Geography of Care

The daily stories about the plight of Syrian and North African refugees who desperately seek entrance to European shores in unprecedented numbers can only be described as an event in the Derridian sense of having the effect of deeply challenging received truths about welfare states in the global north and their capacity to care for the needs of people who live outside of nation-state boundaries. Welfare states have responded to the presence of these, largely Muslim, migrants with a wave of populist anti-immigration sentiment and legislation even in the case of states where these refugees have been accepted in large numbers initially. Extreme right-wing parties have emerged and are running to be elected across Europe, and an openly racist presidential candidate in the United States, Donald Trump, is securing a significant portion of the popular vote on the basis of anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric. Political pundits and social justice activists decry this trend by expressing surprise at the strength of prevalent attitudes that express a refusal to care for the predicament of a people who are clearly fleeing peril. I don’t believe that the indifference shown by liberal welfare states and their public to care for the geographically distant is new or exceptional. I think that this event in fact illustrates some of the central assumptions that liberal welfare states make about care and how practices of care are socially organized. Moreover, social construction of space plays a crucial role in these assumptions. Care does not occur in the abstract; there is a geography to care and it is significant to an understanding of northern welfare states’ responses, including those of social workers as an arm of the state, to care about the needs of refugees that knock at their doors. Over the course of this article, I will undertake a spatial analysis as a lens by which to analyze the responses of welfare states in the global north to the presence of large numbers of Syrian Muslim refugees wishing to enter Europe and North America.

Feminist theorists are particularly concerned with care as a concept and a set of practices in their analysis (Swigonski & Raheim, 2011; Tronto, 2013). Care is political in feminist theorizing through an examination of power relations, both local and global, that result in care practices that are gendered and devalued though it forms the backbone of liberal capitalist economies (England, 2010). In spatial terms, feminist theorists challenge dominant and gendered constructions of space into a public/private binary with care practices assumed to exist within the private space of the familial home presumed to be ruled by emotional ties of affection. They do so analyzing the public nature of the social institution of the family and by challenging the taken-for-granted view of the family as the natural place of care. This notion of care as intimate and occurring in a private space that is separate from the public is also reflected in the care practices of welfare states (Staeheli, 2013).

Welfare state care practices, in themselves an expression of public concern for the welfare of those who are not tied to each other through bonds of kinship, paradoxically reflect the assumption of care as belonging to private space. In neoliberal times such as ours, care is increasingly privatized through state welfare policies that assume the family as having primary responsibilities of care for their members and increasingly regulating families that are found to be deviating from this norm seemingly oblivious to the blurring of public/private lines that occurs as a result of an interventionist state. In the case where the state does provide care, state run services are itself organized through a replication of intimate spaces by an array of “family-like” structures such as foster homes for children and senior care homes for the elderly. The strength of this assumption can be seen in the case of children, where the only form of care available to them is organized on the model of the family, even in the case of group homes, with children always being under the care and control of adults. Children who resist this form of care, largely due to their experiences of abuse both in their birth families and in their foster homes, by seeking alternative care arrangements through peer networks or forming ties with others on the streets are viewed as being “out of place” and simply not eligible for state care provision (Moosa-Mitha, In press).

In liberal welfare societies, care and concern by the state for its members is privileged along citizenship lines, with passport-owning citizens having the greatest access to social services, albeit ever restrictive ones in a neoliberal climate. Immigrants are eligible for fewer resources with an emphasis on services that encourage a one-way integration into societies that are assimilationist in nature (Bhuyan, 2012). Refugees have to go through a two-fold process in most welfare states of the global north through the construction of detention centers situated away from nation-state boundaries where they are kept for any length of time without recourse to any rights or care services beyond provision of food and shelter in contravention of international conventions that articulate the right of all people to make refugee claims on any state (Hyndman, 2012). Welfare state care practices are therefore nationalist and spatial in nature by assuming the space of the nation-state as primary to its care practice—reiterating the assumption of proximity and familiarity as the primary axis of care.

