Relocating asylum seekers to Rwanda repeats pattern of forced mobility from Britain’s colonial past
A fascinating academic article authored in May and published last month in MDPI's Social Sciences journal examines the Government's migration partnership with Rwanda from a distinctly historical viewpoint.
Image credit: WikipediaThe article was authored by Michael Collyer, professor of geography at the University of Sussex's Centre for Migration Research, and by Uttara Shahani, a lecturer in forced migration at the University of Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre. It is a free, open access article and you can read it here.
The authors describe how the policy of relocating asylum seekers and refugees to Rwanda has clear echoes of historical colonial practices that saw people forcibly removed, relocated and dispersed across the British Empire.
Michael Collyer and Uttara Shahani said: "We draw attention to these longer histories before investigating more recent cases of the dispersal of refugees within the British Empire in the twentieth century. In many cases, such forced dispersal concerned those who had been recognised as refugees who were interned and subsequently moved elsewhere in the Empire. Such policies were designed to prevent the arrival of refugees in the UK. These policies have provided inspiration for asylum practices in some postcolonial states—Israel is reported to have reached an agreement with Uganda and Rwanda to deport asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea, although these are not public. In this paper, we highlight how these colonial practices of forcible displacement of individuals inform the current agreement between the UK and Rwanda."
As the article explains, such practices were common throughout Britain's colonial period but were especially widely used, and envisaged, for the relocation of refugees towards the end of the Empire.
By repeating these practices and patterns of forced mobility from Britain's colonial past, the Rwanda policy marks a clear departure from the practices of deportation and enforced removals that developed in the UK and other liberal democracies since the 1970s.
The authors say the colonial connections of the Rwanda policy are important because they reinforce a system in which unequal power relations between countries and peoples are normalised, further exacerbating the difficulties of finding a more sustainable solution to the global crisis of displacement.
They note: "The vast majority of displaced people in the world are hosted in formerly colonised countries. Policies that shift the obligation to care for even small numbers of displaced people from wealthy to poorer countries reinforce an idea that they are 'surplus', a problem to be passed on and an obligation that can easily be avoided. In turn, this serves to legitimise the current global distribution of displaced people, reinforcing the notion that the many millions hosted are surplus and, as such, can be abandoned in terrible conditions in desperately poor countries."
Collyer and Shahani find the Rwanda policy is best understood as a colonial power play in all senses of the term, performative rather than serious.
"The very widespread criticism that the deal has received, its extremely high cost, and the fact that the initial plan to forcibly remove only 200 individuals of the more than 160,000 awaiting a decision suggest that it is unlikely to meet its stated objectives. The real value for the UK government is to be found in a performance of control. This is important and helps to reinforce our central argument that the historical precedent to the Rwanda plan is to be found less in contemporary (post-1970) deportation policy and much more obviously in colonial practices of directed migration and refugee relocation or dispersal."
In concluding, the article explains further: "Most analysis agrees that whatever the policy is, it cannot be interpreted as a serious attempt to resolve the long-standing political challenge of asylum in the UK since, even if it were to be enacted, it would not make a serious contribution to this objective. In the most immediate sense, it is a play for power, an attempt by the current UK government to shore up the electoral support that has deserted it in recent years. It is also a play in the sense of a performance. It appears to be a dynamic, original response to a well-recognised policy priority. From the outset, it was clear that the policy would be opposed by a civil society committed to the defence of the principle of asylum and the rights of refugees and most likely involve the UK courts and the European Court of Human Rights as well. The further electoral gamble was that a sufficiently large number of people would view a public battle with any of these groups sympathetically to carry significant electoral weight."
The authors conclude that even if it fails in its explicit objectives, the impact of the policy will go beyond the immediate effects of undermining the 1951 Refugee Convention and will ultimately legitimatise notions of 'surplus' populations and provide legitimacy to the current vastly unequal global distribution of refugees.