Transcript



TranscriptEuroStorie Podcast, episode 2: The many faces of migration[intro music][Paolo Amorosa, PA] Hello everyone and welcome to the second installment of the EuroStorie Podcast series. My name is Paolo Amorosa and hosting this podcast with me will be my colleague Bea Bergholm.[Bea Bergholm, BB] Hi everyone.[PA] This podcast will bring you closer to high quality research about Europe and give you an idea of what researchers from different backgrounds have to say about the history and current situation of Europe.[BB] And in today's episode, we're talking with Magdalena Kmak. Magda is the team leader of subproject 3 at EuroStorie and she is also a professor of Public International Law in ?bo Akademi. Warmly welcome, Magda.[Magdalena Kmak, MK] Thank you and hello everybody.[BB] We have invited Magda here to talk with us because we wanted to talk about human rights and minority rights in today's episode.So let's get straight to the point. We hope you enjoy listening to us and this podcast.[PA] OK, so, Magda would you like to start by briefly describing your work? What topics you're specialized in and what projects do you have going on at the moment? How did you come to work at EuroStorie?[MK] Alright, so as you already mentioned, I'm a professor of public international law and my specialization is migration, a minority related research. And I've been working for many years with various aspects of relationships between law and migration and law and mobility. Actually, I started as a lawyer working with refugees and migrants in one of the biggest Polish NGOs, Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. And at the same time I was working on my PhD on expulsion of foreigners in the human rights law.But I came a long way from those times until now and currently I'm a team leader in the subproject 3 of EuroStorie. And subproject 3 focuses on the questions of migration and narratives of Europe as an area of freedom, security, and justice. And I am very much interested in the multifaceted relationship between law and mobility. So not only in how law regulates mobility, but also how mobility affects legal changes, but also how law creates in mobilities, how law moves itself, because law can move together with people.Finally, also, I'm very much interested in mobility, understood as quality of a law. So mobility as quality of being in general. So what philosopher would say, the ontological quality, right? But that's something that is one aspect of this relationship and I'm interested in this kind of multifaceted links with each other with mobility and in law.[PA] So you work on this sensitive and incredibly important topics in various roles. Across your career, you've been a lawyer and academic. Maybe one word someone would use is that of activist. How do you see the limits and the negotiation between these positions according to your experiences?[MK] It's a very good question and I think it's also a very difficult one. I think I started as an activist, and then that activist that was perhaps writing her PhD…But then along the years, this position has shifted and I think right now I would say I'm an academic that is interested in social justice questions. I think there are different schools and I think there are people saying that you cannot be both at the same time, that either you have to choose your own academic with the activist interest or you are an activist with academic interest, I would agree with that. I think it's very difficult to negotiate these two roles, but of course there are people who are successfully able to do that, so it's perhaps also like a personal issue and the way how people are able to negotiate between those different types of roles or positions.[BB] Mm.[MK] In my case, I think it has been shifting along the years and I think it's also linked with what type of questions one is asking and what kind of task one is doing so, so it's boils down also to that.[BB] That's some self-reflection you have to do on that topic I guess.[BB] You have an edited book coming out next year together with Heta Bj?rklund, called Refugee Scholarship and Refugee Knowledges of Europe. Would you tell us a bit about that book? Like what does refugee knowledge mean in practice and what is the main topic of the book, and what kind of perspective does it take on refugees?[MK] Right, the point of departure of the book is that there is a certain knowledge about refugees and this knowledge is being created by institutions, migration officers, legal regulations, politicians and so on.And there seems to be a general idea... Who are the refugees? How do they look like? How should they behave, and so on and so forth. So if they don't behave like that, or if they don't look in a way that has been expected of them, then they're sometimes even considered, not the genuine refugees, right? There is a lot of discussion concerning, you know, who is a genuine refugee and who is a so-called bogus asylum seeker.[BB] Right.