim men of Pakistani origin. It seems highly likely there have been many, many other dual nationals who committed sexual and other offences of similar or worse gravity — where seriousness is measured by the length of sentence rather than media judgment — who were never considered for denaturalisation.

The changes made to denaturalisation powers in the 2000s were naive. The government of the day may have intended only judicious, sparing use of citizenship stripping. If so, the scope of those intentions was not reflected in the very wide powers the government conferred on itself and, importantly, on its successors. Subsequent governments have made ever more extensive use of the powers that were conferred on the Home Secretary.

In the process, two tiers of British citizenship have emerged. Those with no foreign parentage are relatively secure in their status because they would be rendered stateless if they lost their British citizenship, meaning the power cannot be exercised against them. But for those who have naturalised or have foreign parentage, British citizenship is now little more than a readily revocable form of immigration status.

Colin Yeo is a barrister, writer, campaigner and consultant specialising in immigration law. He founded and edits the Free Movement immigration law blog and is an Honorary Researcher at the University of Bristol with MMB. His latest books are Welcome to Britain: Fixing our Broken Immigration System (2020) and Refugee Law (2022). This post follows a previous one by Colin on ‘Imperial denaturalisation: towards an end to empire’.

A longer version of this post was originally published by freemovement.org on 6th February 2023.

Footnote:

[1] See the original, full version of this blogpost on freemovement.org, which includes details of the cases of these high profile individuals, namely Abu Hamza, David Hicks and Hilal Al-Jedda.

Borderscapes: policing within

Posted on by Emily

Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Victoria Hattam.

Governments around the globe have been building border walls for decades: Calais is no exception. At least since the Touquet Treaty, the UK government has helped fund the securitization of the Port of Calais through a variety of construction projects. Cement walls, white-mesh-razor-wire fencing, and landscaping are being used to restrict undocumented migrants from crossing from Calais to Dover. Bordering is an expensive business: the House of Commons Research Briefing puts the UK financial commitment to France between 2014 and the 2022/23 financial year at slightly more than GBP 232 million (Gower, 2023). And even this figure, Gower notes, underestimates the total cost as supplemental payments can be found in most years. In 2018, for example, the supplemental payment for Calais bordering was an additional GBP 45.5 million in addition the initial allocation.

Calais white-mesh-razor-wire wall (image: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

I was fortunate to be able to join an MMB trip to Calais last summer and found even my short trip revealing. I began to see the slippage from walls to landscaping. Intense as border walls, razor wire, and surveillance technologies are, it is the landscape design that has stuck with me. Long after one leaves the border proper, bordering continues. 

Bouldering mobility

Hundreds of large boulders have been placed throughout Calais, packed close together, filling a variety of once open spaces. Small parks, spaces underneath bridges, and even small median strips alongside roadways and city intersections now are occupied by rocks rather than people. The materials of choice are decorative boulders: large rocks, generally 3-5 feet in diameter, irregularly shaped, placed in irregular patterns as if in a natural setting. At times, the boulders are accompanied by an array of ornamental grasses: tall, textured, different shades of pale yellow, browns and greens – a touch of Russian Sage for brighter color. The grasses sway in the breeze contrasting with the immovable boulders. It’s a look. Hardscaping, as landscape designers often refer to it, can be found throughout the city.

Boulders filling public space in Calais
(images: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

Fixation points, the French government argues, are being unfixed by making it impossible for people on the move to congregate (Pascual et al., 2023: Van Isacker, 2020). One can sit on the boulders, one might even be able to lie down between them, but they are placed tightly together making congregation and encampment difficult. The so called ‘Jungle’ of Calais is not to be repeated. Landscape design is a new frontier of border policing.

After a day of walking the city, it is difficult to distinguish public beautification projects from border policing. Ponds, parks, flowerbeds all make the city greener, but these very same elements are designed to make Calais less hospitable to the undocumented by removing vegetive cover. 

Boulders and walls control movement differently. The recently constructed white-mesh-razor-wire fences are designed to stop undocumented migrants from crossing over to the UK. For walls, movement is the problem. Boulders carry with them a different politics: move along now, do not gather here. For boulder landscaping, it’s the stopping that is threatening. Walls and boulders create a double opposition in which neither moving nor staying in place are permitted. Migrants, as Nandita Sharma (2020) has argued, are those deemed out of place.

Border creep

The turn to landscaping materializes the ways in which border policing is never simply a matter of securing territorial perimeters. Border security bleeds into internal policing (Ngai, 2004). In Calais, and many other cities, a variety of bordering devices can be found within the city limits. Temporary steel fence sections sit on street corners standing at the ready, waiting to be called to action. Heavy metal poles also have been inserted into the middle of the sidewalk diverting and obstructing movement. The poles are not placed alongside footpaths but are inserted right where one might usually walk. Obstruction is everywhere.

The border creeps from territorial edge into the city proper
(images: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

Aesthetics and politics: what politics do boulders carry?

Living and working in New York City, I am accustomed to highly securitized spaces.  Sidewalks, roads, and buildings are often blocked off, supposedly protected by the deployment of anti-bombing barricades. But New York barricades have a different aesthetic. Rather than natural, irregular, softer boulders, New York City barricades present as manufactured objects: straight lines and crisp edges, often stamped with the New York Police Department initials (NYPD) making clear that this is an official barrier. There is no mistaking NY barricades for landscape features. The barricade of choice is the Jersey Barrier that is materialized both in cement and heavy-duty plastic. Few flowers and grasses are included to soften the look. Security is front and centre.

