The Importance of Location and Territory

This is a familiar situation now in many parts of the world. Yet despite all the media attention to the problem, there has been relatively little attention paid to a couple of its key characteristics, both of which have to do with the relationship between people and their location. First, the whole concept of a refugee is dependent on a particular legal and political understanding of territory. This understanding has developed historically, and its logic is not self-evident (Elden 2013). In order to become a refugee, a person has to cross a particular kind of border, one that distinguishes between territories to which people legally belong and those to which they do not belong. It is obvious, but it is also key to understanding claims to asylum: the whole system is based on certain assumptions about the relationship between geographical space and human beings, assumptions that are embedded within the legal regulations that establish different kinds of rights to be physically present in a territory. By definition, asylum seekers are people who come from somewhere else and are asking for exceptional leave to stay in a territory to which they do not normally legally belong. In that sense, claims to asylum are always exceptional. I will be suggesting later that this historically contingent legal condition of territoriality generates a sense of contradiction whenever the number of claims to asylum rises to a level that makes them appear to cease to be exceptional to the authorities processing the claims. What Fassin did not describe in his outline of changes in French policies on accepting claims to asylum is that the number of people seeking asylum in each of those periods was dramatically different. In 1972, the total population of refugees in France was 98,900; in 2012, it was 217,865, or more than twice the 1972 number.³ UNHCR figures show that in 2012, the number of applications for asylum to France was 97,637.⁴ In stark contrast, between 1970 and 1974, asylum applications to France were approximately 5,100 (Van Mol and de Valk 2016, 37).

It is important to note that, in both cases, the number of people involved was miniscule relative to the whole population of France: in 1972, the French population was almost 53 million, and in 2012, it was 65.5 million, which means that refugees as a proportion of the French population were and remain entirely negligible.⁵ The same is the case for the EU as a whole. In 2012, the EU population was just over 441 million;⁶ applications for asylum in the EU region were 386,392, or 0.087 percent of the population.⁷ This is not about the significance of the numbers of applications relative to the population as a whole—those figures have always been statistically insignificant, despite what some political parties or media reports might suggest. Rather, my focus is on the bureaucratic management of asylum claims, of the circumstances under which claims are heard. In those terms, what changed is that in 2012, the French migration authorities received an average of 267 claims to asylum every day, while in the 1970s, it was less than 3 claims per day. From a border management perspective, if claiming asylum is an exceptional breach of the contemporary principle of territory, then it cannot simultaneously be a common occurrence.

The second issue relates to how that basic principle of territoriality comes into conflict with ideas about human rights on the one hand and humanitarianism on the other. I suggest that the highly precarious existence in which asylum seekers regularly find themselves, and most particularly, the apparently endless waiting it involves, is at least partly the result of the mutual contradictions between these principles. The logic of humanitarianism is universal: it concerns a moral obligation to care for those who suffer, and it focuses mostly on bodily, physical suffering; the logic of human rights is also universal in principle, but it is based on legal rights bestowed on individuals and does not directly concern a moral obligation, but instead a legal obligation, which ties it to the logic of territory, as it is only states that can execute laws. The contradictions between these three principles—humanitarianism, universal human rights, and the particularistic and bordered logic of territory—often lead to the result that people who draw on universal principles in claiming a moral or legal right to enter a territory often find themselves placed in apparently endless moments of waiting and precarity, caught between contradictory logics. They end up with nowhere that they can either safely or legally put their feet on a patch of the earth.

This is somewhat different from a point made many years ago by Liisa Malkki (1992) in her study of Hutu refugees in Tanzania. Malkki suggested that the logic of the refugee camp was tied to the logic of the rootedness of the concept of nationality: the idea that people belong to a territory in the same way trees are rooted in the soil. This meant that refugees came to be understood as being uprooted, and thus placed in special places for those who are effectively “matter out of place,” in Mary Douglas’s famous phrase (Douglas 1976). While not questioning this approach (indeed, Malkki’s pathbreaking scholarship was among those that inspired my interest in spatial aspects of social life), I am more concerned with the concept of location than I am with issues of people’s identities in this chapter: what difference it makes that the ground upon which people walk is defined in such a way that it generates a condition of locals and foreigners.

