Robel Afeworki Abay (Professor, ASH Berlin), Petra Daňková (Assistant Professor, Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt), Tanja Kleibl (Professor, Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt) and Nikos Xypolytas (Assistant Professor, University of the Aegean)
This paper gives a summary of various geopolitical issues of colonial continuities in the context of migration and mobility.[1] The increasingly authoritarian character of EU border management raises a number of issues related to the role of social work within a context that is heavily charged, both ideologically and politically. Based on critical analysis of theoretical and historical contexts of externalization processes and (neo)colonial genealogies of the current migration regimes, this summary highlights the complex inter-relations of social workers with key actors, namely mobile people, policy makers or funders. Particular attention is paid to the socio-economic and political impacts of the global Covid-19 pandemic on social work with variously categorized people moving across borders or immobilized in camps. Finally, the text explores how social workers and refugees resist violent migration controls and increasing criminalization of cross-border movements.
Introduction
The discussion on social work research and practice paying attention to historical genealogies in connection to the colonial order of power and the complex, multiscalar interrelations between social workers, mobile people, funders and policy makers. Three chapters of our co-edited book focus on social work and mobilities in/from West and Northern Africa towards the EU.[2] These geographic regions have for years been the focus of EU policy makers and became emblematic of the entrenched media and populist discourses about ‘African’ migration to the EU. Despite statistics clearly showing that most transnational mobility on the African continent happens within the continent, that only a small percentage of migrants head outside of the continent and that of these only some choose Europe as their destination[3], the politically-influential perception persists of an imagined mass movements of Africans toward Europe.
Some of the contributions to our co-edited collection reflect on the exhaustive policy attention and funding result in significant developments also in social work (as a professional discipline and broadly understood) with mobile people in this region[4]. For example, the EU Trust Fund for Africa dedicated close to 5 billion Euro to projects in the Sahel and in the North of Africa regions since 2015[5] with the aim to “address migration and forced displacement challenges”.[6] As the contributions of our book highlight, funding and internationally driven agenda-setting for social work are significant elements in how social workers engage with mobile people.[7]
One can critically ask the question how social work becomes entangled in categorization of people to make them “legible” and “visible” to EU migration regimes and how social work itself is categorized in order to be disciplined as a “helping” profession and an instrument of the state/EU migration regimes. The precarious position of social work as a ‘new’ or ‘marginal’ profession in some countries, as well as the precarious project-based employment of social workers within governmental and non-governmental programs, further questions the possibilities – or even the perceived necessity – to insist on the rights-based and anti-discriminatory principles of the profession according to its international definition.[8] These developments have been discussed in current international volumes that build on various perspectives of social work’s scholars who have highlighted the geopolitical context of transnational mobility and the relevance of postcolonial reflection on the various ways in which social work entangles with neo-colonial structures of power and domination.[9]
There is however still a gap both in migration research and in transnational social work in relation to the postcolonial analysis of the social fissures that the externalization processes of the EU borders management have created in local understandings of the lived experiences of ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’ both in the Global North and South. Attention has to be given to the problematization of mobility and the complex categorization dilemmas within a critical analysis of this specific multiscalar intersection of social work and mobility[10]. One of these dilemmas are the implementation and contestation of the so-called Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) projects. In many cases the AVRR projects set up as part of EU migration regimes schemes are carried out, reinterpreted and subverted in a multitude of ways reflecting the complex power relations and differing interests. It these processes, the various actors fragment the universalist logic of migration control as ‘harm reduction’ that is propagated by international organizations such as the International Organisation for Migration.[11]
These geopolitical structures also highlight the critical engagement needed in examining the historical dimensions and contemporary structures of migration and mobility and the relevance of critical reflection of the various challenges of promoting human rights as the base of the professional action in this field. Analyzing processes of externalization from a position of critical social workers engaged from ‘within’ an EU state at the Southern border of the European Union can be helpful in understanding the social suffering that is generated by the EU migration regimes for migrants and refugees in the Western Mediterranean region and along the West African routes, showing how social workers struggle to address these situations yet often become part of the regime containing mobile people in inhumane conditions rather than assisting them in realizing their human rights.