Jersey Barricades near the United Nations, New York City
(images: Victoria Hattam, October 2023)
Westside Highway, Manhattan, New York City (image: Victoria Hattam, October 2023)

At times, there is a grunge counter aesthetic in New York in which garbage mingles alongside security barriers.

Jersey Barriers were introduced in the 1940s and 50s through Departments of Transportation as devices for minimizing incidental damage during traffic accidents. Over the last 50 years, the barriers have been used in a wide array of policy domains, including deployment by the Department of Homeland Security at the US-Mexico border and by the Department of Defense in Iraq. Traffic management devises have morphed into security objects (Copp, 2018; U.S. Department of Defense, 2006).

The shift from walls to boulders does not diminish hostility towards migrantized people. On the contrary, it extends that hostility inwards. Consider the street alongside Little Island, the newly constructed park that sits just off Manhattan on the Hudson River. Little Island aspires to be a ‘magical place’, but as one enters and exits, there is a sign in big bold letters stipulating that this is an ‘enforcement zone’. Parking and bordering merge. I can no longer easily distinguish one from the other.

Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research, New York. Her current research focuses on US-Mexico border politics and the global political economy. Victoria is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, hosted by MMB. During 2023-24 she is giving numerous workshops, seminars and public lectures at Bristol – read more about her events here.

Other blogposts in our series on Calais include ‘Time and (im)mobility in Calais’ borderlands‘ by Juan Zhang, ‘Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais‘ by Bridget Anderson and ‘Notes from a visit to Calais‘, a video blogpost by Nariman Massoumi.

The ethics of mapping migrant violence through Mexico

Posted on by Emily

By Sylvanna Falcón.

From October 2021 through to May 2022 undergraduate students from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of California, Berkeley, participated in a human rights investigation with Human Rights First (HRF) and El Instituto para las Mujeres en la Migración, AC (IMUMI, The Institute for Migration of Women). Under the direct supervision of university staff, we became part of a binational team (US and Mexico) to track incidents of violence in Mexico affecting non-Mexican migrants, many of whom were asylum seekers, that were being captured online, primarily through news reports or social media posts.

Student researchers used open-source investigation techniques to identify incidents of harms committed against migrants in Mexico. These techniques refer to methodologically accessing publicly available information on the internet, including online news articles, non-governmental or other expert reports, and social media content. For research purposes, the team collated and synthesized this information systemically and went through a process of verification on as many incidents as possible during the research period.

Police vehicle parked in front of a migration encampment in Tijuana, Mexico (image: Barbara Zandoval published on June 19, 2021)

With a primary focus on US President Biden’s administration, which began in January 2021, the students identified more than 400 unique incidents of violence targeting migrants since the start of Biden’s presidency, from reported kidnappings, extortion, and death to allegations of widespread corruption of government officials working alongside drug traffickers. Students recorded all incidents in a shared spreadsheet and tried to verify as many of them as possible. In addition to vetting the source of the information itself, verification meant that students would locate additional online material about a specific incident in order to have more confidence that the incident indeed occurred.

But what to do with all the collection of incidents? How to communicate this information to the general public in an ethical way? What do we gain or lose by depicting migrant violence in a data visualization project? For what purpose, what audience, does this form of documentation serve? Each organization in this partnership had a different purpose for participating in the project. For university students, it was a unique learning experience to systemically collect this kind of online information. HRF, based in the United States, was in need of additional research support to document these cases to put pressure on the US government to change its immigration policies to align with human rights standards and for IMUMI, based in Mexico, the plight of migrant women is their primary focus through advocacy and education efforts.

As we all began to think about the most effective method in which to share this information publicly, the desire to go beyond a text-based report seemed important given the university’s access to various data visualization options. As we agreed to create a digital story and digital map of the incidents, students began to reflect on the ethics of this work, asking pointed questions about the purpose, the desired outcome, and whether or not data visualization results in dehumanization of the migrants. As I navigated these thoughtful queries from students, I encouraged them to acknowledge the various sentiments they felt about the research project itself and about these final deliverables. In the digital report titled ‘Perilous Journeys: Migrants Vulnerable to Violence through Mexico’ they wrote, in part,

Many of us are undergraduate researchers from migrant families with ties to Latin American countries. The cases the team reviewed have evoked feelings of both accomplishment and powerlessness. While proud to help to document the migration-related trauma that is familiar to many of our families and loved ones who have faced migrant-related trauma, our constant exposure to the quantity and severity of these instances is felt on an even deeper emotional and personal level.

Acknowledging their relative privilege by being university students in the United States, the students felt it important to include in the report the following line: ‘As researchers, we cannot stress enough the importance of remaining cognizant of the real names, faces, and lives behind the work we present in this report.’ 

The ethics of visualizing the data remained front and centre during the duration of the project. And the questions of ethics were multi-layered: from knowingly exposing students to graphic material on a regular basis, from understanding that the material could be mis-used if not careful about the presentation, to inadvertently exposing the safety areas for migrants to authorities, and, most importantly, unintentionally dehumanizing the plight of migrants through dots on a map.

In the end, a data visualization project that turned into a digital report conveyed an ideal synergy between text-based information and learning about the incidents on a map so that readers could geographically situate where the reported incidents occurred. The students opted to add different color markings on the map to distinguish incidents and, moreover, to aid people’s understanding that the extent of the problem is throughout the country of Mexico. Both HRF and IMUMI felt this presentation of the research aided them in their own efforts to raise awareness of migrant violence and to call for change.   

Sylvanna Falcón is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Trained as a sociologist, Professor Falcón is the founder and director of the Human Rights Investigations Lab at UC Santa Cruz. She is a visiting scholar at the University of Bristol, hosted by MMB, from October to December 2023.

