Introduction
Over the past decade, particularly since the onset of the Syrian war, refugee simulations have become increasingly popular advocacy tools among humanitarian actors. By setting up physical model camps, these simulations portray the hardship and violence experienced by refugees and asylum seekers.Footnote 1 These events aim to challenge common misperceptions about refugees, to personalise their stories, and to highlight the responsibilities of states under international law in addressing large-scale displacement. As summarised by Oxfam’s Refugee Realities (2009–2010) evaluation report, these events share a core objective: ‘to encourage greater empathy, understanding and support for refugees…, and [to strengthen] public recognition and respect for refugees’.Footnote 2 Like all other forms of humanitarian communication, they are ‘public practices of meaning-making that represent human suffering as a cause of collective emotion and action’.Footnote 3 Therefore, despite differences in format, the language of care and compassion lies at the heart of how the simulations are structured. Promoted through highly emotive messages such as ‘stepping into the lives of refugees’ and ‘walking in their shoes’, they seek to evoke strong affective responses in participants by scripting experiences of suffering and fear. The messages circulated through these platforms do not turn refugees and asylum seekers into distant images in need of protection. Instead, these simulations invite participants to actively engage with the lived experiences of refugees, to feel and to sense what they endure, and to encounter their realities in a deeply embodied and intimate way. In doing so, they aim to raise awareness about refugees, mobilise solidarity with them, and generate an altruistic commitment to their rights and legal protections.
Despite their growing popularity, refugee simulations have largely gone unnoticed within border studies and, more broadly, in International Relations (IR). While discussions about these simulations are not new, they have been explored mainly within education, game, and media studies. Some scholars emphasise their pedagogical value, suggesting that such simulations can foster empathy and raise awareness of social injustices and notions of ‘global citizenship’.Footnote 4 From this perspective, simulations targeting social issues function similarly to Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed: they do not seek to offer a tangible solution to the oppressive situation, but rather offer ‘an environment for debating not just through verbal communication, but also through performance’.Footnote 5 Others, however, question their educational effectiveness, arguing that refugee simulations can reinforce the status quo and hinder transformative learning.Footnote 6 As physical and virtual simulations continue to attract attention in humanitarian circles, more critical voices have started to question discourses on empathy and have argued that they generate only a form of ‘forced empathy’Footnote 7 and a superficial sense of activist satisfaction without demanding structural change.Footnote 8 Disconnected from the global structural conditions that drive displacement in the first place, they risk becoming ‘feeling good about feeling bad’ performances.Footnote 9 Consequently, many critics have described refugee simulations as advancing ‘self-centred politics of authenticity’.Footnote 10 As Franke observes, these simulations often present an abstract and dehistoricised framing of displacement by shifting the attention towards ‘the self-generated affect of participants’ experiences’.Footnote 11 These emerging critiques compel us to raise questions about the voices of refugees themselves, the representations of their experiences, and ultimately about the politics of solidarity.
Inspired by these criticisms and questions, this paper seeks to contribute to ongoing debates on refugee simulations by centring the discussion on the production and contestation of contemporary borders. My central aim is to interrogate the language of compassion and solidarity that is promoted through these simulations. I explore how, through the construction of certain figures, they challenge, reproduce, or empower existing power relations embedded in the violent diagrams of contemporary borders. These questions are certainly guided by critical approaches to borders, which suggest that borders are not fixed at the outer edges of states. They can be (re)produced across different sites, practices, and encounters, and not necessarily by the state. Ordinary people and everyday sites all participate in the making as well as the contestation of borders. Therefore, rather than approaching these simulations as merely humanitarian advocacy tools, I am interested in exploring how these simulations might produce, sustain, or destabilise the diagrams of contemporary (humanitarian) borders while modelling the very borders that they seek to challenge. Guided by these overarching questions, I move away from queries about the effectiveness of these simulations in changing participants’ perceptions of refugees as well as from the questions about whether these simulations are right/false and authentic/fake representations of refugee experiences.
In addressing these overarching questions, I largely draw on Brian Massumi’s reading of the Deleuzian simulacrum and Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature and conceptualise these simulations as simulated borders. A simulated border is not an imitation or representation of borders; rather, it is an affective space of entangled bodies, discourses, and institutions that introduces functions and meanings of a border. By assembling several Deleuzian concepts – the minor, becoming, and simulacrum – I suggest that simulations neither simply imitate and mirror real-world systems or processes, nor do they exist outside the system they seek to challenge. Instead, they are performative practices with productive powers. Simulations operate within and through existing systems, ultimately creating a new territory – a third site. This site may not resemble a typical border site, and yet it may function as one, temporarily embodying the characteristics of a border. I propose that the border generated by simulations is a doubling space. It may be constituted by and constitutive of ‘normalising, regularising, and reproductive’ performances that reinforce existing power relations.Footnote 12 They may contribute to the multiplication of borders by repurposing the very practices that constitute them. Such simulations, therefore, do not confront borders and their constitutive violence. However, in some other cases, a simulation may function as a small rupture in the order of things, even if it does not change the established order. I call such simulations minor passages. Ultimately, my reading of refugee simulations seeks to challenge Plato’s allegory of the cave, which reduces our understanding of simulations into a single static story that always imprisons the narrative within the idea of false representation. In other words, rather than limiting the critique of refugee simulations to the questions of true/false representations of refugee realities, I engage with their affects with the aim of showing how these simulations operate as performative border sites with a multiplicity of possibilities, some of which may reinforce the violence of borders, while others offer some realisable glimpses of hope for solidarity with those on the move.
I pursue this inquiry by examining two distinct forms of refugee simulations. The first involves humanitarian simulations organised by mainly (international) humanitarian actors and charity organisations. Focusing primarily on Crossroads Foundation’s refugee simulations, I will unpack how these simulations can operate as sites of humanitarian borders.Footnote 13 I argue that through the formation of the simulacrum of becoming-refugee, a simulated third subject, these simulations function as a continuum of humanitarian borders, and therefore they ultimately leave the question of borders and their inherent violence intact. In contrast to these institutionalised humanitarian simulations, the second case presents a grassroots, community-based refugee simulation, Refugee Camp in My Neighbourhood (RCIMN) in Sydney, Australia.Footnote 14 Organised and run by refugees themselves, this community project aims to challenge negative stereotypes and dominant public perceptions of refugees in a settler-colonial country notorious for its cruel treatment of refugees. Australia’s offshore detention camps on isolated islands, its pushback policies, and the continual redrawing of migration zones to penalise asylum seekers arriving by boat have earned it a reputation for such cruelty. With its violent border politics, Australia presents a compelling case to explore whether a community-based refugee simulation can open up minor passages that have the potential to unsettle the contemporary diagrams of borders. Consequently, by focusing on two distinct types of refugee simulations, I seek to raise questions about the contested sites of solidarity shaped by the language of empathy. In doing so, I suggest that we should not take all forms of solidarity unproblematically in our discussions of borders. Rather, we need to problematise how ‘we’ is narrated, circulated, and ultimately produced through these sites. But first, a few notes on the conceptual framework.
