Book Review: Beyond the Western Gaze? A Postcolonial Perspective on Agency in Contemporary Works on Migration

In this article I am applying a postcolonial perspective to the books under review arguing that the structures of Western institutionalised knowledge production can work as an additional structure of domination and exclusion for migrants, especially in an academic context. ¹ This endeavour relates to an emerging critique claiming that migration studies are still fundamentally entangled in a ‘coloniality of knowledge’. ² Very prominent within those debates have been problems of representing migrant agency. From a poststructuralist perspective I argue that every construction of migrant agency – in fact every knowledgeable practice – is productive and an exercise of power on the side of the researcher ³ with significant consequences for how migration is understood but also for (recommended) policies and perceptions around migration. Especially in a Western context, a certain form of subject and thus a certain form of agency is often presupposed and universalised. ⁴ Thus, the question that guides this article is how do we as researchers recognise the agency of migrants and how do we create space for them to express their needs, ideas and rights claims in ways that do not homogenise their experiences or tie their agency to predefined Western values? What is at stake here, is that some people – in this case migrants – might not be able to speak, and even if they are, cannot be heard by a Western audience and thus, cannot participate properly in society due to being embedded within a bulwark of Western knowledge production. With that I mean a specific normative and semantic context of thinking and articulation that is based on ideas of rationality and the possibility of a free and autonomous subject. These are ideas of what enables people to act, how to formulate (convincing) arguments, how to tell a plausible story, and the categories of meaning through which we make sense of the world from a Western perspective.

Embarking on a postcolonial critique, I understand postcolonialism as the project of critique towards Western hegemony and Eurocentrism and its proclaimed superiority of knowledge and representation ⁵ with the aim to deconstruct European universalism by stressing its particularity from a global perspective. ⁶ The ‘West’ and the ‘Non-West’ must be understood as co-constitutive in this regard, neither can exist without the other and the result are not two separate spheres, but hybrid forms of practice, discourse, etc. (being aware that I reproduce this binary in this article). Thus, while the postcolonial refers to situations and problems that followed decolonisation, this does not only concern formerly colonising or colonised countries anymore, rather these conditions travel and are transformed across contexts and people. Consequently, there can never be a form of (migrant) agency that is purely ‘Western’ or purely ‘Non-Western’ and the tensions arising from this premise are central for understanding the complexities of conceptualising migrant agency.

The books in question do an excellent job in challenging many of the problematic consequences of the questions raised and it is exactly for this reason that I consider it relevant to explore how the epistemic coloniality of migration studies still has an (inevitable) impact on those already critical works. Thus, I understand them as ‘hard cases’ that illustrate and strengthen the point I am making. The books under review stand united in a profound critique of humanitarian frames of migration and migration management, ⁷ which victimise migrants and limit the forms of support imaginable and feasible within a humanitarian framing. From this critique I conclude that the authors assign agency to migrants in their own conceptualisations which can induce change and have positive social and political effects. An agential lens is central here as I will demonstrate how each main argument made in the books depends on an underlying affirmative conception of migrant agency.

Migrant Agency From a Postcolonial Perspective

In the following sections I will explicate how the authors of each book construct their conceptions of migrant agency and from there formulate a postcolonial critique towards them. I will do this by embedding each work within the debate between Critical Theory and Poststructuralism. ⁸ While the origins of this debate reach far back, I argue that it is still highly relevant for any discussion about agency, autonomy and resistance today. These theoretical strands promote two very different conceptions of agency, one that is emancipatory and one that is complex and diffuse. I consider these two conceptions a spectrum on which various characterisations of agency can be positioned. Thus, by applying this debate to the books, I understand those works as leaning towards one side of the spectrum not as outright representatives of one or the other.

