From securitization of migration to the dehumanization of refugees: A threat to liberal democracy

The European Studies Centre (ESC) held a seminar on the securitisation of migration, the dehumanisation of refugees, and its impact on the liberal democracy. The seminar was held on 31 October 2023 and was chaired by ESC director Othon Anastasakis. The main speakers were Franck Düvell – Senior Researcher and Coordinator of the Forced Migration and Refugee Research consortium at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrück University, Germany – and Başak Kale – Associate Professor at the Middle East Technical Institute, Türkyie. The speaks were joined by Catherine Briddick - Andrew W Mellon Associate Professor of International Human Rights and Refugee Law and a fellow of St Antony's College – as a discussant.

The main speakers presented their work on the dehumanisation of refugees (Düvell) and the securitisation of migration (Kale). Düvell had started to think about the dehumanisation of refugees after having visited the migration centres in 2013. He began writing in 2015 after conducting fieldwork in the Greek islands and the Aegean coast of Türkyie. To understand the hostile responses to migration after the 2015 crisis, Düvell compares the response of the European Union (EU) to this crisis with the response of European countries to the migration of Eastern European Jews during the 1920s. He argued that there are important parallels between the policies of the EU after the 2015 crisis with those of the European countries in the 1920s, as well as between the narratives of refugees that were constructed in both cases. In both cases, the Jewish refugees Jews in the 1920s and those coming to Europe from Syria and other Middle Eastern and African countries were considered as invaders and were confined to camps. Refugees described their experiences in both cases in similar ways. They emphasised hunger, lack of medical treatment, poor sheltering conditions, and mistreatment by the police or the army upon their reception. Alongside these policies, in both cases there was a dehumanisation process at play, whereby a boundary marked the “in-group” and the “out-group”. The refugees – the outsiders – were stigmatised as a threat to the “in-group”. They were thus considered as subhuman to enable the indifference to their suffering and the denial of their rights. Düvell argues that this process is part of a deterrent policy to stem the flow of refugees and represents a new typology of evil.

Heirs of the Greek catastrophe: The social life of Asia Minor refugees in Piraeus

The European Studies Centre (ESC) in collaboration with Southeast European Studies Centre at Oxford (SEESOX) held a book discussion on the experiences of the Greek population of Asia Minor who settled in Greece after the population exchange agreement through the 1923 Lausanne Convention. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, written by Professor Renée Hirschon, was first published in 1989, whilst its third edition was published to commemorate the centenary of the Lausanne Convention.

The discussion was held on 25 October 2023, and it was chaired by Michael Llewellyn Smith, Fellow at St. Antony’s College. Renée Hirschon – Senior Research Fellow at St. Peter’s College, Oxford – presented the third edition of the book, while Robin Cohen – Emeritus Professor at Kellogg College, Oxford – and Başak Kale – Associate Professor at the Middle East Technical Institute – discussed the contributions of the book to the research on the topic and more broadly concerning questions of identity, belonging, nationalism, migration, and memory.

During the presentation of the book, Professor Hirschon provided some historical context to her research approach, discussed the key objective of the research, and presented some of the key themes. She first underlined some changes in the names of the locations where the field work had been conducted due to confidentiality concerns. The reader of the third edition should be aware that in the third edition “Nea Ephsus” is used instead of “Kokkinia” and/or “Nikaia”, while “Yerania” has replaced “Germanika”. The author then underscored that the research she was conducting in the 1970s was not part of what we may call today “refugee studies” or “migration studies”. The field did not exist at the time and in 1972, when Hirschon was conducting the research, the worldwide population of forcibly displaced persons was approximately 3.2 million. The purpose of the research conducted in the 1970s was to understand the interaction between the use of space and cultural values. But given the exponential growth of the worldwide number of forcibly displaced persons, she revisits her work and seeks to determine whether “we can learn something from the experience of people who were forcibly displaced in the early 1920s and whether that experience is relevant for us today”.