Project lead
Manuel Insberg
Abstract
Violence is inherently linked to refugee status and asylum as it is set out in international treaties such as the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention and the associated 1967 Protocol. Claims to asylum are not only based on explicit violent abuses such as torture, mutilations, or persecution in acts of war, but also on structural forms of harm that include social exclusion, economic deprivation, or state neglection. Acknowledging those claims and accepting people as refugees, oblige signatories of these international treaties to offer protection and safety for ‘forced nomads’ (Fassin 2018).
However, recent research has indicated that refugee arrival and settlement across Europe is often coupled with continuous experiences of violence. Often, but not exclusively, this violence takes more hidden and tacit forms such as waiting and uncertainty (Avramopoulou 2020; Bjertrup et al. 2018; Dempsey 2020; Jacobsen et al. 2020; Topak 2020; Weiss 2020), bureaucratic control (Abdelhady et al. 2020; Bhatia 2020), legal and socioeconomic precarity and temporariness (Kalbermatter 2020; Lindberg 2020; Mayblin et al. 2020; Wyss and Fischer 2021) deportation and deportability et al. 2020; Walters 2016) as well as inaction and indifference (Davies et al. 2017; Isakjee et al. 2020).
Taking these findings as a starting point for my doctoral thesis, I want to uncover the social and political conditions and historical legacies that enable different forms of violence to continuously affect the life of accepted refugees in a presumed safe haven. Based on the data from my fieldwork in Norway, my thesis focuses on the everyday experiences and practices of refugees residing in Oslo. While taking into account efforts to ‘de-migrantize’ (Dahinden 2016) research, I perceive ‘refugee’ as an analytical rather than a commonsense category and contextualize it within the frameworks of global, national and local migratory and welfare regimes. In doing so, I am interested in the particularity of ‘refugeeness’ (Malkki 1996) as a violent construct and its intersection with other social categories (such as ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability) in the Norwegian context. In an effort to go beyond representations of refugees as 'suffering subjects' (Robbins 2013), I also focus on peoples’ tactics to handle attributions of 'refugeeness' and to deal with violence connected to it.
Asked differently, my thesis addresses several questions: Why does violence continue to (re)appear in refugees lives after being granted protection? How do different forms of violence intersect? How does violence become inherent of the figure of the ‘refugee’? And where are possibilities to re-create an ordinary life after and while experiencing harm?
The questions developed partly from my involvement in the overarching SNF-Ambizione project “Violent Safe Havens? Exploring Articulations and Repercussions of Violence in Refugee Reception and Settlement” as well as a grounded theory approach (see e.g. Glaser and Strauss 2008), which I have followed during my three field stays in Norway. I spent approximately eleven months in the capital, Oslo, where I conducted qualitative ethnographic fieldwork comprising participant observation, informal conversation, and semi-structured interviews with adults, who acquired legal protection status. In addition, I included perspectives of other actors involved in refugee arrival and settlement in Oslo such as social workers, politicians, teachers, psychotherapists, volunteers, and political activists.
By answering the posed questions, my doctoral thesis aims to make a twofold contribution: empirical and theoretical. Since research in forced migration studies has mainly focused on articulations and repercussions of violence in the countries of origin or en route, I like to provide, first, empirical evidence of the multitude and linkages of different forms of violence that refugees are confronted with in a supposed safe country. Thus, my thesis shall also deliver a critical comment on the Norwegian integration politics and the research connected to it. Ultimately, I would like to make a theoretical contribution to the anthropology of violence by critically reflecting on the danger of giving an ontological status to violence in refugee research (see also Tyner and Inwood 2014). Without downplaying the violent circumstances in which refugees find themselves in and the importance of addressing those, I see the necessity in my data to further explore possibilities to ‘re-create normal live’ (Das et al. 2001) after violence and to find ways of dealing with continuous violence within the ‘ordinary’.
Discipline
Sozialanthropologie
Supervision
Prof. Dr. Sabine Strasser (Universität Bern)
Dr. Carolin Fischer (Universität Bern)
