Session 5: Migration influences
7th Global Conference
Monday 12th March – Wednesday 14th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic
From Securitization to Externalization: A Journey Through the Italian/Libyan Partnership on Migration
Sabrina Tucci
Amnesty International, International Secretariat, London, U
This research aims to analyse the process which led to the establishment of the Italian/Libyan partnership on migration.
It will assess the process of adoption and harmonization of restrictive asylum and migration policies of European Union (EU) member states as well as examine how the responsibility for assessing and managing asylum cases can be externalized to countries at the EU external borders and to non- EU countries. In the absence of a formal migration regime, Northern states have the power to choose those partners satisfying their interests and to transmit their policies to Southern states. Libyan cooperation on migration with Italy will be analysed in this context.
Within this main aim there are three objectives:
- Explore the process which led to the rise of what can be defined Fortress Europe;
- Explore inter-state relations within the refugee and migration regimes;
- Assess to what extent the Dublin System and the Safe Third Country notion influenced the establishment of the Italian/Libyan cooperation on migration.
Part one will explore the process which led to the creation of what can be called Fortress Europe with a particular focus on the securitization of European borders through the implementation and harmonization of restrictive migration and asylum policies. Part two will analyse inter-state power unbalance within the refugee and migration regimes and the way stronger states can impose their guidelines on weaker ones. Part three will argue that the Dublin System and the concept of Safe Third Country are among the instruments used by the EU/ North Western EU states to delegate the responsibility for migration and asylum management to states at the EU external borders as well as the reason for its externalization through bilateral agreements with third countries. Part four will provide an outline of the findings and of the research method employed.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
From National Subject to National Threat: The Representation of German-Canadians in Contemporary Canadian Theatre
Marissa McHugh
University of Ottawa, Canada
Since the late 1970s, an efflorescence of World War I plays have appeared on the Canadian theatrical scene. These plays focus on the way in which the Great War determined and constructed the boundaries of national identity and membership. Many center on German-Canadians and the way in which the war shifted their identity from preferred immigrant to national threat. What they commonly illustrate is a xenophobic home front, where Canadians (of non-German descent) consolidated and rallied against what they mistook to be internal enemies.
My paper will examine Kevin Kerr’s play Unity (1918), which dramatizes a community’s fight against the Spanish influenza, a deadly viral infection that was carried home by soldiers. Kerr locates an infectious outbreak in Unity, a small, rural Saskatchewan town that functions as a microcosm for the “unified” Canadian home front. This literal figuration enables Kerr to unearth important history obliterated by the events and climax of the First World War. At the same time, the metaphorical representation of the influenza as a wartime enemy, littering Canadian terrain with corpses, allows him to explore the collective wartime fears that were amplified by war propaganda and made apparent by the sudden outbreak of disease.
The militarized figuration of influenza reveals the collective fears of invasion and “contamiNation,” which permeate the wartime home space. “ContamiNation,” as literary critic Marc Priewe explains, describes “not only epidemic infections of a single body, but also connotes the process of making impure, by contact or mixture, on a collective, cultural level.” The characters’ individual fear of corporeal infection, and of the concomitant breakdown of subjectivity such infection represents, speaks to larger, national fears of Germ(an) infiltration and cultural decimation. The fight against the influenza thus comes to symbolize the attempt to defend the homogenous nation (forged in war) from the “contaminating” enemy Other.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Whose Neighborhood is it? On Belonging and Neighborhood Citizenship in the Baka Neighborhood of Jerusalem
Hila Zaban
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel
The neighborhood of Baka in Jerusalem, Israel is heavily populated with Jewish immigrants from western countries who are a part of the long going gentrification process of the neighborhood. The immigrants have influenced the neighborhood in many ways, including the strengthening of a tradition of participation in local affairs. The ongoing gentrification process had also created a heterogeneous community of people of various social groups who on the one hand wish to live in pluralist atmosphere but on the other strive to keep the neighborhood “theirs”.
Residents’ sense of belonging to the neighborhood as well as their commitment to it makes them struggle against any perceived threats on their quality of life. By participating, sometimes alongside and sometimes in opposition to, the city council, the local governance and each other, residents are performing democracy on a small scale and becoming citizens of their neighborhood. Neighborhood citizenship, I shall claim, is a form of citizenship that’s evolving alongside other forms of citizenship, above or below the state level.
Using examples from one neighborhood and its residents’ participation and struggles, I would claim that being committed to a place nowadays makes one want to participate in determining and shaping the character of that place. This in turn is constructing new forms of citizenship that are constantly in progress and evolution. The world is currently dominated by grassroots movements of people demanding to take part in the decision making that affects their lives starting from the most local level. Using ethnographic detailed examples that show the various interests, decision making process, power struggles, values and ability to make a difference, I would show that this is what local level participation looks like today. I would also claim that the concept of neighborhood citizenship helps us better understand the world we live in.
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