Expatriate: why we need to study migration categories

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Sarah Kunz.

My new book Expatriate: Following a Migration Category explores the postcolonial history and politics of the category expatriate. It asks what expatriate has been taken to mean in different places and times. How has it been employed and shaped by political and economic projects? Specifically, how has the expatriate been entangled in the mid-century political decolonisation of European colonial empires and the concomitant rise of the USA and the Soviet Union as new world powers? The book looks at what the changing category reveals about how multinational corporations have exerted and defended their power across such geopolitical ruptures, and how they have participated in building a racialised and gendered global economy. It explores how the expatriate has reflected and reproduced social inequality in migration and mobility, not least in access to mobility and its assigned value. Finally, it asks what insights might the history and present of the category expatriate hold for our understanding of the ongoing coloniality of migration and its study?

Expatriate engages such questions as it follows the category through three sites of its articulation. In each of these it explores the situated histories of the category’s making and contestation, and its remaking and lived experience. From these three sites the book also thinks about the politics of migration more broadly.

Choosing sites was not easy – the category expatriate has numerous sites of articulation. This book first follows it to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Nairobi is the perfect place to study expats, I was told repeatedly and with emphasis during my research. Nairobi is a young city and from its inception has been a transnational city, a city of migrants. Its creation as an imperial centre and its ongoing role as an economic and political hub have thus been bound up with migrations ranging from the highly privileged to those experiencing various forms of oppression and exploitation. As I learned, the category expatriate has been a central feature of these migration regimes and thus participated in the making of urban space and, indeed, the nation.

The second site I visited was the Expatriate Archive Centre (EAC) in The Hague, an archive dedicated to documenting worldwide expatriate social history. The archive grew out of a project by ‘Shell wives’ to document their lives on the move with Royal Dutch Shell, one of the 20th century’s most powerful multinational corporations. At the EAC I learned about how the expatriate is effective today as a category that helps us make sense of migration histories. I also learned how a foremost multinational corporation has (re)created the racialised and gendered management of its business empire throughout the 20th century through the skilful deployment and interpretation of migration.

The third site of this study is the academic field of international human resource management (IHRM) literature. Recognising knowledge production as a social practice situated within specific socio-political contexts allows studying it as an archive of these social contexts. Approaching IHRM literature as such meant reading it against but also along its grain to reveal the political nature of ostensibly technical writings on labour rotation in multinational corporations. Academic writing emerged as involved in the hierarchical ordering of human movement and labour not least by systematically erasing political conflict and struggle from its accounts and replacing it with cultural explanations. 

The book works on the epistemological premise that as categories travel and change, their journeys offer useful analytical gateways to examine broader social changes and shifting power geometries. If migration categories are socially produced, then examining their production is a fruitful research strategy to explore not only the category itself but also the social processes that produced it. Thus, following the expatri­ate allows investigating both the category and its role in the postcolonial politics of migration and mobility.

Following a category means following the term spatially and historically, textually and in everyday lived experience. It also means following up on its uses and effects and thinking about what might follow: how to move beyond difficult categories and articulate a more just politics of migration.

The book shows the expatriate to be a malleable and mobile category of shifting meaning and changing membership; a contested category, as passionately embraced by some as it is rejected by others; and a sometimes surprising category, doing unexpected work with undetermined outcomes. Yet, throughout its conceptual meanderings and the disputes over its meaning, the expatriate proves consistently central to struggles over inequality, power and social justice.

I found that categories like expatriate, and migrant, are central to the gendered and racialised politics of mobility precisely because of their useful conceptual multiplicity and malleability. However, this also means that the relationship of the category expatriate to racial and gender categories is not given, never automatic and rarely straightforward. Tracing this always shifting and contested relationship is exactly the analytical task.

The expatriate has much to teach us about the category migrant, too. Migration is today often equated with the South-North movement of the global poor, and the contemporary migrant habitually positioned as vulnerable and exploited. Many people, of course, do move from the souths of this world to its norths. Many of them struggle, experience violence and exploitation. Yet, if these dimensions come to define the condition of the migrant as such we are creating a homogenised and essentialised figure that risks mystifying socially constituted experiences with specific histories. That which becomes seen as a normal, even natural, part of being a migrant too easily goes unquestioned, even becomes unquestionable. The matter in need of explaining becomes the supposed explanation. Ultimately, this not only limits our understanding of how social inequality is produced, but also limits our ability to imagine and realise a more socially just future.

Further, the migrant as already poor and exploited renders invisible those migrants that in no way struggle but benefit from and advance contemporary power formations, also through their migrations. Imperial state and corporate projects always rely on the migration of their most privileged avatars – and they rely on the framing of these mobilities as altogether different than the mobilities of those who are being scapegoated and criminalised. In this sense, migration categories are core to today’s cognitive legitimisation of an unequally bordered world.

The book thus joins calls for re-orienting our analytical habits from employing categories like expatriate and migrant towards studying them. Attending to categories’ multiply inflected uses and ambiguities, even in scholarship, is instructive. Doing so does not mean determining whether expatriates are migrants and which type thereof, but asking how, in particular instances, they are positioned as different or the same and with what effects and what this allows us (not) to see. In other words, the question becomes what the stakes are of arguments about expatriates (not) being migrants or being a particular type thereof.


Sarah Kunz is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, and an Honorary Researcher with MMB. Before joining the University of Essex this year she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Sarah’s research explores privileged migration, the postcolonial politics of migration categories and knowledge production on migration, the historical relationship between mobility and racism, corporate managerial migration, and the commodification of citizenship. Her new book, Expatriate: Following a Migration Category (2023), is published by Manchester University Press.

