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REFUGES AND DEATH-WORLDS

First published November 2016

When we first began writing as a collective, we made almost no mention of migration or borders. Such an omission is an indictment, both of our own thinking and practice as a collective, and of the thought and politics we were engaging with. Orthodox and radical environmentalism alike frequently neglect those amongst the most affected by the ecological crisis—the people who are displaced by it. It is clear that our early work reproduced this omission. “Refuges and Death-Worlds” marks our first real attempt to engage with migration and the politics of the border. There are some important points here, most notably a critique of the category of the “environmental refugee,” and an insistence on seeing the border as a relation. However, on rereading this piece after the BASE Magazine interview (originally published the following year), there is a striking inattentiveness to race. While it critiqued a politics in which, as Primo Levi posits, “every stranger is an enemy” we failed to attend to the fact that not ‘every stranger’ is the same. This is particularly notable in the section on the Mediterranean, which makes no mention of the antiblackness that drives the war on migrants. In reading this today, it is important to keep this omission in mind.

In If This is a Man, a memoir describing his imprisonment in Auschwitz, Primo Levi writes that:

Many people—many nations—can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’ For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager [camp]. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal.¹

As we write, this alarm signal grows increasingly shrill. White supremacist and antimigrant populisms across the world are drawing sustenance from that “latent infection,” constructing a system of reason premised on the hatred of “strangers” within and beyond the nation. Movements and organizing principles such as Black Lives Matter, No Borders, and #AmINext—at the same time—draw attention to and resist the structural connections between acts of violence otherwise dismissed as random and disconnected.

As scholars of populism have argued at length, “the people” to whom populists appeal, and in whose name they speak, do not preexist such appeals and such speech. Populists construct their own people, and from them, draw their supposed legitimacy and popularity. Terrifyingly, we can easily see how successful reactionary populists have been in this regard. The infection Levi speaks of is spreading and proving fertile for fashioning a xenocidal people.² Meanwhile, “the people” who might enact a counterpopulism remain only a latency. We can imagine, but not fully point to, a constituent power formed from the ensemble of those active in migrants’ struggles—including migrants themselves.³ Such a counterforce, George Ciccariello-Maher argues, could “subject institutions permanently and ruthlessly to popular pressure from below, to the demands of this tenuous, variegated multiplicity that is the people.”⁴

In 2017 there were a record 68.5 million forcibly displaced people in the world.⁵ That was roughly one in every 105 people, and this figure only includes refugees and those displaced internally by armed conflicts. This figure would rise if those moving due to poverty, economic exploitation, or “natural” disasters such as droughts, storms, and desertification were included. Displacement is usually multicausal and attributing any given movement of people to climate change is difficult. Although the UN finds climate is already a factor in eighty-seven percent of disasters, such delineations are impossible to untangle from their social, economic, and historical conditions.⁶

The US government recently allocated its first funds for internally environmentally displaced people after a decade of relentless community and activist pressure, providing $48 million to relocate the Indigenous Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw community of Isle de Jean Charles in southeastern Louisiana. This money was ultimately rejected by the community, who saw it as a ploy to erode their sovereignty and hijack a plan they had developed for years.⁷

In 2016, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia argued that by the end of the century, “the Middle East and North Africa could become so hot that human habitability is compromised. The goal of limiting global warming to less than two degrees Celsius, agreed at the recent UN climate summit in Paris, will not be sufficient to prevent this scenario.”⁸ The Middle East and North Africa are currently home to around 400 million people. Another study found that with the same two degrees of warming, desertification is likely to push north through Morocco and into southern Spain. While some cities could adapt to increasingly hostile desert conditions given sufficient resources, such displacements in other low-latitude regions could mean one in twenty-five people becoming environmentally displaced by the twenty-second century. Without significant political change, “sufficient resources” will simply not be available in these regions for any but the richest inhabitants. The Adaptation Fund established under the Kyoto Protocol to facilitate projects in the Global South funded by the “Annex I” countries of the Global North has allocated only US $358 million to adaptation projects in 68 countries since 2010. Existing finance mechanisms have also been critiqued for simply extending the hegemony of the Global North.⁹ For comparison, in 2014 the UK announced a £2.3 billion (US $2.9 billion) spend on flood defenses alone, also over six years. The Adaptation Fund is not the only source of funding for such projects in North Africa and the Middle East, of course, but it contributes a significant portion of spending on climate change adaptation.

