Ethnicities and values in a changing world

Ethnicities and Values
in a Changing World

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Ethnicities and Values
in a Changing World
Edited by
Gargi Bhattacharyya
Aston University, UK

© Gargi Bhattacharyya 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Gargi Bhattacharyya has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the editor of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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Union Road 101 Cherry Street
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Ethnicities and values in a changing world.
1. Ethnicity. 2. Social values. 3. Cultural relations.
4. Racism.
I. Bhattacharyya, Gargi, 1964-
305.8-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bhattacharyya, Gargi, 1964-
Ethnicities and values in a changing world / by Gargi Bhattacharyya.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-7483-2 (hardback) 1. Group identity. 2. Cultural pluralism. 3. Values.
I. Title.
HM753.B43 2009
305.8009’051--dc22
2009015714
ISBN: 978-0-7546-7483-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-7546-9775-6 (ebk.V)

Contents
1 Introduction: Ethnicities, Values and Old-fashioned Racism 1
Gargi Bhattacharyya
2 Teaching Race and Racism in the 21st
Century:
Thematic Considerations 35
Howard Winant
3 Diaspora Conversations: Ethics, Ethicality, Work and Life 45
A conversation between Parminder Bhachu and Gargi Bhattacharyya
4 Migrant Women’s Networking:
New Articulations of Transnational Ethnicity 65
Ronit Lentin
5 ‘The people do what the political class isn’t able to do’:
Antigypsyism, Ethnicity Denial and the Politics of Racism
without Racism 83
Robbie McVeigh
6 Violent Urban Protest – Identities, Ethics and Islamism 103
Max Farrar
7 Beliefs, Boundaries and Belonging:
African Pentecostals in Ireland 119
Abel Ugba
8 On Being a ‘Good’ Refugee 135
John Gabriel and Jenny Harding
9 Narrating Lived Experience in a Binational Community
in Costa Rica 155
Carlos Sandoval García
10 Conclusion: Ethnicity and Ethicality in an Unequal World 169
Gargi Bhattacharyya
Index 181

Chapter 1
Introduction:
Ethnicities, Values and Old-fashioned Racism
Gargi Bhattacharyya
How do we know how to be good?
How do we decide what we believe?
How do we form our identities in a rapidly changing world?
How do we achieve a sense of belonging and community against a barrage of
global forces and influences?
In recent years these questions have taken centre stage in a range of debates at both
local and international levels. Questions of identity, ethics, values and community
continue to animate the most violent of political contexts. Old questions about
the articulation and enforcement of social values and the need to be connected to
others continue to circulate, with a few positive responses to the central question
of how can we live together? (See for example, Appiah, 2004; Benhabib, 2002;
Parekh, 2000.)
After the violent racial histories of the 20th
century, there appeared to be a
brief moment when the more optimistic of commentators dared to suggest a post-
racial future (Eze, 2001). No longer trapped in a world divided by the colour line
or the formal racial states of earlier times, the racial politics of the 21st
century
promised to be more unpredictable than that of the 20th
– although not necessarily
less bloody or painful.
Unfortunately, the longed-for post-racial future has emerged as a time of new
forms of racialisation, often over-written by older and more familiar structures of
racialised inequality. The twenty-first century seems destined to be riven by ethnic
divisions and animated by ethnic performance, an unhappy outcome that can be
seen in the first decade of this new century and the ethnically-inspired violence
that has cut across conflicts in Darfur (Flint and De Waal, 2005), Kenya (Baldauf,
2008), Iraq, Indonesia (Sidel, 2006) and elsewhere. Although each of these recent
conflicts has been shaped by the changing politics of its own context, each also
represents a reassertion of absolutist notions of ethnic identity, albeit for a variety
of politically expedient ends.
Against this, this collection seeks to challenge the contention that ethnicity is
static or that ethnicity necessarily represents traditional values and cultures.
Instead, this volume considers how ethnicity is mobilised as a political
identity in response to a changing world. This includes discussion of, among other

Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World
things, the formation of religious communities, responses to media racism, the
interplay between state racism and everyday choices, and the struggle of racialised
communities to both be good and be seen to be good.
The debate about ethnicity and values has taken place in a number of arenas,
with slightly different directions and emphases. These debates range from:
discussions of the philosophical conception of the other and our duty to this other
(Benhabib, 2004); the ethical assertion and burden that is declared in any taking
of identity and implications of this for our ability to live together in any kind of
peaceable manner (Sen, 2006); the allegation that some ethnic identities are tied
irretrievably to backward, violent and exclusionary values (Moller Okin, 1999);
the suggestion that allegiance to some ethnic identities means an abdication of
ethical judgement (Gove, 2006).
This volume considers all of these assertions, in varying degrees. Some pieces,
such as that by Howard Winant, argue that the ethical obligations that occur with
the taking of ethnic identity also shape the responsibilities of scholars in the field.
The majority of case studies here reveal the extent to which the ethical claims of
ethnic identity are staged in response to popular demonisation or state racism. In
some instances, as shown by Abel Ugba, this defensive response can itself take on
a rhetoric of exclusion and judgement.Anumber of chapters describe the strategies
that are employed by those facing exclusion, strategies that include reasserting the
benefits and strengths of the ethical values of their ‘community’. However, overall,
the pieces taken together reveal a world of changing and constantly renegotiated
values. This process of ongoing negotiation unsettles the terms of some other
recent debate about ethnicity and values.
Ethnicity as an Expression of Values
Much of the debate surrounding the issue of ethnicity and values implies that the
world is divided into discrete groups of people who can be adequately described
through ethnic naming. The allegation that some groups remain tied to practices
and beliefs that cannot be reconciled with our ethical duty to each other rests on
the belief that culture, in this sense, is stable, inherent in each member of the group
and is immune to the appeals of reason or argument (for a summary of competing
accounts of ethnicity, see Jenkins, 2008).
This work argues that such a conception of ethnicity in the world transforms
all human disagreement into inter-ethnic conflict. Although wary of the dangers
of cliched constructivism, as described by Brubaker, overall this volume seeks
to argue that ethnicity is deployed in part as an expression of values and a model
of ethical practice. This does not assume a solidity to ethnic identity, or that the
consolidation of ethnic identity is an inevitable outcome of ethnically framed
social turbulence. In some of the instances discussed here the ethical claims of
ethnic practice are linked to highly diverse groups (see, for example, pieces by
Gabriel and Harding and by Sandoval-Garcia). The point is that the articulation

Introduction: Ethnicities, Values and Old-fashioned Racism
of ethical judgement and values serves here as an explicit refutation of the racist
allegation that some people have no values.
More generally it can be argued that the performance of ethnicity is always
a kind of ethical display, if we take the ethical to be a statement of intent about
our relations to others. If ethnicity is above all an affirmation of groupness, then
there must be a confirmation of sanctioned behaviour within the group and the
demonstration that group norms can be observed. This is ethics as part of the lived
contract of belonging. The display of ethnicity represents both that assertion of
identity and a statement about way of life, sense of entitlement and manner of
connection to others.
The pieces in this volume span discussions of the manner in which marginalised
or demonised groups take up the rhetoric of moral worth as an element of their
resistance to the demeaning slurs of the dominant. This is a consideration of
ethnicity as a response to changing circumstances and perceived threats and as a
code for ethical behaviour.
This can be seen through a range of recent examples. The much-discussed
politicisation of religion represents one instance of this phenomenon and the
manner in which social actors combine religion and politics and everyday contexts,
including the mundane context of resisting the banality of everyday racism, could
be regarded as a key indicator of the role of ethicality in ethnic articulation. It is
worth noting that these forms of ethical assertion can accompany the re-emergence
of exclusionary identities in both majority and minority communities. Ethical
claims here have no necessary relation to practices of coexistence or tolerance.
In fact, the strength of the ethical claim may be precisely its ability to divide
the world into good and bad and to challenge notions of coexistence that appear
unworkable.
The volume as a whole seeks to place these developments within the wider
context of adaptive and resurgent state racisms and the controversial and varied
political mobilisation that has occurred around the concept of ‘diversity’. The
question of divisions and antagonisms between minority ethnic communities
inevitably has led to a reappraisal of analysis in this field. These are issues that
are not easily confined to models of majority-minority relations or the formal
mobilisation of ethnic nationalism (Kyambi, 2005). Instead, the debates around
community cohesion have sought to acknowledge both structural inequality and
the dangers of exclusionary identities (Worley, 2005; Eatwell, 2006) – although
this discourse brings its own pitfalls, as outlined in pieces by Farrar and by Gabriel
and Harding.
Taken together, the pieces here share some common themes. Firstly, all
contributors share an understanding of ethnicity in which the articulation of ethnic
identity is an ongoing and creative process that can reveal innovative ethical codes.
Although the influence of civilisational clash models of social understanding
clearly impacts on everyday experience, contributors describe the manner in
which those facing racism and exclusion take up the language of values and ethical
codes in order to articulate less absolute and constraining models of identity. Such