See also Sarah’s previous MMB blogpost, ‘From imperial sugar to golden passports: the Citizenship Industry’, which explores the rise of ‘investment migration’.

Time and (im)mobility in Calais’ borderlands

Posted on by Emily

Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Juan Zhang.

At the Dover border crossing I sat in the backseat in silence waiting for questions from the immigration officer inspecting the four passports we handed over together as a group. While neighbouring lanes saw vehicles swiftly passing through with only a small pause, our officer meticulously examined my Chinese passport among three British ones. ‘He’s looking for my Schengen visa,’ I murmured to myself. I hoped he’d find it soon. On that passport, there were four expired Schengen visa stickers mixed with several other entry visas I had to obtain as a Chinese national. Determining the validity dates on these stickers required sharp eyes and patience. Finally, the officer raised his gaze from the documents and directed his attention to us – what work do you do, and what’s the purpose of your visit?

Waiting at the Dover border checkpoint (photo by Juan Zhang, 3 July 2023)

Border delays and extended examinations at checkpoints were no strangers to me, but I couldn’t shake the thought that my colleagues might have crossed faster without me. This interruption reminded me how borders could stretch or compress space-time unequally and regularise a particular kind of asynchronicity to justify delay and waiting, and smooth border-crossing should not be taken for granted (see Anderson 2020 on this point). My Chinese passport added an extra ten minutes to the journey – a minor inconvenience after all. But what if I did not possess a valid visa, or if I were not accompanied by my British colleagues who answered immigration queries, or in a more extreme scenario, without a passport or any form of identification? What could a non-EU, non-UK citizen expect at this crossing in that case?

During the week of our two-day visit to Calais, more than 1,300 migrants crossed the English Channel in small boats, setting a new record of unauthorised crossings in recent years and fuelling intense public debate on the UK and French governments’ failure to ‘stop the boats’. Most of the migrants lacked any documents or legal papers and had likely endured weeks or months of waiting in Calais before their risky attempts (Sandri 2018). If the border added a 10-minute delay for me, for migrants and many others on the move, the border could feel altogether impenetrable as no ‘safe passage’ was possible due to tightening British immigration control and bureaucratic red tape (King 2016). People on the move had been stopped and forced to camp out in Calais, where thousands were stuck in limbo in the so-called Jungle – makeshift campsites of deteriorating conditions outside the city of Calais between 2015 and 2016 – until they were forcibly evicted by the French authorities (Van Isacker 2022).

The Jungle may now be abandoned and appear empty, but this does not mean people have stopped coming or are no longer trapped. Calais-based activists explained to us how the French border police and CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, a reserve force of the French National Police in charge of riot control) enforce a ‘no fixation’ rule, preventing people from establishing any permanence or stable connection with volunteers, services and local residents. Evictions routinely take place every 48 hours when enforcers harass and push people around, destroying tents and seizing their belongings. In underpasses and public spaces, people make temporary sleeping arrangements in makeshift shelters. Unable to move forward safely or legally, and faced with harassment and eviction while remaining stuck, migrants in Calais are exposed not only to the harsh policing environment but also to the brutalities of abandonment and the structural violence inherent in the politics of bordering.

A temporary shelter amidst the boulders in an underpass (photo by Juan Zhang, 4 July 2023)

When we left Calais on a ‘big boat’ – a popular cross-Channel ferry with on-board duty free shopping to ‘keep everyone entertained as you sail’ – I wondered how many were planning or had already embarked on treacherous Channel crossings on small boats during our stay in Calais. Our return journey was rather uneventful, when going through immigration was simply a well-practiced sequence of queuing, passport checking, stamping and onward travel. For us, the border seemed to disappear into the larger urban infrastructure that made things ‘flow.’ Interruptions were seen as anomalies, and even boredom during the crossing was to be avoided for an overall pleasant experience. However, for thousands attempting to cross the same waters each year, the border extended out and hardened offshore, inflicting violence and insecurity on those without proper identification or considered undesirable to the UK government.

Calais border crossing (photo by Juan Zhang, 4 July 2023)

Calais’ borderlands serve as a constant reminder that distinct temporalities and subject-specific immobility are maintained for the purpose of producing illegality (Andersson 2014) and normalising politics of rejection. The overlapping processes of identification, surveillance, interrogation and waiting at the border are not therefore just ‘a by-product of state institutions and bureaucracies,’ as Roos Pijpers (2011) reminds us, but possibly tactics of management and integral parts of state control, where irregular bodies are systematically stopped and checked, captured or evicted.

Juan Zhang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on transnational cultural politics in and out of China, and Chinese mobilities across different cultural and social spheres. She is the co-ordinator for the MMB Research Challenge ‘Bodies, Things, Capital.’

See our other posts in this series on Calais’ borderlands: ‘Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais‘ by Bridget Anderson and the video blogpost ‘Notes from a visit to Calais‘ by Nariman Massoumi.

‘I’ll see you on the other side’: migrant journeys and the (re)formation of diasporic identities

Posted on by Emily

By Leah Simmons Wood.

The poetry of Warsan Shire – a Kenya born, UK raised and US based second generation migrant of Somali origin – addresses the topic of journeys. She often deliberately fails to clarify the point of departure and of arrival. In this way, she centres journeys at the heart of the migration experience and removes the focus from nation states, whilst also using a local, singular perspective to draw attention to global movements of people.

Between departure and destination

‘No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language.’