Within the theoretical realm of Critical Theory emancipation has been understood as the liberation of the individual subject from structures of oppression to enable those subjects to fulfil their individual potential. The central question of Critical Theory is: what are the conditions under which human potential can be fully realised? ⁹ This conceptualisation tends to reify agents and structures as entities of distinct ontological qualities tying agency to attributes like consciousness and freedom. ¹⁰ Consequently, the concept has been tied to predefined normative aims – be it equality, security, justice, liberation, etc. Migrant agency is thus defined as part of a path towards emancipation and liberation from unjust structures. This understanding has been followed and critiqued by a poststructuralist relationist approach, which takes interactions as its starting point emphasising much more the performative constitution of agency and seeing it as a relational effect; the ability to act derives from an individual entity’s embeddedness in a network and links to other entities. ¹¹ Thus, agency is context-dependent and emergent. Within this understanding, migrant agency emerges as much more diffuse and entangled in a complex web of power structures, which are unstable, though. Power and agency are in constant flux and negotiation which enables moments of rupture and appropriation from actors.

This debate has found its way into Critical Migration Studies, even though not explicitly. Some strands of the literature argue, for example, that migrants’ agency in very violent and excluding border contexts is necessarily limited and can only be expressed through desperate strategies of survival. ¹² Others assign migrants and their movements a constitutive agency that can evade attempts of control and is economically, culturally and socially transformative. ¹³ While agency in these debates cannot be reduced to resistance, as it is the broader concept compared to resistance, I understand resistance as a social activity that involves agency, ¹⁴ a particular form of agency so to speak. However, there is a danger of romanticising resistance, solely searching for and explaining resistance, and this way fixing ideas of what agency is supposed to be. ¹⁵ Therefore, I conceptualise migrant agency from a Foucauldian perspective as ‘constituted through processes of subjectification that involve struggles over the de/legitimisation of different forms of subjectivity’ ¹⁶ and subsequently as a tool for a diagnostic of power itself. ¹⁷ One should mention, however, that this is a conception of migrant agency that is particularly tailored to the phenomenon of unauthorised or precarious migration – which is the type of migration the books under review primarily focus on. With other types of migration questions of intentionality, strategic action and the forms agency can take, pose themselves in different ways. ¹⁸ Thus, I argue for a conception of agency that affirms migrants’ capability to act and impact while at the same time recognising its constant entanglement with power. This conception of agency fits well with a postcolonial perspective, as I will show in the following.

These two debates have also met criticism. Very simply put, Critical Theory has been criticised for overemphasising the agency of often-subaltern subjects and presupposing a specific type of (Western) subject that is able to act in the first place ¹⁹ while poststructuralism has been accused of ‘losing’ the agency of the subject entirely within the machinery of all engaging power structures. ²⁰ Related to that, I want to emphasise that the debate between Critical Theory, Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory revolves around a dilemma that cannot sufficiently be solved and thus, researchers have to find their own ways to deal with this in every individual case. In the end both Critical Theory and Poststructuralism dominate and leave the subject destabilised, each in different ways, which means that a ‘real’ liberation and emancipation from these power structures is impossible. This problem is reflected, for example, in the difficulty – and in fact impossibility – of recovering ‘original’ subaltern voices and integrating them into a Western context as they are immediately absorbed into and adapted to that exact context, a problem Gayatri Spivak among others has drawn attention to. ²¹ It is also demonstrated in the struggle to go ‘beyond’ the Western–non-Western binary and finding appropriate terms and concepts (e.g. beyond Global North and Global South) through which relevant differences and injustices can be expressed without homogenising certain experiences, groups of people, etc. The three books under review illustrate this dilemma as they encounter the same problems, although they already deal very critically with the problems outlined at the beginning of this article. Postcolonial theory cannot provide a way out of this dilemma. In fact, these three theories cannot be thought of separately as postcolonialism is mainly a perspective – not a coherent theory in itself – that can be theoretically underpinned with either more neo-Marxist or poststructuralist approaches. However, postcolonial theory can offer an appropriate approach towards this dilemma by emphasising how marginalised subaltern subjects are subordinated by intersected power structures in which we are all inevitably embedded and which we reproduce while theorising, and at the same time affirming their agency and formulating a political agenda to transform these power structures. I will further illustrate this argument in the last section of this article. My main point is therefore to acknowledge this dilemma, to be more outspoken about it and to potentially find remedy in embracing the tensions that come with it.

