The UK’s Necropolitics of Racialised (B)ordering

Hyab Yohannes, PhD holder from the University of Glasgow, is a research associate and academic coordinator for the CUSP N+. He conducts research, synthesises findings, draws expertise from various fields, and engages with academic and non-academic communities. Hyab recently signed a book contract with Routledge for his upcoming book, “The Coloniality of the Refugee”.

The UK Government’s approach to people seeking asylum can be summarized in the following four points.

Firstly, the UK Government claims that there are too many people seeking protection, and it does not have the capacity to admit and accommodate them. According to reports from the UNHCR, it is predicted that there will be over 117 million displaced people worldwide in 2023, with the majority of them being hosted in law and middle income countries (76%). The claim that the UK lacks capacity does not appear to be plausible, especially considering that the majority of the displaced people are being accommodated in the immediate neighbouring countries.

Secondly, the UK discursively claims that it does not share any socio-cultural, linguistic and religious any commonalities with most of these forcibly displaced people and that it cannot afford to admit them into UK society. This is evident in the use of inflammatory and dehumanising language such as "invasion". The Government's position is that, even if the country were to accept a few refugees, it would choose who and how to admit them into society. These racial biases are apparent in the differential treatment of refugees. For example, Ukrainian and Hong Kong refugees receive more favourable responses than those from the Global South, who often face racialised (b)ordering.

Thirdly, the UK Government claims that the plight of forcibly displaced people is not its problem. The Government presents forced migration as an issue primarily caused by "authoritarian and undemocratic" countries, suggesting that the refugee-sending countries should be primarily responsible for handling the asylum issue. The government pays little to no attention to its colonial history and the imperial wars it has been involved in, from the Iraq war to Afghanistan, Yemen, and many other countries. The everyday realities of coloniality and raciality that underpin these imperial and geopolitical wars remain obscure to the average citizen.

Lastly, if a large number of people seeking asylum reach the UK's shores, the government claims that it has no choice but to remove them by any means possible. This is reflected in policies such as the Nationality and Borders Act and the Illegal Migration Bill. People seeking asylum are viewed and portrayed as national security threats, leading to extreme measures such as detention, deportation, and potentially confinement to offshore carceral spaces. The government prioritises border security over the human security of racialised people seeking asylum.

At this point, let me raise some fundamental questions that may have implications for how we approach the question of asylum. Why does the UK Government prioritise border security over human security when it comes to racialised people? One might also ask why the Government weaponises law through legislation that gives the state sweeping powers to deploy violent bordering technologies when it only serves to harm a portion of humanity without addressing the underlying problem. Most importantly, why do refugee lives appear to not matter much?

In response to these questions, Mountz’s book "The Death of Asylum" explains how these biopolitical processes of racialised (b)ordering function and operate to deny people seeking asylum the right to seek asylum. Mountz argues that the biopolitical processes and operations of bordering result in three forms of death: physical, ontological, and political. Mountz (2020) explains:

The state moves offshore to enforce exclusion, resulting in physical death; ontological death involves the resulting impossibility of becoming an asylum seeker due to this prevention of arrivals; and political death means essentially that no critical mass of people knows, cares, or responds to this situation (pp. 12–13).

According to Mountz, when combined, these three forms of death lead to the death of asylum. However, I believe it is more accurate to consider the death of asylum as the ultimate expression of the withdrawal or suspension of asylum, which is now being deployed in the UK and other countries to annihilate those seeking asylum. This suspension of asylum has become a necropolitical experimentation through which racialised people are filtered, oppressed, and selectively exposed to death.

The ultimate death of asylum can only be conceived in destitutive terms by addressing the root causes that lead to the creation of refugees in the first place. This could result in the emergence of undifferentiated and non-exclusive humanity as a decolonial possibility. It requires the dismantling of the violence the state and its institutions of racialised bordering and ordering of societies. When humanity is confined within the confines of selectively violent borders, what remains is what I would call juridico-political humanity, a kind of humanity stripped of its evolving, restorative, and emergent capacity. This is underpinned by a rapidly consuming matrices of coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. Anything that exists outside, beyond, and against the state and its institutions becomes an exception that must either surrender to the state or be annihilated from its core.

In this context, the refugee appears to be a mutated breed of a lesser humanity caught within the framework of juridico-political humanism. The state-centric or humanitarian narratives of refugee protection are nothing but attempts to either assimilate refugees into this juridico-political humanism or eliminate them through necropolitical regimes, which involve “subjugating life to the power of death”, as Achille Mbembe famously argues.

To understand, live, and exist otherwise, we must question the metaphysical foundations of coloniality and raciality. We should subject these violent foundations to radical scrutiny to envision life in the ruins of coloniality. Imagining life in the ruins of coloniality requires a rebellion against the colonial logics of juridico-politics and "necro-ethics". Humanity must rebel against its reduction to racialised juridico-political existence and align itself with the decolonial possibility that the struggles of refugees point us to. In the death world where refugees are abandoned, there is a decolonial possibility for humanity to emancipate itself from violently reductive juridico-political humanism and the everyday realities of coloniality and raciality.

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