If temperatures increase beyond 2°C warming the Sahara Desert effectively jumps the Mediterranean.¹⁰ At higher temperatures still, beyond the 4°C forecast for 2100, the world will be confronted with what Mark Lynas calls “zones of uninhabitability”: areas in which “large-scale, developed human society would no longer be sustainable.” Accordingly, he states, “we perhaps need to start talking about zones of inhabitability: refuge.”¹¹ For us, there is no longer a “perhaps.”

Much of Europe lies at temperate latitudes, meaning it could constitute one such refuge. Yet, even before such a likelihood we are told that Europe is experiencing a “migrant crisis.” Rising numbers of displaced people seeking entry are coming up against increasingly fervent antimigrant populism, which denies their personhood in the name of xenocidal people.¹² One result of this crisis was the scaling back of search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in order to deter attempts to cross. The Italian-led Operation Mare Nostrum was cancelled in 2014 and replaced with the far less extensive EU-led Operation Triton. Such moves are explicitly designed to stymie a politics of refuge. The switch from Mare Nostrum to Operation Triton resulted in a predictable and intended increase in deaths at sea. Indeed, even with relatively small numbers of attempts to migrate to Europe we see awful numbers of victims. 32,000 dead or missing between January 2000 and January 2016. And these are not simply deaths. Migrants are being murdered by the EU’s border regime. The “migrant crisis” is, in fact, a border crisis whose underlying spirit is a barely concealed racial revanchism which says that every stranger is an enemy.

In his 1974 essay “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor,” ecologist Garrett Hardin proposed the metaphor of rich nations as lifeboats with a small amount of spare capacity surrounded by more swimmers than could safely be accommodated in the boats, “begging for admission”. With no criteria to choose who to admit to the nation-boat, Hardin suggests the inhabitants should admit no-one. Just as the boat would sink so, he argues, would the nation be destroyed by the “fast-reproducing poor” as they overwhelm the “slow-reproducing” rich.¹³ Hardin called this “lifeboat ethics,” and it provides a ready rationale for the wholesale murder of migrants as a morally imperative act of racial-national self-defense. Not only is this morally repugnant, the supposed ecological theory underpinning it is incorrect.¹⁴ However, these arguments remain ideologically useful to those looking for environmentalist justifications for border violence in an era of mass displacement.

To avert a future of lifeboat states, a solid understanding of existing border regimes is needed. An excellent place to start is with the concept of “border imperialism” developed by activists in the No One Is Illegal (NOII) network and fleshed out in Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). “Border imperialism,” Walia writes, “can be understood as creating and reproducing global mass displacements and the conditions necessary for legalized precarity of migrants, which are inscribed by the racialized and gendered violence of empire as well as capitalist segregation and differential segmentation of labor.”¹⁵ Displacement has typically come through economic shocks, IMF structural adjustment programs, wars, and as we are seeing now, climate change will increasingly become a factor along with other aspects of ecological crisis. For example, the mining of raw materials not only produces carbon dioxide in the process of mining, through the uses to which industry subsequently puts those materials it causes all manner of pollution in the colonized, poorer regions where this generally takes place.

On paper, if not in practice, refugees have a legal right to refuge. States have enacted border imperialism by resisting and delegitimizing the category “environmental refugee.” Border imperialism is predicated on a distinction between worthy and unworthy migrants. If “environmental refugee” comes to be legitimized by policy changes, we must attend to how states might use the category to further entrench distinctions between “good” and “bad” migrants. Rather than clinging to the rearguard issue of the right to asylum, perhaps we should be orienting our struggles towards the all-embracing demands raised by migrants: “freedom of movement for all,” “everyone deserves a safe home,” and “no more wall[s].”¹⁶

The notion of border imperialism calls our attention to the fact that the border is not just about lines on a map, it is something much more pervasive: the immigration raid on the workplace; surveillance in universities; nationality checks for school-age children, healthcare seekers, renters, and passport checks at train stations and bus stops. It is the riot police marauding through migrant camps and the activities of the EU border agency Frontex, for example, which “increasingly polices the EU’s borders by taking its bordering practices directly to the populations it deems to pose the greatest threat,” such as interdiction off the West African coast.¹⁷ The border is a relation. Bordering practices produce conditions for the exploitation of precarious labor and “death-worlds” for those racialized as not fully human, not deserving of life.