Those kinds of investigations can be readily applied to the three works under review which are Asylum as Reparation, Care Ethics and the Refugee Crisis and The Ethics of Exile. All books deal with questions of justice and recognition around migration in a thought-provoking way. Since these are issues which are also at the heart of postcolonial theory, I consider it insightful to bring these perspectives together in this review article. In what follows I will explicate how each book conceptualises migrant agency and from there formulate a common critique or question towards them. After I position each book on this spectrum, I will demonstrate how a postcolonial perspective can act as a bridge between different approaches and provide a remedy to the dilemma outlined above by putting positionality into the spotlight, which has been a significant part of an emerging decolonising agenda within migration studies. ²²

Reparative Justice for Refugees in Asylum as Reparation

In Asylum as Reparation – Refuge and Responsibility for the Harms of Displacement James Souter makes an argument for supplementing the moral functions of asylum with a reparative approach to ‘engage fully with the moral significance of the causes of contemporary forced migration, and particularly its external international causes’. ²³ Thus, the author argues that states have responsibilities to offer asylum to refugees where they have caused or contributed to their forced movement. ²⁴ Souter develops a systematic account and theoretical framework of when this specific obligation commences and what it obtains. ²⁵ He starts with criticising humanitarian asylum for neglecting the underlying drivers and causes of displacement. ²⁶ Thus, Souter argues for an additional reparative function of asylum, which carries more moral weight and enables the formulation of specific and far-reaching obligations (e.g. claims for permanent residence and full compensations for the harms being inflicted through displacement). In the following, the author explains under which four conditions this special obligation ²⁷ holds and what it entails for states in specific cases and contexts. The first one being outcome responsibility, which means that an actor must be responsible for refugees’ lack of state protection through unjustified displacement, which is the case if there has been a foreseeable connection between an actor’s action and the result of that action. ²⁸ According to the second condition, refugees must have experienced or put at risk of unjustified harm, resulting from that lack of protection. ²⁹ Souter names several forms and causes of harm in this context, such as military interventions of states, the effects of human-made climate change and the consequences of colonial legacies. ³⁰ The third condition asks if asylum is the most fitting form of reparation for the harms caused in any given case and weighed against alternative forms (e.g. repatriation or in situ intervention). ³¹ Finally, the state in question must have a minimum capability to fulfil its obligations and absorb the material, political and cultural costs. ³²

I argue that Souter’s main claim depends on an affirmative conception of migrant agency because in my view his call for a reparative function of asylum is not just based on the misbehaviour and injustices caused by nation states but it also acknowledges the very active movement of people towards the West who claim not only their right to move but their right to be hosted by societies of the West and thus, their right to justice. Moreover, he sees the re-establishment of the dignity and agency of people who have been harmed as an important aspect of reparation. ³³ Through this goal of re-establishing agency, the reparative function of asylum can ultimately strengthen the principle of refugees’ choice (e.g. where to go when the right to asylum as reparation is acknowledged) ³⁴ and thus, it can be argued that it contains an element of emancipation. I therefore claim that Souter’s work leans towards a Critical Theory conception of agency. Consequently, Souter assigns refugees the right and opportunity to be included in the decision-making processes necessary for the implementation of asylum as reparation. He particularly refers to involving refugees and states in the deliberations to assign outcome responsibility, especially in more difficult cases. ³⁵

This proposal raises questions from a postcolonial perspective, though. While refugees’ agency and their preferences are acknowledged, the (Western) model and frame of deliberation as well as the moral reference point is presupposed. In other words, the author offers refugees a seat at the table, the setting and the desired outcome has already been defined, though. Refugees then have the choice to adapt to these circumstances and voice rather limited preferences. Connected to that, it would be interesting to know if Souter also considers the option for refugees to claim these rights for asylum as reparation in courts – which his conditional approach suggests – as this would assign significant agency to refugees themselves and offer a space for their perspectives. In other words, the question if Souter makes a purely moral or a justiciable case for asylum as reparation remains unresolved at this point (Chapters 8 and 9) but in either case it has significant repercussions from a postcolonial perspective. If he does not presume this option, the conditions he proposes are formulated from the perspectives, concerns and interests of nation states. In the end, the proposed conditions allow the assignment of ‘clear’ responsibilities to states, but these conditions are unrelated to the numerous reasons for refugees to move, their aspirations, goals and individual concerns. Even if he does though, the procedural framework within which such claims would have to be made – making one’s case in front of a court and being required to prove one’s righteous claim based on certain criteria – are again tailored towards specific Western forms of litigation and knowledge production. In the context of forced migration this also relates to specific subjectivities available for migrants (e.g. citizen, refugee, illegal migrant, political or economic migrant, etc.), which are in many ways entangled and associated with the colonial past ³⁶ and which are the basis for litigation and rights claiming, especially in the Western world.

