E. Tendayi Achiume is a professor of law at UCLA and a newly announced 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Her research focuses on international migration, refugee displacement, and especially the role of international law in shaping the way that borders work.
Today's episode is a rerun in celebration of her recent fellowship announcement and covers a broad scope of Achiume's work, including colonialism, human rights, and migration.
This episode is a podcast mashup between Ufahamu Africa and Migrations: A World on the Move, hosted by Eleanor Paynter.
Find the books, links, and articles we mentioned in this episode on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.
E. Tendayi Achiume is a professor of law at UCLA and a newly announced 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Her research focuses on international migration, refugee displacement, and especially the role of international law in shaping the way that borders work.
Today's episode is a rerun in celebration of her recent fellowship announcement and covers a broad scope of Achiume's work, including colonialism, human rights, and migration.
This episode is a podcast mashup between Ufahamu Africa and Migrations: A World on the Move, hosted by Eleanor Paynter.
Find the books, links, and articles we mentioned in this episode on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.
Kim Yi Dionne 00:02
Welcome to Ufahamu Africa, a podcast about life and politics on the African continent. I'm Kim Yi Dionne, one of your hosts. We look forward to launching season eight next week with Rachel and I discussing recent trends and events on the continent, including the protests in Ghana and the coup in Gabon. This week, we want to congratulate E. Tendayi Achiume for recently winning a MacArthur Genius Grant. In celebration of that, we're rebroadcasting our episode with her when she's in conversation with Eleanor Paynter discussing the important work that she does on migration and human rights.
E. Tendayi Achiume 00:42
So thank you for having me. My name is Tendayi Achiume, and I’m a professor of law at UCLA School of Law. And my research focuses on international migration, refugees, displacement, and especially the role of international law and shaping the way that borders work, and thinking about the way that colonialism and legacies of colonialism can continue to structure the way that migration and mobility work globally. And I also just ended my term as the UN Special Rapporteur of contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance. The name is really long, and it always takes me a while to recall it.
Rachel Beatty Riedl 01:22
Absolutely. And we want to get into kind of some of the work that you've been doing today, and in particular, your current focus, kind of global governance of racism and xenophobia. So, we were wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how you think about global governance, writ large, in quotes, in general, and then specifically in relation to racism and xenophobia in particular? And are there any bright spots that you see? You know, where are the realms of possibility? And what, of course, are the challenges that that we're facing?
E. Tendayi Achiume 01:59
So when I speak about global governance of racism and xenophobia, that's really to call attention to the frameworks that exist at the international level, specifically within the United Nations that applied to the problems of racism, and xenophobia. And there is international law that applies to the problem of racism and xenophobia, and most of it is in the field of international human rights law. So you have treaties that prohibit racial discrimination, and xenophobia as well. And so my work studies those treaties. But there's also what we think of as soft law mechanisms, so policy documents, frameworks, institutions, bodies that are all responsible for coordinating what the global approach to the problem of racism and xenophobia should be. And it's complicated, because as everybody knows, racism and xenophobia are really local. Race is very locally constructed. And even xenophobia, which is about foreignness really depends on where you are in the world. At the same time, we also know that there are ways in which race has been constructed that are transnational. When we think about the history of the transatlantic slave trade, when we think about the history of colonialism, there are ways of experiencing race and foreigners that are transnational and global. And so one of the challenges of the global frameworks is having baselines that are applicable in really different contexts, while also allowing room for local dynamics to shape what role law and policy play in how these problems are addressed. And another aspect of the job isn't just the policymakers. It's not just the states that are represented at the United Nations. It's also thinking about the movement actors, and the civil society actors, and the communities themselves, who experienced racism, xenophobia and related intolerance, connecting with them to understand how global frameworks can advance the causes that they are advancing, locally, nationally, regionally. And this is actually a nice transition to the second part of your question, which is about bright spots. I think, in my work as an independent expert within the UN system, the bright spots have really been looking at the really innovative and inspiring work that movement actors and even communities themselves are doing to advance racial justice to push back against xenophobia in their local contexts. And I use this example often, but you might think about the racial justice uprisings of 2020, during the peak of the COVID pandemic, which began in the US, but really spread all over the world and I think resulted in a very different kind of conversation about how we should understand racial injustice. And that to my mind was driven by movement advocacy, in many different parts of the world that has actually been going on for many, many years, but that came together in that moment. So when I think about bright spots, I think about the ways that policy at the Global level really stands to be transformed by the insights of grassroots movements that are doing the work on a daily basis.
