Refugeeness as political subjectivity: Experiencing the humanitarian border

Abstract

Building on the idea of the humanitarian border, the paper seeks to theorise its fluctuating geographies as growing from particular governmental strategies, yet shaped by social elements operating beyond the migration regime. We approach the humanitarian border topologically as a relational space experienced by refugee-subjects and constituting of regulations, techniques, tactics and (counter)practices that have emerged, and keep evolving, when people seek asylum in different parts of the world. We suggest that one of the asylum seekers’ key assets in navigating the humanitarian border is agency based on subjective relatedness with the figure of the refugee. Hence, we direct our analytical attention to experiences of refugeeness that we have studied empirically in the context of forced migration in Finland and Jordan. The analysis identifies asylum seekers’ ambivalent emotions and agencies, foregrounding political subjectivities both in the context of immobile life in Amman, and on the move along the Western Balkans route. This reveals the dual politics of the humanitarian border, at once constitutive of and constituting in encounters between asylum seekers and its other actors. In conclusion, the paper makes two suggestions regarding the study of refugeeness as political subjectivity and the topological theorisation of the humanitarian border.