alternative articulations of value offer a critique of the idea that there are absolute
divisionsbetweenculturesandservetointerrogateconceptsofcommunitycohesion
and inter-ethnic interaction in a manner that can propose models of shared values
that do not rely on static conceptions of identity. Alongside this, the pieces in
this volume identify a framework for understanding the processes through which
individuals create innovative ethical codes that inform their relations to others.
Are Values Like ‘Glue’?
Recent debates about national identity, belonging and community cohesion appear
to be based on a conception of ethnicity as a static entity. This conceptualisation
posits ethnic difference as a source of conflict in itself and, therefore, presents
models of mediation and revamped nationalism as essential components of shared
citizenship (Brown, 2006). This volume presents an alternative account of ethnicity
as a mobile process that is under constant renegotiation. Such a conception of
ethnicity calls into question models of community cohesion that present ethnicity
as the source of antagonisms and differences that must be overcome and instead
suggests that ethnicity is itself multiple and changing and is unlikely to be a
basis for articulating shared values. The debate about modernity, reflexivity and
post-traditional societies has been influential in recent analyses of contemporary
society (see Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994). These debates raise key questions
about the manner in which individuals conceive of ethicality and make day-to-
day ethical choices. Individuals may not shape their lives according to so-called
traditional values, however the conduct of everyday life continues to demand an
understanding of ethicality and corresponding code of behaviour.
These questions take on urgency in the current climate. We are undergoing a
widespread re-examination of the nature and extent of our bonds to each other as
human beings (Appiah, 2006) – be this in the form of debates about global poverty
and global warming, terrorism and war or anti-social behaviour and community
cohesion. Political debate, from the most violent and international to the most
local, is focused on the question of how we define our ethical values and how these
values shape our behaviour in relation to others.
The concept of ethnicity is tied intimately to the idea of value – who we believe
ourselves to be and how we choose to relate to others are issues that are shaped
through the prisms of ethnicised cultures. This volume considers again these
debates about the articulation of ethnic identity, the nature of our relation to each
other and discussions of everyday ethics. This volume offers a review of recent
reappraisals of the concept of ‘ethnicity’ and the accompanying insertion of ideas
of belief and value in this discussion. Individual chapters consider how ethnic
identities shift and adapt, in particular in response to the pressures of global forces.
Overall it is argued that ethnic identities are improvised and reveal one method
of retaining a narrative of ethical values in individual lives. Such narratives may