Rachel Beatty Riedl 05:09
Absolutely. That possibility of social movements and local activism shaping the international landscape as we see it.
Eleanor Paynter 05:20
I was gonna ask you about the question of accountability when you were talking about the UN mechanisms. But maybe this is also one answer to that question, that when you have global frameworks for thinking about human rights and questions of racial justice, how do we hold governments or international organizations to account? And the global Black Lives Matter movement, and these uprisings are perhaps one source of inspiration for thinking about practices that hold governments to account. I don't know if you want to say more about that.
E. Tendayi Achiume 05:53
Sure. And I think accountability and even rule of law, those are concepts that are really complex, and they think that in the realm of racial justice, really interrogating what they can mean and how we think about accountability is really important. So if we think specifically about the movement for black lives, and the critique of law enforcement as kind of being characterized by systemic racism, part of the critique there is that the traditional modes of accountability in liberal democracies, which are, you know, the police, the criminal justice system, are themselves infected by the problem they are trying to solve. So, rather than it just being about greater enforcement of the law, which at least from a legal perspective, and because I'm a law professor, this is the perspective that I go to when I think about accountability, we often think about the law being enforced by courts and police, that form of accountability, I think, is put under the microscope as not the end all and the be all, in fact, it's part of the problem. And I think what you see in the global system, and even what you saw in the uprisings was a form of accountability that was about putting into the mainstream an account that says we have to rethink the legal frameworks themselves. And we have to think about forms of accountability that are actually responsive to the communities that are impacted. And I see the global as allowing for a shifting and framing, that means you can then go back to the local and say, “Okay, how are we going to remake our approach to law enforcement in ways that are responsive to this account that has been endorsed at a at a global level.” So, I think accountability is a huge part of it. And what is exciting is how these encounters between kind of the local, the transnational and the global, can even shift what accountability means, from a legal perspective as well.
Rachel Beatty Riedl 07:47
I really liked that you knew the multi layered framework and how each one can think about the role and accountability and its evolution. And I was wondering, connecting that specifically to your recent role at the UN as Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and racial discrimination and xenophobia, unrated related intolerance, I believe you wrote in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. And I was wondering if you could tell us about how you see the fight against racial discrimination as linked to sustainable development goals and a kind of just future.
E. Tendayi Achiume 08:29
So I'll say a little bit about how I came to write that report and how my own thinking shifted in the process of doing so. One of the things your audience might be interested in knowing is that as Special Rapporteur, as an independent expert, part of the role is providing thematic reports to the United Nations where you bring to their attention an issue that you think they need to take on and you have a limited number of thematic reports. And I have to be honest, the agenda 2030 for sustainable development was not on my list of approaches, in part because I've always been profoundly skeptical of the international approach to development, and its relationship to really addressing transnational inequality and injustice. And we can talk about why I have that skepticism. Yes. So it was actually the Human Rights Council Member States who insisted they were like, We want a report on this issue, and I grudgingly did it. This is probably the first time that I'm publicly saying that, but I'm really glad that I did. Because in looking at the Sustainable Development Goals, which within the UN system, I would say are the flagship policy program for coordinating the global approach to inequality, studying that framework, you see that issues to do with racial justice and racial equality are thoroughly marginalized in the most basic ways, and I use the comparison to gender and this is not to say that the UN or the SDGs get gender, right, there is a lot that requires change. But if you compare the approaches to the way the data is collected, the ways that the agenda itself speaks to the issue of racial inequality as a global problem, entirely marginal. And so the conclusion of that report was actually to say we have a framework that can't name and address one of the dominant axes of inequality in this global system. And that's a weakness. And we have to have a way of bringing this into the picture. And part of the drafting of that report was consultations with UNDP, the United Nations Development Programme, entities like the World Bank, these big development actors to say, how will you thinking about what race is and what work it does globally? And how your programs can reify inequalities within communities, right. So in the international system, how we think about racial inequality, it includes discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, national origin, it's a very broad framework. So even in countries, you know, say, pick a country that may not have a lot of racial diversity bid has ethnic diversity, that is part of the analysis as well, but pushing those organizations to say, how were you thinking about ethnic inequality and other forms of inequality? But then also transnationally? How are you thinking about racial injustice in that framework? And so the goal of the report was to say, we cannot have an account of sustainability that does not incorporate a racial justice analysis, and I realize my answers are long. But I want to connect this to my final report in the UN, which was actually about climate justice and thinking about ecological crisis. And that's another context where sustainability is really on the table and another context where the global approach has marginalized questions around racial injustice in ways that mean, some of the most progressive initiatives, or even green transitions fail to account for the fact that the communities that bear the disproportionate burden of getting us to more sustainable futures are racially marginalized communities. So sustainability for whom? At whose cost, right?
