In the summer of 2020, the conveners of the International Forum on Wellbeing and Subjectivity across the Global South invited us¹ to prepare a Panel to reflect critically on the notion of ‘well-being’, the set of aspirations for a ‘good life’ that it foregrounds, and the specific political and ideological models that it draws upon for the future of the Global South. We took up this call, and organised the Panel Borders and the Production of Ill-Being. A Global Conversation, from which the idea for this piece stems. In an effort to further diversify the conversation we had back in 2020, this text serves also as a call for an ongoing global conversation that will be published as a Special Debate Section in Anthropological Theory Commons on an open-ended basis for as long as there are people, anywhere, who are interested in building up a global anthropological theory ‘from and for everybody’ (Eckert, Glick Schiller and Reyna 2016) of the intersection between borders, ill/well-being and migration.

Our decision to focus on the production of zones of ill-being and the ways in which these zones inhibit individuals and communities from claiming their rights to well-being – rather than exploring the notion of the good life per se – was deliberate and political. In our opinion, a clear analytical separation between a focus on ill-being and well-being cannot be maintained, given their mutual conditionality. Research on ill-being always reveals glimmers of the good life, of resistance and of solidarity. Thus by focusing on ill-being, this call for a global conversation should not be seen as either denying or ignoring the significant struggles of people around the world to come together in solidarity in the face of growing far-right politics and worsening social, health and economic hardship (for a discussion of this, see ATC’s debate On Solidarity: Cohen 2019, Eckert 2019, Glick Schiller 2020, and Perl 2021). However as was set out in the Welcome Address from the conference, and as discussed below, when associated with the ‘Global South’, well-being is often connected with technocratic policies and asymmetrical relations of international agencies that cement differences between a more well-off ‘north’ and disadvantaged ‘south’ that tries to catch up. Wanting to sidestep such essentialising and hierarchical framing, we seek instead to examine the issue of border politics and practices, the multiple forms in which they traverse urban and national insides and outsides and, most importantly, their productive power in transforming subjective positions and potentialities across the globe. We invite scholars from different world regions to initiate a global conversation on the significance of borders and bordering for the production of the unequal redistribution of aspirations for a good life in ways that can challenge the universalising of discourse about well-being and can question binaries of the global north/south.

Well-being and ‘the good life’: Between universalism and relativism

References to well-being have become increasingly prevalent in various social fields from health care, consumer industries, sports, development policies, diversity management and social theory, and can be seen as part of a wider ‘moral turn’ observable in societies around the globe and across the social sciences. This moral turn implies that political discourse and mobilisation is often phrased in terms alluding to community, deservingness, humanitarian values, ethics or the good life rather than in the language of exploitation, class antagonisms or political oppression (Fassin, 2012: 26). Academic knowledge production has played an ambivalent role in this context. While some in the social sciences and humanities produce knowledge about how to operationalize ethical values (e.g. in terms of research ethics) and to measure their distribution in a population (e.g. in terms of well-being indexes), reflexive debates have also evolved about how to conceive and study the significance of morality in public discourse and within academic knowledge production. Philosophers and experts in ethics have become involved in the normative project of developing rational criteria for moral judgements, as in the case of the ethics of automatic driving or the ethics of migration control, while a number of anthropologists and social scientists have focused their attention on everyday moralities—what Andrew Sayer (2011) has called ‘lay normativities’. Here, the question is not how to operationalise moral concepts like well-being, but rather to inquire how different actors – within and outside the field of policy – refer to well-being or other values in order to make legitimate claims in a debate (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1999). In light of this, we argue that the notion of well-being has become what Charles Taylor (1989) called a ‘hypergood’, and that it is not only abstractly theorised in the lonely desk of the philosopher, but is being claimed as a right and aspiration by communities across the globe (Hidalgo-Capitan et al., 2020)².

Questions of ethics and morality are inevitably entangled in the old philosophical problem of particularism and universalism. This ‘problem’ is usually understood as referring to whether some core moral or ethical values can or should be treated as universal in terms of their validity and scope, or whether some values are particular to specific groups of people, a time frame and a cultural context. However there is a second layer in the particularism/universalism problem, less discussed in this framework and more strongly linked to political theory than to epistemology. Building on Hannah Arendt (1973), we ask whether values considered universal such as human rights apply only to that section of humanity that can be considered theoretically and practically eligible to claims-making by an authority, an institution or a group of actors with a political voice that is able to guarantee their implementation. If not all human beings can claim rights, is this then just a preliminary state, a nuisance or a scandal that can be overcome – for instance when the rule of law and democracy are established in every corner of the world? Or is exclusion and degradation of parts of humanity a systematic feature of the present world order (Agamben, 2005)? Given that well-being is not a human right in the narrow sense but can rather be considered a moral and ideational aspiration that is depicted as being inherent to the condition of individuals and/or the collective human existence (Rosa, 2009; Sayer, 2011), the application of Arendt’s thought requires further explanation.