Rethinking the simulacrum as a method
In IR, much has been written on simulations in the discussions of war,Footnote 15 war games,Footnote 16 sovereignty,Footnote 17 digital borders,Footnote 18 security,Footnote 19 and peacekeeping.Footnote 20 These studies confronted traditional readings of simulation understood as an imitation of the external world. They explored the performativity of simulations, and in doing so, sought to challenge representational thinking in traditional IR. With a few exceptions, many of these works draw heavily on Baudrillard’s account of simulation/simulacrum, which is neither a representation nor an imitation of external reality. For Baudrillard, simulation does not hide the truth; it creates a new reality.Footnote 21 The simulacrum is a copy of a copy, whose connection to the model has been so completely broken that it is no longer possible to recognise it as a copy. The simulacrum, therefore, is the collapse of representations. It is the terrain of a new reality in which the ‘real’ face behind the mask is lost forever. On the second page of Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard inverts the traditional representational relation between the territory and the map:
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it … it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra.
In his formulation, signs no longer refer to a genuine reality in a world of hyperreality. The power of simulation/simulacra does not lie in the question of true or false representations, the boundary between the real and the imaginary (or fantasy), or in the distinction between the real and the simulated. Instead, it lies in the very reality it produces, from which there is no escape. Employing Baudrillard’s simulacrum, LaLonde, for example, uses ‘simulated borders’ as a metaphor to explain how the digitalisation of border control technologies has created a new border, replacing the physical one and extending its power almost indefinitely.Footnote 22
Baudrillard certainly challenges representational thinking in our understanding of politics and encourages us to explore what simulations (in the form of games, art, theme parks, social media, generative AI, and so on) produce. And yet the world of such hyperreality offers only a partial exit from Plato’s cave. In a Baudrillardian simulacrum, there is no outside; we are all trapped within its defeatist hyperreality. My aim here is not to recap the extensive literature criticising Baudrillard’s account of simulacra. It suffices to say that Baudrillard’s simulacrum is imprisoned within a single narrative. Mourning the loss of the real turns the Baudrillardian framework into a futile critique of the present because it offers no alternatives for the future. The methodological question is, then: how can we read the simulacrum differently from this Baudrillardian picture in order to move beyond its stable frame and discover its multiple meanings and possibilities? Might we instead follow a different path in our reading of refugee simulations? Such a path would neither naively tell a ‘happy’ story by romantically celebrating them (and thus overlooking the power relations embedded in the politics of empathy and solidarity) nor lapse into a defeatist critique that simply focuses on violent power relations, offering no hope for an alternative future. Deleuzian philosophy of becoming and his notion of the simulacrum can offer us such a third path.Footnote 23
For Deleuze, simulacrum as a concept (like all his other concepts) is not a discursive construction employed to explain the external world or uncover truth.Footnote 24 Rather, it is an assemblage, invented to intervene in a problem and to forge new connections among concepts, relations, and practices.Footnote 25 In Deleuze’s framework, a concept is therefore a creation: it does not copy or model an external truth, but produces difference in a world of becoming. Thus, the Deleuzian simulacrum, must, first and foremost, be understood as a method that serves a function: overturning Platonism and problematising the normalised moral assumptions derived from representational and binary thinking in the world of being.Footnote 26 As is well known, the Platonic simulacrum is the lowest form of a copy because it is a degraded, deceptive copy that obstructs our access to truth. Such thinking privileges the primacy of the original, essence, and identity, ultimately affirming the triumph of a stable and coherent being (the origin). By contrast, Deleuze’s simulacrum dismantles these privileges and the hierarchy of origin, copy, and false copy. As he writes, the simulacrum is not ‘a simple imitation, but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned’.Footnote 27 Although Deleuze did not discuss the simulacrum extensively, the concept can be seen as an overarching method for his philosophy of difference and becoming. In my reading, Difference and Repetition is, in fact, a book about the simulacrum, which he uses as a critique of order, negation, the same and the similar, and identity – in short, of Platonism. He writes in the conclusion:
This Platonic wish to exorcise simulacra is what entails the subjection of difference. For the model can be defined only by a positing of identity as the essence of the Same, and the copy by an affection of internal resemblance, the quality of the Similar. …the will to eliminate simulacra or phantasms has no motivation apart from the moral. What is condemned in the figure of simulacra is the state of free, oceanic differences, of nomadic distributions …Footnote 28
The Deleuzian simulacrum’s relation with the copy moves away from the idea of sameness. Instead, what forms its basis is difference. However, difference here is not conceived in terms of binaries, negations, or oppositions (such as ‘differences of degree’, ‘quantitative difference’, or ‘numerical difference’), but in terms of qualitative multiplicity, as becoming (‘difference in kind’). When difference is seen as in itself, as internal difference, it no longer occupies a secondary position preceding a fixed identity, such as a difference between x and y. Deleuze’s Bergsonian difference is always a process of becoming (yet-to-come) rather than a stable construction.Footnote 29 In my reading, the concept of simulacrum, as copy of a copy, is exactly what Deleuze offers us in his theory of qualitative difference: it is not the disappearance of reality nor its completed transformation into something else. The Deleuzian simulacrum needs to be understood as a process of becoming in a world of flux: the constant motion of the ‘original’, the ‘copy’, and the ‘copy of the copy’. There is no stability in the world of the simulacrum. Sandra Plummer similarly puts it in the discussion of photography: ‘the simulacrum uses resemblance in order to produce difference’.Footnote 30 As such, we cannot know in advance what is yet-to-come, how subjects will be transformed, and what spaces will be enabled through the simulacrum. And this is the potential of the simulacrum: it opens up new possibilities. As Massumi writes, the simulacrum’s resemblance is simply a means, not an end, because:
A simulacrum has a different agenda: it enters different circuits.…The thrust of the process is not to become an equivalent of the ‘model’ but to turn against it and its world in order to open a new space for the simulacrum’s own mad proliferation. Footnote 31
That is why, Deleuze celebrates the simulacrum as a concept, as a method that replaces the representational world of given identities and fixed positions with creative forces of becoming.