Rachel Beatty Riedl 12:21
Absolutely. And can I just follow up on that? Because I think it's so key. How do you see a path forward, you know, to move towards climate justice in a way that takes account of that vulnerability and begins to address it.
E. Tendayi Achiume 12:41
So I have been thinking more and more about what it means to build movements and knowledge across silos. And as academics, I think you feel this strongly as well. We all work in our disciplinary silos. And I think a lot of movement advocacy also happens in silos. And I think a lot of my work, as Special Rapporteur was trying to have analysis that cross movement and disciplinary and policymaking silos to say, if you think you're an environmental rights person, you have to be somebody who cares about racial justice, you have to be somebody who cares about gender justice, and you have to be somebody who cares about political economy, because all of these things are deeply connected. Or, if you're somebody who understands yourself as an immigrant rights activist, you have to be thinking about climate, you have to be thinking about racial justice, you have to be thinking about gender justice, because the systems and the structures that we're pushing up against, require this kind of cross cutting intersectional approach. And what gives me hope, I was just at a meeting with some students. And I think a lot about my students and their approach to mobilizing and advocacy. What gives me hope is movement advocacy that is really pushing back against silos that have tried to keep issues in separate categories that I think are a huge part of the problem.
Rachel Beatty Riedl 14:04
Yes, exactly. Right. There's a reason why the silos are there. They are reinforced.
Eleanor Paynter 14:13
What you're saying is reminding me to of how striking it is, to me still, that while I think thanks in part to movement activists, there's increasing acceptance of the idea that, for example, migrant rights and racial justice are inextricably linked as issues. But that's actually relatively new as an approach within the academy. And, I mean, some people have been doing work on that. I don't want to exclude people who have worked on that for a long time, but as a sort of more broadly accepted approach to how we think about migration and rights, it is striking that it's it's taken us until now to put those things in real conversation.