Care as Contestation in Care Ethics and the Refugee Crisis

In the book Care Ethics and the Refugee Crisis – Emotions, Contestation, and Agency Marcia Morgan takes issue with the perceived sense of detachment and nihilism among Western audiences with regards to the current ‘refugee crisis’ and asks, ‘why should we care, how do we care, and how can and should we act upon our care about the issue at hand?’. ³⁷ The author develops a conception of care as contestation as a form of care that can trigger socio-political resistance and broader societal transformations. ³⁸ Like Souter, Morgan starts out from a critique of conventional conceptions of humanitarian care that are characterised by value fundamentalism and produce problematic binaries of good and evil. ³⁹ From there, she argues that a new understanding of care can move beyond that. Morgan then focuses on aesthetic stimuli – in this case images of the so called ‘refugee crisis’ and of migrant deaths – which can trigger a transformation of subjectivity. She argues that aesthetic representation can refer to otherness by rupturing and making visible the current order of inclusion/exclusion and thus provoking an affective emotional response which disturbs the integrity of the subject and from there new boundaries of the self can be drawn. ⁴⁰ However, according to Morgan, the aesthetic cannot constitute direct action per se, which necessitates the move to ethics and politics. ⁴¹ Thus, she turns to the realm of ethics and Foucault’s idea of freedom arguing that resistance based on counter conducts can lead to new understandings of ethical subjectivity. ⁴² Acts of contestation are necessary to become a subject, thus, ‘contestation is an expression of freedom’ ⁴³ and she interprets many of migrants’ actions in this way, for example, she considers the bodily presence of migrants at the margins of the United States and the European Union as a form of transnational political assembly. ⁴⁴ Thus, Morgan attributes migrants – who engage in self-care as contestation – the ability to mitigate the power effects of a normalising order and thus, open avenues for social emancipation. ⁴⁵ Here it becomes clear that Morgan assigns migrants the capacity to act and impact, not just because she argues that they already ‘live by example’ what she requires Western observers to do, but because the actions of migrants in border contexts trigger these exact aesthetic and emotional responses. In a next step, the author then adds dependency as being internal to this ethically constituted subjectivity, meaning subjectivity is always constituted intersubjectively in and through an interdependent relation between self and other. In the following, Morgan expands on Hegel’s conception of the human need to have one’s self-consciousness recognised by others ⁴⁶ and subsequently the importance of a structure of witnessing that can catalyse relationality and dialogue with others but also with oneself. ⁴⁷ It is the act of contestation and resistance fuelled with feelings of empathy then that creates a genuine ethical connection between the care provider and the recipients of care that acknowledges the agency of both.

With regards to agency, I further argue that Marcia Morgan’s Care Ethics and the Refugee Crisis moves between the two poles of Critical Theory and Poststructuralism in a very sophisticated way. Throughout the book migrants’ agency appears as a quite independent force with migrants claiming rights and making active choices, which need to be acknowledged especially by a Western audience. ⁴⁸ Thus, she considers migrants’ actions and life strategies as forms of ethical self-constitution and their movements as transnational acts of political assembly. ⁴⁹ This interpretation is also supported by using the concept of witnessing since you can only witness something that is actually there and has an independent effect. ⁵⁰ At the same time, the effects of that agency depend on various more diffuse conditions of reception and perception, be it what kind of pictures are taken of migrants’ suffering or the emotional constitution of the audience that reacts to an aesthetic stimulus. This gives the quality of migrant agency a diffuse element and embeds it in a web of more dense and unpredictable relations, which in my view is not directly connected to a clear emancipatory goal (the emancipatory potential is rather situated on the observer’s side). Nevertheless, Morgan offers an interesting conception relating the two polarised positions of emancipation and diffusion. The author advocates for a form of care that is mainly based on the common normative experience of human suffering and thus, comes from a strong normative stance without reimposing yet another homogenising and simplifying vision of humanitarian care. ⁵¹