Externalization of EU Migration Regimes
The dramatic pictures of violence on the Polish – Belorussian border, preventable shipwrecks off the coast of Italy and Greece or the killing of people attempting to cross the border into the Spanish exclave of Melilla are just the latest manifestation of the dehumanisation, securitisation and externalization of the EU migration regimes policies. A trend that can be traced to early 2000s has achieved a new level in recent years after a brief opening of EU borders around 2015. The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified these dynamics in important ways and deepened inequalities of transnational mobility.[12] The flight of people from Ukraine into the EU after the Russian invasion has highlighted the differential treatment of refugees based on intersecting hierarchies of racialization, gender and citizenship.[13]
From March 2016, when the EU-Turkey deal was reached, the world has witnessed blatant abuse of human rights at the borders of Europe. Faced with the growing population mobility brought forward by Global North’s pursuit of imperialist interests and the associated fierce inequalities, the European Union opted for a deterrent migration policy which has gone through two main stages. The first stage would be temporally situated in the period from 2016 to 2020, when the main form of deterrence was the establishment of refugee camps. Overcrowded spaces of confinement such as the Moria camp in Lesvos were established. Here, people would have to wait for many months in shocking and dehumanizing living conditions until their asylum claim was processed and, often, rejected. These camps were to become a beacon of meaning designed to project across the world its sinister message designed to prevent people from making a journey: ‘If you want to come to Europe, this is what you have to go through.’
However, the second stage of deterrence from 2020 until now turned out to be even more appalling and features the use of systematic violent pushbacks on the southern and eastern borders of the EU. International human rights organizations and even EU bodies have produced reports documenting the almost daily exercise of violent pushbacks that end up with refugees being abducted, beaten, raped or killed by paramilitary forces working alongside the military, the coastguard or the police. This extremely violent approach to deterrence has led to shocking incidents such as the murder of 37 sub-Saharan refugees on the Spanish Moroccan border on the 24th of June of 2022 by armed forces that opened fire killing indiscriminately, or the more recent actions of the Hellenic Coast Guard leading to a shipwreck in southwest Greece that claimed more than 500 migrant lives. In this horrific second stage of deterrence, the message is far more direct: ‘Do not dare to enter Europe!’
In addition to physical violence by state and non-state actors along the EU external border, EU migration management employs strategies that condone prolonged exposure of mobile people to death and to a host of human rights violations.[14] At the same time, civil society members, media representatives and those who attempt to assist mobile people are also increasingly criminalized, exposed to right-extremist violence and targeted by excessive legal, financial and bureaucratic burdens that make their work difficult, if not impossible.[15]
Externalization as a central characteristic of the EU border management refers to the mechanisms of moving the border forward beyond the geographic/political borders of the EU.[16] Outside of the EU, externalization policies construct EU border controls in so-called countries of origin and transit. In this process, EU migration regimes is fused with foreign policy, international development and international trade mechanisms. These incursions disrupt socioeconomic dynamics and local mobility patterns as far as Iran-Turkey borderlands, West African ECOWAS region or the border between Ethiopia and Sudan.[17] The developments of the internal and external EU migration regimes are inseparable and materialize legacies of colonialism, enduring gender inequalities, politics of citizenship and racialized economies.[18]
At the same time, it is relevant to balance the attention to the impactful dynamics of externalization with the growing recognition that the “externalization” framing carries the danger of focusing on Eurocentric formulations with too little attention to how local actors in the so-called countries of origin and transit understand and co-create the situation. Scholars show that externalization must also be understood in the context of larger (post)colonial genealogies, local socio-political processes and with attention to actors, practices and processes that transcend the narrow focus on migration control by EU policy makers and its study by western scholars.[19] It is therefore imperative to critically analyze how social work and EU migration regimes co-constitute each other.
Theoretical Engagements and Historical Contexts
The conceptual, historical and theoretical discussions of social work engagements with migration and mobility is embedded in a geopolitical relation of domination and solidarity. The broadest definition of ‘social work’ as a human rights profession and an academic discipline but also as an indigenous way of social assistance and social change have already been discussed critically[20] and encompass a broad range of practices recognizable as “reflexive social support”[21] in the various local contexts. We make explicit the historical developments that co-formed current expressions of social work as it understands itself, approaches its ‘beneficiaries’, or relates to national states and supra-national bodies. By paying attention to the temporal and spatial aspects of social work with mobile people, we explicitly refuse the apolitical, decontextualized view of social work as neutral “helping.” Instead, we plea for critical reflection on the entanglements of social work in complex, intersecting power dynamics. Moreover, we ask how social work could be transformed to work in a transnational scale, truly living up to the ambition to employ a ‘glocal’ approach. To do this, social work has to become critically reflexive and examine normative ideas about ‘migration’, ‘integration’ or ‘culture’ that permeate the practices and discourses in contact with refugees, migrants or other categories of mobile people.