utilise a variety of resources, ranging from those of traditional religion to those of
popular culture.
The textbook account of the term ethnicity suggests that this is a description of
a conscious community (Jenkins, 2008). Whereas race is presented as an external
imposition, a powerful categorisation that descends upon a group from the outside,
ethnicity demands some degree of identification. If race is a practice that is done to
us, ethnicity is something we do to ourselves, in part at least.
It is this demand for active participation that makes ethnicity so susceptible
to the claims of religion and belief. There is nothing new about the political
mobilisation of religious identity (Hastings, 1997). It is true that in previous
centuries religious divisions were not couched in terms of identity. However,
many regions of the world have a long history of enacting social division through
religion. The recent upsurge of interest in religious mobilisation appears to be a
response to the perception that religion is becoming a more, not less, significant
component of social division (Jurgensmeyer, 1993; Mandaville, 2007) and a
particular concern in the West that political Islam represents a threat to global
order and so-called western values. Pieces here consider the impact of this anxiety
about religion (Farrar; Ugba), but the volume is framed around the more general
issue of the impact of globalisation on the articulation of ethnic identities and the
concurrent improvisation of ethnic identity that has become so familiar across
locations.
The Context of the Values and Ethnicity Debate
In common with other locations, Britain has undergone a number of years of public
debate about the nature and resilience of national identity. For example, Gordon
Brown heralded his ascent to the role of British Prime Minister by giving a public
lecture on the nature of Britishness. At the same time, the widespread critique of
multiculturalism, much of it international and much of it implying that it is the
British model which has failed, has given rise to an overenthusiastic reclaiming of
national pride and heritage as the supposedly essential underpinning to a cohesive
society. It has been suggested that it is the failure to articulate such a basis of
commonality that is at the heart of Britain’s social problems,
one of the major problems faced by British society today: the failure to produce a
discourse that integrates various ethnic groups under the umbrella of a common
British identity. (Ansari et al. 2008, 1)
Perhaps inevitably, these debates have become more heated and aggressive in
the aftermath of the London bombings of 2005. This event, where four young
British Muslim men carried out a series of deadly bomb attacks on London public
transport, killing themselves in the process, has had a profound impact on British
public debate. After this attack from within, there was a highly public expression

of doubt about the viability or desirability of multicultural co-existence. With little
reference to evidence, although in a continuation of earlier reports about the need
for community cohesion, there was a widespread acceptance that British versions
of multiculturalism were to blame, at least in part, for the emergence of British
residents who wished to launch terrorist attacks at home. This was a critique of
multiculturalism that suggested that the tolerance of difference allowed alien
value systems to be nurtured undisturbed, with an outcome of serious divisions
within the nation (for an extreme example of this argument, see Phillips, 2006).
Predictably, this too continued a longer-running theme in policy debate.
In Britain much of the public anxiety about national identity and the allegedly
corrosive influence of multiculturalism has revolved around a sense of some more
fundamental crisis, a suggestion that the very basis of civilised life may be under
attack. Bannister summarises this as,
the myth, articulated by successive generations of press and politicians, that
the ‘British way of life’ is under threat by an unruly minority (Bannister et al.,
2006, 919)
This account goes beyond narratives of ethnic belonging to include concerns
about youth, disorder, public display and, that most nebulous and yet most
anxiety-inducing of contemporary afflictions, anti-social behaviour. Alongside the
attempted retrieval of national identity and culture, the dying days of Tony Blair’s
government instituted an ill-considered ‘Respect’ agenda, explicitly targeting the
varied incarnations of anti-social behaviour. This was not an initiative that sought
to mobilise a politics of race, or, at least, not in any obvious sense. Those themes
received plenty of government comment (and media releases) through initiatives to
harden immigration control, to increase the punishment of immigration offenders,
to celebrate prescriptive and narrow accounts of national culture and to enforce
integration of minorities on terms that pandered to the prejudices of the majority.
The Respect agenda was introduced alongside such explicitly racialised initiatives,
but as a reminder that an unethical minority threatened majority values.
the Home Office’s Respect Action Plan … seeks to empower majority groups
to enforce respectability in public spaces of all kinds by removing forms of
‘intimidation’ and ‘tyranny’. (Bannister et al., 2006, 920)
The appeal to majority values is a tactic that can move between a variety of
populist agendas, from law and order to anti-immigrant rhetoric. The extensive
public concern and government campaign against antisocial behaviour operated
through an appeal to a set of majority values that remained unspecified. What was
important was the sense that this majority, silent, long-suffering, was under attack
by an unruly minority. This sense that social problems were caused by an alien
group and that the response should be to fight back from this besieged position