Warsan Shire, ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’

Shire’s work highlights the instrumental role played by journeys in the formation of ‘hybrid’ identities – the condition of ‘double consciousness’ that develops in the liminal space between departure and destination. Journeys appear as formative, contrasting the common perspective in policy, media and academia that focuses on the causes and outcomes of migration and construct journeys as linear and as an in-between phase. Focusing on journeys thus gives voice and agency to migrants and legitimises their experiences of mobility and lives in exile.

(Image by yucar studios on Unsplash)

In ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, her most famous poem, Shire recounts the reasons for leaving, the journey itself and the discrimination and state of precarity encountered within the host nation, supporting the notion of internal borders. These include the structural and racist complications migrants encounter once they reach their ‘final’ destination, aligning with ideas of migrants as non-belonging and undeserving. Changing laws and regulations mean the threat of deportation is constant, and migrants remain stuck in both/either mobility and/or immobility: this is the condition of exile. The impact on the speaker’s identity is found in her rhetorical question – ‘Can’t you see it on my body?’

Theoretical context and symbolism

Oceanic imagery and the female body are used as symbols in the poem to explore themes of journeys and identity (re)formation, and the connection between them. The sea appears as simultaneously deathly and generative, hopeful. This recalls previous academic work by Paul Gilroy and his concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (1993). It explains the emergence of transnational and intercultural voices through experiences of the diaspora and documents the cultural dialogue that occurred between Africa, North America and the UK. I apply this concept beyond the realms of the Atlantic to a different seascape: today, the Mediterranean hosts a liquid graveyard of migrants attempting to reach Europe – echoing the horrors of the Middle Passage. Despite this, Shire states that the journey and borders encountered are:

‘better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.’

Warsan Shire, ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’

Here, the female body imagery situates the speaker’s identity within the context of the journey. It illustrates how a person’s sense of self, gender and relationships are renegotiated and transformed by the process of migration. This is also clear in the language and long sentences, which reflect the linguistic work of the 1970’s French feminists’ in ‘l’ecriture feminine’. They argued that the ‘female imaginary’ exists as plurality, non-linearity and fluidity of identity, as reflected in art, poetry and language and symbols such as the ocean. The sea appears as a female space, offering an opportunity for analysing female creativity and resistance in language, where women can challenge their identities and the gendered roles assigned and defined by Western imperialism and patriarchal norms.

Poetry: lens of analysis

Poetry constitutes an especially useful lens of analysis in this regard. It serves as a vehicle for self-expression, the reclaiming of personal and political agency, community building and solidarity. It is specifically relevant to Shire as sound and listening are integral to Islamic culture, and more specifically as Somalia is known as a ‘nation of poets‘. Combining the predominantly pastoralist nomadic existence of Somalis with the fact that their written orthography was only realised in 1972, oral poetry acts as a signature of Somali culture and as a mode of communication across distances. By writing poetry, Shire reclaims her Somali heritage and identity whilst living in a Western world.

Voice, sound and listening

Internationally, migrants and stateless/racialised people are largely excluded by a focus on nation states and their citizens, where overlapping layers of oppression render them voiceless – without access to platforms for expressing their experiences and concerns. Sound has the potential to cross and dismantle borders through space and time, where the mobility of people is increasingly blocked by security controls and xenophobic policies. It emerges as a form of resistance with the ability to restore voice to those who feel like they have lost it. Indeed, Somalis use technological mediums, including social media, YouTube and cassette tapes, to disseminate their poetry and communicate across the diaspora. These mediums capture the emotions, accents, repetitions and hesitations that are often lost in other means of research, but that are given value in poetry and music. Whilst sound appears as something constructed and orderly, noise – embodied by these accents, repetitions and hesitations – holds negative connotations of being disruptive and pointless. In this way, sounds and noises reveal important information on migrant identities and are central to narratives of inclusion and exclusion.

The movement of the ocean

‘I’ll see you on the other side,’ Shire concludes – reflecting on the circular nature of migration. The title of the poem, ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, suggests that at this point, she is being sent back to where she came from, back to where she started – mirroring the movement of the ocean. Placing journeys in this way at the core of attempts to understand migration would legitimise migrant experiences and give a more complete view of the formation of transnational identities and diasporas. The implications of this lie with the contestation and destabilisation of notions of nationalism, race and ethnicity that currently depict a static conception of nations and of societies. Such work would promote and legitimise migrant voices and acknowledge their experiences, with the objective of developing more inclusive politics and policies.

Leah Simmons Wood studied the MA in Migration and Mobility Studies at the University of Bristol and is an MMB Alumni Ambassador. She currently works as the Fundraising and Communications Officer for the Kenyan NGO Sponsored Arts for Education and for the UK Community Interest Company The Launchpad Collective.

This post was originally published by EURAC research in June 2022.

Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais

Posted on by Emily

Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Bridget Anderson.

As we walked around Calais, one of the group remarked ‘It’s just like The City & the City!’ She was spot on. In his novel The City & the City (2009), China Miéville describes a murder investigation that takes place in what, from the outside, looks like one city, but is for its residents two, Besźel/Ul Qoma, which occupy the same space. From childhood, citizens of one are taught to ‘unsee’ the residents, buildings and events of the other. Ignoring or accidentally forgetting this separation is called ‘breaching’, a crime worse than murder. Calais is a manifestation of this hallucinatory dystopia. It is both seaside town and bidonville, both tourist trap and migrant hub. The seaside town markets itself with a certain irony (maybe particularly appreciated by a British sensibility) as ‘Calaisfornia’. In the shopping mall that borders Calais’ Channel Tunnel terminal there is an escape room called the Prison Island adventure game. The escape room backs onto the border police station and an immigration detention centre. To comfortably inhabit Calais(fornia) it is necessary to see past exclusion and violence, and to accept brutal immigration enforcement as a minor inconvenience.