From a postcolonial perspective, though, I would have liked to know how exactly Morgan conceptualises the aesthetic. She develops her argument based on the examples of images of migrants’ deaths and suffering in the Mediterranean and the US-Mexican border that recently and sadly have become very well known in the Western world. ⁵² Images, however, are always embedded in a Western discursive context and, for example, have been put in a specific newspaper for a specific purpose, which can have an effect on the way it is perceived – and thus, the affect it produces. ⁵³ In her example of images, does refugees’ agency not emerge precisely from the ‘gaze’ of the Western observer with problematic consequences? I would ask the author then if her conception of the aesthetic includes the actual encounter of observer and observed based on a real shared experience to produce the kind of political care she proposes. In my view, that is what is happening in current border contexts and that is the basis for solidarities between forced migrants and citizens of host countries rather than visualisations of suffering circulating in the West. Since the aesthetic as encounter assigns a clearer agential potential to migrants it is in my view also a way to unsettle predefined expectations arising from this exact Western discursive context. Without the actual experience of the other, is the image we create of it and from which we conclude ethical and political responsibilities not influenced by the problematic discourses – based on conventional understandings of humanitarianism – we are embedded in?

Telling the Other Side of the Story in The Ethics of Exile

In The Ethics of Exile – A Political Theory of Diaspora Ashwini Vasanthakumar makes two central claims: (1) ‘First, exiles have rights and responsibilities in their communities of origin, and exile politics consists in political roles that exiles are morally required or permitted to play’ ⁵⁴ and (2) ‘Second, . . . exile politics . . . can perform two corrective functions: it can repair defective political institutions at home and, given the inevitability of outside involvement in this repair, it can mitigate the asymmetries of power and voice that characterise the transnational and international domains’. ⁵⁵ The author defines three characteristics of exiles: they are physically absent from their political association, ⁵⁶ they are compelled to leave by political or public pressure or the failings of a state, ⁵⁷ and they remain politically oriented towards their home community and often express the aspiration to return. ⁵⁸ Through applied philosophy and working with empirical case examples ⁵⁹ the author then works out the different roles exiles (should) take on and discusses the normative claims and implications that come with it. She presents the role of witnesses (Chapter 3), solidary intermediaries (Chapter 4), co-authors (Chapter 5), stakeholders (Chapter 6) and representatives (Chapter 7). In a nutshell, the author argues that due to the suffering and injustices they have witnessed and experienced exiles have a minimal duty to assist the people back home, mostly through bearing testimony, which can mobilise further supporters and resistance. ⁶⁰ Due to the limits of testimony and the need for outside assistance, she then turns to more concerted actions exile politics can give rise to. Based on a political form of solidarity as ‘reason-based acting together, on others’ terms’, ⁶¹ the author argues that exiles can act as solidary intermediaries remedying the typical asymmetries of power and voice between the proclaimed agents and objects of solidarity. ⁶² There is still the risk of being co-opted by the numerous moral agents of transnational politics, ⁶³ though, and thus, Ashwini Vasanthakumar then turns to a second form of concerted exile politics - co-authoring - which is based on a common identity of exile groups. However, as the author argues, a flourishing exile politics can also catalyse change and greater pluralism among exile communities and these processes have the potential of further detaching exiles from the community back home. ⁶⁴ Potential conflicts arising from pluralism ground the question ‘to what extent exiles should still be involved in the politics of the homeland’? The author argues that exiles should act as stakeholders in the politics of the home community with varying influence depending on the stakes. ⁶⁵ Finally, another way to exert collective political agency is to establish (informal) political representations claiming to speak for the interests of the home constituencies. ⁶⁶ These claims can be valid depending on the extent to which they suffice the standards of democratic legitimacy. ⁶⁷