Hospitality and Hostility

Anthropologists and others occasionally draw on Jacques Derrida’s (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000) work on hospitality in attempting to build an explanation for the vexatious situation in which no asylum seeker’s explanation will do.⁸ For Derrida, the concept of hospitality, as an abstract concept, implies the simultaneous power to be inhospitable, as well as the potential requirement to accept even hostile strangers into your house in order to satisfy the requirements of being hospitable. A host must have control over the house in question; but also, the host must be morally obliged to use that power over the house to allow strangers in, even ones who might ruin the house. Derrida suggests that these mutually contradictory elements coexist within the concept of hospitality. Some scholars have called on Derrida’s reasoning to try and explain why asylum seekers seem to be constantly let down by the widely reported cultural and social moral obligation to be hospitable toward strangers, while at the same time, current procedures for granting asylum in, for example, the member states of the EU seem to be deliberately designed to reject just about everybody. So how to square this circle? How can the border management processes of countries whose populations apparently publicly take pride in their adherence to the concept and moral obligations of hospitality (not to mention justice and freedom) constantly result in people being sent back to places where they fear that they will be jailed, tortured, and killed?

Greece, which, at the time of writing, is one of the locations of a particularly intense focus on the refugee question, is also the location of a much longer-term anthropological debate on the concept of hospitality in general, and these two debates have folded into each other in discussions of how the refugee question is being confronted there (see Cabot 2014, 99–102, for a summary of that debate). Here, explanation has to make ethnographic rather than philosophical sense. This is important: in anthropology, the abstractions that constitute philosophical reasoning cannot be simply “applied” in order to explain ethnographic events; there is no direct route between Derrida’s ideas and whatever might happen next in Greece, for example. Derrida’s commentary concerned the word hospitality and the thought that the word made possible in a particular language, at a particular moment in history, and that might explain the possibility of the meaning of that word. In his conceptual work, Derrida is never describing what occurs; his work is always “as if,” not “what is.”

Matei Candea (2012, S35) argues this point in looking at how Derrida’s views on hospitality might help in understanding ethnographic details in Corsica. He concludes that in practice, “hospitality more often seems to be a common language in which to argue and disagree, a language of accusation and disappointed hopes, a language of insult and wounded pride” (S46). In coming to that conclusion, Candea carries out two anthropological twists in order to turn his account into an anthropological explanation. The first is that he notes Derrida was French and lived in Paris, and that he made direct interventions on questions of hospitality in French public and political arenas. This turns Derrida into an ethnographic resource for Candea’s study of Corsica, rather than a conceptual resource. And the second is that Candea points out that in practice (or what might in Derrida’s terms be called “in the event”), there is no final conclusion to be had about the meaning of hospitality, nor the best ways to practice it or express it, which means it cannot act as an explanation. In short, hospitality in practice is not only contingent on particular contexts (i.e., the idea will mean different things in different contexts); it is also the subject and object of agonistic debate, in Chantal Mouffe’s (2013) sense: in any given context, how to interpret the word is a matter of disagreement between parties—indeed, it is used as a means to throw brickbats at each other. Candea suggests that this agonism is hidden in the publicly pronounced universalizing and generalizing platitudes about the French (or Corsican) peoples being, ipso facto, hospitable. Drawing on ethnographic description, Candea notes that this is demonstrably not the case, and to make the mistake of thinking that Derrida’s understanding of hospitality can simply be “applied” to the Corsican case is, in Candea’s view, to miss most of the point.

Counterfeits

In the rather different situation I am focusing on—the bureaucratic procedure and unpredictable outcome of asylum-seeking claims in the EU region—there is a different element of Derrida’s work that might be helpful. This concerns the asylum-seeking process as such, rather than anthropological explanations for the practices of hospitality that might make such applications either acceptable or unacceptable. Within the EU at least, the asylum-seeking process is a prolonged (and infamously chronically delay-inflected) event, during which explanations are exchanged between different parties to this process: the applicants, the people who are trying to help the applicants (lawyers, NGO workers, activists, friends), and the people who are adjudicating the claim. As it is currently practiced within the EU, it is an inherently agonistic process as well, in which disagreements regularly occur about the meaning of asylum, of a refugee, and of the accounts given by the applicants. During this bureaucratic stage of the process, the social moral force of hospitality is not supposed to be involved at all: the officers are formally obliged to apply the law indifferently, objectively assessing the applications against a set of criteria (Herzfeld 1992).⁹ In theory, this is supposed to ensure a just result as often as possible. Nevertheless, as the work of researchers such as Fassin and Cabot has shown, there is currently a very strong tendency for officers to assess applications negatively.

This is where Derrida’s thought on performativity as outlined in “Signature Event Context” (1988) might prove helpful. That essay presents Derrida’s ideas on writing as a performative act, which he developed in his engagement with, and critique of, J. L. Austin’s concept of performative speech acts. In the course of this discussion, Derrida comments on the peculiar characteristics of a signature as a form of performative writing: “In order to function, that is, to be readable, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to be detached from the present and singular intention of its production. It is its sameness which, by corrupting its identity and its singularity, divides its seal” (Derrida 1988, 20).

