Demonisation, Borderization and Necropolitics: How the UK Rules Refugees

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By Samuel Antoine


Demonisation, Borderization and Necropolitics: How the UK Rules Refugees

The harrowing events of last November serve as an important reminder of the British government’s shameless manslaughter of refugees. The UK’s management of refugees’ lives and deaths beyond, at and within its borders is deeply necropolitical, employing borderization, crimmigration and necropower. Despite largely focusing on colonisation and slavery, Mbembe’s theory of “necropolitics” is extremely well-suited for understanding how the UK manages migration via necropower—the capacity to divide “people into those who must live and those who must die”.


“Us” versus “Them” 

Recent events in Afghanistan provide a good starting point to highlight the UK’s necropolitical policies towards refugees, dictating who in Afghanistan may or may not be saved. Section 1.1 of the “UK immigration routes for Afghan nationals” outlines that only Brits, Afghans formerly employed by the UK and “particularly vulnerable” Afghans are eligible for evacuation—but the sloppy end to the West’s intervention in Afghanistan endangered millions of lives. Unfortunately, judging from the reports of botched evacuations or the appalling advice offered by the Ministry of Defence, nothing is guaranteed for those eligible either. This “regime of differential humanity” (Mayblin et al., 2020: 120), however, only intensifies the closer one gets to the Channel.

Such hierarchies of human worth are often legitimised by painting “their” elimination as necessary for “our” preservation. This is visible in the racist demonisation of refugees in the UK which has clearly impacted the public more than the news of refugees’ tragic deaths: YouGov (2020) found that 49% of Brits feel little to no sympathy for migrants risking Channel crossings. In addition, Schedule 4A, Part A1, Paragraph J1 of the Nationality and Borders Bill, currently passing through parliament, which provides border patrol with immunity for turning back refugees should they drown, has encountered public support. Furthermore, critics have highlighted that parts of the Bill are unworkable whilst others, which are already common practice, break international agreements. Much like how Mbembe highlights that necropower operated beyond the law in the colonies, we see this pattern repeated in the parts of this bill which violate international law at a key site of 21st century necropower—the border.


Borderization

The demonisation of refugees dictating who is “welcome” has been reinforced by British policy’s shift towards crimmigration. The aforementioned Bill criminalises refugees by invalidating the asylum claims of those entering informally, permitting their deportation and offshore detention. Condemned for creating a two-tier system that discriminates legal from illegal refugees, it creates a Catch-22 situation for most asylum seekers as no application form or process exists enabling their safe and legal entry to the UK. Along with the increased militarisation of the borders and the depoliticization of migrants’ motives, this refugee–migrant–criminal conflation fuels the public’s perception of refugees as a threat. This process of crimmigration bolsters the UK’s borderization process, “by which certain spaces are transformed into uncrossable places” for those judged “undesirable lives” (Mbembe, 2019: 9), to enable and justify their immobilisation.

But borderization does not stop at the border: domestic borderization bars refugees’ from accessing means of sustaining themselves. To reduce what the Home Office incorrectly assumes are “pull factors”—welfare and employment—the rights of refugees in the UK have been erased to the point that destitution is built into the UK asylum system. With a quasi-total ban on asylum seekers working, they must somehow survive off an allowance of £39.63/week, whilst legislation and inefficiency have rendered the healthcare provided to them completely inadequate, turning UK welfare for asylum seekers into a “necropolitical site of violence” (Serpa, 2021: 3). Stripped of human dignity by the slow violence (Nixon, 2011) of destitution, asylum seekers in the UK cross the “line of modernity” and become “non-beings” (Fanon, 1967), embodied by their deteriorated mental and physical healths. Alienated from the public sphere and stripped of political status, they correspond to Mbembe’s analysis of the slave and enter “death-worlds”: physically alive but socially deceased, they are the “living dead” (2003: 40).


Inside the Death-World

The death-worlds in which refugees in the UK exist today are epitomised by the infamous Napier Barracks—which are still in use today. These barracks previously housed 400 refugees (for one on-site nurse) subjected to overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, safety hazards and verbal abuse from far-right xenophobes. Prison-style detainment ensued when COVID-19 broke out, and the home secretary blamed the explosion of cases on asylum seekers “mingling”—despite social distancing being impossible. Whilst a report judged the barracks “impoverished, run down and unsuitable”, the government feared better accommodation would undermine public trust in the asylum system—and intended for this to become the new style of long-term accommodation for asylum seekers. 

The government’s contempt for these lives it judges undesirable couldn’t be clearer. Among its consequences was the mental health crisis among those in the Napier Barracks, some having previously experienced torture or persecution, resulting in appallingly high rates of depression, anxiety, flashbacks, self-harm and suicide attempts. Nineteen ambulances were called to the barracks in October 2020, demonstrating the “retraumatization” that this human rights violation entailed, corresponding to Mbembe’s “certain kind of madness” (2003: 39). Though a disturbing idea, Mbembe argues that death can be agency and suicide can be resistance: Hashem’s five-day hunger strike protesting the conditions in Napier Barracks resulting in his relocation to a hotel illustrates this. 


Broader Implications

All this isn’t simply a result of post-Brexit UK: British policy towards refugees has become increasingly necropolitical for decades in a way that resembles rather than differs from Fortress Europe (Duffield, 2008). What does set the British government apart, however, is its obvious incompetence: the Afghanistan debacle, the unworkable bill, the dysfunctional healthcare system and the measures taken to prevent and discourage more refugees arriving which will do nothing but increase life-threatening crossings—their final resort. Through necropolitical legislation and politics of exhaustion, the UK government will further dehumanise refugees and exacerbate their misery, certainly leading to more tragic yet preventable deaths—what Mbembe described as “syntheses between massacre and bureaucracy, that incarnation of Western rationality” (2003: 23). 


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