In the year 2023, approximately 186,000 refugees entered Europe, and thousands lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe (“More than 2,500 Dead, Missing as 186,000 Cross Mediterranean in 2023”). The influx of such a large number of refugees on a regular basis has become an issue of concern for European countries. In fact, it has become a security issue, not only because of the sheer number of refugees but due to various other reasons that are going to be discussed in this blog. However, the main aim here is to look at how the refugee crisis has been dealt with in the context of a changing discourse of security studies, from the traditional view to the critical (as a part of which the post-colonial and feminist approach have been highlighted), and the securitization theory.
On analysing this issue from the perspective of the European countries, it can be noticed that their concern is coming from a more traditional understanding of security. The view is limited to the state’s security being threatened by refugees.
Refugees are no longer “geopolitical pawns or ideological trump cards for the West” in its battle against communism in the post-Cold War world (Hammerstad 393). They are not seen as a welcome contribution to national workforces but seem to threaten the limited employment opportunities available to the citizens. They are perceived as criminals or anti-social elements, and all of these perceptions are fueled by racist and xenophobic sentiments, which have also manifested itself in the “electoral successes of anti-immigration, extreme right-wing parties” (Hammerstad 393). This has resulted in countries implementing a series of policies and measures to limit the inflow of migrants into Europe. For example, the United Kingdom passed the Illegal Migrant Bill, which denies access to asylum to refugees who enter “irregularly” and may have passed a country on their journey where they did not face persecution (“UK Illegal Migration Bill: UN Refugee Agency and UN Human Rights Office Warn of Profound Impact on Human Rights and International Refugee Protection System”). Another example is how Italy has made it harder for humanitarian groups to carry on their rescue operations easily. Not only have European politicians vilified humanitarian groups for running a migrant “taxi service”, Italy adopted a set of regulations that required humanitarian ships to return to shore after a rescue rather than attempting to make multiple rescues (“A Rescue Ship Saved Them from the Sea. Now These Migrants Find a Tough Road in Europe”). One thing that becomes very important to note here is that some of the measures and policies adopted by these countries are at variance with international human rights and refugee laws.
Security as a concept is essentially contested and ambiguous; however, if we were to adopt a more critical approach to understanding it, we would need to consider the relativity of security (Krause and Williams). This entails asking questions about whose security, from what or whom, by what means, for what purpose, and by which actor. This can also be termed as deepening the referent object (whose security) to include a variety of actors in the equation, moving away from the fixation on the state, and broadening the threat object (sources of insecurity) to include a range of issues like economic or political instability, environmental disasters, food security etc. Applying this understanding of security to the refugee crisis, the refugees themselves can be understood as being threatened by states, not only by the ones they are fleeing from but also by the ones they are trying to flee to. And this is how they can become the referent objects of our analysis. As a part of adopting a more comprehensive understanding of the situation, the Post-colonial theory underlines the importance of historicizing and contextualizing, rather than using “devices of abstraction” and theorizing ahistorically as done by the traditional approaches (Krishna). Doing so will divert our attention towards the fact that refugees are being forced to leave their homes because of disturbances, wars and conflicts, a lot of which are waged by the West. A critical feminist angle can be applied in this situation to understand “where the women are.” But more specifically, their experience as individuals who embark upon perilous journeys across the sea. In spite of various points of contention within feminist scholarship, one thing most scholars agree on is that violence is both gendered and gendering (Shepherd 211). Visibilising experiences of violence or gender-based sexual violence will help in the broadening and deepening agenda of critical security studies. However, this approach comes with its own set of criticisms, one of the main ones being that if anything that is bad for human well-being is labelled as a security threat, then the term loses its “analytical usefulness” (Kauser and Williams 08). The process of taking something out of normal politics and bringing it to the realm of high politics means that the state is ready to employ any means necessary to deal with the threat. Bringing the refugee crisis to this level would mean the states could justify their reactionary arguments.
The aspect of ‘human security’ of individuals, which is extensively used by the UN and is similar to the critical security approach, also needs to be applied in a more precise and limited fashion (Hammerstad 401). This is because it also, as a term, is ambivalent and has come to mean to mean different things in the International Organisations discourse over the decades. It is sort of all-encompassing as the ‘security of people’ as a result of which the human security of refugees and host population can also be set up against each other since it can be construed as affecting human security in one way or another (Hammerstad 399). However, what becomes important here is to keep the two concerns separate and analyse the relationship between the way security is viewed traditionally by states and the security of refugees and to focus on the complexity of the refugee crisis.
References
“A Rescue Ship Saved Them from the Sea. Now These Migrants Find a Tough Road in Europe.” NPR, 12 Feb. 2024, www.npr.org/2024/02/12/1223911518/migrants-mediterranean-sea-europe-rescue. Accessed 13 Feb. 2024.
Hammerstad, Anne. “Whose Security? UNHCR, Refugee Protection and State Security after the Cold War.” Security Dialogue, vol. 31, no. 4, 2000, pp. 391–403, www.jstor.org/stable/26296710.
Krause, Keith, and Michael Williams. “Security and “Security Studies.”” The Oxford Handbook of International Security, 15 Mar. 2018, pp. 13–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198777854.013.2.
Krishna, Sankaran. “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 26, no. 4, Oct. 2001, pp. 401–424.
“More than 2,500 Dead, Missing as 186,000 Cross Mediterranean in 2023.” Www.aljazeera.com, www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/29/more-than-2500-dead-missing-as-some-186000-cross-mediterranean-in-2023#:~:text=News%7CRefugees-.
Shepherd, Laura J. “Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies.” Political Studies Review, vol. 7, no. 2, May 2009, pp. 208–219, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-9299.2009.00180.x.
“UK Illegal Migration Bill: UN Refugee Agency and UN Human Rights Office Warn of Profound Impact on Human Rights and International Refugee Protection System.” OHCHR, www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/07/uk-illegal-migration-bill-un-refugee-agency-and-un-human-rights-office-warn.
You've made some fascinating interventions on a crucial present and future issue! On post-colonial theory, I think using Tarak Barkawi's analogy of 'small wars' can expand the scope of how migration has been elevated as a 'security issue' for European countries. Do you think perhaps the West fails to understand 'human security' as refugee crises are sparked by conflicts occurring in spaces far from the West itself? Perhaps it is this lack of understanding that justifies the over-securitization of refugees.