Such potential of the simulacrum is what I seek to uncover in this paper. When refugee simulations are rethought from this methodological framework, the problem is no longer whether these simulations are true or false representations of refugee experiences, nor whether they are ‘real’ imitations of the border. From a Deleuzian perspective, this is a wrong question, because it assumes a fixed refugee experience, a stable border narrative, and border representation to begin with. I suggest that such fixations of origins are problematic because they form constitutive violence due to their moral impositions. And that is why we must confront the idea of stable origin and the copy: a fixed refugee identity, experience, or narrative. Such confrontation is needed to trace the potential of these simulations, the future of solidarity, and alternative forms of thinking about borders that could emerge from these simulations. In a Deleuzian world of becoming, the border (the origin in this case) changes while it is being simulated. That is to say, there is no stable origin to begin with. This should not be misunderstood as dismissing the past and ongoing violence of borders and bordering technologies. On the contrary, the potential of the simulacrum as a method lies in its ability to unsettle these fixed narratives that are so firmly rooted in our belief systems, thereby exposing constitutive violence of borders. The simulacrum helps us to walk in the room of refugee simulations as affective spaces, not populated with pregiven identities and us being the passive audience, but as spaces that are constituted through encounters among people, practices, and institutions. In such a Deleuzian formula, the notion of passive spectator, who simply observes the copy, simply disappears. Instead, the spectator becomes part of the simulacrum’s becoming, taking an active role not only in the constitutive process of this affective space, but also in its own transformation. Deleuze writes, ‘the observer becomes a part of the simulacrum itself, which is transformed or deformed by his point of view’.Footnote 32
It is this affective space of the simulacrum, its constant motion (becoming), which I call the simulated border. This space is charged with different possibilities. Within this framework, the simulated border is a fluid performance: it is a collective, shifting site with contested meanings, relations, and encounters. That is to say, unlike the Baudrillardian simulacrum, the Deleuzian reformulation does not confine the present and the future (in this case, the potential of refugee simulations) within a single narrative of the fixed hyperreality of simulations, but instead releases different possibilities (and hope) for political action by tracing the blocked passages enacted through these simulations. Therefore, for my purposes at least, the conceptual shift towards a Deleuzian simulacrum is not simply methodological, but also deeply political and ethical.
Simulated border as a doubling space
A Deleuzian framework of simulacrum then encourages us to chart the pluralism of the simulacrum’s own politics by mapping of its different motions. That is to say, we do not know the simulacrum’s trajectory in advance. We simply need to walk with its own motion to uncover its multiple lines. Like all Deleuzian concepts, the simulacrum too seeks to show the unpredictability of politics, ‘many politics’:
multiplicity of lines running through our lives – lines of capture and lines of escape; old lines and new lines; actualized lines of being and pure lines of becoming; lines that constitute not just one politics, or two politics, but many politics. Footnote 33
Deleuze’s desire to show such multiplicity calls for his concepts to come in pairs. Hence, like all Deleuzian concepts, as Massumi suggests, the simulacrum, too, needs to be thought accordingly: as double becoming, oscillating between the formations of two different modes of simulation.
The first mode, Massumi writes, is a ‘normative, regularizing, and reproductive’ simulation.Footnote 34 This mode of simulation is generated by and preserves familiar binaries, identities, and pre-established fixed positions within existing power relations. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that this mode of simulation ‘does not replace reality … but rather it appropriates reality in the operation of despotic overcoding’.Footnote 35 In doing so, this mode (re)produces bodies, territories, and institutions by capturing them within the norms of existing power relations.Footnote 36 In this paper, humanitarian simulations exemplify this first mode. As the next section explores, the language of empathy mobilised during these simulations to activate solidarity towards refugees fails to contest the structural problems associated with the contemporary global border regime, including mobility inequalities and injustices. Moreover, through their prescriptive moral codes, these simulations produce a humanitarian subject that defines a threshold for participants’ empathy, and thus for who is deemed worthy of protection and solidarity.
The second mode of simulacrum, writes Massumi, ‘turns against the entire system of resemblance and replication’ through its disturbing power.Footnote 37 In my reading, however, this second mode may not be as powerful as Massumi suggests. If we take seriously Deleuze’s warning about the unpredictability of politics, we cannot assume the second mode will reliably ‘turn against the entire system’. Therefore, at least for the purposes of this paper – and its case studies – I prefer to conceptualise the second mode of simulacrum as a minor passage: a transitional moment that offers hope for the creation of alternative sites for solidarity with refugees without assuring a complete transformation in the contemporary operation of borders and mobility governance. The minor passage is an in-between space and time. It unsettles marginalised spaces and practices by exposing the violence embedded in them and making them more visible, but does not fully realise the rupture of the system. The most important quality of the minor passage is that it is created by the subtle acts of ‘the minor’ living in the cramped, marginalised spaces of the major. The community-based refugee simulation discussed in this paper exemplifies the second mode.