For Arendt, the situation of millions of Jews, stateless persons and refugees in the first half of the 20th century shed light on ‘the right to have rights’, which turns human beings into recognizable political and legal subjects in a community of equals. To be granted the right to have rights is for Arendt the precondition of engaging in morally meaningful relationships to others or, as she formulates it, ‘to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions’ (Arendt, 1973: 296-297). In this sense, not having the right to have rights means being excluded from a political community in which individuals count as persons in a moral sense. For Arendt, this would make a difference regarding the evaluation of a person. In contrast, when stripped of their human rights, individuals become reduced to an ‘abstract nakedness’ (Arendt, 1973: 297) that enables others to treat them as the ‘scum of the earth’ (Arendt, 1973: 312). Critics – like Benhabib (2004) – have argued that, at least for an analysis of the contemporary political situation, Arendt gives too much weight to the question of national citizenship and the power of the nation-state to secure the right to have rights. Notwithstanding this, we argue that Arendt’s proposition retains considerable plausibility if one looks at those in refugee camps, airport transit zones, prisons and urban zones of advanced marginality, where their ill-being is considered less of a political problem and less an issue of moral concern because their civic – or even human –  value is deemed of lesser importance. 

In contrast to the perspective of cultural relativism, which asks whether there are culturally or politically alternative ideas of well-being that deserve to be recognized, Arendt’s political relativism shifts the focus of attention to much darker and unsettling omissions, gaps and unsignified spaces in the discourse of well-being. Such Arendtian displacements lead us to raise a set of questions that we would like to use to start a Global Conversation for Anthropological Theory Commons: is there an outside, either tolerated or even intentionally created, to the sphere where claims to well-being can be legitimately made? How do different types of national and urban borders produce zones of well-being and ill-being? What kind of inequalities do they produce, sustain, reinforce? How are these borders challenged or circumvented? How do border regimes intersect with and produce differently scaled and relational ‘souths’, ‘easts’ ‘norths’ and ‘wests’ across geographical regions? How are zones of ill-being and exclusion transformed into zones of political belonging? Are there spaces in which it is not the aspirations of collective well-being but the production of ill-being that shapes the political agenda? If there are: Where, when and how are these spaces produced, maintained and legitimised by whom? And what forms of collective action are involved in resisting, dismantling and transcending these? What role can solidarity play across and within such borders?

Ill-Being as the Aporia of Humanitarian Universalism

From the ‘right to have rights’ problem we move to Arendt’s Aporia of Humanitarian Universalism. The moral ‘order of worth’ (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1999) of human rights assumes that all human beings have the right to have human rights, but de facto these fundamental rights apply only to those who belong to a political community that is willing and capable to protect those rights. People lacking the status of citizenship therefore have no access to institutions that can be made accountable for granting and protecting their fundamental human rights. There is no right to have rights in this vacuum. Moreover, these institutions essentially produce an ‘outside’ where claims to rights don’t count politically. If – again, following Hannah Arendt – zones of ill-being are seen as spaces where the right of people to make legitimate claims to well-being is collectively ignored or denied, it is our contention that border regimes are the main device through which the ‘right to have rights’ is modulated.

We build here on work coming out of border studies, where activists, scholars and social movements have increasingly focused on processes of population control and management that dissipate beyond physical borderlines into a whole set of institutional settings (Balibar, 2002). The transformational regime of rights and statuses brought about by current borders and bordering practices have the power to designate certain people as ‘illegitimate’ or ‘unlawful’ thus producing legal and moral stratifications of individual worth and deservingness. This is where the need to re-think the functions of borders beyond conceptions of ‘negative power’ become most urgent – borders not only ‘filter’ or ‘regulate’ (Rumford, 2008: 3), they are also productive in the sense that they actively constitute classes and categories of people as, for instance, ‘illegal’ migrants, refugees, residents of ‘ghettoes’, recipients of social welfare, potentially dangerous subjects, etc (Kearney, 2004). At the same time, the production and implementation of border technologies have become a major industry that has advanced and expanded significantly over the last decades. These technologies that create and govern divisions of the geographical and social space – from lines, barbed-wire and barriers to smart cameras, drones, data-bases and finger-print scanners – have invaded and shaped social spaces. They aim at maintaining and surveying borders between inside and outside spaces, where different standards apply, affecting the treatment people receive, how much solidarity they are entitled to in emergency situations (see Stierl 2020), which rights they have access to, or how they are treated socially. Or, to put it in the terms of this Special Debate Section, these bordering mechanisms shape the amount of well-being people can legitimately claim and how much ill-being they can or should be expected to endure. Both functions of the border – the classification of persons and the division of spaces – are powerful interventions that produce and modulate the spatial, legal and political outsides of the polis from where the individuals that inhabit them have only very limited capacity for raising legitimate political, moral or legal claims. We suspect that ‘zones of ill-being’ might act as ‘spectacles of deterrence’ (Stojić Mitrović, 2020), inhibiting individuals and groups from entering or leaving a territory or claiming their fair share to the global promise of a ‘good life’.

Empirical research has shown blind spots, paradoxes and complexities in the different modulations of ‘the right to have rights’. Under these circumstances human suffering can become part of the governmentality of social welfare, inequality and/or mobility (Nieswand, 2018). In this context, we invite anthropologists and other social scientists globally to pay attention to both urban and national border regimes as infrastructures of spatialising inequality, marginalisation and exclusion and their different contestations in different global contexts.