E. Tendayi Achiume 14:50
It is so striking and I think in the migration context, it's so profound, and it's definitely in the academy. So I'm an international lawyer who studies international migration, and it has been a journey to try and bring conversations around racial justice into the international migration law space. And it's happening more, and it's exciting to see more people do it. But those frames have been kept really separate. And the legal regimes do that as well. So, treaties that apply to racial discrimination actually have carve outs that say, this isn't about issues to do with non-citizens. And that's not that's not by accident, right? UN member states, including the most powerful and former colonial powers have basically structured the law in ways that makes it difficult for even those of us who are interested from a disciplinary perspective and making these connections. They are gaps that are hard. And I've come to think that it's because in immigration law, the citizen, non-citizen distinction is where democracies go to do things they cannot do within their communities, you know, so there's a long conversation we could have about that. But I think it also has implications in terms of there was a global compact on migration that was adopted in 2018. And I remember being in conversations around those negotiations. And part of what civil society actors were trying to do, part of what my mandate was trying to do was convince UN member states that issues to do with racism and xenophobia had to be at the center of that sort of agreement, because they're not fringe. And as you say, I think even in movement advocacy, you see the silos and it's only recently that there have been efforts to break those silos down. And it's not to say that breaking down of the silos work is easy. You know, I think there are very difficult conversations to be had, right here in the United States. For example, when you think about the rights of immigrants, you think about the rights of racially marginalized groups, including people who aren't of an immigrant background, and then you think about Native Americans and their experiences in what is a settler colony, and what it means to try and reconcile the various rights claims that different groups legitimately have. I think we can't paper over the difficult work that is required to break down the silos. But to my mind, that is the work, that is really, really the work. And it is heartening to think about how even in academic spaces, these conversations are happening more. And one thing I feel compelled to say is that I think my domestic immigration law scholars have been thinking a lot about race and migration together. So they have been doing that work, but they've been thinking about it only within the borders of the US. And that's another thing you know. You have to have, I think, transnational and international conversations. It can't just be about what's happening in the US.
Eleanor Paynter 17:45
This is part of what you bring to the table through, I'm thinking about two articles, in particular that you've written on racial borders, and migration as decolonization, which I actually got to teach in a migrations course. And they resonate with students in really incredible ways. And I think, turn our attention to these intersecting issues in ways that are really important. So I wondered if you could say a little bit more about the place. I mean, we're talking about the entanglements of migration and race and racial justice, I wonder if you could say a little bit more about how you see the place of colonialism in this set of dynamics?
E. Tendayi Achiume 18:22
Absolutely. And, you know, I think I want to mark both colonialism and imperialism, and those things are related. But obviously, I'm not the same thing. And when we're thinking about borders, in particular, a lot of my work has focused on how colonialism has shaped the way that border regimes works, and continues to shape who is included, and who is excluded in really profound ways. You know, I focus on the relationship, for example, between the European Union and the African continent and the long history of immigration policies that basically immobilize black Africans while permitting people of European descent permissions to move across the continent, and even within Europe that persists to the present in ways that require a racial justice account of visa policies that we are facing with a neutral, you know, we think of racism and immigration as being about you know, Trump, who comes out and says, you know, explicitly racist things, but we have visa regimes that have effectively patterned the world on a racial basis with a genealogy that we can see comes directly out of colonialism. But I mentioned imperialism because you look at a country like the US, and the US is a settler colony and also has had colonies of its own for sure, but its imperial domination has been through informal empire, through military occupations that don't necessarily result in the US kind of taking political leadership and also through economic intervention to US corporations. You think about Central America right now and the discourse around Central American migration, which places Central Americans as sort of these people outside of the US who are coming here and flooding our immigration system. When you look at the causes of Central American displacement, the US is leading among them, right. So, so in my work, I've argued that the kind of Imperial domination that the US exerts have a place like Central America actually makes it so that Central Americans have legitimate claims to the US political and territorial space on account of the fact that their self determination is so dramatically curtailed by the US. And, you know, I was reading an article recently that was talking about the US, the Biden administration's root causes strategy, which is about addressing the causes of migration. And they say, one of the things they're going to do is increase corporate intervention into Central to help stem migration, when it's known that actually corporate intervention into the region has been one of the most destabilizing causes of displacement in the in the first place. So anyway, I think it's why even if all you care about is what's happening at the US southern border, your gaze can’t end at the territorial border, you have to sort of see where the US as a political and economic force is projecting itself and understand the internal fights as being about also the projection of US Imperial domination everywhere else in the world.
Eleanor Paynter 21:35
And we could talk about something similar also in the EU-Africa context, right, with the same conversations around root causes, and, quote, unquote, development as a possible solution to the quote unquote, problem of migration.
