In Search of Security: Migrant Agency, Narrative, and Performativity

IN SEARCH OF SECURITY: MIGRANT AGENCY, NARRATIVE, AND PERFORMATIVITY

‘Why I leave my country? I had a hard time, a problem, that’s why I leave my country’

Sonny was seeking asylum in Greece. He came from Ghana, and when I met him he was living in an asylum shelter in Athens city centre. His move to Greece was the result of his involvement in a political conflict between the Mamprusi and Kusasi clans in the Northern part of the country.[1] Sonny had filed an application for asylum and he had temporary leave to remain in Greece while his case was being considered. Sonny had travelled to Greece in search of protection, yet he continued to face problems, uncertainty about his future and insecurity.

In Athens the signs of international migration are visible. Migrant bodies along with homelessness and drug use are evident on the streets. Gang violence towards migrants and police brutality towards migrants, particularly black Africans, have been well documented by the Greek and the international media.[2] While these reports provide important information about conditions migrants face in Greece, in many accounts the migrant as an individual is absent. Migrants are instead represented as an anonymous part of the hordes or masses ‘invading’ the Greek capital or are positioned as abject victims who are helpless in the face of the European security complex. In this study I follow Sylvester[3] who points to the lack of studies in international relations (IR) that feature the experiences of individuals and I look at Sonny’s experiences of seeking asylum in Greece.

I situate this study specifically in the security literature. One of the key challenges of critical and feminist security studies has been theorising security as a concept that is capable of moving away from the unit of the sovereign state and its corresponding reproduction of categories of power and legitimacy. Critical and feminist security studies have argued that broadening, deepening, and opening how we conceptualise security gives it the potential to move away from the traditional focus on war and conflict in order to accommodate increasing recognition that war is just one type of insecurity or existential threat.[4] However, because states are often considered the (at times only) actors of IR a theorisation of security that succeeds in resisting the reproduction of state power even while deconstructing the operation of that power has been elusive. I argue here that a focus on a person who is extricated from the state can offer insight: such people might seek security where it is not provided by state or international apparatus. Examining security seeking suggests a conceptualisation of security as a process rather than an object to be gained. Security is fluid and continuous and can be identified as it is sought. The practice of seeking security in lived experience reveals security as a performative concept: insecurity is recognised as it is experienced and security is made in responding to these insecurities. A performative concept of security captures an ontological security, which is the feeling of security. That feeling is constituted in the performance of security, which is the act or process of making security. Performative security draws on experiential security, an epistemological approach that foregrounds experience as knowledge of security. I focus on Sonny’s experiences to understand how security, as a performative concept, is constituted. This decentred approach to theorising security remains consistent with an underlying normative objective to challenge the ‘high politics’ of state security in IR and to focus on how people as global subjects experience security in everyday life. Of course, security is not the only subfield through which one could theorise Sonny’s experiences, nor do I intend to suggest security is the only prism through which one can view Sonny’s motivations and actions. To do so would run the risk of homogenising the position of migrants and engendering the assumption that all migrant acts can only be driven by security seeking. Rather, I offer an interpretive analysis of Sonny as an international actor through the prism of security studies. A decentred conceptualisation of security emerges that is performative and acted by an individual who would normally be excluded from or homogenised by security theorising. Other sub-disciplines of IR can equally benefit from recentring around an individual in order to allow such decentred conceptualisations of key theoretical terms that permit the participation of conventionally silenced voices. Thus, while the theoretical contribution of this article engages security studies, its secondary objective is to make a broader statement about the agents and subjects who make IR theory.

This article proceeds as follows: I first discuss migration and the migrant journey as offering unique scope for analysis in IR that is capable of moving beyond the state. I then move to elaborate on the value of conceptualising security as a practice and as an experience of everyday life, rather than an object to be obtained. I refer to the human security literature as my approach is human (or person) centred and I refer to the feminist security literature as the most influential body of work to my theoretical development. I foreground, through narrative analysis, Sonny’s agency to seek security, juxtaposing his process of security with the material security that was provided to him as an asylum seeker in Greece. I am interested in Sonny’s individual story as a means of ensuring that his personhood is not obscured by his identity as an asylum seeker or migrant. The way Sonny tells his story illustrates choices and moments of negotiation with state power at which point his agency as an international security actor is apparent.

