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Political life beyond accommodation and return: rethinking relations between the political, the international, and the body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2013

EEVA PUUMALA
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Abstract

This article explores political agency in the interstices of the bodily politics of asylum. It shows how its practices make bodily surfaces and how alternative forms of political authority emanate from bodies. Relying on Jean-Luc Nancy's ontology of the body, it examines forms of political agency that are enacted by people often considered as abjective subjectivities in the spaces of the international. Deriving from interviews conducted with failed asylum seekers, the article sheds light on agencies and resistances embedded in and extant despite the governmental efforts to solve the problem of the moving body. Ethnographic data and interviews with the failed asylum seekers show how they take control over their lives, not as separate, sovereign subjects, but in relation to their political surroundings and others. In a way, the failed asylum seekers produce and practice their own politics that both takes part in and exceeds the limits set by sovereign politics. By exploring political agency from underneath and beyond sovereign power and governmentality, the article presents a reading of the intertwining of the international, political, and bodily.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 949 - 968
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2013 

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References

1 This article was written as a part of a research project funded by the Academy of Finland (SA 132403). I wish to thank Anitta Kynsilehto, Vicki Squire, Annick Wibben, and other participants at the 2011 European Peace Research Association conference where a version of this article was presented. Furthermore, I am grateful to the RIS editorial team and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Empirically the article takes its cue from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with failed asylum seekers living in three reception centres in Finland between August 2006–April 2007. Geographically the participants of this research came from Afghanistan, Iraq (Kurdistan), Palestine, and Somalia. The fieldwork period involved participating in the daily routines in one of the centres, such as being present at staff meetings. All in all, the period of participant observation added my understanding of the wider context of those issues that my interviewees addressed in their accounts, because it gave me a chance to witness what living in a reception centre means on a daily basis.

2 Interpretations that on the other hand surpass the notion of the sovereign subject, but on the other remain its captives have been offered by, for example, Dossa, Parin, ‘The Body Remembers: A Migratory Tale of Social Suffering and Witnessing’, International Journal of Mental Health, 32:3 (2003), p. 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pugliese, Joseph ‘Subcutaneous Law: Embodying the Migration Amendment Act 1992’, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 21 (December 2004), p. 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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16 Here my examination is greatly inspired by Walker, Rob's After the Globe, Before the World (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 29Google Scholar.

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24 Rygiel, ‘Bordering Solidarities’, pp. 4–5.

25 Not supposing identities to be substantial, according to Nancy, is to do right by identities. He sees the task being enormous and yet extremely simple; it is the task of a (political; my addition) culture remaking itself. Nancy notes that this task means mixing together again ‘the various lines, trails, and skins, while at the same time describing their heterogeneous trajectories and their webs, both those that are tangled and those that are distinct’. See Nancy, Jean-Luc, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 147Google Scholar; also Devisch, Ignaas, ‘Doing Justice to Existence: Jean-Luc Nancy and “the Size of Humanity”’, Law and Critique, 22:1 (2011), pp. 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in contrast, see Zevnik, ‘Sovereign-less Subject’, pp. 90–3.

26 The intertwining of personal and political has been discussed and its underpinnings charted within IR, but yet ‘personal’ suffering and emotional distress are often regarded politically uninteresting or irrelevant. For a different interpretation, see Zarowsky, Christina, ‘Writing Trauma: Emotion, Ethnography, and the Politics of Suffering among Somali Returnees in Ethiopia’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 28:2 (2004), p. 201CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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41 This claim resonates closely with discussions surrounding resistance and governmentality. See especially Campbell and Heyman, ‘Slantwise’, pp. 3–30; Takhar, Shaminder, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Political Activism’, Contemporary Politics, 13:2 (2007), pp. 123–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zevnik, ‘Sovereign-less Subject’, pp. 83–106; and Joseph, ‘The Limits of Governmentality’, pp. 223–46.

42 Huynh, Kim, ‘Refugeeness: What's So Good and Not So Good about Being Persecuted and Displaced’, Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community, 8 (2010), p. 54Google Scholar.

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46 See Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 174–5Google Scholar.

47 See, for example, Dugan, Kimberly and Reger, Jo, ‘Voice and agency in social movement outcomes’, Qualitative Sociology, 29:4 (2006), p. 470CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a different interpretation see, however, Ross, Andrew, ‘Why they don't hate us: emotion, agency and the politics of “anti-americanism”’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:1 (2010), pp. 109–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Ross, ‘Why they don't hate us’, pp. 117, 120.

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50 See Nancy, ‘La comparution/the compearance’, p. 375; also Zarowsky, ‘Writing trauma’, p. 201.

51 Nancy, ‘La comparution/the compearance’, p. 375.

52 Heikkilä, At the Limits of Presentation, p. 15; also Derrida, Jacques, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 111–30Google Scholar.

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58 Nancy, Jean-Luc, A Finite Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 8Google Scholar. Within International Relations Nevzat Soguk has presented the idea of passage and connected it with migrancy, see ‘Poetics of a world of migrancy: migratory horizons, passages, and encounters of alterity’, Global Society, 14:3 (2000), p. 433Google Scholar.

59 Benterrak, Krim, Muecke, Benjamin, and Roe, Paddy, Reading The Country: Introduction to Nomadology (Fremantle WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984), p. 15Google Scholar, cited in Muldoon, Paul, ‘Between speech and silence: the postcolonial critic and the idea of emancipation’, Critical Horizons, 2:1 (2001), p. 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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