worked to rally the electorate around a whole series of initiatives that purported to
defend the majority against a dangerous and intrusive minority.
The suggestion that majorities are under attack and that this requires a defence
and consolidation of national identity has been echoed in a range of ‘crisis’
measures across Europe. Bertossi explains that this propagation of the idea that
majorities are besieged has enabled a shift to the political right across Europe,
Migrants and ethnic and religious minorities have been identified as an
explanation for this integration crisis, to which governments have responded
with a return to the national. National identity is therefore being set up as a
form of ‘common belonging’ which is under threat from Islam and, at the same
time, as a solution to the crisis of ‘common belonging’, which is particularly
noticeable in the fact that themes which were traditionally held by far-Right
parties have now become commonplace. (Bertossi, 2007, 6)
Bertossi goes on to explain that this reveals the tension between maintaining ideals
of citizenship, a central plank in the mythologised self-conception of European
culture that has emerged, increasingly, in response to shifts in the global status and
internal composition of Europe, and other anxieties that the culture and status of
majorities is being undermined as a result of these same changes.
In short, the opposition between ‘national philosophies’ of citizenship and
integration policies is being played out in three areas: a crisis in the national,
but a resurgence of nationalist discourses to make sense of solidarity within
globalised, plural societies; a crisis in ‘integration models’, but calls from
minoritiesof immigrantorigin for full access to substantial,first-class citizenship;
and a crisis, in public opinion, in the sense of ‘common belonging’, but the use
of immigration and Islam to make sense of a global crisis whose only political
response that ‘pays’ is a return to national identity. (Bertossi, 2007, 6)
Although much of the mobilisation of majority anxiety has been focused on issues
of ethnicity, nationhood and belonging, the sense of disruption arises from a larger
array of changes, not least the unsettling impact of shifts in the global economy
on the security and sovereignty of the nation. Bertossi suggests that the array of
rediscovered popular nationalisms across Europe, in both minority and mainstream
political parties, are an indication that electorates suffering from anxiety on many
fronts, including those caused by the vagaries of the global economy, respond
most readily to a return to the familiar terrain of exclusionary nationalism. The
initial popular response to the enormity of global economic downturn seems to
confirm this – with workers’ movements proclaiming their demand of ‘British
jobs for British workers’ and parties across the political spectrum rushing to
demonstrate their support of this principle and public battles about the necessity
of ‘protectionism’ in many locations. The perceived dangers of the ethnic other
and the allegedly unwise accommodations of ‘multiculturalism’ fold into this

larger anxiety about global status, economic and political sovereignty and future
well-being, yet simultaneously become the most recognisable short-hand for this
generalised feeling of social unease.
The Alleged Crisis of Multiculturalism
Not all of the debate has been limited to Britain, or even to Europe or America.
Perhaps in another indication of the inappropriate influence of American trends in
social theory and policy (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999), Kuo writes of the take-
up of the language of multiculturalism in Taiwan. However, she, also, is doubtful
about the efficacy of the concept or practice.
Is multiculturalism possible? At least, multiculturalism is conceived as an
alternative vision of cultural strategy whose objective is to resist cultural
supremacy and to focus on the equality of different representations among
cultures. The concept of multiculturalism is much commented upon these days.
Increasingly today, the rhetoric of multiculturalism is in the air, as evidenced by
political debates and agendas. It has been considered as a capacious vehicle for
presenting cultural diversity in a transnational society. (Kuo, 2003, 223)
The varied use of multiculturalism as a ‘capacious vehicle’ that can be transported
across locations to meet the needs of any transnational society is connected to the
return to nationalism for locations facing a sense of social crisis. In both instances,
it is concepts of ethnic boundary and belonging that emerge as fixing techniques
for other uncertainties.
Modood and Ahmad suggest that the alleged crisis of multiculturalism, in fact,
is a sign of a necessary reassessment of the relationship between majority and
minority groups, particularly through a time of rapid social and economic change
for many locations. In particular, they argue that a multiculturalism that does not
encompass religion and religious identity cannot address the challenges of co-
existence in our time. They ask whether there is a need to think again about what
it is that,
a dominant culture which aspires to be liberal, democratic and inclusive may
require from minority cultures; whether we need a new extended concept of
racism which can incorporate hostility against Muslims; and about the place
of religion in the political culture and institutions. (Modood and Ahmad, 2007,
187)
Tariq Modood has argued for some time that concepts of racism and exclusion have
failed to recognise the role of religion and religious identity. In particular, he has
argued that there is a tension between the expressed values of secularism, which
have increasingly been proclaimed as a central aspect of Western culture and even

