What’s in a Category? The Politics of Not Being a Refugee

Abstract

How are refugees perceived and governed in contemporary politics? What sort of sovereign responses has been advanced to govern and discipline the movement of people in a globalizing world? The article discusses how the ‘figure of the refugee’ (Scheel and Squire, 2014) or the ‘refugee label’ (Zetter, 1991, 2007) has changed once the Cold War ended and growing numbers of asylum seekers from the global South began searching for protection in the North. It attributes the restrictive character of contemporary asylum politics both to a perception of refugees as abject masses from the South and to sovereign states’ responses to a globalizing reality. In this context, I argue that access to asylum has been restricted both through the mobilization of new sovereign borders that seek to contain the mobility of asylum seekers perceived as villains, and through the creation of new categories or legal limits, in the form of temporary protection statuses to those perceived as passive victims. By focusing on the latter strategy, I briefly explore how Haitian asylum seekers have been labelled as ‘humanitarian immigrants’ in Brazil, highlighting the productivity of this legal limit.