Running for inclusion: responsibility, (un)deservingness and the spectacle of integration in a sport-for-refugees intervention in Geneva, Switzerland

Abstract

This study contributes to critical inter-disciplinary analyses of the meanings, uses and implications of sport-for-integration initiatives in relation to the contemporary politics of asylum in the Global North. It will do so, by drawing on an ethnographic study addressing the activities of FLAG21, a sport project based in Geneva, Switzerland, that employs running as an instrument of integration and health promotion for migrants and refugees. In advancing this discussion, we put to dialogue Nicholas De Genova’s work on the ‘border spectacle’ (2013) with critical analyses of integration in (forced) migration studies to explore what we call the ‘integration spectacle’. Through this lens, we address FLAG21 activities to examine the scenes of inclusion and the obscene of exclusion that sports projects aiming to foster refugees’ social integration can at the same time make visible and unwittingly conceal through their interventions. The discussion illuminates the ambivalent positions that sports interventions occupy within the politics and moral representations of asylum. This, as a premise to imagine, co-create and support sport and leisure practices and contexts that are more closely attending to and engaging with refugees’ experiences, struggles and trajectories within and beyond contemporary regimes of asylum.

Keywords:

• Sport
• running
• integration
• politics of asylum
• refugees
• Switzerland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In this paper, the terms ‘refugee’, ‘forced migrant’, ‘people seeking sanctuary/asylum’ will be used inclusively to refer to people at all stages of the asylum process, unless when relevant to draw attention to the differences produced by the maze of the asylum system (see also De Martini Ugolotti, 2020).

2 It is important to note that nationality-based assessment for asylum decisions have been widely critiqued for ignoring individual circumstances that lead to an asylum claim (e.g. from political to gender, or sexuality-based persecution that are increasing in countries otherwise considered “safe to return”) (Vuilleumier 2020).

3 Authors have highlighted how asylum claims’ “non-credibility” are actively created by means of decision-making processes, particularly through the questioning techniques used in asylum interviews (see Affolter, 2020 for an overview). This argument complicates the common explanation put forward by asylum administrations, politicians and much of the mainstream media that the majority of claims are rejected because the majority of asylum seekers lie.

4 The refugee coaches often represented the associations when at running events and in several occasions were invited to speak about the association’s aims at these and other public events

5 Out of 9500 Eritrean nationals with temporary admission permits and an overall population of 25000 Eritreans in Switzerland in 2018 (Herzog 2018).

6 See also what is currently taking place in Denmark with 1200 people facing the prospect of being deported to Damascus, Syria, now deemed “safe to return”. In this sense this exemplifies once more what Mountz (2020) discussed in terms of the “fast policy transfer” of “best practices of exclusion” across nation states (xv- xvi).