In light of the on-going "migrant crisis," there has been renewed attention to the ways in which Middle Eastern diaspora and refugee/migrant populations have again become the target of increased policing, surveillance, and social marginalization. This panel offers a multidisciplinary and multinational exploration of the dynamics between states and migrant communities in diasporas, homelands, and liminal border zones, focusing particularly on cases in which the legal status and belonging of these groups is complex, ambiguous, or fraught. Through historical and ethnographic accounts, we challenge the confines of nationalist paradigms and argue that disciplinary securitization regimes are a transnational phenomenon that have imperiled the stability, mobility, and sense of belonging for Middle Eastern migrants.
The panel begins with a historical intervention that highlights French attempts to regulate and police the Syro-Lebanese diaspora community around the world during the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon. Through a comparative analysis, it details French efforts to surveil, manipulate, and discipline its colonial subjects, even in contexts beyond France's immediate jurisdiction (e.g. South America) through a variety of techniques seldom considered in contemporary studies on state policies toward immigrant communities. The second paper analyzes the increased targeting and imprisonment of Iranian dual citizens in recent decades, both in Iran and in diaspora. It argues that the perceived benefits of dual citizenship are constrained by geopolitics that limit rights, security, and mobility, impacts which also impinge on belonging for 1.5/second generation dual citizens. Marginalization of the second generation is also the focus of the third paper, specifically the racialized exclusion experienced by the Maghrebin in France. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this paper demonstrates that exclusion from French cultural citizenship has led young people to interpret their social position by connecting their experiences to that of black populations worldwide, invoking a transnational blackness. The final paper addresses obstacles faced by Iranian LGBTI asylum seekers in Turkey awaiting third country resettlement. Stuck in satellite cities in Turkey, they often lack freedom of movement, the right to work, financial assistance, and social protections, while also experiencing discrimination, vulnerability, and even violence. This paper examines how legal and humanitarian practices of asylum map onto gender, sexuality, race, and class hierarchies that delineate 'at risk' and 'risky' refugee groups, and legitimate and illegitimate mobilities. Taken together, these studies shed light on diaspora and refugee/migrant communities that often live and move precariously between nation-state borders and citizenship regimes in the modern era.
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Amy Malek
The sharp rise in non-exclusive citizenships in recent decades has been explained by citizenship scholars as a global shift towards instrumental attitudes about citizenship, a phenomenon described in the literature as “strategic citizenship” or “compensatory citizenship.” These theories suggest the rise in dual and multiple citizenships worldwide are best understood as enabling individuals greater access to mobility, security, and rights than that afforded by a single citizenship. Iranian dual citizens pose a challenge to this typology: as a result of geopolitics that has pit Iran against many Western states and vice versa, Iranian dual citizens in diaspora and in Iran may actually experience greater insecurity, immobility, and disruption of rights due to their multiple citizenships.
Based on semi-structured interviews with Iranian dual citizens in diaspora as well as on legal scholarship and media reports, I demonstrate two related constraints facing Iranian dual citizens in Europe, North America, Australia, and in Iran itself. First, increased securitization both in Iran and in the West has tended to tighten restrictions on dual citizens’ rights, leading to greater surveillance, detention, and intimidation of Iranian dual citizens as well as heightened suspicion, discrimination, and social marginalization. The targeting of Iranian dual nationals in Iran for interrogation, intimidation, and imprisonment has been well-documented, and on-going. The restrictions placed on the U.S. Visa Waiver Program and its expansion in the Muslim Ban and Canada’s Bill C-24 (amended by C-6) are prime examples of these kinds of securitization efforts that led to Iranian dual citizens’ increased immobility and insecurity, respectively. Second, although technically permissible by Iranian law, the practical impossibility of renouncing Iranian citizenship leaves dual citizens in a Catch-22. When joined with Iran’s paternal jus sanguinis citizenship law, the inability to renounce leads to situations wherein individuals may not even realize they are technically considered a dual citizen, but are nevertheless targeted and affected by the aforementioned securitization efforts. These efforts not only have broad impacts on dual citizens’ rights, they also weigh heavily on their sense of self and belonging. As my interview data demonstrates, this is especially the case in experiences of discrimination (especially in employment settings), indefinite separation from family, and intimidation from security officials in either or both of the countries they call home.
