Panel III – Discourses on Migration and Citizenship in a Globalized World

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"Normative (B)Orders. Migration and Citizenship in a Time of Crisis" - 9th International Annual Conference

Friday, November 25th 2016, 1 pm - 3 pm

Focusing on migration and citizenship from a historical and cultural anthropological perspective, the panel presents the empirical foundations of various discourses. Some of these are completely marginal, revealing refusal to even take notice of the issues under discussion. Others are omnipresent and rife with images of threat. While the case studies analyzed refer to local or national particularities, they are, at the same time, well suited for sharpening the eye for problems that are to some extent universal. When, and under what conditions, do migrants become projections of a negatively charged “Other”? When does the plight of refugees arouse compassion, empathy, and solidarity, and when does it fail to engender such emotions? In addition, the contributions with their focus on non-European case studies show that it may be necessary to critically reassess concepts used very matter-of-factly in academic and political discourses, as they perpetuate postcolonial asymmetries of power. Hence, even positively charged terms such as “citizenship” may not have a positive connotation in all contexts.

Chair: Prof. Dr. Susanne Schröter (Professor for the Anthropology of Colonial and Postcolonial Orders at the Goethe University Frankfurt and Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”)

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Susanne Schröter holds a PhD in social anthropology. She is Professor for the Anthropology of Colonial and Postcolonial Orders at the Goethe University Frankfurt and Adjunct Professor at the Universitas Indonesia in Jakarta. In 2014 she founded the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam (FFGI) and operates as the director of the think tank. She is also director of the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”, director at the Cornelia Goethe Center for Gender Studies, and a member of the board of the German Orient Institute. Her research focuses on political Islam, Islamic extremism, multiple modernities, feminist Islam, transformation of gender orders, multiculturalism, secularism and post-secularism. Her recent publications include Gott näher sein als seiner eigenen Halsschlagader. Fromme Muslime in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Campus 2016); Debating salafism, traditionalism and liberalism. Muslims and the state in Germany. (in: Ennaji, Moha, [ed.], New horizons of Muslim diaspora. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan 2016); Dschihadistische Rechtfertigungsnarrative und mögliche Gegennarrative. [with Christoph Günther, Mariella Ourghi and Nina Wiedl] (in: HSFK-Report 4/2016); The young wild ones of the ummah. Heroic gender constructs in jihadism (in: Friedensgutachten. Berlin: Lit 2015).

Lecture 1
Prof. Dr. Leo Lucassen (Research Director of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam and part time professor of Global Labour and Migration History at the Institute of History of Leiden University)

Migration and the Formation of Normative Orders in Western Europe: from the Rushdie Affair to the ‘Refugee Crisis’

Abstract
In this talk I will analyze and compare two different, but intertwined, turns in the political discourse on migration in Western Europe since the 1950s. First I will focus on the settlement process of guest workers and colonial migrants from the 1950s onwards and secondly I will deal with the refugees who came to Western Europe in large numbers in the 1990s and 2010s. I will argue that the discomfort with immigration and integration with regard to the earlier groups changed significantly (and suddenly) after the Rushdie affair (1988/89), whereas the ensuing growing islamophobia – reinforced by international Islamist terrorism since 2001 – created a new (and largely negative) normative order with respect to refugees in our current world.

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Leo Lucassen (1959) is Research Director of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam and part time professor of Global Labour and Migration History at the Institute of History of Leiden University. Furthermore since 2016 he is (honorary) adjunct professor at the University of Aalborg in Denmark. He received his PhD (1990) cum Laude at Leiden University. He is a former fellow of the New School for Social Research in New York and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and since 2011 a member of the Academia Europaea. He specializes in migration history, urban history, state formation, eugenics and other socio-political developments in modern states. His publication list (1987-2016) counts over 240 scholarly publications, among which 11 monographs and 16 edited volumes. Recent publications include Globalising Migration History. The Eurasian experience (16th-21st centuries). (Brill, Leiden and Boston 2014). Edited with Jan Lucassen; Gewinner und Verlierer. Fünf Jahrhunderte Immigration. Eine nüchterne Bilanz (Münster and New York, Waxmann 2014), co-authored with Jan Lucassen; Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective (Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers 2013). Edited with Ulbe Bosma and Gijs Kessler; The Encyclopedia of European migration and minorities (Cambridge University Press, New York 2011). Edited with Klaus Bade, Pieter Emmer and Jochen Oltmer.