The escape room, Prison Island adventure game, backing onto the border police station by the Eurotunnel (image: Emma Newcombe)

In July 2023, the MMB team, Challenge leads and Leverhulme Visiting Professor Victoria Hattam, of the New School for Social Research, visited Calais. We were guided by a long-term activist and researcher who has been working in the town for over ten years. It was his knowledge and experience that enabled us to commit a ‘breaching’ and see the gaps between the cities. Calais(fornia) is crosshatched (Miéville fans will catch the analogy) with fences and barbed wire. For Calais(fornia) visitors, they enclose random spaces: running along both sides of a long, thin strip of disused yard; closing off a space under a bridge; enclosing a small piece of land in front of some residential flats. Indeed, the randomness helps invisibilise the practice: there is nothing of note here, nothing exciting or dangerous that is guarded by these fences, just concrete and grass. But breaching enabled us to see these spaces were once hubs where people on the move gathered, hosting community kitchens, they were meeting and distribution points, places where people could sleep. In January 2015, when people were forcibly evicted from the centre of Calais and pushed to the outskirts of the city, the spaces they vacated were enclosed to ensure that they could not be used again. The fences can be read as maps of struggles against deportation and eviction.

An area where migrants once camped is now fenced in for ‘wilding’ and conservation with all access prohibited (image: Nariman Massoumi)

These evictions were the origin of the so-called Jungle* as people were pushed to a piece of land that had been a neglected dump for city rubbish, toxic waste and dredgings from the port expansion (Van Isacker 2022). This became the gathering point for people attempting to cross from France to the UK and was a constant source of dispute for the two governments. In October 2016, the French Government destroyed the encampment completely and declared the area subject to ‘ecological restoration’ and ‘landscape reconquest’. It was converted into a nature reserve, with the UK Home Office a key investment partner. The topography was changed to make it attractive to waterfowl but impossible for humans to camp on, and anti-intrusion features made it difficult for humans to traverse. ‘Fort Vert’ was transformed into a reserve where the citizens of Calais could ‘reconnect’ with nature and where the endangered native species Liparis Loeselii fen orchid could flourish. This would mean the space could achieve designated status in France’s ‘National Restoration Plan’. The then UK Immigration Minister was delighted, describing the project as facilitating a ‘return to nature’ and as preventing the return of migrants to the area (Rullman 2020). This eerily silent space is a different form of enclosure. But it is haunted by its recent past: the police access road, the fences around the motorway, the graffiti under the bypass declaring ‘No Border No Nation’ and, in a nod to Calais(fornia), ‘Maybe this whole situation will just sort itself out…’. People on the move today are banished largely to the inhospitable territory of the outskirts, with no easy access to basic necessities like water, food or shops.

Graffiti under the bypass (image: Emma Newcombe)

Calais(fornia) is curiously manicured and carefully landscaped. Flowers and grasses abound, but bushes have been uprooted as they provide shelter. We roamed freely around Calais(fornia), and about halfway through our walk we arrived at the town hall, a striking red brick and stone building constructed in the early twentieth century and surrounded by well-tended flower beds and grass. One of the group took a photograph of us as we sat down and opened our map to decide next steps. To sit freely should not be taken for granted. After the eviction of 2016 the authorities announced a policy of ‘zero point de fixation’, moving people on within hours to ensure that there is no possibility of informal settlements, destroying tents and goods in processes known as ‘cleaning’. As part of this policy green spaces which could be potential resting spaces are littered with boulders to prevent people from lying down or gathering. As we walked past one such space, I wondered what purposes future archaeologists might attribute to these out-of-place rocks that must have taken such efforts to move and that make public spaces so horribly ugly and unusable. A form of worship? A collective project that builds community? Will such cruelty and racism be imaginable?

Boulders by the canal prevent groups from resting on the grass there (image: Nariman Massoumi)

We, the breachers, both sat and moved freely. The thousands of people on the move who attempt to breach the national border that separates Britain and France enjoy no such possibility. To be able to inhabit Calais(fornia) and to see Calais is indeed a privileged position. But I left feeling the importance of not being paralysed or silenced by that acknowledgment of privilege. Rather, having seen, we now have a responsibility to speak.

* There are in fact many ‘jungles’ around Calais, but this site is the one most strongly associated with the word.

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

Other MMB blogs and projects connected to this post include the (de)Bordering plot, a space for exploring the politics of immigration and the environment through planting, which contains a Hearth modelled on shelters in the Calais ‘Jungle’. See also Travis Van Isacker’s post on ‘Environmental racism in the borderland: the case of Calais’ analysing how the French and UK governments have created a hostile environment for migrants trying to cross the Channel from Calais.

Imperial denaturalisation: towards an end to empire

Posted on by Emily

By Colin Yeo.

As the British empire gradually remodelled itself into a British nation state over the course of the twentieth century, it was inevitable that problems would arise. There was no masterplan or strategy on how to achieve change and successive governments tended to react rather than plan. Nowhere was this more evident than in the process of redefinition of membership of the emerging nation state.

Until as late as 1 January 1983, all citizens of all Commonwealth countries were, according to British law, British subjects. This had been the legal regime at common law, before British subjecthood was put on a partially statutory basis by the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914. It remained the legal regime when the British Nationality Act 1948 became law.

