(Im)moral Borders in Practice

ABSTRACT

This Forum aims to push existing debates in critical border and migration studies over the featuring of morals, ethics and rights in everyday practices relating to the governance of the mobility of non-citizen populations. Its contributors steer away from the actual evaluation or advocacy of the good/just/ethical, focusing instead on the sociological examination of morals and ethics in practice, i.e. how actors understand morally and ethically the border and migration policies they implement or resist. A proliferating interest in the discursive and non-discursive materialisation of moral and ethical elements in asylum and migration policies has examined the intertwinement of care and control logics underlying the management of refugee camps, borders and borderzones, and hotspots alongside the deployment of search-and-rescue operations. Nevertheless, recent research has shown the need to unpack narratives and actions displaying values and symbols that are not necessarily encompassed within this intertwinement of compassion and repression. We argue that there is a need to pay more attention to the diversity, plurality and the operation of morality, ethics and rights in settings and geographies, and of including a diversity of actors both across and beyond EUrope.

Notes

1. A Durkheimian, ‘deontological’ approach (Karsenti 2012) defines morality as a bounded system of rules of conduct to which an agent can refer; while a Foucauldian, ‘virtuous’ approach (Faubion 2012), considers ethics as ‘the subjective work produced by agents themselves in accordance with their inquiry about what a good life is.’ An additional ‘consequentialist’ approach, ‘which assesses conducts according to their consequences rather than their conformity with pre-existing rules or their resulting from a specific disposition of the agents. While these lineages are interesting to keep in mind, it is also important to note that it is often difficult to sort out between the different threads when analysing a given, specific situation (Fassin 2012b, 8).

2. Created in 1966, it is originally involved in international solidarity projects. Since the 2000s, it focuses on the call-out to national and international authorities about the respect of fundamental rights in relations between Northern countries and the global South. The CNCD is considered as the privileged interlocutor of the Belgian federal government on international cooperation. The NGO is nowadays split between a Francophone and a Flemish branch. In this paper, I focus on the advocacy work as experienced by the Francophone part.

3. Based on a paper document « Pour la justice migratoire – dossier de campagne », written on September 2017, as well as the description of the campaign online, https://www.cncd.be/-campagne-justice-migratoire- (consulted on September 2017).

4. Based on the « Manifeste 2018 des assemblées locales réunies pour la première session plénière des états généraux des migrations », Etats Généraux de la Migration, published online on May 28th, 2018, https://eg-migrations.org/Manifeste-des-Assemblees-Locales-reunies-pour-la-1ere-session-pleniere-des (consulted on May 2018).

5. I conducted a textual analysis using the online software Hyperbase, version 10. I constituted two corpuses. One corpus called “Campaign” contains texts from the two campaigns (press communiqués, the manifesto, political recommendations) (number of occurrences: 104 876, umber of texts: 2). The other corpus is called “NGO”, it contains annual reports by NGOs in France and in Belgium involved in the campaigns (number of occurrences: 104 876, number of texts: 6). The corpus “NGO” is used as a reference of the lexical context on how the NGOs in Belgium and in France, usually talk about migration and from where the two targeted campaigns have emerged. The textual analysis compares how the campaigns frame migration issues regarding how the NGOs individually frame them as part of their regular activities.

6. I chose these textual units because they represent classical terms in current migration controversies between a security & control threat narrative, a right associated to mobility narrative, and a global economy (development and opportunities through migration) framing (see Benson 2013).

7. https://alarmphone.org/en/category/reports/.