The minor passage here warrants further clarification, since it draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the ‘minor’ and ‘minor politics’. For Deleuze and Guattari, the minor does not signify a fixed identity – a migrant, a child, or a minority for example – but a shifting position within, and in relation to, the major. They use Kafka’s ‘minor literature’ to develop the political relationship between the minor and the major.Footnote 38 Kafka, they argue, was a minor author not because he belonged to a minority, but because, as a marginalised and oppressed writer, he wrote in German, a major language, and re-appropriated that language ‘for strange and minor uses’.Footnote 39 As Thoburn notes, the key aspect of ‘the minor is not identity, but creation’ in relation to the major.Footnote 40 In other words, minor literature ‘does not come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language’.Footnote 41 It emerges within a ‘cramped space’, which forces every expression to take a collective and political value, Deleuze and Guattari write. These cramped spaces are not necessarily enclosed sites such as camps, prisons, or detention centres, but can also be communities and close-knit neighbourhoods, wherever the minority condition is shaped by (social, cultural, and political) blockages and limits imposed by the politics of the major. The cramped nature of these spaces, in which the major (dominant) ‘political domain has contaminated every statement’, compels the minor to write, speak, and act, turning each individual expression into a mode of ‘collective enunciation’.Footnote 42 That is why Deleuze and Guattari suggest that minor literature ‘produces an active solidarity’, making possible the expression of ‘another community’ and creating ‘the means for another consciousness and another sensibility’.Footnote 43
Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation of active solidarity in the context of minor literature hence directly contributes to our understanding of solidarity promoted through refugee simulations. My intention is not to map different forms of collective movements that have emerged over the last decade in the context of border politics.Footnote 44 However, for the purposes of this paper, it is important to note that we should not paint a glorified picture of solidarity towards refugees. The language of victimhood and empathy promoted through collective actions can serve nationalistic purposes, playing within the very political imaginations that produce border violence in the first place.Footnote 45 Active solidarity, by contrast, seeks to move beyond such language to create new ways of living, thinking, and forging connections between the major and the minor. With such qualities, active solidarity (potentially mobilised through minor politics) seeks to generate affirmative hope. Such hope aims to transform our relations with one another by estranging us from the comforts of the major.Footnote 46 Minor politics therefore begins with exposing the fault lines of contemporary border politics, rejecting the language of sympathy or victim-driven solidarity. As Kocher and Stuesse observe in their study of anti-deportation activism in the US, minor politics is ‘fluid and experimental’, seeking cracks in the major by reappropriating its language in novel and critical ways.Footnote 47 But minor politics, as Kocher and Stuesse note, comes with a warning: like all politics, minor politics, too, is unpredictable. Its proximity to the major implies that it can be co-opted by the dominant language.Footnote 48 I suggest that the second mode of simulation discussed in this paper, with its characteristics of minor politics, may open up a space for active solidarity within the limits of its cramped space, exposing the cracks of the major. This is the potential of the second mode of simulacrum: it can function as a minor passage by reappropriating the language of the major, and yet we do not know in advance its own trajectory.
In short, as Massumi writes, in a Deleuzian simulacrum ‘what we are left with is a distinction not primarily between the model and the copy, or the real and the imaginary, but between two modes of simulation’, a doubling space of the simulacrum.Footnote 49 The question is then how different modes of refugee simulations produce affective spaces for solidarity.
The simulacrum of becoming-refugee: refugee simulations as sites of humanitarian borders
I just invite you to reflect on how you make the connection between the policy discussions and the people who are having those policy discussions and what you have experienced here briefly and 68 million other people are experiencing for a lot longer. Footnote 50
These words come from the Crossroads Foundation’s 2019 Refugee Simulation, A Day in the Life of a Refugee, staged during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This interactive and immersive event invited some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential corporate and political leaders to ‘step very briefly into the shoes of the least powerful’ and to gain a ‘sense of what it is like to be displaced’.Footnote 51 The simulated camp was part of Crossroads Foundation’s ongoing Global X-perience program, which, since 2005, has been offering experiential simulations on pressing social issues such as hunger, wars, HIV/AIDS, and poverty. According to the Foundation, hosting a refugee simulation in Davos was a strategic choice: to deepen empathy in the world’s most influential people for refugees and to give ‘voice to the voiceless’.Footnote 52 Reflecting the reactions of high-profile participants, former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg described her experience as ‘truly moving and educational’.Footnote 53 In the words of another participant, the simulation reminded them of ‘empathy and humanity’ at a time when the constant stream of news about refugees had become mere background noise for a distant audience.Footnote 54
The Crossroads’s highly publicised simulations in Davos exemplify a growing trend of refugee simulations organised by charity organisations and humanitarian actors, including UNHCR, Oxfam, Red Cross, and others. Despite their differences in format and scripts, these simulations share a common goal: to present the lived experiences of refugees, including the dangers, hardship, uncertainties, and various stages of their pre-settlement journeys. Primarily targeting ordinary citizens, in particular young people, these simulations are designed to raise awareness about displacement, and international humanitarian and human rights law. They also aim to challenge negative stereotypes about refugees and to mobilise empathy as a source of motivation for solidarity. Stimulating empathy is the driving force behind these simulations, very much like all forms of humanitarian communication. As Crossroads summarises, the goal is to educate participants about the risks and challenges of forced displacement, to foster care and compassion for refugees, and to encourage them to take meaningful action.Footnote 55 According to the American Red Cross, ‘opening a small window into the horrific reality that millions face on a daily basis’ through simulations can provide a better understanding of the struggles of displaced people worldwide.Footnote 56 Similarly, World Relief emphasises that simulations foster a deep understanding of who refugees are and why they flee from their countries.Footnote 57 Grounded in the language of care and compassion through interactive experiential settings, these simulations are expected to function as platforms for emotional engagement and individual reflections. Simulations use ‘shock effects’ for the participants’ moral education. Thus, the typical imagery of suffering is used to generate humanitarian solidarity, albeit in this case not through a distant gaze, but through bodily proximity.
Becoming a refugee, as a simulation device, is the most striking feature of all these simulations. Rather than disseminating visual images of the suffering body or promoting virtual realities of the refugee experiences, these simulations place bodily proximity at the centre of the humanitarian stage. The emphasis is no longer on watching the vulnerable other at a distance in your comfort zone but on experiencing what the vulnerable other experiences. It is no longer videos, photos, movies, or posters of humanitarian crises, but bodily sensations that are assumed to act as the drivers of empathy and solidarity. At these simulations ‘walking in the shoes of refugees’ is not framed as a humanitarian representation or a role play, but as an affective performance. That is to say, the premise is to connect the spectator with the vulnerable other to address the inauthenticity of other forms of humanitarian communication. In these simulations, communication is performed through feeling and sensing the refugee realities: pain, anger, fear, sadness, and despair on your very own bodies. They do so by presenting a stage for the embodiment of refugees’ vulnerability. One of the participants of A Day in the Life of a Refugee, for example, expresses that these simulations represent ‘the difference between hearing and being’ – it is not ‘like watching a TV’.Footnote 58 In the words of the CEO of Crossroads, at these simulations, ‘you lose your identity, you become one of the displaced, you become their future’.Footnote 59 The underlying rationale is that resemblance, closeness of souls and bodies – becoming a refugee – can create an emotional space to motivate participants to act in solidarity towards refugees. Affective performance here is not simply emotive performance; it is an (assumed) transition of bodies from inaction to action, and from indifference to compassion and solidarity. The question is: what are the spatial and temporal implications of this formation? What knowledges and subjectivities does this assumed transition produce?
