International Workshop
Rethinking political agency in the Middle East: engaging political anthropology
Migration Policy Centre, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI (Villa la Fonte)
19-20 May 2016
Scientific Organisers:
Luigi Achilli | Migration Policy Centre, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI
Antonio De Lauri | Università di Milano-Bicocca
This workshop intends to bring ethnographic research in the Middle East into conversation with anthropological debate on political agency. There is a number of reason to combine these two bodies of literatures. The recent political turmoil in the region provides a wealth of material for contemporary debate and fine-grained ethnographic comparison: about the nature of political change; about the comparability of post-colonialisms; about the performativity of power and the exercise of sovereignty; or the new kinds of structural dependence that emerge when nominal “independence” coincides with the orthodoxy of neoliberal economics. However, lured by the spectacular clarity of political demonstrations and acts of violence that have dramatically upset Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, many Middle East scholars and political analysts have, with few exemptions, missed the complexity of political change in the region. With this workshop, our first aim is to bring together a group of junior and more established scholars who have been seeking, in diverse ethnographic sites and in hitherto isolated fashion, to bring the theoretical insights of recent anthropological work on political agency to bear on the study of political change in contemporary Middle East. Our second aim in holding this workshop is to bring together scholars whose research in the Middle East has sought to develop alternative ways of thinking about political action and political subjectivity, and whose work has thereby come to envisage forms of agency that cannot be fully explained by traditional analytics such as “pouvoir-savoir” and sovereignty. We believe the time is ripe to set up an organic and ground based political anthropology of the Middle East so as to test and expand existing accounts of political agency that have sought to go beyond the limitations of the Foucault-Agamben canon.
This workshop is entirely sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
International Workshop
Critical Engagements on Irregular Migration Facilitation: Unsettling the Human Smuggler Narrative
Migration Policy Centre, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI (Villa la Fonte)
5-6 April 2016
Scientific Organisers:
Luigi Achilli | Migration Policy Centre, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI
Gabriella E. Sanchez | National Security Studies Institute, University of Texas at El Paso
In contemporary mainstream narratives of migration, the human smuggler has earned a privileged if infamous spot as one of the most widely recognized and despised global predators. Smugglers are often referred to as orchestrators of senseless human tragedies along migration corridors, masterminds behind sexual exploitation rings, or amassers of untold riches made at the expense of asylum seekers, migrants and their families –in turn often narrowly portrayed as infantile and ignorant. Constructed as racialized, hypersexual and greedy males from the global South, facilitators of irregular migration have earned widespread notoriety in narratives of human and national security, particularly in the context of migration control efforts.
Media and authorities conceive the fight against clandestine migration as a war, a war where the evil is represented by the smuggler. The question is: is this a worthy war? Human smugglers certainly bear responsibility for many of the tragedies we are currently witnessing in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. However, our knowledge of irregular migration facilitation is often plagued with fragmented perspectives on the socio-cultural dynamics of the migratory journey, the facilitator-traveler relationship and their community dimensions. This is hardly surprising. Scholarship on the facilitation of irregular migration often draws exclusively from the experiences of government or law enforcement entities, or of the migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who were the unfortunate target of threats, scams or violence during their clandestine journeys, further obscuring the perspectives of those playing a role in their transits.
In light of the necessity of elaborating an adequate policy response to human smuggling, a better comprehension of the phenomenon is pivotal to ensuring the stability of the receiving state and the security of the migrant/refugee. With this task in mind, this workshop aims to problematize the figure of the smugglers beyond overly simplistic generalizations and representations. There is a growing corpus of empirical and critical work on the facilitation or brokerage of irregular migration within migration regimes that deserves to be fostered and strengthened. We are proposing critical and empirical engagements on the topic of the facilitation and brokerage of irregular migration as witnessed regionally and comparatively.
The workshop is co-organised by the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, and the National Security Studies Institute, University of Texas in El Paso.