MIGRANT JOURNEYS AND MIGRANT AGENCY

The migrant journey offers unique scope for analysis of IR that is not dominated by the state as often, during the journey, a migrant leaves state jurisdiction and consequently the rights and responsibilities that are tied to state membership. Legal work that has examined the process of seeking asylum finds that the ability to exercise one’s right to seek asylum under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Refugee Convention has eroded over time, particularly over the last two decades, thanks to the increasing development of mechanisms designed to prevent asylum seekers from reaching a territory in which they can exercise such a right.[5] Asylum law first requires a migrant to be outside of his or her own country. Therefore, to become an asylum seeker or a legally recognised refugee, migrants must embark on a journey that takes them outside of the borders of their country of nationality or habitual residence. After undertaking this journey, asylum seekers must reach a state designated as safe, where they can file an application for asylum based on persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.

Once outside of their state of nationality or habitual residence, and before having gained legal immigration status in another state, migrants who travel without documents fall outside of international jurisdictions of responsibility – they are neither under the responsibility of their own state nor have they entered another state. Rules governing transit often make difficult or prevent altogether onward migration and migrants are often left with no choice about how or where they travel and remain.[6] The designated safe country in which an asylum claim should be made according to law is not necessarily a country in which a person feels safe. Offshoring of immigration controls and rules about onward travel, exemplified in the Dublin Regulation of the European Union, demonstrate states’ reluctance to take responsibility for the protection of migrants; instead, states have opted to enact measures of deterrence in an attempt to prevent further migration.[7] Thus, migrants become excluded from the state: the journey to seek asylum requires moving outside of state jurisdictions due to increasing barriers to legal movement. As Johnson[8] points out, the journey cannot be conceived as a simple linear movement from one place to another: the journey moves and it stalls, the journey is both movement and immobility. Periods of stillness on the journey represent times of negotiation, facing barriers and navigating around or through them. The migrant journey is a state of being rather than a passage or a crossing from one country to another.

Movement that happens outside of what islegally permitted by state immigration laws can be understood as a form of agency whereby migrants extricate themselves from the categories of the state that have proved both unable to help and a hindrance to movement. Recent work in migration studies contests the dominant view of the migrant as a passive and grateful victim who must happily accept any support given even when it is negligible.[9] Migrants are simultaneously seen as both resisting borders (by transgressing them without acknowledging them in the normalised legal forms) and creating borders as borders are solidified visually by states as a symbolic contestation to migrants transgressing them.[10] For example, Squire and Bagelman[11] describe migrants as taking sanctuary in British cities rather than seeking it, the distinction being that migrants enact sanctuary though migration prior to requesting and being awarded it. Johnson[12]analyses migrants working outside the confines of a refugee camp, negotiating, stretching and overturning the physical and legal boundaries that confine people within. Undocumented migrants in Los Angeles, as explored by McNevin[13], perform citizenship ceremonies as an expression of their personhood, perhaps most literally manifesting Engin Isin’s theorisation of ‘acts of citizenship’. These are acts undertaken by people in order to perform themselves as political subjects. Isin[14] describes these acts as making a claim on the ‘right to have rights’ rather than accepting the passivity that might be imposed on undocumented people, marginalised or subaltern communities, or people who do not fit the dominant understanding of citizenship in a given state yet lead their lives there.

Much of the work on migrant agency is concerned with how rights are accessed by people who are excluded from political rights by a state yet are present within the territory of that state. I extend that focus further by examining migrant mobility in practice and concentrating on the act of the journey to seek asylum: the literal geographic movement across countries and continents the metaphorical movement through the legal process; and the movement in terms of experience, that is, how the migrant making the journey orients him or herself towards the world. This latter focus is informed by Sara Ahmed’s[15] attention to the migrant journey as the transnational citizen moves around the world and is reoriented towards place as different places represent the feeling of home. In terms of forced migration the relationship to place is of course different than that of transnational citizens. However, the way the migrant orients him or herself to place can impact identity and, of most relevancy for this research, experiences of (in)security. Furthermore, the idea of the journey might change while the journey is in process. For example, Sonny did not initially set out to reach Greece but identified Greece as a destination while on the journey. After arriving in Greece he continued to experience insecurities and thus the journey – the time of uncertainty and the lack of feeling “at home” – continued after having reached the place that he had identified as destination. As I explore below, understanding the journey as constitutive of an ontological security revealsthe journey is a performative process, an ongoing search for a feeling of home. Migrant actions on the journey and in receiving countries disclose the practice of maintaining both agency and security. The negotiations involve moments and periods of insecurity where migrants contend with the process of being insecure and perform security. Here security is not an object that can be gained but an experience that is lived – a process of security that I argue below can inform critical conceptualisations of security.