This implies that, in the process of authenticating that somebody is the author of a text and authenticating that what is contained in the text is the author’s intention (“I, the undersigned, do hereby …”), there must always be the possibility of a fake, a counterfeit signature. The signature only works if the person signing can repeatedly reproduce it: if it looked completely different every time they signed, it could not be used as a form of authentication. This means that, by definition, the possibility that somebody else could produce a copy of this signature (a counterfeit) is always already there: it is a key part of how signatures work, how they become performative in (for example) making a document into a legal document.

I will return to this at the end; suffice it to say here that the process of claiming asylum constantly requires that the applicant authenticate themselves in this way, and as many have observed, that process of authentication has become ever more elaborate, ever more burdensome, with ever more demands for more authentication, and in recent years, with diminishing chances of success. Moreover, it is not only that the chances of having the asylum seeker’s story accepted as authentic are quite slim: it seems almost impossible to predict which techniques will work.

The Rise of Humanitarianism, Security, and Precarity

As a result of all this uncertainty, there have been plenty of explanations offered by anthropologists and others about the real reasons for these dismal success rates (success in this case meaning being officially recognized as a refugee under the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees). There has been no shortage of events around the world in recent years that have generated a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” to use the phrase from the convention (UNHCR 2011, Article IA(2)). And as outlined earlier, in recent years, the number of applications has increased considerably. For example, the UNHCR recorded that the number of applications to France between 2000 and 2010 was 885,487; between 2011 and 2021, it was 1,382,336, a 64 percent increase.¹⁰ The acceptance rate went down during that period, but not dramatically: from an average of 17 percent to an average of 15 percent.¹¹ In 2012, the year mentioned by Fassin, UNHCR recorded a 9 percent success rate, an unusually harsh decision year, it would seem. Nevertheless, none of the 2000s figures are anywhere near the 90 percent acceptance rate of the 1970s that Fassin mentions. The acceptance rate in the EU as a whole in 2012 was 11 percent (43,834 positive decisions from a total of 383,216 decisions made), again nothing like a 90 percent success rate.¹²

On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in France, including in the transit facility and camp at Sangatte near Calais, Fassin suggests that a shift away from a political definition of asylum, as drafted in the UN Convention, and instead toward a more humanitarian moral imperative to take care of people who are suffering, is part of the explanation: “The logic of compassion now prevailed over the right to protection” (Fassin 2012, 144). Fassin notes that simultaneously, there was a substantial rise in the suspicion that asylum seekers were lying about their suffering. He suggests that in the 1970s, during which time claims for asylum to France were rare relative to more recent years, applications were generally taken at face value, or at least not investigated very heavily (116). In recent years, at the same time as the rise in humanitarian approaches, no story seems to be believed, and even if it is, it does not necessarily mean a successful application.

This simultaneous rise in humanitarianism and increase in suspicion of migrants within the EU region has been described by many others. This notably includes Nick Vaughan-Williams (2015, 30), who draws on Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Derrida, and (most particularly) Roberto Esposito to suggest that there has been a mutually reinforcing relationship between the ever-increasing securitization of the EU’s borders and the EU’s ever-increasing emphasis on a humanitarian response to what is often termed a “migration crisis.” Vaughan-Williams’s explanation is that the EU has effectively developed a kind of strong membrane at the outer edges of its territory, which simultaneously both compassionately permits “good people” in and strongly protects and repels “harmful outsiders.” It is not accidental that this sounds a little like the contrast between “bad bacteria” and “good bacteria” that is often made in advertisements for yogurt: Vaughan-Williams explicitly suggests that a biopolitical (and racist) notion of “immunisation” is behind many policies toward the EU’s outer borders: “ ‘The border’ does not exist as such beyond diverse biopolitical attempts to striate space and produce subjects,” he says (2015, 10).

That latter comment, although relatively common within a range of scholarship on contemporary border dynamics, is of course somewhat of an overstatement. In practical terms, modern political borders (at least those) also have a formal legal existence, whose purpose is to demarcate territory in the manner outlined by Stuart Elden (2013): as a bounded space under the control of a group of people, which defines a historically specific form of power in relation to that space. The meaning, creation, enforcement, and experience of political borders may be a highly complex matter, and one that, within the EU, has some historically novel forms (Green 2012b, 2013); but they still follow the contemporary legal and discursive logic of territory. Christoffer Kølvraa and Jan Ifversen, in their discussion about the European Neighbourhood Policy, also point to this geopolitical condition when they comment on the habit of many researchers to refer to “deterritorialization” in discussing recent changes in border dynamics: “Deterritorialization does not mean the elimination of territory—which would be absurd—but is just another way of understanding the link between territory and state” (2011, 47).