E. Tendayi Achiume 21:48
Absolutely. And then you see what the EU is doing, even just to internal African borders, you know, the African continent and the African Union is a complex regional body as well, I don't want to paint it out to be some, you know, angelic body, we have governance issues on the African continent, as does every other continent, by the way. But when you look at some of the ways that the African Union, and even the sub regional groups like the Southern African Development Community, if you go back to the founding documents, they have accounts of the continent that speak to just freer regimes of mobility that I just rooted, I don't think in a kind of neoliberal, open borders push, but that actually resonate with the way that mobility and migration has historically operated on the African continent. You know, I'm from Zambia, and Zimbabwe and my family's on both sides. I have ancestors from across the region of southern Africa, because mobility has always been a way that people have lived. But you look at what the EU is doing, which is hardening national borders, in an attempt to prevent Africans from reaching Europe and going kind of further and further into the continent. I mean, it's an externalization of European borders that overlaps with national borders that are themselves a product of the European colonial project. You think about what we call Zambia, and what we call Zimbabwe. And the way that those regions were structured politically, before they became named those things, and it's just, you know, we could be here forever unpacking that. But I think it's really true. And what breaks my heart is that, you know, when I studied international law, when I studied migration, and even now, when I open textbooks that are about these legal frameworks on the continent, these stories just aren't there. Right? So how are we teaching people to understand what borders are and what work they do? And that has to be a crucial piece of how we would move to frameworks that work better.
Rachel Beatty Riedl 24:04
And you know, it ties so directly to the concept of what we think of as citizenship. Because the borders determine, you know, citizenship and in the route to becoming citizens, and then how we think about that in relationship to nationalism, ideas of belonging? So I wanted to dig into that a little bit because these different conceptions about nationalism and citizenship are, in some ways the root of promise in an inclusive nature of citizenship, inclusive pathways to citizenship. They're also the root of much peril, for these contested borders and boundaries that we're discussing. And you wrote for the UN racial discrimination in the context of laws, policies and practices concerning citizenship, nationality and immigration. And so, here we wanted to ask you a little bit about the concept of inclusive nationalism and citizenship laws, in social policy and practice that could lead in that direction. How do you think about immigration laws, citizenship laws as offering a route into civic conceptions of the nation that may be based on principles of belonging, of liberty, or other kinds of conceptions of how we organize and what connects us? And how do you see the current practice and context of laws and policies evolving in the years ahead?
E. Tendayi Achiume 25:34
Yeah. Okay. And I think it touches on, on so much, that is interesting. I'll try and be responsive. And you can definitely push me on anything that I missed out on. But, you know, citizenship and nationality, there's so many ways you can think about both of those concepts. And I know that in my own mind, I've gone through various iterations. And, and even now, my sense of them is not necessarily stable in the sense that, as a lawyer, I am interested in the ways in which existing legal frameworks around citizenship and nationality can be made more just, and that report that you mentioned to the UN was exactly about that. It was about the really basic ways in which citizenship and immigration laws are being deployed all over the world to basically entrench ethnonationalist forms of exclusion. We know what that looked like in the US under the Trump administration. Some of those dynamics continue under the Biden administration. But you can think about a country like India with, the kind of Hindu nationalist project there is very different from the one that you see in the US, but you've seen citizenship stripping and efforts to exclude certain ethnic and religious groups from citizenship in ways that I think can at least be mitigated under existing law. So that's one mode in which I engage this question of citizenship and nationality is thinking about how both institutions can be more inclusive, and more legitimately reflect the kinds of economic social and cultural belonging that actually pattern people's lives. I think that there is a project there that is worthwhile. But when you think about it in another register, when you think about both citizenship, and even the nation as a category, you know, the history of both of those concepts and institutions are histories that have had inherently exclusionary projects built into them. And one of the things I've been interested in is, you know, what would it mean, to rethink the relationship between political community and territory in ways that don't keep us stuck within these institutions, which, you know, the nation and even citizenship, without ceding too much to me come out of Western traditions? And it's not even Western traditions for all time, right? If you look at the history of what we think of as the Western canon, there are other modes, and even what citizenship and the nation have meant have shifted really dramatically in ways that I think would result in periods that would make what we do now seem a little bit unrecognizable, you know, in terms of how citizenship and nationality work. But to come back to Southern Africa, I wrote an article with a co-author last week, part of the research we were doing in that piece was thinking about how political communities in the region that we call Southern Africa now, what kinds of institutions did they use to basically manage political belonging, relationship to territory and mobility. And there were different kinds of ways of dealing with those problems. There were different kinds of institutional technologies. That meant, for example, that allegiance mattered more than say ethnicity, sometimes, in determining who you belonged to, and what kinds of rights or entitlements you had. So I think it is really urgent in a time where I think both citizenship and nationality are so fraught to my mind, are so embedded in a particular sort of racial and kind of I want to put capitalism on the table as well, because I think we have to. There's a way in which these categories right now are operating and doing a kind of work that I think produces injustice in really profound ways that we have to be looking at diverse and outside of the usual suspect traditions, in thinking about how we create political and legal institutions that allow us to live in a more interconnected way. So this is a really, perhaps abstract way of responding to your question, but I think both citizenship and nationality require really deep interrogation in part, because on their face, they just seem so neutral. And then of course, valuable, you know, like, who wouldn't? Why would citizenship be bad? Why would the nation be bad when they both carry with them legal and political arrangements that are truly terrifying?