HUMAN (IN)SECURITY AND NON-STATE-BASED SECURITY: ONTOLOGICAL AND EXPERIENTIAL RENDERINGS

The security studies literature in IR is vast, deriving from traditions in strategic studies and peace studies.[16] Looking to security as experienced by migrants and asylum seekers requires moving away from a state-based conceptualisation of security whereby the state as a unit is the subject of security, a move made by scholars in critical security studies.[17] Yet problematizing the state is not the only shift required in this context: it is not just the referent of security that must shift, but the form and content, the understanding of the security concept itself.[18] I argue that Sonny’s experience of (in)security must be read as a process, a performative (in)security that is made as it is practiced, felt and experienced. I follow feminist security studies, to argue that material factors conceptualised as security according to positivist and objectivist assumptions cannot resolve the feeling or experience of insecurity.

The concept of human security offers a means of turning to the human or the individual and identifies seven specific potential forms of insecurity: economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security and political security.[19] The concept, initially outlined in the 1994 Human Development Report,recognizes that “for most people, a feeling of insecurity arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event” and proposes four dimensions to human security: universality, interdependence, a need for early prevention, and a people-centred orientation.[20] The final criterion proposes a shift from the dominant paradigms of human rights and security studies, both of which are state-centric and moves beyond a state-centric and militarized understanding of security,although does not abandon the concept of the state completely. The concept of human security establishes a nexus between individual security, state security and the security of the international system.[21]

Conceptually, human security responds to a material or objective lack in one of the above seven categories and relies on an assumption that security experiences are to some degree universal. Thus, security can be provided by identifying what people lack and providing that material good, whether it is economic (such as access to work or housing) or whether it is practical (such as the ability to freely associate in a community without oppression). However, universalising security in this way creates security as a static and objective concept. Human security incorporates subsistence but cannot account for differing experiences of security according to identity, social and cultural attachments and geographic location. Consequently the theoretical conceptualization of human securityis not always open, inclusive and sensitive to subjective experiences of the world. For example, the 1994 UNDP report identifies migration as one of “the real threats to human security”, a symptom of unchecked population growth and economic disparities along with terrorism, religious fundamentalism and drug trafficking.[22] Designating migrants as provocative of insecurity at both the global and state levels positions them as potential terrorists who undermine the stability of the state system.[23] In this way, the liberal conceptualisation of human security emphasizes the state and the neoliberal, Western-dominated global system as holding the “solution” to insecurity. Migrants become a faceless threat rather than people experiencing insecurity.

An alternative rendering of security that places humans as the referent of security yet remains sensitive to subjective experience of the world can be found in feminist security studies,which is driven by the assumption that the female experience of the world often differs from the experience of the world rendered in the male-centric field of security studies.Therefore, if we turn our attention to the nurses rather than the soldiers, or the wives rather than the diplomats, we see a different practice of IR that nonetheless is part of the making of IR. Thus, feminist scholars advance a decentring of IR from the state and a re-centring around marginalised or feminized subjects.[24]

The conceptualisation of security for feminist security studies rejects the notion of insecurity as a lack that can be simply resolved by the provision of materials and objects of security. Rather, security is an ongoing process that is subjective, temporally and contextually contingent, and constituted through varied experiences of identity, social and cultural relations, power and violence. Feminist security studies reveals that understanding states as the providers of security has two potential effects: First, state violence is accepted as legitimate action, particularly when it is taken against those who might challenge the integrity of the international system. The state as the legitimate actor may not appear objectionable when the violence of the state is practiced against groups labelled as terrorists; however, groups such as stateless persons, undocumented migrants, or ethnic populations who pursue a ‘homeland’ are then potential subjects of incontestable state violence. Secondly, if states are the (legitimate) providers of security then to be secure a person must be a subject of a secure state. Such an assumption renders illegitimate people with non-state-based identities and obscures the experiences of those living without security but within secure states.[25]

Feminist security attends to the individual and is both experiential and ontological. Personal narratives both create and reveal ontological positions.[26]In Sonny’s case, his narrative offers insight into how he experienced security and how he negotiated insecurity. Sonny’s process of making an ontological security is revealed through his narrative telling of security. While one cannot hold Sonny’s experience as universal, the form of security – a process, performed in actions and negotiations and understood as a performative concept – offers relevant insight for a security studies that seeks to be sensitive to intersectional identities, subaltern and non-state-based identities and a diversity of experience. Such a conceptualisation of security can exist in conjunction with and in opposition to state security. This type of performative securityis often produced in negotiation with state-based identity categories that assume a particular subject position based on characteristics that are defined by the state rather than by the person to whom they are applied.In the subsequent analysis of Sonny’s journey I illustrate the interaction between material security and ontological security through engaging his experience as knowledge and through conceptualising security as a performative concept. I refer to ontological security, experiential security and performative security, all of which are interrelated. For the sake of clarification, ontological security is the feeling of security. I argue that this feeling is constituted in the performance of security. Experiential security represents the epistemology that foregrounds experience as knowledge of security.I foreground that experience in order to describe the performance of security.