This is an important point in what I want to suggest about explanation in relation to contemporary asylum-seeking processes: the whole process is based on the premise of a spatial and geopolitical difference between the place from which the asylum seeker fled and the place in which that person ended up. The separation of the two places, both in geographical terms and in terms of their relative value, is crucial: the asylum-seeking process occurs in one of the states that is a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees, and the process always involves specific reference to a specific other state (the state from which the asylum seeker fled). This sets up distinct and historically changing conditions that define one of the fields (in Bourdieu’s [(1990) 1995] terms) concerning what can, and cannot, count as a valid explanation in this process. Explanations that focus strongly on the bodies of asylum seekers, or on processes of subject formation, tend to ignore this geopolitical territorial element in their explanations.

The key point here is that Vaughan-Williams’s explanation for the failure of the majority of asylum seekers to succeed in their efforts to be recognized as refugees (even if they are given leave to remain, it is rarely as refugees) is that the biopolitics of the EU basically regards the majority of people applying for asylum as somehow toxic for the EU citizens’ body politic, as it were. In this, Vaughan-Williams is suggesting a fundamental shift from territories to bodies as the focus of the operations of power—or rather, a confusion between bodies and territory, as if they were the same thing.

A much more ethnographically grounded argument that also focuses on the bodies of asylum seekers is provided by Miriam Ticktin. Like Fassin, Ticktin studied the French case, and she also focuses her explanation on the idea of the rise of humanitarian rather than political justifications for assisting those attempting to escape persecution (Ticktin 2011, 2016). She argues that the shift from giving people political asylum to focusing on their bodies as a form of care actually hides a move away from an earlier concern with political inequalities, and toward a situation in which every case has to be judged, case by case, on the grounds of levels of human, bodily suffering (Ticktin 2011). Like Fassin, she argues that in France at least, the monitoring and assessment of the wounded body has become the focus of the possibly successful applicant. Increasingly, the paperwork for establishing that a person is worthy of being allowed to stay requires demonstration of what could be called the stigmata of persecution. Alternatively, there might be the right to compassion due to having a life-threatening illness that cannot be treated in the country from whence you came. That possibility is the result of a change in French immigration law in 1998 (Ticktin 2011, 2).¹³

More recently, Ticktin has argued that the humanitarian approach requires those who have suffered to be innocent (victims), and preferably children, rather than people who have the right to asylum because of a well-founded fear of persecution, irrespective of their moral worth. As Ticktin puts it, “Rather than having access to rights or laws, humanitarian solutions depend on individual sensibilities, which, in turn, are shaped by racialized and gendered ideas of who is a worthy subject of compassion” (2016, 265).

In this kind of explanation, the level of precarity over what might or might not succeed as an application for asylum is about as high as it gets, being dependent on the most unpredictable of things: emotional responses to somebody’s reported plight, often based on highly biased assumptions drawn from historically fraught and unequal relations between different parts of the world, and between different populations: postcolonialism, racism, gender bias, and prejudices regarding sexuality all come into it. No surprise, then, that the outcome of each application appears to be individual—idiosyncratic, even.

Geopolitical Territorial Shifts

There is an important point here that many writers focusing on the rise of humanitarianism make: that the logic of humanitarianism is based on an abstract logic, an apparently universal moral principle that people should take care of their fellow human beings if they are suffering. There is no legal or spatial referent to this principle of humanitarianism. Yet as most of the authors I have mentioned emphasize, and as Malkki (1992) noted years before them, there is a rugged and often brutal territoriality in the evaluation of human suffering, and where that territorial principle is challenged, it is often violently reimposed, or at the very least has to be channeled through the contemporary geopolitical logic of territoriality. This is a point alluded to by Agamben (1998) at one end of the spectrum (notions of the camp, as special spaces taken out of normal territorial conditions) and Judith Butler (2004, 2009) at the other end (precarity and legibility): the abstract principle of humanitarianism not only turns out to have a spatial, religious, and political history, as Fassin has noted; it is also crosscut by the geopolitics, historical discourses, and the laws of borders. Yet humanitarianism, in being a universalizing principle, contradicts the particularizing logic of geopolitical borders. It is not simply, as Ticktin has forcefully argued, that humanitarianism “depoliticizes” the problem of asylum seekers and masks the highly power-inflected inequalities that exist across the world, as noted in the quote above (2016, 265); it is also that the logic of humanitarianism works against the territorial logic of contemporary border dynamics.