As discussed earlier, Deleuze’s reformulation of simulacrum disrupts the binary of original and copy, rejecting the idea of passive spectator. Instead, the simulacrum generates new realities, affects, knowledge, and subjectivities through the logic of becoming. In the case of refugee simulations, participants do not simply observe refugee stories. Instead, by mimicking vulnerability and displacement, their bodies become part of the simulations. Their bodies are folded into a performance, enacting a transition that produces a figure that I call becoming-refugee. This figure is neither the ‘real’ refugee nor the spectator, but a third, simulated subject, a simulacrum. Participants’ becoming a simulacrum, however, is not a neutral act. As Deleuze warns us, becoming always has a potential to reproduce, normalise, and reinforce existing violent relations. Therefore, we should not glorify the idea of becoming in our understanding of agency and relationality. This is particularly the case in refugee simulations. The simulacrum, the simulated third subject, is not any refugee. It is a knowable, resilient, and lovable refugee: one rendered familiar, and therefore worthy of participants’ empathy and solidarity. The knowable and lovable refugee is no longer an unknown stranger, because participants can feel and sense them in their very own bodies. The knowable refugee is rendered familiar through bodily proximity, and therefore it is no longer a threatening stranger, but a lovable figure deemed worthy of empathy. The simulacrum, then, is this simulated figure of the refugee. It is neither real nor fake, but a humanitarian construct that produces a fantasy of knowing and loving the other by becoming them. And it is precisely why this humanitarian construct is so deeply problematic.
The simulations are not merely role-plays or advocacy tools. They are constitutive performances that, through the production of the simulacrum, the third subject, reproduce humanitarian knowledges, subjectivities, and existing power relations. At first glance, such formations may appear transformative, as negative images of refugees are replaced with positive, empathetic ones. The language of empathy is not inherently problematic, as it can inspire structural changes. Yet, as Didier Fassin famously writes, when the language of empathy and care becomes a source of ‘humanitarian reason’ that governs precarious lives; when it sets the boundaries of action by imposing its own moral economy and exclusionary universal codes on who to save and why; when it turns certain populations into objects of intervention; and when it is directed ‘from above to below, from the more powerful to the weaker, the more fragile, the more vulnerable’, it reproduces existing injustices rather than challenging them.Footnote 60 Within the humanitarian simulations, this logic is powerfully enacted. The very formation of the simulacrum – knowable and lovable refugee – as a humanitarian figure inscribes strong normative and prescriptive moral codes about people on the move: their experiences, their past, present, and future. In effect, the simulacrum operates precisely through what Pallister-Wilkins terms the ‘cataloguing of suffering’: producing violent hierarchies between those who protect and those who suffer, and among different forms of suffering to determine which bodies are deserving of compassion and rescue.Footnote 61 The question, therefore, is not whether these simulations stimulate real or simulated empathy. It is how the formation of the simulacrum – this third figure of becoming-refugee – produces political effects that reinscribe violent diagrams of humanitarian care and compassion.
This formation is solidified most clearly in the image of the resilient refugee produced through the simulacrum. First, this image reproduces a particular perception of refugees as patient, self-reliant, and enduring despite profound suffering. Ironically, despite the emphasis on the capacity and agency of the refugee, the image of suffering does not disappear simply because, in this image, resilience requires suffering, and suffering becomes the very threshold for care and compassion. Second, the resilient refugee defines the limits of solidarity: it is no longer the refugee in general, but the resilient refugee, who is cast as worthy of empathy and hence transformed into the object of humanitarian concern. The resilient refugee is the ‘ideal victim’. The emphasis on such an image is not accidental. In fact, the figure of resilient refugee has long been celebrated by humanitarian actors, for whom self-reliance and resilience serve as cornerstones of intervention. Incorporated into the language of ‘leaving no one behind’, resilience is promoted as a key principle of burden and responsibility sharing in refugee-hosting countries particularly by the UNHCR.Footnote 62 However, as critics observe, the celebration of resilience not only demands refugees be resilient, but also ‘normalize[s] their displacement, and legitimate[s] the exclusionary bordering practices of states’.Footnote 63 The resilience image first performs despair as an inevitable condition of border politics (for those who are displaced) and then asks refugees to adapt themselves to the present situation to regain their agency and hope. In doing so, it promotes neoliberal solutions and individualises the border, transforming it into a site of personal responsibility.Footnote 64 The figure of becoming-refugee as a resilient refugee regenerates such moral codes of being an ‘ideal refugee’ and ‘ideal victim’.
The production of such moral codes through the simulacrum has deeper political implications for the production of the relation between ‘the self’ and the ‘other’. As Sarah Ahmed argues in her discussion of ‘becoming stranger’, becoming is not a linear movement from distance to proximity. It is a performative act that prescribes the relationship between the self and the other, reproducing knowledge of strangers and transforming them into targets of interventions.Footnote 65 In the context of humanitarian simulations, the desire to know refugees by becoming them idealises the sites of solidarity as a structured and organised space governed by normative prescriptions about refugees. It reinforces the violent temporalities of borders by binding the prospect of empathy and eventually solidarity to certain prescriptions of who the ‘ideal’ refugee is. In doing so, it rewrites the history of borders by erasing their constitutive violence and forgetting the role of mobility inequalities and injustices in producing displacement and border deaths.Footnote 66 By incorporating refugees and internally displaced people into the scriptwriting and staging, these simulations ironically claim to offer authenticity and to give ‘voice to the voiceless’. From the organisers’ perspective, they are meeting points between those who protect and act (typically from the global north) and those deemed vulnerable (often from the global south). What renders this mode of encounter problematic is the belief that simulations can function as spatial transmitters of memories and feelings of vulnerability, pain, and sorrow from one body into another, as if identification through becoming were the source of care and compassion. Yet such encounters enact a belief in the ‘universality of suffering’: that ‘suffering can be recognised wherever it is found, that it can be measured and understood, …[and that it can be] recognised and responded to by looking to the biological body’.Footnote 67
The simulated figure of becoming-refugee, the third subject, is consequently a violent performance. It presumes that suffering can be represented and responded to through bodily proximity, while masking the very histories that create suffering in the first place. The figure of becoming-refugee freezes history: it homogenises the experiences of refugees and renders underlying inequalities (of race, gender, class, disability, religion) and injustices in the contemporary global mobility regime invisible. For example, in A Day in the Life of a Refugee, the storyline begins with moments of displacement and the checkpoints – the physical border.Footnote 68 The storyline is constituted by sequential dots in a way that refugee journeys are presented as universal, linear, and orderly temporal paths. Such linear representations obscure the past and present colonial extractions, dispossessions, and racialised regimes of mobility governance. As a result, the border emerges as an ahistorical construct, as an individual experience. By framing the humanitarian present as an urgent ‘humanitarian reason’, the figure of becoming-refugee produces ‘hegemonic temporality’ in which the past is forgotten or acquires a forcibly unified meaning.Footnote 69 As Ahmed suggests, harm has a structural history, and its ‘forgetting would be a repetition of the violence or injury’.Footnote 70 The simulacrum of becoming-refugee seals the past within narrow, selective individual stories, thereby limiting the possibility of alternative, less violent futures.