Rachel Beatty Riedl 30:31
Absolutely, absolutely. And I was wondering, for our Ufahamu Africa, listeners, if you can talk a little bit about how you see this playing out, kind of within Africa across the continent, but then also, as you're mentioning it in these cross regional, international forums.
E. Tendayi Achiume 30:50
So I think, a lot, about Southern Africa. Not surprising, because that's where I'm from, but I think some of these questions obviously have resonance in other parts of the continent as well. But if you look at South Africa right now, which is actually where I began my legal career as a human rights lawyer representing refugees and asylum seekers. And citizenship for South Africans is, of course, especially for black South Africans is, of course, a really significant game, given the history of apartheid and the exclusion of black Africans from citizenship in the territory to which they were indigenous. But in the present, you see citizenship being mobilized in ways that results in violence and a phobic responses, in particular to other black Africans, and to nonwhite refugees and migrants in South Africa. And you might think about the racialization of xenophobic backlash in South Africa, that doesn't seem to necessarily mobilize the same kind of antipathy towards what you might describe as white corporate power, including white corporate foreign power. So that is just something that brings the whole capitalism frame into into the conversation again. But if you look at South Africa, and the ways in which citizenship is being mobilized to exclude groups, actually, with whom South Africans have been deeply interconnected to politically, economically, culturally, it to me speaks of the limits and the dangers of relying on categories that may not be suited for the project of living, the kind of interconnected lives that are the reality in southern Africa. And, you know, I think there can be ways of talking about xenophobic violence in South Africa that really trivializes or kind of paints out these really, you know, bad actors who are going after foreigners. So that tells a different story, which is just, this is about economic precarity. And people are in contestation, but I will highlight that one of the things that is also clear is that they are political actors who are basically entrepreneurs of divisive politics, that I think have done a really good job of making the citizen, non-citizen distinction be the primary way that many people understand the precarity of their lives. And I think that division is not the one that is actually doing the most work, but the narrative really sinks in. So I think it's really difficult to think about how we move out of it and how we build the kinds of political consciousness and even just understanding of a region and its histories that shakes that up. And I've singled out South Africa, in part because it's like the powerhouse in the region, economically, politically. But you see these dynamics playing out in other parts of the region, as well. I mentioned Zambia, where I go home regularly, and you start seeing these discourses around foreigners, which are not new, there's been previous iterations where these kinds of discourses around foreigners are mobilized. But again, you look at the people who are being named as foreigners and you think to yourself, these are people who have always moved through these regions as well. And what work is that citizen, non-citizen distinction doing? And then in a place like Zambia and other parts of the continent, I think, also thinking about Chinese Empire and thinking about how that is also shifting questions around belonging and not belonging, citizen and non-citizen and also producing kind of rhetoric that often I think is xenophobic. So anyway, it's very complicated, but these dynamics, I think, are playing themselves out in related and unrelated ways to other parts of the world as well.