[MK] I think we can observe in the EU that, and I don't think only in EU, in other places or countries as well, that the identity is being defined against some sort of groups, right? So refugees can be those, others, that are not us and we define ourselves against the others. And this is a very state-centric perspective.So the idea of the book is to shift a gaze and look at not only the knowledges of refugees, but what kind of knowledges refugees have about Europe? So how Europe is being known by refugees. How it’s being discussed? How it’s being experienced and this is very much at heart of the subproject 3 of EuroStorie. So what kind of narratives about Europe are there that we perhaps don't know about that should be brought into the fore.So the book shifts the gaze from state to the mobile persons themselves and it follows the philosophy of American philosopher Thomas Nagel who has been recently trying to think how our political world would look like if you would consider not the statehood and not the citizen, but the mobile person as a kind of primary subject. How we could conceptualize or think about our political system, institutions and so on and so forth. So this book attempts to shift this gaze. This can be done in many ways, but what I have been interested in my research is the way how knowledge is being created through the experience of mobility, and in particular the academic knowledge. So hence we discuss the question of refugee knowledges. The book is based on the premise that the knowledge is also created through experience of movement. For instance, the experience of refuge. This idea emerged when I was working in… Paolo, you asked how have I ended up working in EuroStorie, right? So I used to work with Kaius Tuori’s previous project on reinventing the foundations of European legal culture. I was studying the scholarly careers and scientific work of refugee scholars from Nazi Germany in the USA. And the aim of this book is based on a kind of continuation of this work.So the aim of this book is to open up and problematize and contextualize the concept of refugee scholarship in contemporary Europe. Obviously, there is no one refugee knowledge like there is no one type of migrant or refugee. So, this is again against this kind of generalized idea that there are certain types of people. And another premise of this book, which I think is very important that also links to this interest in the relationship between law and mobility is that the experience of being a refugee or the experience of being an exile influenced the direction of scientific work of these academics. So in other words, something that we all know, but it's sometimes easy to forget, is that science is not done in vacuum. The scientist is not the person that sits somewhere and just comes up with some sort of scientific claims. But it's the researcher as a person who functions in the certain environment, has certain experiences and a certain background, and that of course affects the academic work.And the book emerged from collaborated effort by a group of scholars from subproject 3, and as a follow-up of the roundtable that we organized at one of the conferences on the title “Coming home, the post-war return of refugee scholarship”. And for this roundtable we invited scholars who are either refugees themselves or who focus in their own research on refugees or who are both refugees and looking at refugee related questions.And we've been asking them, what does it mean for them to be a refugee scholar, what does the concept of home mean for them? And the discussions focus on the links between, you know, the reason of fleeing the country and the topic one studies, the role of language, the adaptation strategies, or you know, general situations of the contemporary academia.And then we took this discussion further, so we thought, OK, let's have a book about it, so hopefully the book will come out next year. I'm really looking forward to that.[BB] Yeah, me too! Sounds good. You mentioned, I mean I think that what you're saying is that academics and scholars are people just like everyone else. Like, we have our background, we have our experiences or history, our hopes and dreams. But do you have any concrete examples of how the experience of, for example, exile or refuge affects the scholars’ work?[MK] One of the examples I can mention is a historical one. Many of the refugee academics or the exile academics that left to the US in the 1930s and 1940s had to, in a sense, reinvent themselves academically. I mean many different scholars from different disciplines have to kind of rethink what they're doing, and in case of lawyers, there has been quite a big change because law is such a discipline that it's very difficult to do it abroad, unless you have perhaps a focus on international or comparative law.[PA] You do know that [chuckles].[MK] Right. But if you study a civil or criminal law, it's very difficult to go to other countries and teach it or do research about it. So that was one of the examples and I was very curious whether I can point to this link between the experience of being a refugee or being an exile, and the kind of direction of the academic career.So for that reason I also interviewed a couple of legal scholars who are currently scholars at risk. And I was trying to figure out, you know, ask them, has you academic career changed after you left your country? Would you do something else if you would stay at home? So those were the topics that I've been very much interested in. [BB] OK, I guess we'll have to read more in the book then when it comes out. [MK] Yes, I highly recommend it![BB] So, in the last episode with Kaius Tuori, we touched upon the topic of what Europe looks like from the outside. For example, for people who are wishing to enter Europe for different reasons. And we often think of these people as refugees or migrants, but obviously there are other people too. But if we now focus on migrants, how would you describe the Europe that is seen by them? What are the most kind of prominent types of narratives about Europe and do you have any concrete examples of this?