This has important implications for the explanations provided by asylum seekers: the people doing the assessments within the context of the EU are officers of the state, and they are implementing EU laws and protocols; their task is to decide whether to permit people to stay in the state territory, and their job is to defend the logic of the border. The 1951 UN Convention on Refugees provides a balancing act between these two: while evoking the idea of universal human rights, it is also based on the premise that a person needs the legal right to reside in a territory in order to be able to exercise those human rights. It could not be otherwise: its principles can only be applied by states who choose to sign the convention.

Hannah Arendt, who famously studied the refugee crises in Europe that eventually led to the drafting of the 1951 Convention on Refugees, noted the territorial basis of human rights many decades ago. She pointed out that human rights—although they have various principles (e.g., the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US version, or equality before the law, liberty, protection of property, and national sovereignty according to French principles)—are also only guaranteed by law, and the law assumes a right to reside in a state (Arendt 1958, 295). The problem of the stateless person, Arendt said, “is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody even wants to oppress them.… Even the Nazis started their extermination of Jews by first depriving them of all legal status (the status of second-class citizenship) and cutting them off from the world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps” (295).

Arendt is noting that in practice, rights only exist when a person has the right to reside within a political territory. In legal terms, all the procedures that are organized in terms of dealing with asylum seekers are based on that principle. It also sets up an implicit, and sometimes entirely explicit, relationship between the state that is receiving the asylum seeker and the state from which the applicant has arrived. The officer who makes the decision about the applicant is assessing not only the veracity of the applicant’s claim but also the relative value of the territory from which the applicant has come, compared with the value of the territory into which the applicant wishes to move. In that comparison, it is more often than not assumed that the relative value of the host country across a range of measures (e.g., quality of life, economic conditions, and security) is far higher than the country from which the applicant arrived (a perceived relative value that both applicants and assessors often share).

Elsewhere, I have referred to this constant habit of placing different parts of the world in a hierarchy of value as “relative location” (Green 2012a): the idea that the value and significance of any given place are at least partly dependent on its connections to and separations from other places, defined by some kind of hierarchical classification system that locates a given place somewhere along its scale.¹⁴ When an asylum applicant’s case is assessed, it is not only the applicant who is being assessed: it is also the relative value of where they have come from. Both in terms of the underlying territorial logic of the law being applied in assessing the case and in terms of the relative value of the two territories being compared, there is no escaping the deep territoriality of this process, despite the apparently abstract and body-focused notions of suffering embedded within the principles of humanitarianism.

The Problem of Disproportion

Even without the advent of humanitarianism, the idea of asylum still poses a challenge to the modern logic of territoriality, as Arendt pointed out, and as others (e.g., Fassin, Ticktin, and Cabot) have also noted. This particular challenge has been repeated time and again historically. As Arendt noted, the First and Second World Wars generated huge numbers of displaced people who had been rendered stateless—their former states would not accept them back. Suddenly, there were millions of refugees in the world. Arendt suggests that the right to asylum was always intended to be exceptional, on the premise that almost everyone should be a citizen of somewhere. The right to asylum could not survive the mass loss of citizenship generated by those two world wars: “The first great damage done to the nation-states as a result of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of stateless people was that the right of asylum, the only right that had ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man [sic] in the sphere of international relationships, was being abolished” (Arendt 1958, 280).

The point is that this right to asylum was a borderless right, one that appealed to a universal (that is, covering the whole world) human right. Although the UN Convention on Refugees that was ratified shortly after Arendt wrote this was framed entirely within territorial logic, it also incorporated that universal principle of human rights. The implication is that, in recognizing a refugee as someone with a right to reside in a legal territory on the basis of having fled from somewhere else, it creates a category of person whose status is inherently based on them being from somewhere else. In noting this, Arendt is pointing toward a paradox: people who claim some right to reside in a country on the basis of either asylum or humanitarian grounds are in effect questioning the territorial logic of the nation-state. These are not temporary guests, as implied in discussions on hospitality; rather, they are claiming the right to stay as refugees, as people who, by definition, are not from there.

This paradox has not been lost on Cabot, who studied the often deeply paradoxical processes involved in Greece when people (both asylum seekers and others; the distinction was often somewhat blurry in practice) attempted to gain the right to reside. As she notes at the beginning of her study, “Refuge is awarded by the very virtue of their being ‘alien’: a citizen of another nation where citizenship has failed. Thus, while the law of protection is grounded on an ahistorical vision of humanity, a ‘universal’ citizenship invoked through the regime of international human rights, this framework simultaneously reinscribes the refugee’s ‘alien’ origins” (2014, 7).