Rachel Beatty Riedl 34:47
Absolutely, absolutely. You’re describing, kind of the South African case and example in the context that you plant the political and economic entrepreneurs and the way in which that keeps people from recognizing that kind of shared vulnerability. It absolutely translates to where we're sitting right now in the United States, and across so many regions. So it's just very, very powerful patterns that you can pull from a particular example.
E. Tendayi Achiume 35:17
Yeah, no, I was really disturbed. And just in terms of the transnational networks, and because I tend to analyze things transnationally. I think when you’re a hammer, everything's a nail, I want to own that particular problem. But one of the things that I found stunning in my rapporteurship is even just thinking about how, especially with right wing groups, there is a lot of trans national mobilization of the same kinds of rhetoric. So seeing Qanon conspiracy theories popping up in South Africa doing work there, it’s just like, what is this world that we are living in, where we are so connected in these ways so that when we see similar patterns, sometimes it's because it's coordinated, or there are conversations taking place among the groups, I think, that are bringing this kind of instability in this kind of analysis. And I saw this in other parts of the world, as well, where you see neo Nazi rhetoric popping up in places where it's just not even clear what the relationship is to the origins of neo Nazi ideology. But it's like these things travel, and it's quite stunning.
Eleanor Paynter 36:30
And they are, in one way or another, how people in different contexts appeal to power some way.
E. Tendayi Achiume 36:36
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's the case. And it's, you know, I think we are in a time where, and I think the COVID pandemic only made this worse, where there are very real reasons for people to feel insecure and to be experiencing precarity. You know, I think the economic fallout of the pandemic, and even just the way that our global economy is structured means that many people are living in the kind of precarity that means that some of these ideologies, discourses, and narratives can resonate in ways that have really terrifying outcomes.
Eleanor Paynter 37:21
Is there anything that we haven't asked you about or anything you haven't had a chance to talk about that you'd like to bring to the table?
E. Tendayi Achiume 37:27
So I decided, you may you can edit this out if you decide, but I've been thinking about how there is something about migration, and there's something about immigrants and discourses about foreigners, that really allows political actors to consolidate authoritarian measures, even in societies that otherwise wouldn't tolerate them. And so if you think about the fear of immigration and the way that it is mobilized to really advocate for stronger border enforcement, surveillance technologies, all of these sorts of things that then end up being used on border populations, right, things that are implemented the border never stay at the border. So DNA collection from unauthorized immigrants is just a step away from DNA collection of people who are incarcerated to then, you know, broader populations. And this may have a flavor of kind of conspiracy theory. But it's not. There are people who are tracking the way that surveillance technologies that are mobilized first and live in the border enforcement context end up being deployed, so that people who are protesting against a particular regime find themselves surveilled and then kind of punished in ways that wouldn't have been possible before. So anyway, just thinking about how dangerous that is, that issues around migration and issues to do with immigrants can be this political resource that is mobilized to entrench authoritarian politics in a time when I think the threat of authoritarianism, even in so called liberal democracies, I think is really high, is a reason to my mind that issues to do with immigration and the border should be viewed by everybody as really important and not just as affecting the migrants and the refugees who are moving. This is a fairly abstract point, and I don't know where it fits in the conversation, but it is definitely something that has been on my mind.
Eleanor Paynter 39:32
I think it's racial borders that you start with the story of the Aquarius. And I think that's so this ship that the Italian government held at bay, one of the first and this has now become a normalized practice. So a ship holding migrants and, you know, probably mostly asylum seekers, who were kept out mostly from countries in West Africa. The Sahel, the Horn of Africa, you know, kept out of European spaces, violating international law. And I love your point because I think it is easy to think about that border space, this sort of vast, amorphous sea as not pertaining to people in Europe. But I think you can directly relate that violent policing of bodies to the different forms of the control of you're talking about surveillance, but also related, I think, to what happens with then with what governments are permitted to do in terms of gender issues and things like that. There's so much connection, and we see that happening in places like Italy.