[MK] I think, um, we need to of course understand that there are different types of migrants, right? So some people come for holidays, some people come to do business, some people come to look for protections. So in subproject 3 of EuroStorie, we are studying or looking into those different narratives. And of course we are in the middle of the research, so I cannot really point to a very concrete type of narrative.However, there are certain ideas that we are having already, and for instance, our colleague Laura Sumari, who is a doctoral student, studies how Europe is culturally constructed as a space of security or insecurity for migrants coming from African countries and how the introduced measures in Europe reinforce the division between global South and the global North. And that's something that really comes out from that type of research. I think we will be in for some surprises also. I think what I can say right now is that not really all people want to come to Europe. I think Europe is not really like the main place where people are going in the world. And that also if you look at statistics, European Union is not the place where there is the biggest amount of refugees right? For instance, Laura interviewed people in Nairobi in one of the refugee centers and the destination they all wanted to go was South Africa rather than the European Union. So I think we have this idea that everyone wants to come here ([BB] Exactly, yeah.) but I think the picture is much more nuanced. People have different interests and people have different plans and I think there are different needs and different contacts around the world. So I think it's much more nuanced and we come back again to what I said before. That we have this idea about refugees, certain type of unified idea of certain kind of, you know, we seem to essentialize them in certain way or label them in certain way, but I think this research will show that the picture is much more complicated.Another example which I can mention is another colleague, Daria Krivonos, who is a postdoctoral researcher in EuroStorie. She is currently studying how Poland is being perceived by the young migrants from Ukraine in the context of Europe. So is Poland Europe or for whom Poland is Europe. These are very interesting questions and I think of course they would be the best people to discuss this. But those are examples of what we are doing, what we are focusing on and that will surely soon come out as a publication one way or another.[BB] Exactly, yeah, and I think that's one example of why this kind of research is so important, because usually the talk is quite eurocentric and kind of generalized, so to voice those different aspects of everything. So maybe we'll have to have both Laura and Daria here for the next episodes, so we'll see what we can do.[PA] Moving on but not so much. Let's take the European perspective instead. Europe has traditionally been seen as promising human rights, security, stability and cooperation for those coming from outside of Europe. But especially since the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, there has been quite a straightforward change where several countries have set up stricter border control and indicated that refugees are not welcome. Has this change in policies and practice affected how Europe is seen, has it become less desired?[MK] It's again a really good question, and of course, that's something that has been focused on by many academics and activists, but what I think is that the COVID-19, I think I mentioned it for the first time today [chuckles], but I think that the COVID-19 has actually shown that nothing really has changed in the sense that despite changes and despite border closures, people are still attempting to come to Europe. Which means that this is a good counter-argument for those who say that our policies are too lenient. It's only because you know it's so easy to come and so easy to apply for asylum that people are coming. So there have been over the years, the policies became stricter, but it doesn't seem that it stops people from coming. So perhaps the reason is different. People are not coming because they find it easy to come here and and find it easy to stay here, but perhaps there is a real serious reason for them to leave their homes and then come here.I've recently read the statistics that during last couple of weeks there have been quite a lot of deaths in the Mediterranean because the countries close themselves. So Italy, Malta and others stop taking refugees, but people are still coming. So that's one of the arguments that people are coming nevertheless, even though the conditions are much more stricter.[BB] And maybe it's just not in the news so much at the moment when the COVID has taken over the news media quite completely.