Faith and the Asylum Crisis: The role of religion in responding to displacement (Policy Paper)

This briefing paper is a distillation of the main points and recommendations that arose during two two-day workshops held in Washington DC in May 2014 and Brussels in June 2014. The workshops, funded by the British Council USA Bridging Voices program, assembled scholars, policymakers and practitioners focused on issues of asylum, refuge and protection in contemporary global politics and the current and potential future roles of faith and faith actors across the US and Europe

Governing the resilience of neoliberalism through biopolitics

Neoliberalism is widely regarded as the main culprit for the 2007/8 global financial crisis. However, despite this abysmal failure, neoliberalism has not merely survived the crisis, but actually ‘thrived’. How is it possible to account for the resilience of the neoliberalism? Existing scholarship has answered this question either by focusing on the distinctive qualities of neoliberalism (such as adaptability, internal coherence, and capacity to incorporate dissent) or on the biopolitical capacity of neoliberalism to produce resilient subjects. This article adopts a different perspective. Drawing on and partially challenging the perspective of Michel Foucault, I argue that neoliberalism and biopolitics should be considered two complementary governmental rationalities, and that biopolitical rationalities contribute to governing the uncertainties and risks stemming from the neoliberalization of life. Biopolitics, in other words, plays a key role in governing the resilience of neoliberalism. Through this conceptual lens, the article explores how biopolitical rationalities of care have been deployed to govern the neoliberal crisis of the Greek sovereign debt which threatened the stability of the European banking system and, I shall argue, the neoliberal life, wealth and well-being of the European population. The article discusses how biopolitical racism is an essential component of the biopolitical governance of neoliberalism. Biopolitical racism displaces the sources of risk, dispossession, and inequality from the neoliberal regime to ‘inferior’ populations, whose lack of compliance with neoliberal dictates is converted into a threat to our neoliberal survival. This threat deserves punishment and authorizes further dynamics of neoliberal dispossession

‘Good Muslim/ bad Muslim’ and ‘good refugee/bad refugee’ narratives are shaping European responses to the refugee crisis

The growing importance of religious identity in the politics of migration and refugees has led to increasingly harsh immigration policies. Erin K. Wilson and Luca Mavelli argue that the focus needs to shift from religious identity to solidarity with fellow human beings

The unbearable lightness of neoliberalism: Monsters, ghosts, and the poetics of neoliberal infrastructures

This article advances the concept of neoliberal infrastructures as the ghostly carriers of neoliberalism by drawing together two distinct research trajectories: the political critique of neoliberalism and the poetics of infrastructure. The framework of the argument is Kundera's famous dilemma in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Should we approach life with heaviness or lightness? While lightness may be tempting, the only way for us to be ‘real’ is to confront the ‘heaviness’ of things. The article argues that Kundera's construct unwittingly underpins recent critiques that, by confronting the ‘heaviness’ of neoliberalism (its crises, exploitation, and violence), frame it as a ‘monster’. The risk of this characterization, I contend, is to portray neoliberalism as an almost autonomous force, thus neglecting our involvement in its reproduction. Reversing Kundera's logic, I suggest that for us to be ‘real’ we also need to confront neoliberalism's lightness (its seduction, fascination, and enchantment) and thus understand it as a haunting presence, not merely as an oppressive monster. To advance this view, I discuss the notion of hauntology in the context of Mercato Mayfair, a deconsecrated London church turned glamorous community market. Building on the poetic dimension of the infrastructural turn and reflecting on how neoliberalism has established itself through processes of urban restructuring and spatial transformation, Mercato Mayfair is explored as a neoliberal infrastructure. Neoliberal infrastructures are theorized as lived spaces encompassing people, materials, symbols, histories, affects, and desires in which we enable and give life to the unbearable and ghostly lightness of neoliberalism

