The Un-Human Beings

Abstract

This essay traces the political and legal discourses around migrants and refugees in two distinct conditions: the postcolonial and the postsocialist of India and Poland, respectively. The two countries have recently turned to nationalist right-wing politics with an increasingly hostile focus on foreign Others, particularly Muslims. In the context of increased global surveillance and criminalization of Muslims, we show how the bodies of Muslim migrants are dehumanized and constructed as threats, denying their humanity in the process. We do this through the two cases of Ayub and Ameer, two Muslim men navigating their “illegality” in two different contexts in India and Poland. This essay is a contribution to the literature on postcolonial and postsocialist theories and critical debates about the possibilities of dialogue between postsocialist and postcolonial geographies. The examples we use demonstrate that the postcolonial and postsocialist nation-states respond to global phenomena such as migration and Islamophobia in ways that have discernible traces of their histories and are constituted distinctively from the western metropoles.

Keywords:

• India
• islamophobia
• migrant
• nationalism
• Poland
• postcolonial
• postsocialist
• refugee

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Human Rights Law Network, West Bengal, and New Delhi for assistance in the fieldwork. We are grateful for the comments provided by two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Agreeing that the East is often overlooked by both western and Global South academia, it is also essential not to ignore, as T¸ichindeleanu et al. (2020) argues in his response to Müller (2020), the wealth of knowledge production in the European East, rooted in local histories, that often happens outside what is “visible” to western-oriented academia and thus is ignored by it.

2 All names in the Indian case study have been changed to protect the identity of refugees who have got bail or are undertrial. Also, the case numbers are not referred to in the text. It is advised to get in touch with Human Rights Law Network, West Bengal to get the detail of the cases.

3 Because this case is widely known in Poland and Ameer has decided to speak publicly, we use his real name.

4 The term Central Eastern Europe, although contested, is used here to discern the specificity of the CEE region in relation to its Muslim population that differs from many other Eastern European states. For a critical overview of the genealogy of the term CEE to distinguish countries “closer” to Western Europe to its Eastern neighbours, see Janion (2006).