Vasanthakumar does not just acknowledge the agency of exiles, but she also ascribes that agency a profound transformative capability. I find it particularly appealing how the author manages to construct a compelling counter-narrative to many current political debates by convincingly arguing against limiting exiles’ political rights and economic possibilities in a host community since economic empowerment and a secure legal status are essential resources for exiles to create political autonomy and enable the corrective mechanisms of exile. ⁶⁸ Such a narrative complicates classical understandings of asylum and what we owe to refugees. ⁶⁹ Thus, she is most outspoken about agency among the three authors and bases her argument on the potential of agency. Moreover, this transformative potential has a clear positive connotation as she assumes exiles’ numerous activities abroad can remedy or even cure injustices inherent in the current international system of nation states, such as the inequalities and asymmetries of power and voice. ⁷⁰ Through the roles they play exiles emerge as autonomous political agents who are increasingly able to fulfil their potentials of representing their own interests and those of their communities back home on a (trans-)national stage as well as contribute to their host communities. ⁷¹ Vasanthakumar constitutes that agency as quite independent, with the asymmetries of transnational politics indeed being hindrances and constraints, but they must and can be (at least partly) overcome through specific forms of exile politics. I therefore argue that the author leans towards an emancipatory ideal of agency.

Bringing in a postcolonial perspective raises an issue with that conception of agency, though. Despite being inspired by historical case examples, the forms and effects of that agency as well as the roles available for exiles are predefined by the author herself. In the end, she depicts a rather clear picture of the emancipatory effects of exiles’ agency as well as the remedying functions of exile politics as a means against injustices and she takes on an active role in assigning those functions – functions that I would argue not every exile is able to fulfil in the same way. By doing this, the author universalises a very specific type of agent – elites in exile ⁷² – and she paints a very particular picture of exiles very much tailored to the ideas of political agency in a Western democratic context. ⁷³ In other words, Vasanthakumar emphasises the agency of those who are able to speak out in a Western context. ⁷⁴ This does not mean, though – and I am sure the author supports this claim – that non-elite exiles are not capable agents, they just express their agency differently pointing to further directions of inquiry.

On the Need for Self-Reflexivity and an Eye for Resistance

My critiques from a postcolonial perspective should not end in a pessimistic outlook, though. As has become clear, science is never neutral and researchers are drawing boundaries – recognisable structures of normalised subjectivity and objectivity – in the process of theorising and empirically investigating. ⁷⁵ However, in order to have an ethical perspective at all, we need to make choices and all our choices are made from within a specific ethical disposition, the task of judging what might be ethically ‘better’ or ‘worse’. ⁷⁶ This has in my view two consequences for research on migration. Firstly, ‘playing with as little domination as possible’ ⁷⁷ and tracing the paths of exclusion which accompany an author’s assumptions and theorising ⁷⁸ – in short self-reflexivity. Secondly, a postcolonial perspective demands a responsibility towards otherness, ⁷⁹ a struggle for difference – as this opens up new configurations of politics –, and the need to engage others (and their agency) in the most humane and affirming way possible; ⁸⁰ it points to the affirmation and assertion of the subjectivity of those who are marginalised and live precarious lives within a dominant Western system of power. ⁸¹ Thus, in conclusion it could be interesting to investigate where the authors of the three books leave space within their conceptualisations for migrants to resist and ‘recover’ their autonomy. One could ask, for example, if Souter’s deliberative approach would be sufficient for migrants’ perspectives and opinions not just to be voiced but also to be heard ⁸² by the audience of nation states: to which extent are they able to express their views ‘freely’ and to which extent do they have to adjust to both the procedural rules of Western forms of deliberation and the legal and moral frames and categorisations available via a framework of refugee protection primarily shaped by the West? One could also bring Morgans approach into that conversation and the question if and how Western participants are able to create and implement a form of care as contestation in such a context of actual encounter. Can the ‘Western gaze’ be answered or even challenged by both migrants and Western participants themselves? Furthermore, it would be interesting to investigate if exiles in the West are able to resist the contexts in which they are expected to fulfil their predefined roles rather than just adapt to them? Are exiles ‘free’ to create their own roles and how do host as well as societies of origin react to that? I suppose this possibility exists as Vasanthakumar concludes the roles for exiles inductively from empirical historical examples and thus, her approach appears generally open for input from exiles themselves – even though it is again – and perhaps inevitably – the researcher who ascribes these roles, agency and responsibilities.