Seeking Refuge in Relativism

 The didi who helps us with household chores is a Bangladeshi migrant who fled her country for reasons she doesn’t wish to remember. She can speak only Bengali and doesn’t have much to tell us about her experiences except that this country has given her refuge. I’ve never felt comfortable asking her if she worries about where India is headed, particularly for an undocumented minority woman.  And so I never did. Until the Monday morning class on the broadening and deepening of security concerns that made me look over to my didi who was mopping the floor of my room at the time and wonder how this frail woman with the wide smile and sad eyes could ever be a security threat to the state. 

The refugee crisis that has flared up tensions across the world is being perceived as a disease and the refugee, a threat. In reality, the refugee crisis is a symptom of the diseases of climate change, political suppression, gang violence, vested interests and such. And so it becomes crucial to assert that the crisis might be a security problem but the refugee is not the security threat. They are the referent object that is threatened by the state (among others) more often than what fits the narrative of security as conceptualized by traditional theorists. While this approach can be dismissed as one with a heavy bias, I intend to use historical accounts and empirical evidence to contest that the refugee crisis is a security concern only because there hasn’t been adequate action taken to counter the larger security problems that plague us today. 

The first example that I wish to employ is that of the border that the US shares with Mexico which has long been the center of the heated immigration debate in American politics. The erstwhile Trump administration and a significant portion of the American public view the millions of people at the border as threats to the ‘American way of life’ which in turn is synonymous with ‘national security’ because identity and sovereignty are closely tied in the social architecture of the nation (as opposed to what Ole Wæver argues when he distinguishes between state and societal security). The perceived threat posed by refugees has led to a sharp increase in far right terrorism and gun lobbying in America. The irony of relativity in this scenario is that the National Rifle Association, a pro gun lobby group that  profits domestically from the securtizing of refugees as a threat, is directly responsible for supplying guns to Central American countries that these refugees are forced to flee from. 46% and 49% of the ‘traceable gun supply’ in Honduras and El Salvador come from the US. (Minhaj 2019) These nations are reeling under the effects of gun violence that forces women and children in particular to leave their homes. Here, the NRA is a security threat for it enables the large-scale gang violence in Central American countries that leads to a migrant exodus and then guarantees the average American the right to bear arms and attack the same refugees who had no choice but to escape. Here Wæver’s conception of security as ‘speech act’ is essential because by defining refugees as threats to national security, the state is sanctioning the use of extraordinary force and, as Barry Buzan put it, employing the term for its “enormous power as an instrument of social and political mobilization”. (Wæver 1995) 

It must also be noted that the US government has played a role in supporting coups of elected governments in countries like Guatemala which subsequently led to complete destability in the nation. (Planas 2014)

The case of climate induced conflict and subsequent migration is the second example I wish to take.

Of the many causes for the civil war, no one could have anticipated that climate change would spark one of the deadliest humanitarian crises of all time. A three year drought and extreme heat waves forced the farming communities in the rural, disconnected regions of Syria to migrate to the urban centers. (TEDxTalks 2020) Soon the urban settlers and rural migrants entered conflict over the limited resources and quickly this turned into larger public angst over the governance of the Assad regime. Climate change exposed class hierarchies within Syrian society. The rural farming community were viewed as second class citizens in contrast to their urban counterparts and questions of whose security of livelihood and access to resources mattered most arose. These questions however didn’t matter in the slightest when compared to the security interests of the incumbent regime. The military and use of violence was deployed in order to combat the security threat that public opposition posed and soon enough thousands of Syrians were forced to leave their homes in order to survive. 

While this may not directly tie into the relativity of security, it is perhaps worth exploring whether climate change can be considered a security threat. It is evident that climate change (among other things) caused enough existential fear that led to a refugee crisis but there lies a concern in ‘securitising’ it. As Wæver mentions, “Use of the security label does not merely reflect whether a problem is a security problem, it is also a political choice, that is, a decision for conceptualization in a special way. When a problem is "securitized," the act tends to lead to specific ways of addressing it: Threat, defense, and often state-centered solutions.” (Wæver 1995) While this certainly is a pertinent point, I still believe that climate change is a security threat purely by the standards of mainstream security studies. However, there lies the problem. As a result of broadening, we have acknowledged that climate change is a security threat like no other and yet most of our solutions to evade said threat are ‘state centered’ and ‘militarized’. So perhaps the best way to combat climate change as a security threat is to do so in ‘non-security’ terms or at least non-traditional security terms. The same is true of how governance agencies can tackle the refugee crisis. It is a security issue that is not inherently violent and not one where the refugees are threats. Therefore militaristic solutions (the manner in which border security engages with refugees for instance) to this crisis also need to be discarded. It is the bare minimum owed to people like my didi.

References

Minhaj, Hasan, dir. 2019. Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. Season 3, episode 2, “The NRA’s Global Impact.”

Planas, Roque. 2014. “Here's How The U.S. Sparked A Refugee Crisis On The Border, In 8 Simple Steps.” HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/refugee-crisis-border_n_5596125.

TEDxTalks, dir. 2020. TEDxYouth@BeaconStreet. “The Silent Killer: A War Ignited by Climate Change.” Aired January 2nd, 2020.

Wæver, Ole. 1995. “Securitization and Desecuritization.” In On Security. New York: Columbia University Press.