[MK] That is true, and of course we can easily see that the so-called refugee crisis is not really like a security issue for Europe, because suddenly it's not in the news, there are some other problems that we're dealing with that are much more serious right now. So I think that's also an indicator of that perception of refugees as being this enormous security threat somehow disappeared. Or maybe it is still there, but it's somehow not as a big threat as we thought or as it has been discussed.At the same time, of course, I am not very surprised by such a change. I'm not surprised by the securitization of migration and how the border control measures become more strict. Because that has been basically embedded in the way how the European legislation has been set up or created. Even in the early treaties. I think in the Maastricht Treaties migration has been lumped together with crime protection in the in the treaties article K1 of the Treaty of Maastricht regulates in the same chapter issues related to migration, refugees, criminal collaboration between nation states and so on and so forth. So it's not directly linked together, but it deals with them in the same space ([BB] OK) and some of these scholars who have been studying those questions more deeply were claiming that this kind of sets the tone and sets the perspective towards migrants.[PA] I would say that that goes beyond the Maastricht treaties. For instance, you have written a piece about the naming of the new European Commission, the current European Commission. When there was a position for the commissioner for protecting the European way of life. Can you open up that please?[MK] The new commissioner portfolio in the new Commission has been named at the very beginning, “protecting the European way of life”. And that portfolio has been very much linked with border control and securitization, and I think this is exactly the perspective that we've seen already over the years. I think now somehow it became very open. Perhaps that's the difference. Now of course it has been changed to “promoting our European way of life”, which I think is also problematic.[PA] Slightly less [chuckling].[MK] In the blog post in Politiikasta.fi that you mentioned that I wrote together with Elisa Pascucci, we discussed those questions and also you know, what is the European way of life. That's another big topic that I would need to open up at some moment, but definitely there’s been a discussion. Or there’ve been certain types of arguments linking migration with a threat to Europe, to European way of life, whatever it means, and I think it's very problematic and I think it has to be unpacked. I think it also has to be linked into the way how migration has been treated or regulated in the EU law, for instance.[PA] Definitely.[PA] So you mentioned the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on migration and how it has been treated in the news and maybe we can open that up a bit more too.Well, in general, when there are major crises like the COVID-19 pandemic that tend to hit hardest people there are in risk, such as refugees, migrants and minorities. And one could draw connection between the disproportionate consequences of the pandemic on minorities and the protest against systemic racism widespread in US at the moment and happening also to a lesser extent in Europe.At the same time, as you said, the issues related to migration previously so central seemed to have disappeared from the news cycle. One would assume though, that the plight of refugees and migrants breaching Europe has been further worsened by the restriction and events that have been linked to the pandemic. So, what's your take further, looking at these developments?[MK] Yeah, I think the pandemic has exposed a lot of tensions that have been present before but now were quite amplified. And it also exposed some absurdities or certain type of dominant discourses that are very problematic. I've already mentioned the fact that suddenly the refugee crisis stopped existing at all, like basically in one week.Also, there have been other very interesting developments. For instance, Finnish Prime Minister has called FInns to return home because of the pandemic, but it didn't seem to concern the Finnish citizens who are in turn in the Al-Hol refugee camp, which has been considered very problematic. And the discussion concerning the rights of women and children who are in the Al-Hol camp has dominated the Finnish political discourse. So we can clearly see that there are good and bad citizens, right? In that some of them are more welcome than the others. Another case concerns the migrant workers employed in agriculture. I think this is a very interesting development as well. We can see that suddenly people in European Union countries are not able to pick up the crops and there is a need for people who are actually skilled in doing that. And as Daria Krivonos, who wrote a very good blog post recently on that topic, she referred to kind of absurd situation where people who are called unskilled workers actually have certain necessary skills that Finnish citizens don't have. They would need to be trained to do the job, to pick up the crops, which is obviously very costly. So now we have to take those migrant workers from Ukraine, right? Also, as I wrote, there was a question relating also to the fair pay for the work. So the question is quite complicated, but I think this type of issues have been exposed or brought to the light. It's something that we haven't been really thinking about, but it's very interesting. Also when you observe the reactions of the different EU nation states to the rights of migrants during the pandemic… Of course, many or most of the countries have closed their borders, some of them froze the refugee procedures or the residence permit application procedures. Others did not allow asylum seekers already present at the territory to apply for asylum.But at the same time, for instance, Portugal has granted citizenship rights to all migrants and asylum seekers who have residency applications underway.