Lecture 2
Prof. Dr. Mamadou Diawara (Professor for Anthropology at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, Founding Director of Point Sud, Bamako and Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”)

“Lose your Passport!“ Migration and Citizenship in a so-called Globalized World

Abstract
Migration is intimately inscribed in the past of the people of the Western Sahel. Oral traditions relate such events of movement, mythical or real, as far back as the 4th century AD, and it continued in force into the colonial period and the present day. This phenomenon has yielded a large body of scholarship, with particularly brilliant analysis in the context of intensified mobility. The concept of migration is dear to scholars, yet it is not without its critics: Whose mobility are we considering, against the backdrop of whose immobility? The topic of mobility has been discussed in the context of so-called globalization. But again we may ask ourselves who is becoming globalized? In the same way, we should question the concept of citizenship. These discourses and their corollaries are products of the state. Rather than “seeing like the state” (Scott 1998), this paper explores how the affected individuals take part in migration, citizenship and globalization. How are these “products of modernity” (Macamo and Neubert 2004) experienced and put to use by actors on the ground?

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Mamadou Diawara is Professor for Anthropology at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, Founding Director of Point Sud, Bamako. He is Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” and deputy director of the Frobenius Institut; member of the Council of the International African Institute, London. He was fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, John G. Diefenbaker fellow at the Université Laval, Canada, fellow at the Institut d’Études Avancées de Nantes and Henry Hart Rice Professor for Anthropology andHistory at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University. He is author of several books and articles, among them L’empire du verbe - L’éloquence du silence, Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag; co-author of Staging the Immaterial: Intellectual Property, Piracy and Performance in sub-Saharan Africa. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing. His main research topics are popular culture, local knowledge and development anthropology, local media in Africa facing Western Media.

Lecture 3
Dr. Dominik M. Müller (Director of the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Department of Law and Anthropology, Halle)

Economies of Attention and Selective Empathy in Times of Multiple Refugee Crises: The Case of Rohingya in Southeast Asia

Abstract
Under the present conditions of dynamics of social acceleration and ever-increasingly complex transnational entanglements, it appears to be more and more impossible to develop a well-founded overview of the countless conflicts and humanitarian crises that our “world society” is facing. While the amount of relevant information and its availability is constantly expanding, the capacities of attention remain limited. One illustrative example for this problem is the current refugee crisis in Southeast Asia, and its discursive irrelevance in Europe. My contribution does not intend to dramatize this supposed or factual injustice. Instead, referring to the example of Rohingya refugees who fl ed from Myanmar, I will present some considerations about selective empathy, dislike, and the (non-)perception of particular refugee groups. Finally I will argue that although selective attention in contexts of multiple refugee crises and groups is unavoidable, a reflection of the genesis of specific normalizations will enable a deeper understanding of one’s own preferences and limitations. The example of how Rohingya refugees are dealt with in Southeast Asia and its embeddedness in locally specific political and religious discursive contexts is thereby not a far distant, exotic or singular case study, but has implications that can insightfully be applied to the current situation in Germany.

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Dominik M. Müller is Director of the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Department of Law and Anthropology, in Halle. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” in Frankfurt am Main. He studied Anthropology, Philosophy and Law in Frankfurt and Leiden (2003-2008) and pursued his PhD with a scholarship from the Cluster of Excellence in Frankfurt (2008-2012). His dissertation on the rise of “pop-Islamism” in Malaysia received the Frobenius Society’s Research Prize 2012 and was published by Routledge in 2014 (Islam Politics and Youth in Malaysia: The Pop-Islamist Reinvention of PAS). He held fellowships and visiting positions at Stanford University (2013), Universiti Brunei Darussalam (2014), the University of Oxford (2014), and the National University of Singapore (2016). In 2016 he has been appointed as a member of the Young Academy at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. He has published in peerreviewed journals such as Asian Survey, Globalizations, Indonesia and the Malay Word, Internationales Asienforum: International Quarterly for Asian Studies, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, and South East Asia Research.