The relationship between urban and national borders has been discussed by scholars in different ways. In Border Studies, there is an increasing contestation of the fixity of national borders, especially in the context of the ‘new’ European border regime and migration management. Rather than conceptualising bordering as a fixed and clearly spatialised process of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, its downscaling and extension to the urban scale has been examined within frameworks of fluidity, mobility and contextuality (Hess, 2018: 92). This means that borders are not (and never were) ‘lines in the sand’ (Parker and Vaughan-Williams, 2009; quoted in Hess, 2018: 92) but cut across urban, national and international limits. Without assuming that national and urban borders can be converged analytically from the outset, and while being reluctant about sustaining the binary dichotomies within which they are often conceptualised, we take this discussion as an intellectual starting point that can stimulate debate, allowing us to explore the delineation of, and struggles against, the production of ‘zones of ill-being’ within various fields and the common logics and mechanisms of categorisation and exclusion that they involve. We are interested in paying particular attention to both the similarities and differences that emerge across different social spaces and scales, on the grounds that this could provide deeper analytical insights into the production of zones of ill-being by border technologies across the globe.

Beyond the ‘hemispheric’ frame: thinking through Global ‘Souths’ and Global ‘Easts’

Finally, in view of the framing of the conference, we wish to explore how the mobilisation of the socio-spatial category of the Global South may be fruitful for these reflections. Like the now-dated notion of the ‘Third World’, the Global South is a notion inflected with a contradictory set of meanings which don’t have ‘much to do with the equator’ (Mignolo, 2011: 183). While the exact origin of this neologism is unclear, it is often dated to the ‘Brandt Report’, authored by a commission set up by the former German Chancellor Willy Brandt with the aim ‘to illustrate international inequalities and the socioeconomic gulf that separates regions of the world’ (Lees, 2021: 85). Since then, the term has been appropriated by different actors with diverse agendas, including by those — researchers as well as organisations such as the World Bank — who use it as the latest way to classify, position and ‘other’ what once were categorized as ‘under-developed’ parts of the world (Eriksen, 2015; Schwarz, 2015).

In parallel the term has been appropriated and mobilised by decolonising scholars to counter hegemonic Euro-American thinking to confront an orientalising gaze that objectifies non-Western ‘others’.  In this sense, the Global South has often been deployed to designate non-Western countries that despite manifesting a vast array of political, economic and socio-cultural diversities share historically-embedded racialised relations of colonisation (Berger, 2020). This conceptual framework has been defended as a strategic essentialism’ (Roy, 2009) which creates social spaces for alternative narratives of social theory; a place from where to change the content and the terms of debate, while speaking against on-going marginalisation both within the international state system and within hierarchies of knowledge production. It has also been critiqued for, on the one hand, responding to a false universalism with forms of southern particularisms which tend to iron out the diversity of hierarchical relations across multiple global norths and souths (Burawoy, 2011) and, on the other, contributing to an elision of the ‘Global East’ from scholarly enquiry (Müller, 2020).

However deployed, the ‘north’/’south’ dichotomy has political and epistemic implications when studying the production of borders and ill-being within a global framework. Research in social-spaces that tends to be considered in or part of the ‘Global North’ continues to be broadly associated with a part of the world where there are stable states and a formalised economy (Eriksen, 2015). Research in and of this part of the world assumes that systems are rule-based and greater weight tends to be given to the study of national borders framed in terms of immigration control and access to the welfare state (Lee, 2013). Conversely, as the ‘Global South’ tends to be associated with failed, weak, or flawed states, scholarship in and of the ‘Global South’ predominantly focuses on borders between state and non-state institutions and informal relations in urban social spaces.

Rather than taking the Global South and the Global North as categorical givens that can be mapped geographically, our ambition in this Special Debate Section is to open up a space of critical dialogue where ideas of various norths, souths, easts and wests can be considered as relationally-produced ‘macro-categories’ (Berger, 2020) and ‘epistemic spaces’ (Müller, 2020) which can offer insights into unequal relations in the global world order. By placing these spatialised perspectives within the same frame, we seek to shed light on hierarchically-entangled structural relations while challenging Eurocentric binary thinking about the productions of borders and ill-being – and the production of knowledge – across cities and states around the world. Our invitation, thus, aims at building a global symbolic geography that looks at the relational making and unmaking of peripherality as experiences of social and spatial subjugation and exclusion from the spheres of deservingness and well-being beyond hegemonic North-South or East-West divisions.

Endnotes

1. The authors of this blog and invitation for a global conversation are the members of the Chair in ‘Migration and Diversity’ at the Institute of Sociology, University of Tuebingen (Germany). [↩]
2. While middle classness and good life have been theorised as interchangeable, especially by anthropologists of class identities and aspirations in the Global North (Hoey, 2005) and Post-Socialist countries (Crăciun and Lipan, 2020), we refer here rather to alternative articulations and claims to the ‘good life’ made by grassroots and indigenous communities, especially in the Global South. [↩]

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