Migrant Protest, Counter-Sovereignty, and a Democratic Community Yet-to-Come

• In Event: Refugee Politics, Human Rights, and International Norms

Abstract

Australia and the United States are two wealthy democratic nation-states that have implemented some of the harshest laws regarding border policing, migrant detention, and deportation, in comparison to similarly situated countries. In this paper, I explain two dominant types of migrant protest—hunger strikes and faith-based sanctuary—in Australia and the United States to elucidate how they are responses to the specific legal context. Understanding migrant protests in context helps to politicize tactics that have often been framed in individual, ahistorical, and pathological manners (e.g. medical literature that frames protest as a product of mental illness). Alternatively, some migrant protests have been interpreted in a temporally limited manner, failing to understand important historical trends that include a history of tactic-sharing, invocation of a broader issue-based community, and goals of protesters themselves to change the systems that treat them as enemy-invaders rather than refugees.
Understanding the deeply political character of these protests is a first step in making those who feel like they have been disappeared more visible. As I explain, many of the tactics, goals, and affective energies of these protesters are similar to, if not overlapping, with citizen civil disobedience activists. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that migration policy in each country is a form of prerogative power, exercised as foreign policy, and occurs in sites often viewed as “Constitution-free” (US) or as “excised” from the mainland (Australia). Either potentially or in reality, the state deploys its warfare power on these individuals. In these sites or when they are scheduled for detention and deportation, they are technically “non-persons” (as Monica Varsanyi has characterized the suspension of 14th Amendment rights and personhood in the US context). Accordingly, they cannot draw on existing rights, nor a formal political community; nor do they have the hope of filing future civil rights claims if abuses do occur. The combination of the civil character of migration policy, the fact that it is foreign policy and therefore largely immune to meaningful judicial scrutiny, and military force can or has been used all explain how the spheres in which protest occurs “sovereign.” An important example is detention, which is prison-like but lacks prison standards, while detainees do not have criminal rights. Detainee protest aims at interrupting and altering forms of total control over bodily movement, speech, family relations, and political action. The stakes are high as someone can be placed in solitary confinement, force-fed through the nose, beaten, disappeared, and/or separated from their families. Protests are therefore risky and administrative reactions are forms of torture. I argue that given the tactics and aims of protesters as well as this context that seeks total power over migrants in these situations, their protest is a form of counter-sovereignty.
Counter-sovereignty does not leave intact the status quo but rather democratizes unjust and undemocratic spaces, interrupting undemocratic processes, and forming an inclusive political community that enacts more just practices and fairer methods of political interaction. Sovereignty does not need to be interpreted or deployed in dehumanizing, violent ways that pit security against human rights. In fact, whether a democratic version of modern sovereignty has existed or not, it is imperative to conceive of a set of founding powers that isn’t at odds with human well-being or positive political freedoms and duties. Drawing on authors such as Arendt, Derrida, and Peter Westoby, I believe that sovereignty could be defined as a foundational claim to assert power by a political community committed to plurality and egalitarian relations. These protest methods are democratic because they rely on persuasive methods to convince a plural community that conventional beliefs and narratives are dehumanizing and destructive; they aim at greater political inclusion; and they invoke justice-oriented notions of duties and responsibilities. We could conceive of the resultant community as one formed by democratic agonism aiming at reaching agreement on shared vocabulary, issues, and solutions.

Author

• Kathleen R. Arnold, DePaul University