Many scholars have already examined the role of social work professionals and institutions of social work education in context of displacement and forced migration. The contributors of our co-edited book critically examined to what extend social work might actually support exclusion and non-participation of migrants and refugees rather than the stated goals of integration or empowerment. Convincingly, they argue that discrimination-critical social work that pays attention to structural entanglements of the discipline needs to become a component of a critical-reflexive professionalization rather than a ‘special competence’ that social workers scramble to acquire when they start working with mobile people. The text concludes with series of guiding questions that can serve to examine social- and educational work in a discrimination-, racism- and diversity-sensitive manner.
The so-called de-politicization of refugees as part of a western ideological tradition that sees collective action as a distinctively modern social expression plays also a role in understand the processes of externalization the EU borders.[22] Following this rationale, refugees would be a somewhat premodern social group that is still grappling with the satisfaction of its basic needs and has yet to reach the stage of making informed political demands in a collective manner. This evolutionary – if not neocolonial – scheme is combined with the objective subjugation methods of refugee management that aim at the individualization of people on the move to paint a picture of total domination. Yet this bleak picture would ignore the various hidden and overt acts of resistance which inform the everyday refugee experience as well as the potential that lies within these processes of defiance. In this regards, social work research and practice is positioned between the problematization of social and global issues as well as entanglements with EU migration regimes in a number of contexts in the transnational field between West and North Africa and the EU.
Resistance and collective action
One section of our co-edited book particularly reflects the various engagements of resistance and collective action of social work practitioners and civil society entities in dealing with the restrictive and discriminatory structures of EU migration regimes.[23] Externalization and the extreme deterrence migration policy of the EU have been contributing developments to recent refugee condition varying forms of defiance and resistance are taking place undermining simultaneously two dominant – yet at the same time, problematic – narratives. On the one hand, the supposedly unchallenged power of the European political and economic elites and on the other, the alleged pacification of both refugees and solidarity networks. Many scholars have already suggested theoretically and empirically that resistance is one of the most prominent social forces.[24] Refugees, social workers and solidarity groups – sometimes alone, sometimes in combined forces – are daily defying an unjust and dehumanizing migration policy. They are doing so consciously and with different degrees of openness depending on the levels of state repression. They are also effective, in the sense that they force their opponent – namely, the EU and its members states – to continuously adjust their strategy to account for that resistance. Both critical and normative analyses might suffer from a myopia when it comes to this particular field[25], however it is also important to emphasize the following: Resistance to migration policy is present; the resistant groups and their interrelations vary; the political consciousness of these groups is present and continuously building; any analysis of the recent developments in migration is incomplete if resistance is not taken into account. However, further empirical research is needed to analyze the claim of centrality of resistance and the challenges created within this social space such as the criminalization of solidarity with refugees in Europe.
Footnotes
[1] As discussed in our co-edited international volume with specific focus on the consequences of EU border externalization policies; Daňková, Petra, Afeworki Abay, Robel, Xypolytas, Nikos, and Kleibl, Tanja (eds) (2024). Transnational Mobility and Externalization of EU Borders: Social Work, Migration Management, and Resistance. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[2] Daňková, P., Afeworki Abay, R., Xypolytas, N., & Kleibl, T. (eds.) (2024). Transnational Mobility and Externalization of EU Borders: Social Work, Migration Management, and Resistance. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[3] Abuya, E. O., Krause, U., & Mayblin, L. (2021). “The neglected colonial legacy of the 1951 refugee convention.” International Migration, 59(4): 265-267.
[4] Daňková, P., Afeworki Abay, R., Xypolytas, N., & Kleibl, T. (eds.) (2024). Transnational Mobility and Externalization of EU Borders: Social Work, Migration Management, and Resistance. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[5] European Commission, Directorate General for International Partnerships (2022). EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa: 2022 Annual Report. LU: Publications Office. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2841/9748.