Citizenship for Sale and The Neoliberal Political Economy of Belonging

Recent research considers the proliferation of citizenship-by-investment schemes primarily as a manifestation of the commodification of citizenship and of states succumbing to the logic of the market. I argue that these schemes exceed mere processes of commodification. They are part of a neoliberal political economy of belonging which prompts states to include and exclude migrants according to their endowment of human, financial, economic, and emotional capital. Hence, I show how the growing mobility opportunities for wealthy and talented migrants, the opening of humanitarian corridors for particularly vulnerable refugees, and the hardening of borders for “ordinary” refugees and undocumented migrants are manifestations of the same neoliberal rationality of government. Conceptually, I challenge mainstream understandings of neoliberalism as a process of commodification characterized by the “retreat of the state” and “domination of the market.” I approach neoliberalism as a process of economization which disseminates the model of the market to all spheres of human activity, even where money is not at stake. Neoliberal economization turns states and individuals into entrepreneurial actors that attempt to maximize their value in economic and financial, as well as moral and emotional terms. This argument advances existing scholarship on the neoliberalization of citizenship by showing how this process encompasses the emergence of distinctively neoliberal forms of belonging

‘To be human is to bury the enemy dead’: migrant deaths, posthumous citizenship, and the ‘soldier-migrant analogy’ in the refugee crisis

While states increasingly govern migration through the administration and distribution of death, they occasionally invest considerable resources in recovering, identifying, and burying dead migrants. How to explain this paradox? A forceful argument in the critical scholarship on migration and citizenship maintains that death sometimes compels states to acknowledge the humanity of the migrants and grant them some degree of posthumous citizenship. In this article, we advance a view that is both different and complementary. We suggest that burying dead migrants is a way for the state and its host population to affirm and celebrate their own humanity. This perspective rests on three arguments: to be human is to bury; the ultimate act of humanity is not burying the loved ones but the enemies; burying dead migrants can be compared to burying dead enemy soldiers. The article sheds further light on the still underexplored phenomenon of ‘caring for dead migrants’ and assesses how these practices of care challenge but also reinforce dominant exclusionary understandings of citizenship

Governing populations through the humanitarian government of refugees: Biopolitical care and racism in the European refugee crisis

The notion of humanitarian government has been increasingly employed to describe the simultaneous and conflicting deployment of humanitarianism and security in the government of ‘precarious lives’ such as refugees. This article argues that humanitarian government should also be understood as the biopolitical government of host populations through the humanitarian government of refugees. In particular, it explores how the biopolitical governmentality of the UK decision to suspend search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in 2014, and the British rejection and German welcoming of Syrian refugees primarily concern the biological and emotional care of the British and German populations. To this end, the article analyzes how dynamics of inclusion/exclusion of refugees have been informed by a biopolitical racism that redraws the boundary between ‘valuable’ (to be included) and ‘not valuable’ (to be excluded) lives according to the refugees’ capacity to enhance the biological and emotional well-being of host populations. This discussion aims to contribute to three interrelated fields of research – namely, humanitarian government, biopolitical governmentality, and responses to the European refugee crisis – by exploring how biopolitics has shaped the British and German responses to the crisis and how it encompasses more meanings and rationalities than currently recognized by existing scholarship on humanitarian government

Europe's Encounter with Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular

In the last few years, the Muslim presence in Europe has been increasingly perceived as ‘problematic’. Events such as the French ban on headscarves in public schools, the publication of the so-called ‘Danish cartoons’, and the speech of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg have hit the front pages of newspapers the world over, and prompted a number of scholarly debates on Muslims’ capacity to comply with the seemingly neutral and pluralistic rules of European secularity. Luca Mavelli argues that this perspective has prevented an in-depth reflection on the limits of Europe’s secular tradition and its role in Europe’s conflictual encounter with Islam. Through an original reading of Michel Foucault’s spiritual notion of knowledge and an engagement with key thinkers, from Thomas Aquinas to Jurgën Habermas, Mavelli articulates a contending genealogy of European secularity. While not denying the latter’s achievements in terms of pluralism and autonomy, he suggests that Europe’s secular tradition has also contributed to forms of isolation, which translate into Europe’s incapacity to perceive its encounter with Islam as an opportunity rather than a threat. Drawing on this theoretical perspective, Mavelli offers a contending account of some of the most important recent controversies surrounding Islam in Europe and investigates the ‘postsecular’ as a normative model to engage with the tensions at the heart of European secularity. Finally, he advances the possibility of a Europe willing to reconsider its established secular narratives which may identify in the encounter with Islam an opportunity to flourish and cultivate its democratic qualities and postnational commitments