In short, the formation of the simulacrum – the figure of becoming-refugee – constitutes both a spatial and temporal performance. Through this formation, humanitarian simulations produce a border: a simulated border that does not look like a border, yet functions as one. By reproducing violent scripts of humanitarian care and compassion, they create one of the sites of humanitarian borders that empower the global north to determine which bodies (from the global south) merit mobility, care, and ultimately solidarity. The moral imperative of humanitarian borders first frames displacement as an emergency, or ‘refugee crisis’, and then mobilises empathy, care, and compassion to address it.Footnote 71 Grounded in the politics of care and compassion, the diagrams of humanitarian borders do not necessarily abolish practices of control and capture.Footnote 72 Instead, they re-configure contemporary borders as dual sites of control and care, often by weaponising compassion in order to police and exclude unwanted mobile populations and to govern their mobility. Such practices result in proliferation of more militarised sites and practices of surveillance, control, and detention of those on the move. By shifting attention from the inherent violence of borders to the experience of feeling, sensing, and knowing refugee realities, these humanitarian simulations therefore (perhaps unintentionally) enter the circuits of ‘compassionate borderwork’, which ‘enacts worlds, creates and delimits political and ethical possibilities, and has concrete and often contradictory – if no less violent – effects on the lives of targeted populations produced as irregular’.Footnote 73
The simulacra of the boat and the border: community simulations and minor passages
RCIMN was launched in 2014 in Western Sydney, Australia. The project was initially inspired by the refugee simulation camps organised by Médecins Sans Frontières.Footnote 74 Since its inception, RCIMN has received wide media attention and multiple awards in Australia. The simulations are open to the public and target students, health professionals, community workers, and teachers. While it is modelled on the refugee camps in Uganda and South Sudan, the storyline also reflects local issues related to everyday life in Australia and Australian border politics.Footnote 75 RCIMN is organised around a three-hour tour with 11 sections, in which the participants encounter several confronting real-life scenarios.Footnote 76 It begins with the unexpected moments when refugees are forced to leave their homes and continues with the dreadful conditions in refugee camps, as well as Australia’s off-shore detention camps, exploitation at checkpoints, traumatic boat journeys, and life in Australia.Footnote 77 The interactive tour ends with a debrief section that involves participants’ reflections and structured conversations with the tour guides.Footnote 78
The striking feature of RCIMN is that it shifts both the ownership and the authorship of simulations to current and former refugees themselves. RCIMN is not a humanitarian event organised by a humanitarian or charity organisation. Rather, it is a community event organised and run by people from refugee backgrounds living in a community that holds one of the largest refugee populations in Sydney. It seeks to present stories from diverse communities with a large number of current and former refugees. As a community project, the initial ideas began with public meetings with local refugee communities including Afghan, South Sudanese, Somali, Tamil, Bosnian, Rwandan, Burundian, Iraqi, and Iranian community members.Footnote 79 The storyboarding workshops brought together more than 100 community members.Footnote 80 According to the organisers, the most important aspect of these simulations is that they provide a platform, albeit temporarily, for current and former refugees to talk about a ‘topic that is quite difficult to talk about’.Footnote 81 As a community project, the simulations aim to ‘empower local refugee communities’.Footnote 82 With these features, RCIMN is a collective project that seeks to make refugee communities visible in the city. It does not present a single, uniform, fixed, and individualised image of a refugee, but diverse stories of refugee communities. As expressed powerfully by one of the tour guides from a refugee background, at the camp:
a lot of experience came together … not all refugees have the same experience … [People have] this experience inside but they don’t have a chance to share with the people. They can’t find any person to share. But they found a lot of people here to share.Footnote 83
At first glance, RCIMN may resemble humanitarian simulations in its use of becoming refugee as a simulation device. However, unlike the ‘normalising, regularising and reproductive’ simulations discussed earlier, RCIMN, as a community project owned by current and former refugees, shifts the emphasis away from the figure of becoming-refugee as a device to foster empathy towards making an impact on the communities themselves, on the ‘neighbourhood’ as its name signals. This reorientation of the central aim is evident in the Council evaluation reports, which identify a key impact on the refugee communities.Footnote 84 The Council reports suggest that the project helps refugees to process past and ongoing traumas and seeks to contribute to their well-being and connection with the community.Footnote 85 It also offers some refugees their first employment opportunities in Australia at a time when finding work is particularly challenging for those living in limbo on temporary visas.Footnote 86 Guided by multiple voices, RCIMN unsettles the assumptions about the uniformity of refugee experience and the homogeneity of community. It does not seek to produce a single community identity or a fixed image of ‘refugee realities’. Rather, it generates a minor passage within the established structures and formations of Australian majoritarian practices. It does so by connecting each individual story to a collective politics shaped from the ground up, rather than by normative and moral prescriptions. I suggest that RCIMN performs such connections through generating two simulated figures: the boat and the border.
First, the simulacrum of the boat. Owing to Australia’s pathological obsession not with any irregular arrivals, but particularly with ‘boat arrivals’, RCIMN presents a powerful section on a boat journey. The section simulates an asylum-seeker boat with the participants wearing life jackets, while the sounds of waves echo in the background, and a tour guide tells her own journey.Footnote 87 Because Australia’s closed border regime has historically targeted so-called unauthorised maritime arrivals, who are repeatedly labelled ‘illegal immigrants’, this section of the storyline has particular importance in the Australian context. Rather than centring the figure of becoming-refugee, the focus shifts to storytelling and the agency of the storyteller. The simulated boat functions as a simulacrum: neither the ‘real’ nor an imaginary boat, nor a copy of the original refugee journey, but a third image. The simulacrum in this case disturbs the idea of a stable origin; it multiplies difference. It does not produce resemblance. Rather, it uses resemblance to generate a difference, undermining representational practices (stable origins and copies). As Sandra Plummer elaborates, the ‘role of the artist in making “copies” of reality in a manner … exceeds the mimetic and functional aspects of the medium’.Footnote 88 In this case, the simulacrum of the boat creates difference by opening minor cracks within dominant practices and discourses (the politics of the major). It unsettles the belief in a stable origin of the boat that dominates Australia’s political discourse by provoking a counter-image of what has been historically portrayed as an ‘enemy vehicle’ in the national imaginary.
