Institutskolloquium: Barak Kalir (University of Amsterdam) - “From Apartheid to Departheid: on abandonment, indifference and deportation as the 21st- century modality for governing noncitizens”

Letzter Vortrag im Rahmen des Institutskolloquiums im WiSe 2017/2018:

Barak Kalir (University of Amsterdam): “From Apartheid to Departheid: on abandonment, indifference and deportation as the 21st- century modality for governing noncitizens”

Abstract: We nowadays live in societies – in the global north but increasingly everywhere – where states govern populations by drawing a stark distinction within their sovereign territory between legal citizens and illegalized noncitizens. Illegalized noncitizens are often apprehended on the street or at home, abruptly uprooted from their family and community. They are detained for weeks or months and then deported against their will, sometimes to life-threatening conditions in warzones such as Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Turkey. If not deported, illegalized noncitizens live in constant fear (of deportation) and in extreme marginality. They are basically abandoned by states and are left to die slowly in horrendous camps such as the Calais jungle, the Moria hotspot in Lesvos or mount Gurugu in Morocco. These severe sanctioning of illegalized noncitizens are applied above all to undocumented migrants or unauthorized asylum seekers whose only violation of the law is administrative in character: the failure to secure an orderly registration with the state authorities.
In this paper I seek to approximate an explanation not just for state authorities’ securitized dealings with the “problem” of illegalized noncitizens (criminalization, detention, deportation, abandonment), but also for the more endemic silent complicity of the majority of the citizenry. Why do so few people concern themselves with deportations of illegalized noncitizens? Why do most people remain indifferent at best? And can critical anthropology play a role in advancing a public and political debate around this emerging modality of departheid? In approximating some answers to these questions I will draw on my recent fieldwork on the topic of deportation regimes in Spain, Israel and the Netherlands.