Nationalist state care practices get conflated with sameness, those who are most like “us” or who can be regulated into being more like us are most deserving of public care and concern. This is evidenced by the long history of exclusions that “other” citizens have experienced on the basis of their difference/s from the ideal, White, breadwinner, male, able-bodied, and heteronormative citizen. It is also clear from the way that state care practices have been and are increasingly used as instruments of governance to produce the docile, productive citizen subject. This is always an unfinished process as citizens resist such interventions insisting on recognition of their differences as the basis of public acknowledgment and concern. However, what the history of state care practices in countries of the global north reveals is the technologies of biopolitics that it practices in relation to those who are viewed as strangers by treating them as threats to the very existence of the nation-state that it then takes on as its role to protect (Brodie, 2008). An examination of the discourse on child poverty across countries in the global north reveals this fundamental truth about state care practices through an articulation of child poverty as a problem that threatens the well-being of societies over multiple generations that needs eradicating to remove the threat it poses to society in the future. State care is not rationalized on the basis of responding to the social need experienced by a group of people living in poverty in the present but rather through a construction of poverty as a threat to the very sustainability of society as a whole in the future (Jenson & Saint-Martin, 2003). In the case of indigenous peoples whose lifestyles can differ markedly from the consumer–productive citizen, the interventionist (even violent) nature of state care practices is even more clear (Carrier & Thomas, 2014). State care practices are nationalist therefore not only because they privilege passport owning citizens but also because they are used as instruments of socialization into a common set of values in the interest of the smooth running of capitalism and nationalism. Its nationalist tendencies get revealed when state welfare practices are conflated with protecting the nation-state from the “other” who is consistently viewed as a threat to its very survival.

Spatial organization of care through state practices where nationalism and social care are constructed as being mutually constitutive reflects the geopolitical nature of care. Social care becomes an aspect of nation building through the intertwining of care with nationalism. Nationalism is a belief in the naturalness of space that is organized into nation-states that are discrete and fixed. Social care as an outgrowth of nationalism provides the context that explains dominant and exclusionary responses of nation-states in the global north toward its own Muslim populations and to Muslim Syrian and North African refugees outside it boundaries as continuous. The war on terror that countries in the global north are engaged in on Muslim-majority states (and within its own state boundaries) has resulted in the treatment of the Muslim body as a threat—both internal and external to its very existence. This monolithic view of all Muslims as potential terrorists results in the treatment of Muslims living within nation-state boundaries as strangers, where the presumed security needs of nations trump over the welfare needs of their Muslim citizens. The proliferation of antiterrorist legislation across all welfare states, which target and discipline Muslims, particularly young men, through heightened surveillance measures is evidence of this. For Muslims living in the global north, having affiliations and identifying with a worldwide Islam in ways that transcends nation-state boundaries is treated as a site of suspicion and disloyalty to the state they are living in. State policy and rhetoric, media pronouncements, and social responses to the “otherness” of Muslims living in their midst have become routinized, and Islamaphobia is on the rise everywhere in nation-states of the global north (Sahin & Atlantus, 2009). Caring for the needs of Syrian and North African refugees, most of whom are Muslims, is viewed as being against national interests in the same way that caring for the welfare of the Muslim other who is a citizen is antithetical to the security of nation-states. Where you “come from” continues to define social care practices of welfare states in the global north.

The national basis of state care practices envisions nation-state boundaries as constituting the limits of its responsibilities for the provision of care. Not unlike private space, the space of the nation-state is constructed as the natural arena for state care practices. We care-less for those in need who live outside of our nation-state boundaries as though human precarity is containable within bounded spaces. We see it as the responsibility of each nation-state to look after its own forgetting that nation-states are not a given, they are constructed and require continual efforts to look like they have always existed. In the particular case of Syrian and North African largely Muslim refugees, the global war on terror provides a pretext to raise the specter of fear for its own survival as a way to rationalize its refusal to care, remaining inscrutable in the face of so much human desperation. In fact, nation-states all over the global north have consistently and increasingly put up barriers from allowing all refugees to seek asylum. There are broader and deeper reasons for why nation-states in the global north don’t feel responsible to care for those outside its boundaries and understanding the geography of care, its geopolitical and spatial nature provides important insights into these processes and how they get rationalized.

Despite care practices of nation-states like Germany and Sweden, who have willingly accepted Syrian refugees in greater numbers, these remain acts of exceptionality of having done something outside the norm to which they are free to return by closing their borders at a time of their own choosing. The body of the refugee is often times a marker of the unnaturalness of the existence of nation-state boundaries, and it becomes the embodiment of the fragility of nation-states and reveals them to be the result of ongoing contestations over space that is neither fixed nor discrete. Ultimately, refugees belie and resist the naturalness of nation-state boundaries by placing their bodies on those boundaries—and for that, they are punished.

Transnational feminist analysis has challenged normative feminist theorizing that grounds its analysis within the space of the nation-state as a given. They do so by examining the interdependant and global nature of social issues and power relationships within which care practices are defined in ways that traverse, transcend, and transgress nation-state boundaries. However, feminist theorizing needs to go further by examining the relationship between the geopolitical nature of social welfare practices that are motivated by aims to contain nation-state uncertainty and anxiety in the face of a global world order which it is less able to control. Undertaking a spatial analysis of state care practices will add to feminist theorizations of transnationalism by revealing the national, gendered, racialized, secular, and heteronormative nature of welfare states that cares only for those it deems as necessary to its own political interests.