This national imaginary needs a further comment. Floating vessels of the sea certainly have had shifting meanings in the Australian national psyche. Colonising boats and convict ships are celebrated as heroic beginnings of the nation, enforcing careless forgetfulness of their role in enabling the fiction of terra nullius. And yet, ironically, the boat has simultaneously bred fears of invasion since Federation in 1901. Since then, the sea has been imagined as ‘an easy road, open to the enemy, which he can pass along at pleasure’.Footnote 89 Such a perception of the sea and those coming from it was evident during the Second World War and the fear of Japanese invasion. In the following decades, Australia’s perennial border panic has been defined less by arrivals without documentation than by boat arrivals. Since the Vietnamese refugees of the 1970s and the 1980s, the recurring slogans of ‘boat people’ and ‘stop the boats’ have occupied a central place in the public imagination. As Perera writes, Australia is full of boat stories, most of which narrate boats as invaders.Footnote 90 Whatever meaning the boat acquires, it always plays a role in the (re)imagination of the coastline of Australia. The boat as a simulacrum therefore creates a counter-origin without an origin; it reorients the function of the boat away from both invasion and celebration. As a third image, it introduces a multiplicity of new meanings packed with the stories and experiences of asylum seekers that no longer conform to established national exclusionary imaginations.
The second simulacrum is the border: the border simulacrum. The shift in focus to storytelling and the agency of the storytellers enables RCIMN to present reflections on the disappointments and joys of life in countries of origin and Australia.Footnote 91 A section on Life in Australia, for example, stages the urban experience including employment challenges, especially for those with temporary visas.Footnote 92 In 2018, an art-based project with refugee children was included to explore ‘Life in Australia’ from children’s perspective.Footnote 93 The Council report also suggests that ‘for people from refugee backgrounds whose children have been born or grown up in Australia, RCIMN was seen as a unique and important way for children to gain the experiences of their own families’.Footnote 94 These features trouble the static image of refugee journeys, which are mostly perceived as a line with departure and arrival points, discussed previously. They show that border encounters do not necessarily end with arrival in Australia nor necessarily constitute a transitional journey from moments of suffering to happiness. The border simulacrum once again emerges as a third figure, which disturbs the image of the border as a straight line or the image of refugee journeys as a movement between ‘dots’ on that straight line. The simulacrum is a mobile border that moves back and forth with time and space.
The border simulacrum therefore has both spatial and temporal elements. Temporally, the border simulacrum is not a border frozen in time but one that constantly moves backward and forward with its lived experiences, not presented in a linear logic of ‘then (suffering) in the past’ and ‘now (happiness) in the present’. As opposed to the ‘hegemonic temporality’ discussed in the previous section, the border simulacrum presents what Adrian Little calls ‘complex temporality’: acknowledging that ‘the experience of the passage of time is neither universal nor linear. Temporal change involves contested interpretations of the nature of transition that is simultaneously backward and forward looking’.Footnote 95 Shared experiences of an indefinite period of detention at Australia’s offshore detention camps, for example, turn the border not only into a spatial confinement, but also into a ‘2000 days of limbo’.Footnote 96 Spatially, the border simulacrum is a border both away from the border and within the border: a shifting border that oscillates between Australia’s territorial borders and the visible and invisible boundaries of the city. In fact, the location of the simulations has a particular significance in this context. Located in an area where the city’s several layers of racial and socio-economic boundaries are constantly remade and questioned, the border simulacrum emerges as a complex border, whose meaning and function are always in motion. RCIMN is located in Western Sydney, one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse regions in the city, distanced from the more affluent areas in the East and the North. The area is often the first place of settlement for many newly arrived refugees and is one of the most disadvantaged areas in the city.Footnote 97 Currently, Western Sydney has the highest population in New South Wales holding short-term temporary visas, which force visa holders to live in limbo without health, education, job and housing security, making them more susceptible to all forms of exploitation.Footnote 98 And finally, while Western Sydney (Parramatta) has the largest Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population of any region in Australia, its Indigenous presence and history are largely invisible in the memory of non-Indigenous Australia.Footnote 99 RCIMN reveals the everyday negotiations and redefinitions of these boundaries of the city and transforms the simulation into a border simulacrum, which sits at the top layer of constantly shifting boundaries, introducing a complex, fluid border defined by its spatial and temporal motions.
It is with these features, I suggest, that the transformative simulacrum moves away from the ‘normalising, reproductive ones’ and creates a minor passage. This passage does not copy or represent a stable story, an origin, but uses resemblance to generate a third image within majoritarian political structures. In other words, minor passages re-appropriate the major languages to make their cracks visible. Most importantly, minor passages are owned by minority people. Deleuze and Guattari argue that politics begins with the experience of the oppressed, subaltern, and minority people who are captured and suppressed in cramped spaces. Every movement in a cramped space is expected to be shaped by a boundary, and every boundary aims to control and govern ideas and expressions. Yet, the ‘impossibility of action is matched with the impossibility of passivity’.Footnote 100 The impossibility of action that is inherent in such ‘cramped’ spaces of Australia’s border regime compels the creation of minor passages. And this is the power of the simulacrum I want to emphasise in this paper: its potential to make us rethink promises of spaces of solidarity activated through minor passages.
The simulacrum of Australian self: (back to) enduring borders of empathy and solidarity
The concept of simulacrum developed in this paper is not a static one, and hence one should not settle for a linear or juxtapositional analysis with firm conclusions but should follow the path of the simulacrum’s own movement. As discussed earlier, Deleuzian concepts come with warnings. Involving pairs that disrupt the idea of fixed identities, they are important reminders of how politics can always take unexpected turns. Therefore, rather than following a rigid analysis that outlines the stark contrasts between the two forms of simulations discussed in the paper, it is important to explore the possible shifts. In the context of RCIMN simulations, one notices the reappearance of familiar boundaries of empathy and solidarity with the local Council’s emphasis on what I call, the figure of people-like-us.
