Browsing by Author "Safouane, Hamza"
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- Between Hospitality and Inhospitality: The Politics of Migrants Protection in GermanySafouane, Hamza (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2017-09-08)In Europe, the public discourse on migration opposes narratives of endangered national identities and sovereignties to utilitarian arguments that migrants can restore fiscal balance and demographic dynamism. The notion of hospitality as the foundational basis for granting protection is, however, absent from the debate. In Germany, the initial spirit of organized popular solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers that came in during summer and fall 2015 were soon disillusioned by the unpreparedness of the bureaucracy in processing all asylum claims. As a result of the massive streams of migrants in the recent years, resentment towards migrants, while still marginal in Germany, has become more outspoken. The state’s duty to provide protection to refugees and asylum seekers has become fraught with political considerations that serve bureaucratic interests. Consequently, the provision of protection paradoxically developed into inhospitable practices that disenfranchises migrants and hinders the provision of protection to incoming displaced populations. This article proposes a re-discovery of hospitality by integrating the analyses of Derrida and Hallie. It argues for a politicization of hospitality that can achieved by enabling migrants themselves to enter discourse and fill it with their subjective outlook on their own mobility. Hospitality, as a discursive act that relates the host and the guest on a basis of equality, demarginalizes migrants in the reception country as they are invited into the public space to express their own voices on the migratory processes that they experienced.
- Governing Migrants in the European Union: A Critical Approach to Interrogating Migrants' Journey NarrativesSafouane, Hamza (Virginia Tech, 2018-03-23)Is it possible to conceive of migrants as active stakeholders of migration and asylum policies rather than passive objects of political and humanitarian intervention? In the public discourse on migration, migrants' voices are largely ignored and their political future in the reception country is often that of ascribed muteness and disenfranchisement. Yet, migrants have a voice, a history, a context, and therefore, potential aspirations to a political existence. In this dissertation, I propose an empirical study of the migratory journeys that occurred during what has been known as "the summer of migration," which described the incoming of migrants via the Aegean Sea and through the Western Balkans to Germany and the rest of Northern Europe. Based on field observations in initial reception centers for asylum seekers in Hamburg and semi-structured interviews with fifteen participants from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who came to Germany between 2015 and 2016, this dissertation proposes an analytical framework that provides a critical approach to the migration management regime and migrants migratory journey narratives. The claim of this dissertation is double. First it argues that it is analytically necessary to systematize the production of immanent knowledge about migrants' journeys through their own subjectivities. Such a perspective enables a deeper understanding of the impact of human mobility on state sovereignty, borderscapes and the workings of the migration management regime. Second, it is equally necessary to politically contribute to the normalization of integrating migrants' voices in the public debate and discourse to address oppressive practices of migration management and control.