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Elif Sari
Facing discrimination and abuse in Iran, many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) individuals flee their home country and arrive in Turkey. There, they join millions of displaced refugees waiting for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to resettle them to a third country willing to accept them. Due to their vulnerability, until recently LGBTI refugees constituted an exceptionally advantaged group: UNHCR and third countries such as the United States and Canada expedited the assessment of LGBTI asylum applications and reserved prioritized resettlement quotas for victims of sexual and gender-based violence. Thus, LGBTI asylum applications used to be so-called ‘golden cases,’ accorded expedited consideration for resettlement in the United States and Canada. This picture, however, has drastically changed with the recent asylum policies of the third countries. Since late 2015, Canada has begun to implement new resettlement quotas for Syrian refugees, and simultaneously, the resettlement of LGBTI refugees has slowed down, if not completely stopped. On the other hand, US President Donald Trump’s executive orders have left Iranian LGBTI refugees in limbo, suspending indefinitely their resettlement plans.
Drawing on ethnographic research in Turkey and interviews with Iranian LGBTI refugees, asylum lawyers, and national and diasporic NGOs, this paper examines how the recent asylum policies of the US and Canada have affected Iranian LGBTI refugees’ individual and communal experiences. As the prospect for resettlement has been severely undermined by the discriminatory asylum policies of the US and Canada, refugees are overwhelmed by unsafety of their present and uncertainty of their future. Yet, they have also responded to hardening asylum policies of the US and Canada in various ways, through political and communal organizing; humor and sarcasm; alternative resettlement paths such as human smugglers, private sponsorship, and converting to Christianity; a growing demand for sex-policing to distinguish ‘fake cases’ from ‘authentic’ LGBTIs; and an increasing resentment toward Syrian refugees for being the ‘new golden cases.’ By offering a contextualized analysis of an at once privileged and discriminated group, I examine how legal and humanitarian practices of asylum are mapped onto hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class, which, in turn, delineate ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’ refugee groups, and legitimate and illegitimate mobilities.
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Joshua Donovan
The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the subsequent division of the Arab East into “mandate” territories administered by Britain and France had enormous implications for the region’s inhabitants. Intentionally or not, the League of Nations opened up a new discursive space in which the Ottoman Empire’s former subjects sought to assert themselves and their interests on a global stage. An exciting new vein of scholarship has begun to explore the ways in which Syro-Lebanese migrants living abroad advanced visions of nationalism and identity through vibrant cultural and intellectual production. Some scholars have also recognized the important role played by the mahjar (diaspora) in anti-colonial nationalist movements during the interwar period, as immigrants leveraged their hybrid positions and transnational networks to advocate on behalf of their rapidly-changing homeland.
This paper examines French attempts to regulate and police the Syro-Lebanese diaspora community in the 1920s and 30s, arguing that France viewed these diaspora communities as extensions of its “mandate” in Syria and Lebanon. Drawing on French intelligence reports from the High Commission in Beirut, French consular files from around the world, international newspapers, and rare collections of personal correspondence, this study begins by demonstrating French anxieties about activists working outside the borders of Syria and Lebanon and highlights efforts to monitor emigration. It then advances a comparative analysis of French efforts to surveil diaspora communities in several countries including Brazil and Argentina and extend its disciplinary reach beyond its immediate jurisdiction. Tactics included employing consular dragomans as informants embedded in diaspora communities, planting articles in diaspora newspapers, and nurturing personal ties with mahjar luminaries. In explaining why French efforts to influence the Syro-Lebanese diaspora were more successful in some areas than in others, this paper insists on the agency and heterogeneity of the diaspora to both undermine and facilitate state disciplinary structures. Mindful of important new studies on the policing of immigrant communities in the present day, this paper offers a historical perspective which calls for a broader and more globalized understanding of how immigrant communities from the Middle East are monitored and “managed.”
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Dr. Jean Beaman
Based on ethnographic research in France, I explore how the Maghrebin second-generation in France makes conceives of a diaspora connecting France and the Maghreb, as well as other regions, as a way to cope with their marginalization from mainstream French society. Despite an official “masking” of difference based on Republican ideology, France has an increasingly narrow definition of what it means to be “French,” a definition which often excludes particular populations within French society, including those who were born in France to parents from former French colonies in North Africa. I consider how they invoke a transnational blackness in making sense of their marginalization and social location by connecting to shared experiences of oppression with black populations worldwide. I argue that this connection to blackness reflects how France is undergoing a “racial project,” per Omi and Winant’s (1994) formulation.