According to the Council, the emphasis on the message of ‘people like us’, as the title of the report suggests, shows a similarity between people from refugee backgrounds and others.Footnote 101 From their point of view, this message could increase a sense of connection with people from refugee backgrounds and the rest of the population and could therefore have a wider social impact. In fact, the report notes that ‘refugees are just like us’ was one of the frequent comments made by visitors.Footnote 102 While the emphasis on ‘people like us’ may introduce an alternative to the overwhelmingly racialised stereotypes and dehumanising portrayals of refugees in Australia’s dominant political discourse, I argue that it is not without problems, as it regenerates a simulacrum of the Australian self through the figure of people-like-us.
This figure recalls Chouliaraki’s observation on the changing forms of humanitarian solidarity. This form of solidarity, she suggests, has a ‘theatrical structure’ taking the form of a ‘mirror structure, where this encounter is reduced to an often narcissistic self-reflection that involves people like “us”’.Footnote 103 Indeed, the figure of people-like-us emphasised by the Council seeks to foster care and empathy by enforcing an ideal of resemblance in the form of sameness, not difference. This is the figure ‘we’ like and like to support, because we identify with it due to ‘our’ sameness, commonality, and proximity. The figure of people-like-us is no longer a threatening or unknown other, but a friendly one who has feelings, emotions, and families just ‘like us’. The first problematic aspect of this figure is that the ‘ideal refugee’ once again assumes a concrete identity, the one who mirrors ‘us’. This construction simultaneously posits an ideal identity for ‘us’ and then requires refugees to mimic this identity, defined mostly by positive attributes, including tangible contributions to the nation. Such constructions reproduce the familiar tropes of Australian multiculturalism, which, as has long been argued in the scholarship, only welcomes familiar diversity, not different differences.Footnote 104 The figure of people-like-us, unfortunately, constructs, once again, sameness and proximity as a threshold of solidarity and empathy.
The second problematic aspect of this figure is that it does not eliminate the idea of the threatening stranger that it seeks to contest. Rather, it replicates the very figure of the stranger, because familiarity can only be embodied through what Ahmed calls, ‘the figure of the strange stranger’.Footnote 105 That is to say, the figure of the familiar (and ideal) refugee demands knowability and/or predictability. This figure takes shape only by excluding the unknowable, undesirable or suspicious strangers. To put it differently, the figure of the familiar refugee does not exclude the figure of the threatening stranger that it seeks to challenge, because it essentially requires binary oppositions to compose itself. The unknowable or undesirable stranger remains threatening. The figure of people-like-us therefore can only tolerate a particular figure of the stranger, a familiar one, not a ‘strange stranger’.Footnote 106
In conclusion, I suggest that the figure of the familiar refugee, the one who is ‘like us’, generates a simulacrum of the Australian self, a hyperreal self, that is constructed through positive attributes. The simulacrum in this case is the simulation of the simulated Australian self that celebrates the construction of a self who is imagined in the national imaginary as welcoming, caring and compassionate. This celebrated self, however, is a violent one because it is constructed through an act of forgetting. This act comfortably hides how boundaries of care have been enacted and weaponised to colonise, imprison, and control the unwanted, ‘strange stranger’ in the Australian body politic, whether they are First Nations peoples, Indigenous children, people from ‘non-white’ backgrounds, refugees or asylum seekers. This Australian self has been reproduced through repeatedly reviving the fiction of terra nullius by (re)enacting the boundaries of care and compassion at different sites, which are considered ‘empty’, waiting to be invaded and shaped through Australian colonial dreams and fantasies of who ‘we’ are. These sites have been first emptied and then populated with different bodies, who are made objects of governmental care. Silverstein calls this form of care and empathy ‘cruel care’: a form of political technology informed by the racialised logic inherent in settler colonialism and preserved not always through the visibility of its violence (at sites such as detention centres, prisons, youth detention facilities, missions, stations or reserves), but also through its invisibility, everydayness, and normalisation in Australian multiculturalism.Footnote 107 In short, the simulacrum of the Australian-self re-invents itself with its institutions, sites, and technologies of ‘cruel care’. Perhaps, therefore, the emphasis on the figure of the familiar refugee, who looks ‘like us’, in these simulations may limit the possibilities of radical alternatives for solidarity.
Conclusion
By mobilising a Deleuzian concept of simulacrum, this paper sought to introduce a new area of inquiry in our discussion of borders. The central purpose of this paper, however, was not simply theoretical or methodological. Rather, by looking at two different forms of refugee simulations, it aimed to explore the ways in which refugee simulations can act as alternative sites of solidarity. Driven by the language of empathy, refugee simulations presented us with a good example of how to move towards forms of solidarity that resist closures and fixed narratives, including those created through our own critical scholarly concepts. I argued that when solidarity is imagined with the language of the self (the major) and its celebration (production) of the universality of refugee figures and experiences, it becomes a blockage that perpetuates the cramped spaces of borders, rather than challenging them. Within this context, the discussion of the simulacrum has sought to contest the contemporary celebration of relationality in our discussions of borders and refugee solidarity and suggested looking closely at how such encounters driven by the language of empathy and solidarity may (perhaps unintentionally) empower the contemporary violent diagrams of borders.
In conclusion, the paper used the example of refugee simulations to encourage all to question the sites of solidarity created by the major and to offer a glimpse of hope for alternative futures. As a final note, I suggest that contestations of the prevailing order need to begin with questioning what subject positions ‘we’ inhabit within the diagram of border politics and how our encounters presuppose, given identities with names and positions. Solidarity does not require appropriating someone else’s experiences, journeys, and identity, nor does it require creating humanitarian figures. Instead, ‘active solidarity’ requires going beyond the familiar boundaries of care and empathy, and as Chouliaraki suggests, this begins with the world beyond ‘us’, by confronting ‘us’ with ‘the uncomfortable questions of power, otherness and justice’.Footnote 108 Stierl calls this form of solidarity ‘migratory solidarity’.Footnote 109 Such a form of solidarity, Stierl suggests, first requires that ‘we’, who do not experience or are not affected by border violence, to question in whose name border violence is enacted, reproduced, and normalised. It does not, however, end with questioning one’s own identity and positionality within the diagrams of borders. It ultimately requires the re-invention of the ‘we’, calling for collective struggles that are empowered by ‘cross-identity, a process leaving the subject in in-between spaces without identitarian stability’.Footnote 110
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors, reviewers, and all those who gave me generous feedback and inspiration. All mistakes are mine.
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