(Image: Markus Spiske on Unsplash)

What the 1948 legislation did change was the constitutional nature of British subjecthood. Until then, British subject status derived from a person’s place of birth and a direct relationship of allegiance to the crown. In future the question of who was or was not a British subject would effectively be decided by the legislatures of independent Commonwealth countries. In the United Kingdom and its colonies, the legislature was the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the local citizenship within the Commonwealth was citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies.

Both before and after the 1948 legislation, a British subject was free to enter and reside in Britain. At least, that was the legal position. In practice, informal barriers to entry and residence were used to try to interfere with the rights of some racialised subjects. In the case of Bhagwan [1972] AC 60, about alleged illegal entry by British subjects, Lord Diplock held in the House of Lords that a British subject ‘had the right at common law to enter the United Kingdom without let or hindrance when and where he pleased and to remain here as long as he liked.’

This is arguably not quite correct as it was more of a freedom than a right, given that aliens (meaning everyone not a British subject) had historically also been free to enter and live in the United Kingdom. As the legislation of the twentieth century was to show, it was a freedom that could be curtailed for aliens and subjects alike.

The right to enter and reside in a country is one of the fundamental rights of membership of that country, whether labelled subjecthood or citizenship. But the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 removed that right from a wide range of British subjects. The separation of rights of entry and residence from nationality law status was further cemented by legislation in 1968, 1969 and 1971. British subject status was then formally terminated by the British Nationality Act 1981 with effect from 1 January 1983.

This process is not traditionally classed as ‘denaturalisation’, a term usually reserved in modern usage for involuntary loss of formal nationality status on an individualised basis by means of administrative action. On this traditional understanding, denaturalisation is seen as exceptional, albeit to have undergone something of a revival in recent years. Withdrawal of rights of entry and residence from colonial peoples should nevertheless be considered denaturalisation by the central imperial power. With significant caveats, the process was comparable to massive scale denaturalisation by legislative means by certain states in the early to mid-twentieth century.

It might be said that the whole point of independence is to achieve a new citizenship of a new state, which might necessarily involve shrugging off the yoke of the old subjecthood. Such ‘denaturalisation’ might be considered not just consensual but actively sought, rather than imposed involuntarily. But there are two major flaws with asserting that this process was benevolent.

First, the British had hitherto felt free to enter and reside in many countries around the world and in the process repatriated much of the wealth of those countries to Britain and gained a considerable leg up in international trade, in industrial, economic and social infrastructure and more, as Nadine El-Enany argues in (B)ordering Britain. Unilateral withdrawal of access to this bounty quite understandably seemed rather unreasonable to many colonial subjects, who were attracted to live and work in the part of the empire that had overwhelmingly benefited from the imperial project.

For others, the loss of the right of entry to and residence in Britain was far more than an abstract and as-yet unrealised benefit. Those colonial subjects who had already moved from their original colony of residence to another were routinely denied the right to re-enter or reside — or at least reside with dignity and rights of citizenship — in their new country of residence. The East African Asians are one such group, for example. They were denied the right to live as full and active citizens in their country of residence: some were also denied formal citizenship and some were forcibly expelled.

Many of those British subjects who moved from colonies to the United Kingdom, later dubbed ‘the Windrush generation’, form another such group. It is thought that a very considerable (but unknowable) number were later denied re-entry to the United Kingdom following temporary absences abroad, for example. Others were later excluded from formal British citizenship status by complex and paid-for registration requirements when nationality law was later reformed. Later, some were denied effective citizenship rights by the suite of hostile environment laws brought into force since the late 1980s.

For those affected by these laws this felt a lot like denaturalisation, and with good reason. ‘I don’t feel British. I am British. I’ve been raised here, all I know is Britain,’ Paulette Wilson told journalist Amelia Gentleman in 2017. ‘What the hell can I call myself except British? I’m still angry that I have to prove it. I feel angry that I have to go through this.’ Wilson was not in fact a British citizen according to law, although she was able very belatedly to obtain leave to remain as a foreign national before she died in 2020. This was not before she had been rendered homeless, denied welfare benefits and health care and even detained for deportation at the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre. Her situation and her feelings of betrayal and estrangement were very far from unique.

Denaturalisation is not a novel or new phenomenon in British law. The involuntary loss of rights occurring as imperial citizenship was withdrawn first de facto then eventually de jure was a prolonged and, for some, ongoing episode of denaturalisation.

Colin Yeo is a barrister, writer, campaigner and consultant specialising in immigration law. He founded and edits the Free Movement immigration law blog and is an Honorary Researcher at the University of Bristol with MMB. His latest books are Welcome to Britain: Fixing our Broken Immigration System (2020) and Refugee Law (2022). We will be posting a second blogpost by Colin on denaturalisation in the autumn.

Previous MMB blogposts by Colin include ‘The hostile environment confuses unlawful with undocumented, with disastrous consequences.‘ You can also hear Colin discussing the UK Nationality and Borders Bill in an MMB webinar in 2021 here.

If you enjoyed this post you may also be interested in Nandita Sharma’s posts, ‘A tale of two worlds: national borders versus a common planet‘, and ‘National sovereignty and postcolonial racism.’

The other side of Partition: tracing Bengal and Bangladesh’s (post-)Partition legacy

Posted on by Emily

By Nazia Hussein and Anushka Chaudhuri.

