What brought me to write the article was an attempt to respond to a very concrete question I faced: how to talk about the border regime with people who wish to move to Europe but who don't have any other option than to take illegalized routes, because of draconian EU visa restrictions? This question confronted me when I first moved from one node of the border regime, Europe, to another one, The Gambia, to research the impact of EU asylum and migration policies. I traveled to the Gambia with Mamadou, a research collaborator and former asylum seeker whom I met years before when I was working in the asylum system and who was going home for the first time after 4 years in Italy. It is a question that, therefore, stemmed from my positionality and from its affective, ethical, epistemic and political stakes.
As I met people in Banjul, friends, relatives, and acquaintances of Gambian friends who I knew from Europe, they asked me about asylum procedures, reception centers, and networks of support for migrants, often adding that they wanted to undertake the journey. In these interactions, I was caught in a terrifying uncertainty, realizing I did not know how to modulate my answers. I felt a friction between wanting to uphold the right to move of people who are de facto immobilized and the fear of accidentally contributing to their encounter with the necropolitical forces of the border regime. In other words, I was trapped between the reluctance to perform borderwork, "sensitizing" people only about the dangers of the trip, and the concern of "encouraging" people to go and endure border violence, talking about the network of support and solidarity in which I participated. Mamadou, who secured a job as a cultural mediator in an asylum center and an Italian resident permit, found himself in a similar conundrum, incarnating the example of the "successful migrant" to emulate despite his modesty and circumspection.
I started to perceive this condition as being trapped in an impossible positionality, which in the article I define as "ethical entrapment," and think about what it said on the border regime itself and its way of acting through the people who move/not move in it. I used this question, which appealed directly to my presence and responsibility in the field and beyond, and which restituted the "structural" dimension in which I was caught, to try to understand the scattered, fragmented, and counterintuitive assemblage of powers which constitutes the border regime.
In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions your article engages and what is the article's contribution to those debates?
My article engages with two related debates: the one concerning the various conceptual and analytical tools developed by scholars to define the hierarchized organization of people's movement, and the one which concerns the ethical and epistemic stakes of practicing ethnography and producing knowledge about such hierarchy while occupying a privileged position in it. It does so by observing the social connections born out of border encounters in which I was enmeshed and which structured my fieldwork, treating them as lenses to understand and theorize the border regime itself. In the article, I treat the ethical entrapments me and Mamadou faced as moments of "epistemic disclosure", illuminating how the border regime constantly involves, co-opts, and captures subjects differently positioned in it, acting on and through them, sometimes beyond their willful and conscious agency.
I argue that these ethical entrapments emerged because we related with not-yet-illegalized Gambians from our position of mobility privilege and formal asylum workers. Such a position exposed the arbitrary spatiotemporal structure of the border regime (for which you can be categorized as illegal migrant/humanitarian victim/refugee according to where you stand in relation to it); its securitarian-humanitarian nexus (the fact that humanitarian care is provided only if you survive border violence and rejection); and the broader global inequalities on which it relies and reproduces.
I chose to think about these moments, therefore, as signaling an "otherwise", where being entangled and affected by the social connections of the border regime means also being caught in its violent and counterintuitive logic. However, if, on the one hand, these moments unveil the "principle of dissimilarity", as Mbembe defined it, that the border regime institutes between subjects, on the other, they prove how borders bring people together, and how such relations could radically unsettle that dissimilarity, as the transnational network for freedom of movement clearly demonstrates.
A different otherwise also materializes in our interlocutors' adamant willingness to take the journey despite knowing the dangers, as they relied on radically different epistemic frameworks than those envisioned by borderwork. Even if Mamadou and I did not just warn them about the dangers of the illegalized journey and instead unveiled the role of Europe in producing harmful conditions for people on the move, these arguments didn't seem to be of much interest to young men and women who couldn't wait to embark on a journey that they believed would restitute their dignity in the eyes of their families and communities, even if they were going to perish. These "otherwises" then do not resolve the violence and inequalities in which people are caught, as we dramatically witnessed when 60 young Gambians perished in a shipwreck between Mauritania and the Canary Islands, but point to the fact that the border regime could try to control people's movement but cannot control how they make sense of the world.
How do you make anthropological theory? Is there a way that theory making in anthropology diverges from theory making in other disciplines? What are some of the challenges one faces in making anthropological theory?
For me theory in anthropology is connected but not determined by the so-called "fieldwork". I think the main challenge is to carve out the space to theorize on people's experiences and daily life, a move which has heavy epistemological and political stakes, especially if the intention is to overcome eurocentric frameworks and the forms of knowledge production that have been historically recognized as legitimate in the disciplinary field. In this regard, I always felt a certain discomfort in applying theories, even the most critical ones, to the richness, intimacy and complexity of people's lives and relations while conducting fieldwork. This is what brought me to embrace theory more openly as an attempt to make the lenses I use visible and include them explicitly in my arguments. As I try to explain in the article, what was revealing to me in these moments of ethical entrapment is that they disclosed the feedback loop between a theoretical object (the border regime, which doesn't exist as an entity but only in its partial/local/epiphenomenal expressions) and the very relationalities it engenders between people, in which I was immersed and which constituted both the fieldwork and its condition of possibility.
I believe these conditions of possibility need to be theorized, especially in an anthropology of the border regime, to understand the "fractality", as Denise Ferreira da Silva defines it, of the contemporary forms of power in which histories of enslavement, colonialism and domination re-assemble themselves in a past that doesn't pass but re-invent itself trough (dis)continuities. Simultaneously, anthropological theory could help us think more analytically about the indeterminacy of the relational worlds we build, the political dimension of affect, and the unpredictable and surprising ways in which even the most structural connections play out and reverberate intersubjectively.
Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?
I think theory matters because it is already embedded in the way in which we construct research questions and process our encounters on the field. In this, I believe in the sort of "back and forth" between the object of observation and the object of study that Trouillot formulated. Exercising this shifting focus makes us aware of the way in which we construct both and gives theory a more transparent and explicit role when doing critical analysis.
I also think we need to be brave enough to advance theoretical discussions, conscious that "theory" is as relational and positioned as our presence when doing ethnography. Theory can help us make sense of what we live before, during and after fieldwork and how it relates to multi-scalar conjunctures, as Julia Eckert affirms. It allows to build conceptual tools and visions capable of restituting at least a fraction of the complex entanglements of power in which we all take part, willingly or unwillingly. In other words, I believe theory is a way to creatively use our capacity for abstraction and imagination to reflect on what we are confronted with while moving and doing and relating in our shared world and to make the connections between them emerge.
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