[6] ibid. 6.
[7] Daňková, P., Afeworki Abay, R., Xypolytas, N., & Kleibl, T. (eds.) (2024). Transnational Mobility and Externalization of EU Borders: Social Work, Migration Management, and Resistance. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[8] Global definition of the Social Work profession: Social work is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people. Principles of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversities are central to social work. Underpinned by theories of social work, social sciences, humanities and indigenous knowledges, social work engages people and structures to address life challenges and enhance wellbeing. The above definition may be amplified at national and/or regional levels (IFSW 2014). IFSW (2014). Global Definition of the Social Work Profession. https://www.ifsw.org/what-is-social-work/global-definition-of-social-work/ Accessed September 2024.
[9] Daňková, P., Afeworki Abay, R., Xypolytas, N., & Kleibl, T. (eds.) (2024). Transnational Mobility and Externalization of EU Borders: Social Work, Migration Management, and Resistance. Lanham: Lexington Books; Afeworki Abay, R., Ihring, I., & Garba, F. M. (eds.) (2024, forthcoming). The Coloniality of Human Hierarchy: Disrupting Racialized Capitalism and Fostering Transnational Solidarity. Lanham: Lexington Books; Kleibl, T., Afeworki Abay, R., Klages, A.-L., & Rodríguez Lugo, S. (eds.) (2024). Decolonizing Social Work. From Theory to Transformative Practice. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
[10] Daňková, P. (2024). Working Categories: Categorization Dilemmas at the Intersection of Social Work and Mobility in Nigeria. In Transnational Mobility and Externalization of EU Borders: Social Work, Migration Management, and Resistance. Edited by Daňková, P., Afeworki Abay, R., Xypolytas, N., & Kleibl, T. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[11] Castellano, V. (2024) Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration in The Gambia: Aid Workers and Returnees as Implementers and Contesters of Humanitarian Borderwork. In Transnational Mobility and Externalization of EU Borders: Social Work, Migration Management, and Resistance. Edited by Daňková, P., Afeworki Abay, R., Xypolytas, N., & Kleibl, T. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[12] Lee, C. J. (2020). “The Necropolitics of Covid-19.” Africa Is a Country. https://www.thecitizen.in//index.php/en/newsdetail/index/6/18541/the-necropolitics-of-covid19. Accessed May 2022; Afeworki Abay, R., Kassaye, D., & Kleibl, T. (2022). “Overcoming the Socio-economic Impacts of the Coronavirus Pandemic: Social Work Perspectives and Postcolonial Reflections from Ethiopia.“ In The Coronavirus Crisis and Challenges to Social Development: Global Perspectives Edited by M. d. C. d. S. Gonçalves, R. Gutwald, T. Kleibl, R. Lutz, N. Noyoo, & J. Twikirize, 431-442. Cham: Springer International Publishing; Matela, M., & Maaza, A. (2022). “Lockdown in a Dual Society: Exploring the Human Capability Implications of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) in South Africa” In The Coronavirus Crisis and Challenges to Social Development: Global Perspectives, Edited by M. d. C. d. S. Gonçalves, R. Gutwald, T. Kleibl, R. Lutz, N. Noyoo, & J. Twikirize, 87-96. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
[13] Afeworki Abay, R., Ihring, I., & Garba, F. M. (eds.) (2024, forthcoming). The Coloniality of Human Hierarchy: Disrupting Racialized Capitalism and Fostering Transnational Solidarity. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[14] Mbembe, A. (2003). “Necropolitics” Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40; Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham/London: Duke University Press; Mayblin, L. (2016). “Complexity reduction and policy consensus: Asylum seekers, the right to work, and the ‘pull factor’ thesis in the UK context.“ The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 18(4), 812-828; Mayblin, L. (2017). Asylum after Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking. London: Rowman and Littlefield International; Mayblin, L., & Turner, J. (eds.) (2020). Migration Studies and Colonialism. London: John Wiley & Sons; Abuya, E. O., Krause, U., & Mayblin, L. (2021). “The neglected colonial legacy of the 1951 refugee convention.” International Migration, 59(4): 265-267; Sadeghi, S. (2019). “Racial boundaries, stigma, and the re-emergence of “always being foreigners”: Iranians and the refugee crisis in Germany.“ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(10): 1613-1631.
