Refusing Refusal
space. 4 This literature allows us to understand how rights-claims implicate a
refusal to accept illegalisation 5 and criminalising designs of migratory regimes. 6
Such agency also challenges the construction of ‘the good, grateful and passive
refugee’ and, thus, the ‘deserving’ one. 7 That is, the migrant who can prove their
status as a legal ‘convention’ refugee, as opposed to the ‘undeserving’, or ‘illegal’
migrant. 8 Resistance strategies might then be enacted in the form of refusing to
accept the ‘slow violence’ implicated in borders, governmentality and
deportability, 9 refusing to accept a continued existence in limbo.
Asylum seekers, deportees, stateless people and other precarious migrants do
not always passively accept bureaucratic mechanisms that implicate their
continuous liminality and conduct, but instead engage with the state in their
struggle for change. 10 Migrant resistance is often analysed using the Foucauldian
notion counter-conduct, 11 through which governmentality’s disciplining powers
to shape certain conduct and performance is resisted. 12 Conduct and counterconduct are intertwined. It is suggested that the migration regime, through its
coercive and disciplinary mechanisms, seeks to ‘conduct’ the asylum seeker into
a specific type of obedient subject and counter-conduct is a way to transcend this.
For Jacques Rancière, resistance represents efforts to destabilise an order and
construct a space for those without a voice, acknowledging that ‘people are
persistently engaged in efforts to alter their world’. 13
Although migration regimes, understood as a set of rules, regulations, norms
and practices that serve as the ‘governmental technologies’ 14 of institutions, are
not necessarily internally coherent nor intentionally malignant, the very state
system and the international order that aims to provide protection is also a
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
See Martina Tazzioli, Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab World
(Rowman & Littlefield 2015); De Genova (n 3); Bernd Kasparek, ‘Routes, Corridors, and
Spaces of Exception, Governing Migration and Europe’ (2016) 1(1) Near Futures Online
<http://nearfuturesonline.org/routes-corridors-and-spaces-of-exception-governingmigration-and-europe/>; Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli, ‘Choucha Beyond the Camp:
Challenging the Spatial and Temporal Boundaries of Migration Studies’ in De Genova (n 3).
See Anderson (n 3).
See De Genova (n 3).
See Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Deger Ozkaramanli, ‘The Construction of the “Grateful”
Refugee in Law and Design’ (2017) 4(1) Human Rights Law Review 1.
Tazzioli, ‘The Temporal Borders of Asylum’ (n 2) 2.
See Dalia Adbelhady, Nina Gren and Martin Joormann (eds), Refugees and the Violence of
Welfare Bureaucracies in Northern Europe (Manchester University Press 2020).
Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole ‘Introduction: Providing a Framework
for Understanding Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds),
Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 1, 3. See also Stierl (n 2).
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France (Palgrave
Macmillan 2007) 389–90. See also Deirdre Conlon, ‘The Nation as Embodied Practice:
Women, Migration and the Social Production of Nationhood in Ireland’ (PhD Thesis,
University of New York, 2007).
See Chriss Rossdale and Maurice Stierl, ‘Everything is Dangerous: Conduct and CounterConduct in the Occupy Movement’ (2016) 30(2) Global Society 157, 158.
Jacques Rancière, ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ (2004) 103(2–3) South Atlantic
Quarterly 297, discussed in Ilana Feldman, Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments
and Palestinian Refugee Politics (University of California Press 2018) 24.
Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of
Governance’ (1992) 43(2) The British Journal of Sociology 173, 175.
269