As Arendt and others have pointed out, so long as the number of asylum-seeking applicants remained exceptional, this underlying paradox would not present a problem. However, whenever the numbers have historically gone up sufficiently to draw the attention of the media and for the migration authorities to feel as if it is a regular occurrence, the underlying paradox becomes highly visible, and thus highly problematic. A couple of examples from what has been happening in Greece recently demonstrate how this reveals that there can be no possibility of an explanation that can square the circle for the applicant: the logical contradiction between the idea of refugee (someone who is axiomatically from somewhere else, by definition) and the territorial logic of the relation between people and location (citizenship, in which a person legally belongs in a territory) means that any explanation in terms of the one will contradict the terms of the other.

One example is provided by Katerina Rozakou, who has been researching the processing of spontaneous migrants on the island of Lesvos for some years now (Rozakou 2017). She noted that in 2015, at the height of what the media dubbed the “migration crisis” for that island, the UNHCR estimated that over half a million people arrived by sea. To provide a sense of the way this felt out of proportion on the island, Lesvos normally has around 85,000 inhabitants (Rozakou 2017, 37). That year, 2015, was not only a period of intense arrival of undocumented visitors; it was also at the height of the Greek financial crisis, during which there was a very real chance that Greece might crash out of the Eurozone. In the summer of 2015, when the number of undocumented people arriving on the island daily ranged between 1,000 and 3,000, the banks were closed and everyone was restricted to extracting a maximum of sixty euros per day (Green 2017).

The EU media seized on the optics of this situation: a small island being “overwhelmed” by undocumented travelers arriving just when the residents were on their knees financially. The way the Greek authorities struggled to cope was also widely reported, adding to the negative coverage of Greece as somehow being a problematic EU member state during that period.¹⁵ Yet the arrivals were not traveling to Lesvos, nor even to Greece, really: they were entering the territory of the EU. The island was a transit point on the way to somewhere else. And having been on the island during the summers myself across those most intense years (2009–2016), I did not gain any sense of being overwhelmed by these travelers. In practice, the sense of crisis affected a relatively small part of the island: some of the villages on the coast where many of the boats landed; the port in the main town of Mytilene, where many of the travelers were processed for onward travel to Athens; the areas where the makeshift reception centers were set up. There was also an increased workload for the police and border authorities who had to process all the people who had arrived, and for the travelers themselves, who were perhaps more overwhelmed than anybody else.

Those last two groups of people, the border authorities and the travelers, did indeed experience it as being overwhelming, out of proportion, and anomalous. Rozakou recounts how, in the reception centers, the strain caused by the sheer numbers involved often overwhelmed the officers who were trying to process all these people, with the aim, once processed, of shipping them off to Athens. The idea was to provide them all with a piece of paper, an “expulsion order,” which specified terms suggesting that the holder of the paper should leave voluntarily. For those from Syria, Somalia, and others classified as “nondeportable,” the period before voluntary expulsion was six months; for all others, it was one month. Rozakou describes the way these papers were full of errors; how the backlog of processing developed; how there were enormous political efforts to clear the backlog; how representatives from EU agencies, especially Frontex and, later, UNHCR, came to inspect and assist; and how everyone complained that everything was creaking under the strain. Yet at the same time, these events were not overwhelming for those not caught up in the process. For most others on the island, they lived the intensity vicariously, by reading about it in the media and occasionally catching glimpses of people who had recently arrived, or seeing some of the debris of their crossings—damaged dinghies, tins of food, clothes, many other items—piled up in the harbor.

Nevertheless, in the media the events of 2015 were expanded to appear to be a generally overwhelming condition, implicitly affecting the entire EU area. It was also quickly recorded as a “humanitarian crisis” (to add to the migration crisis and financial crisis). The result was that Lesvos not only received thousands of undocumented travelers every day, it was also deluged with the world’s media, and quite a few famous people, including Susan Sarandon and Pope Francis (Smith 2016). There was much more of this kind of media reporting, but that is enough to give a sense of the way that the logic of humanitarian reason (in Fassin’s terms) was being applied in reporting about Lesvos. It could hardly have been any more extravagantly theatrical.

Eventually, the EU brokered a deal with Turkey in 2016, which allowed these “spontaneous migrants” to be sent back to Turkey, from which they had traveled to reach Lesvos. UNHCR, as well as a variety of other NGOs and activist organizations, complained that this deal was illegal under the 1951 Convention on Refugees, but the arrangement was maintained (Rozakou 2017, 45).