[15] Afeworki Abay, R., Ihring, I., & Garba, F. M. (eds.) (2024, forthcoming). The Coloniality of Human Hierarchy: Disrupting Racialized Capitalism and Fostering Transnational Solidarity. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[16] Andrews, K. (2021). The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. London: Penguin; Getachew, A. (2019). Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E. (2018a). “Conceptualizing the coloniality of migration: On European settler colonialism-migration, racism, and migration policies.“ In Migration: Changing Concepts, Critical Approaches Edited by D. Bachmann-Medick & J. Kugele, 193-210). Berlin: de Gruyter; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E. (2018b). “The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism.“ Refuge, 34(1): 16-28; Mayblin, L., Wake, M., & Kazemi, M. (2019). „Necropolitics and the slow violence of the everyday: Asylum seeker welfare in the postcolonial present” Sociology, 54(1), 107-123.
[17] Augustová, K. (2021). “Impacts of EU – Turkey Cooperation on Migration along the Iran – Turkey Border.” IPC – Mercator Policy Brief. Istanbul Policy Center; Bakewell, O., Gezahegne, K., Ali, K., & Sturridge, C. (2020). “Migration and Migration Management on the Ethiopia–Sudan Border: Research from Metema,” Research and Evidence Facility (REF) EU Trust Fund for Africa; Adam, I., Trauner, F., Jegen, L., & Roos. C. (2020). “West African Interests in (EU) Migration Policy. Balancing Domestic Priorities with External Incentives.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46 (15): 3101–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1750354.
[18] Andrews, K. (2021). The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. London: Penguin; Getachew, A. (2019). Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[19] Lemberg-Pedersen, M. (2019). “Manufacturing Displacement. Externalization and Postcoloniality in European Migration Control.” Global Affairs 5 (3): 247–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2019.1683463; Ould Moctar, H. (2020). “The Proximity of the Past in Mauritania. EU Border Externalisation and Its Colonial Antecedents.” Anthropologie & Développement, no. 51 (December): 51–67. https://doi.org/10.4000/anthropodev.951; Daňková, P., Afeworki Abay, R., Xypolytas, N., & Kleibl, T. (eds.) (2024). Transnational Mobility and Externalization of EU Borders: Social Work, Migration Management, and Resistance. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[20] Staub-Bernasconi, S. (2012). “Human rights and their relevance for social work as theory and practice“ Handbook of international social work: Human rights, development, and the global profession, Edited by L.M. Healy and R.J. Link, 30-36. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Staub-Bernasconi, S. (2016). “Social work and human rights—linking two traditions of human rights in social work”. Journal of Human Rights and Social Work, 1, 40-49; Healy, L. M., & Link, R. J. (eds.). (2011). Handbook of international social work: Human rights, development, and the global profession. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Afeworki Abay, R., Ihring, I., & Garba, F. M. (eds.) (2024, forthcoming). The Coloniality of Human Hierarchy: Disrupting Racialized Capitalism and Fostering Transnational Solidarity. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[21] Grasshoff, G., Homfeldt, H.G., & Schröer, W. (2016). Internationale Soziale Arbeit: Grenzüberschreitende Verflechtungen, globale Herausforderungen und transnationale Perspektiven. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa.
[22] Xypolytas, N., & Psimitis, M. (2024). Depoliticizing Refugees: How a Western World’s Favorite Intellectual and Political Game Takes Place and its Alternatives. In Transnational Mobility and Externalization of EU Borders: Social Work, Migration Management, and Resistance. Edited By Daňková, P., Afeworki Abay, R., Xypolytas, N., & Kleibl, T. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[23] Daňková, P., Afeworki Abay, R., Xypolytas, N., & Kleibl, T. (eds.) (2024). Transnational Mobility and Externalization of EU Borders: Social Work, Migration Management, and Resistance. Lanham: Lexington Books.
[24] Sanyal, D. (2017). “Calais’s ‘Jungle’: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance.” Representations, 139: 1-33.
[25] Hollander, J. A., & Rachel L. E. (2004). “Conceptualizing Resistance.” Sociological Forum, 19(4): 533-54.