[BB] Yeah, very different approaches.[MK] Yeah, I think it makes sense that if there are people on the territory of the country, it would be really good in times of pandemic that they had access to health care. And they have access to accommodation that is safe for them and for everyone. So, clearly, we don't have a very common refugee migration policy in Europe, and I think also those tensions between different states have been shown and highlighted and amplified somehow. I'm sure there will be more of this type of interesting examples that one could find that has taken place during the time of pandemic.[BB] Sure, yeah, that's a valid point. Do you think that a common migration policy for the entire European Union would make it easier to handle the situation in exceptional cases like pandemics?[MK] Well, in principle we have a common European asylum system.[BB] Right, but it's not applied very consistently.[MK] No, it's not, and in practice the differences in different countries regarding, for instance recognition rates, the rights of migrants, even though they're supposed to be the same, are very very different. I think the migration policy has been called the last bastion of sovereignity for states and I think states are trying to keep that side for themselves to decide. But I don't think it's possible in such times as the global pandemic to lock yourself and deal with those questions on the national level. I think policies which are based on collaboration proved to be much more beneficial in the end and I hope that this will teach the states something. But I don't know.[BB] Yeah, that remains to be seen.[BB] So, moving on to a bit different topics. You have also done historical research on the experiences of exile scholars across the 20th century, like you already mentioned. Can you think of any parallelism or continuity that you would find particularly instructive or inspiring in regards to the current events?[MK] I think, um, what is of course very obvious is that scholars continue to be targeted in different places by different regimes and that what happened in Nazi Germany that's what's happening also currently.Even though a lot has changed in the world, politics and the academia from the 1930s and 1940s, there is surprisingly a lot of commonalities in the experience of exiled scholars and refugee scholars. Currently one threat is the securitization, I think that's something that I've already mentioned, and I think securitization or security perspective has been very much present. For instance, in 1930s, I think Hannah Arendt has been referring to that in the Origins of Totalitarianism.Um, another example is this victim and a threat dichotomy, where migrants are considered to be either the victims of persecution or the security threat. And I think that has been very much present and very much visible.And of course there are always scholars that need protection. I think the Scholars at Risk Network, which is a network of the universities that attempts to help refugee and exiled scholars, or has helped more than 700 scholars since they've been established. So when you look into the commonalities, you can clearly see that there are some common experiences that those scholars, historical figures and the contemporary scholars, would have. And of course that's related to the legal status in the country, the knowledge of language, the focus on human rights and justice. That's what I also found out.The way how they discussed this scholarly identity, the relationship with one's home country, so these issues came up both in the biographies of the historical figures and in the interviews that I conducted with a few scholars.So the scholarly work is of course affected by the multifaceted positionality of the researcher. That's also what I mentioned before. And the way how they react to the world. So these experiences have been influencing the academic research.Another similarity is that scholars have been losing their field of research or were not able to continue with the topics that they've been working on before.[BB] You mean in their home countries? [MK] For instance, yes, in the home countries.This is actually, I found it quite funny. There are lots of very mundane matters that remain the same or very similar, despite the way how academia has changed since 1940s, 1950s. When I visited the archives in Albany, that's the German-Jewish Intellectual Refugee Collection, and I looked at a couple of names of legal scholars. What has been very prominent in the archives is that they've been very much complaining that they don't have time to do research, that there is so much administrative work that they have to do, [BB and PA chuckle] and they have thousands of PhD theses to read. So they kept apologizing for not being able to write an article or write a book and so on and so forth. So that was quite funny actually. [BB] Sounds familiar to many academics today.