no refuge: a provocation

I receive an email about some academic conference while Israel bombs refugee camps in Gaza. I can’t exactly recall the theme, something on open borders and refugee integration. I immediately delete the message and wonder how migration scholars around the world can gather in hotels with ugly-patterned carpets to debate pressing “issues” when generations of Palestinian refugees are shuttled from one “safe” region to another only to be slaughtered, when millions seeking protection are exposed to bombardment with impunity, when every institution of higher education in Gaza has been destroyed in a concerted scholasticide.

Then, in the midst of all this, I watch the UK set ablaze with Islamophobic, anti-immigrant riots on social media. The scapegoat is an imaginary Muslim asylum seeker. White faces, some hiding under black balaclavas, take to the streets to loot businesses, attack people of color, and chant “stop the boats.” Some raise their arms in Nazi salute. A man sets fire to a green roll-off bin blocking the exit of a Holiday Inn Express housing asylum seekers. A crowd cheers. Rocks smash through windows. I think again of the ugly-patterned carpets and the people huddled inside, maybe on the floor, who once believed that they had escaped danger.

The old monsters—colonialism, fascism, racism—rear their heads. But this time something feels different. These attacks on refugees are too brazen, pushing a limit, crossing a red line. In the year 2024, it seems that there is no such thing as refuge, that the very principle of refuge, enshrined in international law and liberal democracies, has gone hollow. As I write this provocation, juridico-political refuge, as concept and practice, is quickly eroding to nothingness. No veneer of western bourgeois liberalism can hide the devastating fact that refuge is unavailable—indeed intentionally eliminated—for those who need it most. As such, the very idea of state protection for the displaced, the stateless, the persecuted has lost its integrity as a democratic good.

Refuge is failing its litmus test—its center cannot hold. The category of “refugee,” once imbued with humanitarian values, has become meaningless. Intergovernmental organizations tasked with legally protecting the rights of refugees like the United Nations have been impotent to intervene and end the massacre in Gaza. The world is forced to watch a lived-streamed genocide. Children, women, men burning beyond death. And those who protest against this genocide are beaten down with repression, reprisal, and prosecution. There is nowhere that can be considered safe anymore.

It's not that the global community was a paragon of humanitarian care for Palestinians or other migrants from the global south before October 2023. But in the past twelve months, the unprecedented violence in Gaza (and Gaza in the world) has shone a glaring light on, among other things, the ineffectual refugee protection system, including the large body of knowledge production that undergirds it.

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My first single-authored academic monograph was published just weeks into the genocide. At the time, colleagues encouraged me to mark the culmination of years of hard work with a book launch. Some invited me to give talks on their campuses. I refused, mostly because I was in no condition to celebrate, but also because I began to realize that the historical present had made my ideas obsolete, or irrelevant at best. My book explored the experience of refuge, but as I scrolled through my newsfeed and looked around at my life, I saw that there was no such thing as refuge. No real refuge for Palestinians, or for any of us in settler states. By “us” I don’t just mean former refugees like me or those who are racialized or socially precarious, but a collective much more diffuse, those committed to justice, who dared to break silence, who wanted a ceasefire. And even those who sit idly at home, those who breathe—dare I say, humanity.

I truly believe that my own refuge is connected to the possibility of refuge for others. I can’t shake off the feeling every morning that some part of my existence, our collective existence, is being worn down, that human decency is rotting away.   

I keep waiting for major research centers, big professional associations, and respected journals to say something about what has been happening in Gaza. For the international refugee studies community to rally around the very people they research and write about. After all, this genocide is happening to refugees. I continue to hope for something, anything, a symbolic gesture, an acknowledgement, a little cry. In the void, what I see is more publications, more conferences, more summer schools—“read my new article … apply to this exciting fellowship …pleased to announce …”

The dissonance, the disconnect makes my head spin. It drives me to my bed in paralysis for days. To be sure, this provocation is not a call out or an opportunity for self-righteousness; I have no interest in that kind of thing. What I desire is for refugee and migration studies to be relevant. What the hell are we doing if not using all our resources to end the assault on Palestinian refugees?