Since its June 2022 release the Disney Plus series Ms Marvel has brought the conversation around the creation of Independent India and Pakistan – commonly dubbed as ‘Partition’ – to the mainstream. The series has been applauded for introducing the first Muslim superheroine and narratives of the Partition – one of the bloodiest episodes in South Asian history – onto global screens, with recognition of the British colonial administration’s active role in its formal withdrawal from, and cleaving of, British India. However, in line with much academic research and popular culture, Ms Marvel presents a partial Partition narrative via the Two Nation Theory. This theory positions Islam (Pakistan) and Hinduism (India) against each other and disregards the violent and multiple partitions of Bengal, which created West Bengal in eastern India and East Bengal in East Pakistan, the latter gaining liberation as Bangladesh in 1971. This positioning is aligned with most popular representations of South Asia and, as a result, erases past and present lived experiences of Bengali Muslims and Bangladeshis.

Created primarily for young and Western audiences, Ms Marvel erases the brutal realities of Partition. The Partition subplot demystifies the story of Aisha, the protagonist Kamaala’s maternal great-grandmother, who secured her family’s safety by ensuring they boarded ‘the last train to Pakistan’ from Punjab, India, to Punjab, Pakistan. The series’ representation of Partition as a time of tension, fear and existential insecurity, but otherwise a relatively organised migration process, amounts to misinformation for global audiences. What ensued after the announcement of the new borders – severing Punjab and Bengal – to create West Pakistan (now Pakistan), India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on 14th and 15th August 1947 was overwhelming disarray and disorder. Hindus and Sikhs were to migrate from West and East Pakistan into India, and Muslims were to migrate from India into one of Pakistan’s domains. Violence was widespread. Hence, the minor reference to boarding ‘the last train to Pakistan’ risks erasing the harsh truth that, due to widespread violence, train travel was often inaccessible. The limited number of trains that did run often arrived blood-stained or filled with dead bodies and became known as ‘blood’ or ‘ghost’ trains. Therefore, most individuals migrated on foot or by cattle, with many seeking refuge in camps, being killed or dying from disease.

Partition of India 1947 (image: Wikimedia Commons)

Many of the academic and popular representations of Partition are heavily Punjab-centric. Ms Marvel follows the same pattern. Its representation not only neglects Bengal’s Partition story but also latently equates the Punjab province with all of Pakistan by symbolically and linguistically portraying, but not directly naming, Punjabi language, culture and lands when representing Pakistani national identity and diasporas. That Bengal was partitioned twice – first in 1905, which, prompted by protests, was annulled in 1911, and then again in 1947 – is disregarded. Such erasures are dangerous, excluding voices from the ‘other half of Partition’ with its differing socio-political histories and ambivalent religious demographics. It also positions a Punjabi Partition narrative in popular culture as representative of this period, when there are other equally complex and alternative histories. For example, upper caste Bengali Hindus (including Zamindars or landowners) dominated political, arts and agrarian labour systems, subordinating Bengali Muslims and other lower caste workers and prohibiting their access to wealth and land. Coupled with Bengal’s Muslims being the marginal majority, this created a more complex task for the British and Indian political elite when drafting religionised borders.

While the shift of nationalism to communalism in Bengal is blamed for Partition, such narratives erase the agency of contemporary Bangladeshis’ and then-East Pakistani populations’ (denied) choice in their fate. This is observed in the political elite District Congress Committee in Sylhet’s pledge to Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement – a Hindu contextualised Indian anti-colonialism movement which emphasised non-violence – despite the Committee’s lack of commitment to this type of struggle. Furthermore, after Hindu Zamindars learned of Sylhet’s lucrative tea estates and the international demand for tea, Muslim-majority Sylhet was fragmented during its 1947 referendum, with some regions being succeeded to greater Assam in India, despite voting patterns revealing an intention for Sylhet to join then-East Pakistan. The agency of East Bengal as a region and a people during Partition in seeking to choose their own destiny – despite being disallowed – is rarely addressed in either academia or popular culture, with Muslims in pre- and post-Partition India continuing to be presented as violent, communalistic and unpatriotic in curricular textbooks and films such as The Viceroy’s House and Earth. The creation of West and East Pakistan itself drew another line between the two regions and populations. This new ‘border’ induced linguistic, cultural and economic oppression, including genocide and weaponised rape, on the Bengalis of East Pakistan. This led to the Liberation War of 1971 when East Bengal again separated from Pakistan, gaining independence as Bangladesh.

The downplaying of the historical struggles of Bengal and contemporary Bangladesh undermines the legacy of discrimination and deprivation experienced by Bengali Muslims and Bangladeshis in the hands of the British colonists, Hindu nationalism and dominance in India, and West Pakistani state and military. This same deprivation is visible in the UK today. British Bangladeshis show the highest rates of poverty and face the largest ethnic pay gap with, on average, 20% less earnings than their white British counterparts. Indians are just 2.42%, Pakistanis 2.58% but Bangladeshis 3.56% more likely to be economically inactive than white ethnic groups in the UK. Further, the death rate involving COVID-19 was highest for Bangladeshis – respectively 5.0 and 4.5 times greater than white British male and female groups in 2020–2021.

In Britain’s classed and racialised surveillance state, Bangladeshis will continue to be labelled and penalised as ‘bad minorities’, likely to experience the worst of the Conservative’s austerity measures, particularly during the worsening cost of living crisis. Such lived experiences of British Bangladeshis reflect a long history of violence, starting with British and European colonialism.

Nazia Hussein is a Senior Lecturer in Race at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research, teaching and activism focuses on gender, race and religion with a particular focus on Asian Muslim women in South Asia and Britain. Her most recent book is Muslim New Womanhood in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2022).

Anushka Chaudhuri is a Sociology PhD student at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work explores nationalism, migration, ethnicity and racism, and focuses on South Asian histories, politics and diasporas.