DisPow

In times of sustained conflict and humanitarian crisis, migration has become both a main political issue, and a key topic in understanding the transformation of civil societies. In the past three years, Europe has experienced the greatest incoming movement of people since the Second World War, and is still dealing with the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. These transnational movements of asylum seekers are affected by border control policies that have been adopted or modified in a post-terrorist attacks climate. The counter-terrorism argument is often used by governments, including in France, as a justification for the adoption of emergency orders that suspend or modify the law and limit fundamental rights and freedoms in the short to longer term. The right to entry to the EU to seek asylum is dramatically affected by these measures. International Conventions, such as the Geneva Convention of 1957, remind us what the (theoretical) limits of this discretionary state power are, in accepting and refusing asylum seekers. In practice, exclusion and selection criteria today are increasingly blurred: many asylum seekers are de facto excluded in spite of their eligibility as nationals of unsafe countries, and/or as at-risk categories such as unaccompanied minors. As a consequence, these violations provoke protests that can translate into socio-legal controversies. These controversies bring actors defending different definitions of fundamental rights and different ways of guaranteeing these rights in democratic societies into opposition. Courts are often called upon to decide on the merits. The general objective of DisPow is to analyze these socio-legal controversies in order to understand their origin, the different conceptions of justice they symbolize, the way they are challenging contemporary French policies, and their effects on civil society’ actions. This resolutely interdisciplinary project focuses on the contemporary forms of the discretionary power of the State and its influence on 1) the everyday interpretation of the law and the implementation of immigration policies; 2) migrants’ (and in particular asylum seekers’) access to fundamental rights; and 3) social movements. The aim is to analyze resistance and protest against this discretionary power of the State through the prism of socio-legal practices that are challenging the legitimacy of contemporary immigration policies in France. The study of socio-legal controversies is pertinent to understanding: 1) how the law can be mobilized as a weapon , by whom, under what conditions, and with what results; 2) the spaces (the street, airports, railway stations etc.) where different conceptions of justice appear and conflict, and where these different conceptions converge (administrative courts, district courts, high courts, international courts, outside the court, etc.); 3) whether and how these controversies are part of broader social movements, or to what extent they contribute to the emergence of (renewed) social movements. Through an ethnographic approach, DisPow proposes to compare three paradigmatic case studies, to better understand these interconnected phenomena: the French-Italian border (in particular the Roya valley and the coast zone between Vintimille and Nice), the Grand Calais (in particular Calais and Grande-Synthe), and the Basque country (in particular the coast zone between Hendaye and Irun). The fieldwork proposes to investigate how different actors deal with ‘real law’, being engaged in controversies related to migrants’ rights. Far from the conventional view of law as mythical abstraction, the project aims to shed light on how the law is used in practice by migrants, activists, lawyers, local policymakers, and public officers. While surveying examples of actual socio-legal practices dealing both with the implementation of immigration policies and with their contestation, the research team will look to the potential of the law as a tool for social change.