There comes a time when our critical frameworks are no longer adequate, when the same old ways of doing things don’t work anymore. Just as nothing remained the same after the Holocaust, so nothing will remain the same after the genocide in Gaza ends, as it will, as it must.

We are experiencing a historical turning point, and our ways of thinking, doing, and being must shift to reflect this new reality. Refugee studies, in particular, is facing an identity crisis. It needs some serious soul searching.

This is existential: What do refugee scholars and what does refugee scholarship owe to refugees? What are refugee studies commitments? What is its politics?

If refugee studies survives (and I hope it does), it needs a serious and honest scrutiny of its concept formation. That is, refugee studies must reconsider its foundational assumptions, investments, and aims.

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Recently, a trusted friend asked me to speak to her class and I shared some of these ideas in scattered form. Her students asked smart questions to help me grapple with my thoughts. Eventually, after moving in circles, we arrived at the inevitable—so where do we go from here?

I, of course, had no answers.

I only had wishes for what refugee studies could become. I present these wishes to you here:  

The problem with refugee studies is that it’s too focused on refugees. This focus leads to research questions about who is or isn’t a refugee, how to better manage refugee “crises,” how to develop better policies, how to understand the refugee’s internal constitution. But perhaps we’ve already reached the limits of these questions; maybe these questions are no longer the right ones to be asking. Because all this asking and researching has still led to bomb craters and blazing tents in Gazan refugee camps, places that should be inviolable. Sacrilege.

So, what might be possible if we de-emphasized our attempts to “know” refugees and make refugees “knowable,” and instead commit ourselves to scrutinizing the forces of violence that produce and then imperils them? What if the subjects of refugee studies aren’t refugees, but “us,” who are not currently refugees but could one day become refugees, who are not removed from the reach of violence?

To my mind, refugee studies could lead the way to train our vigilance and continual pushback against fascism. Refugee studies could always be the warning signal, beeping and flashing in the fog, against the dangers of falling into the militaristic, ethno-nationalist thirst for blood, so we will never again ask, “how did this genocide happen?” It could be the first to surround any emergent power-maker trafficking in xenophobic, racist, anti-immigrant ideologies and immediately debunk them to ashes. It could make far-right groups the target instead of refugees.

It could be radical. In the sense of roots. Grassroots. Work on the ground. Engage the people. Educate citizens, and help them resist the seduction of the basest argument, the easiest threat, the allure of hate.  

Its politics could be decolonization. Not “decolonizing” refugee studies, but struggling with the practical dismantling of colonial thinking and practices every day, for us all. 

Refugee studies in its most potent potential form is the study of how a society—and a global community—can cultivate a political culture that is anti-war, anti-carceral, and anti-imperialist, putting humanitarianism (not the old strategic, branding, colonial kind) at its center. Refugee studies is the study of how to manage the citizen’s shortcomings: the lack of humanity, the fear, the myopia, the complacency. Refugee studies creates better policies for supporting the settled and their communities so refugees can’t be blamed for housing and job crises, limited resources, or social precarity. Refugee studies breaks the imaginary border between the displaced and the resident, the fleeing and the safe, them and us.

Refugee studies must always be the first call for a ceasefire.

Many of you will read this and scoff, will say that I know nothing or that I’m an idealist. This is not how things work, you will declare. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. I don’t have much that’s concrete. But I do have belief. Gaza has taught me to believe in the next moment; to hang on, with the tightest of grips, to life; to home in on the tiniest particles of my humanness. And trust that I am right. How else am I to stay in this topsy-turvy world?

Refugee studies must start remaking itself by calling for a ceasefire, or else wither in the genocidal violence to which it won’t bear witness.