[MK] Indeed. But I think that despite those differences, scholars still keep reflecting on the position and on the experiences perhaps more than other refugees and migrants. But of course, at the same time, with the change of technologies, I think it's possible to also discuss and talk about those issues with migrants and refugees themselves. Not only scholar but other people who travel and who move.[BB] Thanks Magda, those are some really great points and really make one think. I feel like we could continue with this topic for hours to an end, but… [MK: Yes, definitely.] Yeah, maybe it's time to wrap it up with some a bit more off topic, light questions.[BB] So we were wondering what book has influenced your thinking or inspired you the most? And it can be an academic one, or maybe a fictional one.[MK] OK, this is a really tough one. Probably one of the toughest questions today. OK, because I really read a lot, practically nonstop. I like to have a couple of thousand books on my phone all the time, but I think Olga Tokarczuk's books have been really close to my heart for a long time. Because her main focus or main theme of her books, and that's something that she talks about herself, is crossing borders as a way of life. [BB] Okay.[MK] And that's something that's been always very inspiring and something that in a sense, links with my work but also links with something that that I find very important also in my own life. So Olga Tokarczuk is, as you all know, the recent Nobel laureate in literature from Poland and all her books have been always looking at movement, mobility, at crossing different types of borders, not necessarily geographical borders, but also social borders and societal borders and so on and so forth. How movement and mobility are constitutive for different ideas and different forms, and how prominent they are for us, and development of ideas and so on.[PA] If you could go back in the history of mankind, where would you go and why?[MK] [Chuckles] It's a good question, very difficult question. I mean, if I would go back in history as a female scholar, I don’t think I would be able to go safely anywhere back in time. I would be in a great risk, instead of being a professor, ending up, you know, spending my days knitting or washing my husband’s dirty laundry. [Chuckles] That’s not something I’m interested in doing. [BB] You couldn’t do what you’re doing for a living now.[MK] I think I would be interested in going back to really old times, times before agriculture and before the creation of the modern nation states, with which I have a quite complicated relationship. That would be extremely interesting. I think the times we could characterize by mobility rather than times of migration, because for migration you need borders, right? Without borders there is no migration, there is only mobility and movement. If we could consider mobility as a primary phenomenon and migration as something secondary, then I would be really interested to see how human relationships before borders have existed, in the contemporary way. How the world of mobility looks like, rather than the world of migration that we got to know right now. That would be extremely interesting. [BB] That’s a good answer.[PA] I think it’s interesting that you’re only our second guest but both of you, also Kaius Tuori before you, put the hands forward when we asked this question and said that “Maybe I wouldn’t want to go back”. Kaius made the point that these are people that are incredibly different from us, that we wouldn’t really enjoy being with. Why do you think that is, that both of you didn’t want to engage, is it a historical awareness of a researcher or something else?[BB] [Chuckles][MK] Perhaps that. Probably I would be more interested in going to the future and see what’s there.[PA] Good point![MK] Perhaps the space travels would be something. [BB] Maybe we should modify the question.[MK] [Chuckles] But I think that maybe it’s some sort of awareness. And of course we have a certain understanding of history that would or could be very nuanced, of course we don’t know very much and of course we study history from our own perspectives. So perhaps I’m not trusting enough in what has been happening before…But maybe the future would be more interesting. [PA] Yeah and of course there are good point. Because I often say to myself that maybe I would have lived better, I don’t know, in the late 19th century, but then I think imperialism, tuberculosis…maybe not. [MK] I think there were other pandemics then and I’m not sure I would want to go through those. [BB] Alright, I think it’s good to end here with dreams of the future. Thanks everyone for listening to our podcast, I hope you enjoyed it. And thank you Magda for visiting us, and thank you Paolo.[PA] Thanks, Bea.[MK] Thank you so much for inviting me.[BB] And remember that you can follow us on the EuroStorie website, and on Twitter @eurostorie. We really hope you give us some feedback and tell us what you thought about the episodes.[PA] See you next time![BB] Yeah, thanks, see you and stay tuned for the next episodes![outro music] ................
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