Two quotes serve to illustrate this argument. The first is from philosopher Achille Mbembe:

I have put forward the notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.¹⁸

The second is from Abu Jana, a Syrian migrant:

Let me tell you something. Even if there was a [European] decision to drown the migrant boats, there will still be people going by boat because the individual considers himself dead already. Right now Syrians consider themselves dead. Maybe not physically, but psychologically and socially, [a Syrian] is a destroyed human being, he’s reached the point of death. So I don’t think that even if they decided to bomb migrant boats it would change people’s decision to go.¹⁹

Levi’s warning—that the “end of the chain” of the logic that renders these strangers, these walking dead, enemies—haunts us. Lifeboat ethics are readymade refrains to rationalize and naturalize these horrors, to beget lifeboat states and the death-worlds of their border regimes. The latent infection diagnosed by Levi demands antifascist inoculation.

1. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man/The Truce (London: Abacus, 2003), 15. If we take Aimé Césaire’s point that the Holocaust had its roots in colonial genocides, then we should not be surprised that non-Europeans are more readily treated as enemies.

2. By xenocide, we reference the deliberate extermination of foreign entities. This term has roots in the practice of the intentional eradication of foreign plant or animal species.

3. For more on the role of “the people” in populism, see “Climate Populism and the People’s Climate March” in Section IV of this volume.

4. George Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 133.

5. UNHCR, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017” (Geneva: UNHCR, 2018), 2. Available at https://www.unhcr.org/5b27be547.pdf.

6. UNISDR, “Ten-Year Review Finds 87 Percent of Disasters Climate-Related,” accessed April 25, 2019, https://www.unisdr.org/archive/42862.

7. The terms of the resettlement plan are very much contested. See Julie Dermansky, “Critics Say Louisiana ‘Highjacked’ Climate Resettlement Plan for Isle de Jean Charles Tribe,” DeSmogBlog (blog), April 20, 2019, https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/04/20/critics-louisiana-highjacked-climate-resettlement-plan-isle-de-jean-charles-tribe.

8. Max Planck Society, “Climate-Exodus Expected in the Middle East and North Africa,” Phys.org, May 2, 2016, https://phys.org/news/2016-05-climate-exodus-middle-east-north-africa.html.

9. David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts, and Mizan Khan, “The Politics of International Climate Adaptation Funding: Justice and Divisions in the Greenhouse,” Global Environmental Politics 13, no. 1 (2013): 49–68.

10. Joel Guiot and Wolfgang Cramer, “Climate change: The 2015 Paris Agreement Thresholds and Mediterranean Basin Ecosystems,” Science, 354 (2016): 465-468.

11. Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, DC: National Geographic Books, 2008), 209.

12. Rising numbers remain modest in light of forecast climate migrations and when compared to other parts of the world. Only a small fraction of the world’s refugees try to enter Europe. According to the UNHCR’s end-of-2017 figures, the European continent “hosted” 2.6 million refugees (this figure does not include Turkey, which hosts 3.5 million alone); compared to 6.3 million in sub-Saharan Africa and 4.2 million in the Asia-Pacific region. It is a similar case in the United States. The Americas as a whole “host” just 644,200 refugees (a decline of six percent from 2016). [See UNHCR, Global Trends.] This does not imply benevolence on the part of states hosting greater numbers, only proximity to displaced populations. In many states there is no route to citizenship, so people displaced decades ago from Palestine or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan remain ‘refugees’, as do their descendents.

13. Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” Psychology Today 8 (1974): 38–43.

14. See “The Dangers of Reactionary Ecology” in Section II of this volume for an expanded critique of Hardin.

15. Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, 75.

16. These slogans can be seen in Guy Smallman’s photographs of a 2015 migrant-organized demonstration in Calais.

17. Nick Vaughan-Williams, Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 28.

18. Mbembe, “Necropolitics.”

19. Quoted in Patrick Kingsley, “Passport, Lifejacket, Lemons: What Syrian Refugees Pack for the Crossing to Europe,” The Guardian, September 4, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/sep/04/syrian-refugees-pack-for-the-crossing-to-europe-crisis.