Rozakou argues that this situation did not represent the breakdown of state structures. On the contrary, it demonstrated the continued effectiveness by which the state reproduced itself, even if it was done somewhat chaotically on this occasion: it was still Greek police and other officers of the state who were dealing with all of this, who took responsibility. And I will also note that in this situation, part of the “solution” to the state authorities being overwhelmed with the number of people was to effectively close the border by expelling these travelers from Greek territory—irrespective of the law, or of the needs of those people who had made the journey to arrive on Lesvos. The fact that this reassertion of the territorial border (in this case, it was the EU border, not the Greek one, that was being reasserted) was likely to be in contravention of the Convention on Refugees seemed somehow irrelevant.

The second case involves Cabot’s (2014) extensive study of the procedures carried out in Athens for handling asylum applications. Cabot notes that many people arriving in Athens had multiple reasons for leaving the country from which they came, a situation that is not really catered for in either the asylum application procedures or the standard migration application procedures. Cabot particularly looked at the extreme importance that almost everyone involved—the applicants, the NGOs helping the applicants, and the migration authorities—placed on a piece of paper generally referred to as the “pink card.” This card was issued to asylum seekers and provided leave to remain for a period of time while the holder of the card’s application for asylum was being processed. Cabot describes how the whole process was replete with paradoxes, informal practices, mutual misunderstandings, endless delays, and waiting, and with a sense on the part of the authorities that they were somewhat overwhelmed with numbers. Cabot also describes how the card became a highly important object, capable of being reinscribed in a variety of ways, often quite contrary to the formal status of the card itself. She notes, “The card cannot be easily located in zones of legality or illegality, but rather, moves unpredictably through the shifting spectrum or ‘continuum’ between illegal and legal status and practice” (2014, 46–47).

Cabot goes on to describe how the card simultaneously appeared as a means to control and render the holder visible, while there were also all kinds of space for negotiation on every side (official, applicant, unofficial) about the meaning and the use of the card. Often, it was an important form of legitimation for applicants; at times, it was effectively used as a residence permit by the police. Drawing on this ethnography, Cabot resists any of the studies that would suggest that there was any single explanation of, cause for, or power over what she observed happening. Instead, she concludes, “Governance, thus, emerges as an evolving, unruly nexus of persons, practices, and things, constantly redirected toward variously overlapping, conflicting, or even unrelated ends” (62).

The Gray Area of the Exercise of the Law at Borders: Fakes, Counterfeits, and Paradoxes

That brings me back to the question of fakes and counterfeits, and the impossibility of any stable explanation in this situation. Both Rozakou and Cabot point to the way that the line between what is legal and what is not, what is real and what is fake, is a highly gray area. In the process of dealing with asylum claims, nobody was exactly following the rules, and it was often physically, logistically, or even formally impossible to do so. Laws were broken, partial truths and outright lies were told, and compromises and creative solutions were found all the time. This is unlikely to be solely the outcome of the extreme conditions in Greece at the time. Madeleine Reeves (2013), in her study of Kyrgyz migrant workers in Moscow, whose arrival was in no way overwhelming for the Russian migration authorities, also describes the very gray area between legality and illegality in her study of how the workers prove, or fail to prove, that they are legally in Russia. That situation is particularly notable because during Soviet times, these same workers did not need any visas at all, since both territories were within a single legal jurisdiction.

Given this combination of legal grayness at borders in general and the paradoxical position of the refugee in relation to territory in particular, I have suggested that asylum seekers are collectively placed under suspicion when the number of applicants for asylum rises beyond the level of being exceptional from the perspective of officers of the state who process these claims (as noted earlier, these numbers have not been significant in terms of the whole population of France or even the EU for the periods being discussed). That shift from a general acceptance of the explanation the applicant gives to one that is assumed to be fake reveals an underlying contradiction between the idea of the refugee (always already from somewhere else, and granted asylum on the universal grounds of human rights or humanitarian principles) and the logic of territoriality upon which contemporary formal border management relies (the integrity of the bordered territory is paramount). What appears to happen regularly in practice is that the figure of the refugee is rendered exceptional again by other means: whatever the applicants say, whatever they demonstrate about the validity of their case, the vast majority must be counterfeits; people will only be admitted exceptionally.

Finally, I return to Derrida’s “Signature Event Context.” The asylum application procedure plays an important performative role: if successful, it transforms a citizen of another country, or a stateless person, into a refugee. The process through which this occurs follows the application of particular laws, bureaucratic procedures, and protocols and thus, in principle at least, satisfies the requirement of iterability: there are specific, repeatable, and citable procedures that must be followed in order to enact the transformation from the one status to the other. As Tuija Pulkkinen outlines, Derrida’s understanding of performativity relies on this element: “We are able to understand what an utterance means and what it performs, not because of the intention of the speaker, but because of a known cultural procedure, which is present in the given culture by virtue of its constant repetition. The meaning of an utterance and its performative force derive from the possibility of iterability” (2000, 187).