E. Tendayi Achiume 40:39
Absolutely. And one of the things about it, that's hard is that there can be a way of thinking of migration issues, and their governance and challenges around racism or xenophobia as being especially about a threat from kind of ethnonationalist politics only. But I think what you see across the political spectrum, is a willingness to have really harsh policies that exist at the border. And I think it puts immigrants rights group and movements while pushing for border justice in a very difficult position. Because then the challenge becomes, what would it mean to win this battle, when politics across the spectrum seem comfortable with this kind of division, and perhaps one of the ways of overcoming that is getting people to understand that these issues aren't just about what's happening at the border. They can affect them, and they do affect the entire society.
Rachel Beatty Riedl 41:43
When you begin to use practices, in any case, that are dehumanizing, when you sharpen the edges of coercion and the state apparatus to repress humans, those practices continue to shape the nature of the state, from everyone who lives within it, and beyond its borders.
E. Tendayi Achiume 42:06
Absolutely. And in most of these societies, immigrant labor, including unauthorized labor is such a piece of the economies that are then acting as though those people are just coming to be a burden, you know, and so it's interesting here in the US right now, that it does seem to me like there are parallel debates taking place. One is the debate that's talking about how refugees, asylum seekers, and people who are being granted status are filling jobs that are urgently needed, and factories and all of these sorts of places. And at the same time, those same groups are being framed, as you know, they are coming to put pressure on our welfare system, whatever the case might be. And neither story I think, is exactly right. And of course, the actual story is one that is really complicated. But it cautions against buying too easily into many of the narratives I think that have as the solution, more vicious borders.
Rachel Beatty Riedl 43:07
Exactly. So, I wanted to kind of wrap up by taking your challenge and kind of reinforcing your message to us about what are more capacious ways that we can think beyond the existing citizenship regimes and relationships and nationality and being attentive to the connections between harsh and repressive border practices, and the ways in which we are all interconnected? And to the transnational level, to your point? And at a very local level, to the ways in which Delegitimization of, you know, humanity and rights is an issue for all of us, like that connects us.9
E. Tendayi Achiume 43:53
Absolutely. Okay, so I there's two things I want to say. One is a little bit niche, but because I know that your audience includes academics and graduate students, I think that it has never been more urgent for everybody, irrespective of what you are studying to understand how the borders of the nation that you are in, are not going to exhaust the analysis of how power is being shaped even just within those territorial borders. And I think the project becomes overcoming what has been described as methodological nationalism in a very profound way. So really beginning to shift how we produce knowledge that masks interconnection, including interconnection that privileges certain groups over others in pretty systemic ways. I think that's something that I think is really important. And I think there's an analogy, or an analogue, even for people who aren't academics and who are interested in living, more ethical lives and kind of, you know, wanting to be good to the planet and to everybody around. And I think that also is about the kind of consciousness that means that, you know, you're thinking, for example, about the difference between drinking water from a plastic water bottle versus kind of trying to shift the decisions that you're making on a on a level. And I think it's always hard to say something that can resonate across the many different contexts and realities that people are living, you know, and we are living in such different worlds, not just in terms of geography, you know, we're recording this in Ithaca, New York, your listeners are in many different places that are not even Ithaca, you know, but even here in Ithaca, what it means to be on the Cornell campus and what it means to be five minutes away. And you know, everybody is in a really different situation. And some people are on such the extreme end of the inequalities, that the kind of advice I'm giving them was almost kind of insulting because they are living the experience of the thing that I'm trying to ask more people to have awareness of. But so I want to have humility, about even that kind of recommendation to say that we are all living really different kinds of lives. And perhaps it is the case that those of us whose lives are the most privileged in some ways also then carry the burden of these kinds of interrogations because the bubbles we live in can make some of the stuff really hard.
Kim Yi Dionne 46:37
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Ufahamu Africa. You can find more episodes, show notes and transcripts on our website, ufahamuafrica.com. This podcast is produced and managed by Megan DeMint, with help from production assistants Chukwufunanya Ikechukwu, and Ami Tamakloe. We are generously supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and receive research assistants from Cornell University and the University of California, Riverside. Our music is courtesy of Kevin Macleod. Until next week, Safiri Salama.