The ‘Migrant Crisis in the Mediterranean’ as a Threat to Women’s Security in the EU? A Contrapuntal Reading

ABSTRACT

The decentring agenda in European Studies has called for turning our gaze from the ‘centre’ towards the ‘periphery’. This essay offers one decentred approach to EU migration governance in the Mediterranean: Studying geopolitical encounters between the receiving and sending spaces as constitutive of the very issues that are otherwise portrayed as autonomously developed. I will do this by adopting Edward Said’s method of contrapuntal reading, which involves ‘thinking through and interpreting together’ narratives from different parts of the world towards recovering ‘intertwined and overlapping histories’ of humankind. The specific case I look at is the 2015 ‘migrant crisis in the Mediterranean’ and the ways in which women’s insecurities were portrayed. While such representations presume women’s insecurities to have developed in the South/east and arrived in the North/west via migration, a contrapuntal reading of Fatima Mernissi’s writings together with everyday portrayals of the ‘crisis’ points to the connectedness of otherwise differentiated experiences. What is represented as ‘before Europe’ (in Bernard McGrane's felicitous turn of phrase) is, at the same time, the ‘aftermath of Europe’ insofar as geopolitical encounters between North/west and South/east of the Mediterranean have been constitutive of women’s insecurities.

Notes

1. On the place of assumptions of autonomous development in the study of world politics, see (De Carvalho, Leira, and Hobson 2011).

2. Needless to say, everyday representations of migrants were gendered in more than one way. For an analysis of the UK context, see (Gray and Franck 2019).

3. This is not to underplay the vulnerabilities women experience (as migrants and as hosts). For instance, when Syrian women and young girls who have fled to Turkey during the civil war marry to Turkish citizens (illegally) as second or third wives, all women suffer, although in different ways. See, ‘Syria’s refugees: fears of abuse grow as Turkish men snap up wives’, The Guardian, 8 September 2014 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/08/syrian-refugee-brides-turkish-husbands-marriage. (Accessed 26 July 2019).

4. Pitting citizens' security against that of migrants has been going on for more than a decade. For a discussion, see (Ibrahim 2005).

5. On the portrayal of migrants in the United States, see (Doty 1996, 1999).

6. I refer to ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’ knowing fully well that the dangers of essentializing. I also use ‘Europe’ as a short-hand for political actors in North America and Western Europe.

7. Keukeleire and Lecocq (2018) identify five dimensions of decentring for European Studies: temporal, normative, polity, linguistic, disciplinary. Without wanting to underplay the significance of the agenda they set for European Studies, I wish to underscore that all are focused on empirical decentring and leave untouched the concepts and categories informed by the aforementioned narrative on ‘Europe’ and its place in world history (cf. Halperin 1997).

8. Mernissi (1940–2015) was a sociologist. She was very well-known in the Arabic- and French-speaking worlds. She was also well known in the English-speaking world by virtue of all her works being translated into English. Yet, this article is also one of the least cited among her otherwise well-cited body of work. Google Scholar figures suggest that the 1996 edition was cited 8 times and the 2003 edition was cited 20 times. These figures are in contrast to thousands of citations some of her other work has received.

9. Mernissi cites Aziz Al Azmeh’s 1992 book Secularism in the Arab world. The book’s English translation was published in 2020. Also see, (Dabashi 2012).

10. Mernissi (1996b, xi) is quick to note that she is ‘not talking about a woman deciding for herself, without any pressure from a politician or a husband, to put a scarf on her head and cover her hair and face … The veil I am referring to … is an intrinsically political one, it is that head-covering forced on women by political authority such as Imam Khomeini’s July 1980 ‘Hijab law’ which ordered women working in the state sector to veil, or the Saudi police-enforced veil’.