Here, there is an implication that neither the intentions of the applicant nor the intentions of the officials examining the case should be important in establishing whether it will be successful: it is the repeatability of the procedure, the standardization, that should, in principle, create the result that, most of the time, if applied correctly, will succeed. Yet in the case of refugees, I have described how the same procedure has resulted in dramatically different success rates at different historical moments. The iterability, which means the possibility of a fake copy must always be present, seems to be generating almost no fakes at one moment and endless fakes at another. I have argued that this historical instability is related to the way applications for asylum have to be exceptional to avoid challenging the logic of territory that gives people the right to apply for asylum in the first place. By focusing on the historically shifting logic of location and the law of territory rather than on the person (or body) of the undocumented traveler and whether he or she is welcome, what emerges is a spatial contradiction that is ultimately unresolvable: unlike other kinds of travelers, the refugee can only ever be an exception. No explanation will do unless that condition is met.

This provides a different argument from that of researchers such as Fassin and Ticktin, who have identified a significant shift in whether the utterances of the refugee are taken at face value, are accepted by the authorities as a signature of their own life rather than a counterfeit, and one that authentically involves a well-founded fear of persecution. For Fassin and Ticktin, the move away from human rights and toward humanitarianism has effectively been a cultural change: the perceived likelihood of the signature being authentic has radically dropped. Nowadays, instead of looking out for the fake in a sea of authentic signatures, there is an attempt to find the authentic signature in a sea of fake ones. My argument has been that this shift marks different historical moments during which the people tasked with protecting the logic of state territorial borders attempt to find the exception, and they shift their practices when applications becomes too numerous or too frequent, so as to maintain the exceptional status of the refugee.

That could make more sense of Cabot’s and Razakou’s rich ethnographic accounts, which tell of the messy, chaotic spontaneity involved in this process, showing repeatedly that things do not proceed according to the formal rules and regulations. The implication is that the paradox of the figure of the refugee, caught in between two contradictory locational principles (the principle of universal humanity and the principle of state territoriality), and thus always having to be exceptional, could never produce a stable explanation; it all depends on when and where someone claims that status.

NOTES

1. 1. The research for this text has been carried out with funding from European Research Council Advanced Grant 694482, Crosslocations. See https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/crosslocations.

2. 2. As will be discussed further, the actual numbers of refugees accepted by France changed significantly in different time periods, so the percentages hide a wider story.

3. 3. The source for refugee numbers is World Bank data: “Refugee Population by Country or Territory of Asylum,” World Bank, accessed February 13, 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sm.pop.refg.

4. 4. Source: Asylum Applications, 2012–2021, Refugee Data Finder, UNHCR, accessed February 13, 2023, https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/download/?url=vM7h6M. These statistics are calculated in different ways by different organizations. Eurostat shows a very different figure for asylum applications to France in 2012: 61,440. “Asylum Applicants by Type of Applicant, Citizenship, Age and Sex—Annual Aggregated Data,” Eurostat, accessed February 13, 2023, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/migr_asyappctza/default/table?lang=en.

5. 5. Source: “Population, Total—France,” World Bank, last accessed February 20, 2022, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=FR.

6. 6. Source: “Population, Total—European Union,” World Bank, last accessed February 13, 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=EU.

7. 7. Source: Asylum Applications, 1970–2021, Refugee Data Finder, UNHCR, accessed February 13, 2023, https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/download/?url=lQOoW9.

8. 8. See also discussion on this use in Candea 2012 and Fassin 2012, 135.

9. 9. Of course, as many ethnographic accounts have shown, such indifference is rare in practice; see, for example, Jordan and Duvell 2002.

10. 10. Source: Asylum Applications, 1970–2021, Refugee Data Finder, UNHCR.

11. 11. Calculated from UNHCR data: Asylum Decisions, 2016–2021, Refugee Data Finder, UNHCR, accessed February 13, 2023, https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/download/?url=Pvbv61.

12. 12. Calculated from UNHCR data: Asylum Decisions, 1970–2021, Refugee Data Finder, UNHCR, accessed February 13, 2023, https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/download/?url=InEht6.

13. 13. See also Ticktin 2006 for a discussion of the history of Médecins Sans Frontières.

14. 14. This means, of course, that it is very important to have control over the logic of the classification, as noted by both Herzfeld (2004) and Wilk (1995).

15. 15. Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos 2018 provides a wide range of perspectives on that moment in Greek history.

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