of liberal democracy, and the high levels of religious observance among minority
communities in the West, in particular amongst Muslim communities (Modood,
2007). To Modood, this oversight is at the heart of multiculturalist crisis talk.
Whereas earlier debates about the benefits of multicultural living could rely, to a
large extent, on the active participation and gratitude of minority communities who
expected no more than tolerance at best, the increasing politicisation of religious
identity unsettles this framework. At worst, those expressing an allegiance to
secular values may portray the proclamation of proud religious identity as itself
another version of exclusionary supremacism. The imagined idyll of multicultural
living had assumed that all participants would be persuaded, perhaps over time,
to tolerate and perhaps even value each other. To this extent, even quite weak
versions of multiculturalism adopt an ethical stance that prescribes the way of
living that is presumed to be better for all. However, such a conception has relied
on the assumption that assertions of group rights can be accommodated within
egalitarian frameworks. As Modood and Ahmad argue, religious groups and
Muslims in particular have not been regarded as participants in such quests for
equality,
In theory and in practice, then, while minority racial and ethnic assertiveness
(not to mention women’s movements and gay pride) were encouraged by
egalitarians, religious assertiveness, especially on the part of Muslims – when it
occurred – was seen as a problem: not as a strand within equality struggles but
as a threat to multiculturalism. (Modood and Ahmad, 2007, 189)
If multiculturalism has been in crisis, then this has been a result of the limitations of
multicultural thinking.The emergence of Muslim minorities across western nations
who are both observant and politicised tests the ability of a multiculturalism that
assumes secularism to accommodate all groups. Modood and Ahmad argue that
there must be a reconsideration of multiculturalism that can accommodate religious
identity and create a framework for public life that can allow participation and
entitlement for all, without demanding that groups prove their own multiculturalist
credentials and without assuming that multiculturalism can become a new
universalism that erases all difference.
Some other critiques of the conceptual framework of multiculturalism have
argued that this focus on cultural tolerance and appreciation cannot mediate
difference and inequality in any meaningful way. McClennan argues that an
excessive focus on the cultural makes multiculturalism unworkable,
Some multiculturalists are militantly culturalist, believing that, to have any value,
multiculturalism must involve the protection, and perhaps enhancement, of only
the sort of entrenched national, ethnic and religious forms of life that have a
manifestly profound and primary inﬂuence over their members. Apart from the
risk of exaggerating the ‘grip’ that such cultures have on their participants, an
obvious snare in this line of thinking is that within many strongly formative

Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World10
cultures there is little scope for serious accommodation to the fundamental beliefs
and practices of other, equivalent ‘deep’cultures. That being so, multiculturalism
itself would hold little promise of developing into a new metacultural ethic for
our times; indeed multiculturalism might well be seen as a deﬁnite threat to
strong cultures. (McClennan, 2001, 390 )
McClennan is sceptical about the overall social benefits of multiculturalism – in
particular its ability to bring together groups with divergent views and values.
As he suggests, the call to co-existence of a certain kind could itself come to be
regarded as a cultural imposition and threat. In an echo of Modood and Ahmad,
McClennan suggests that a multiculturalism that celebrates cultural autonomy
and mutual tolerance, but cannot adapt to the political context shaping relations
between minorities and majorities, will not be able to address the challenges
of transnational societies. However, unlike Modood, McClennan disputes the
assertion that cultural identity holds such a central role in contemporary life.
Whilst it might be accepted that all human beings are in some signiﬁcant way
culturally formed and culturally located, the notion that everyone inhabits deep,
coherent and relatively unchanging cultures is disputable. (McClennan, 2001,
390)
This view has brought together an unlikely alliance, including those who regard
multiculturalism as a diversion from the continuing structural inequality and
violence of many diverse societies, those who argue that granting such authority
and solidity to something as changeable as culture gives undue power to self-
appointed leaders of minority cultural groups at the expense of less enfranchised
group members such as women and sexual minorities, and those who feel that
multiculturalism has been used to undermine the shared value set that should
underlie any national political community. All three viewpoints are united in the
implication that multiculturalism and multiculturalists have been the cause of
social unrest and injustice, albeit unwittingly.
However, in the same debate, Peter McLaren defends critical multiculturalism
against these allegations, arguing that multicultural wars in the US represented an
important battle about access, entitlement and power,
Multicultural education also represents an early initiative to counter brutal
stereotypes of African Americans, Asians, and Latinos/as in school textbooks, to
challenge the disproportionate placement of students of color in special education
programs for ‘disturbed youth’, and to redress their lack of representation in the
media, and in key sectors of the government. (McLaren, 2001, 410)
For McLaren, multiculturalism in both liberal and critical forms, represents a
necessary corrective to the uncritical celebration of power and the powerful. As he
puts it, multiculturalism,

Introduction: Ethnicities, Values and Old-fashioned Racism 11
still serves as a counterweight to those expanding ranks of fundamentalists who
herald the United States’ blameless passage from sanctuary for the Pilgrims to
global capital’s Alpha Male as an act of Divine Providence. (McLaren, 2001,
410)
However, McLaren too discerns a reinvention of liberal multiculturalism as a new
assertion of supremacism – the only acceptable human values in the world.
Liberal multiculturalism needs to be understood often as having more to do
with maintaining the residual Pax Romana fantasies of a blood-thirsty Cartesian
imperialism – ‘I invade you therefore you exist’... than with defending the dream
of ethnic pluralism under a sun umbrella festooned with happy face symbols. ...
multiculturalism camouﬂages imperialist aggression and defends – through a
particular species of American Chauvinism and moral sangfroid – the imperial
domination of the West in various forms throughout our transculturalized planet.
(McLaren, 2001, 413)
In the end, it seems, McClennan and McLaren converge in the view that
multiculturalism is proving unequal to the challenges of globalised living. This
disagreement about the place of multiculturalism in a globalised world uncovers
a theme that informs much debate yet which is rarely addressed directly. In a
confirmation of Kuo’s view that multiculturalism has come to be regarded as a
technique for managing the challenges of transnational society, commentators in
other fields have suggested that issues of ethnicity, identity and racism have become
the nodal points between local debates about belonging and entitlement and an
international arena divided by violent conflict and wars of exploitation. For some,
this has been an opportunity to deride multiculturalism for bringing the excesses
of ethnic wars into the space of the liberal democratic state – in a confirmation that
some can never be inculcated in the values necessary for democratic freedoms.
However, in contradiction to the demonisation of multiculturalism and the
suggestion that this tolerance of difference has allowed the development of
enemy aliens within the nation, others have argued that the violent tensions of
contemporary political life must be understood within the framework of existing
national identities. Writing of ‘the construction of modern jihadi terrorists’, Stuart
Croft argues,
they are part of British society, and take their cues from us: in their attitudes and
behaviour, they are much more British than we British would like to believe.
(Croft, 2007, 318)
There are two points to note here – those who claim to wage a religious war
against the West from within both operate within the framework of values and
cultural references of that space, a view that is echoed by Max Farrar in this
volume, and their complaint is expressed in the terms of this shared culture.

Despite the much repeated fantasy of the dangerous alien, those who are accused
of attacking western culture and values are also its products, as seen in the often-
repeated observations that Bin Laden has benefited from a western-influenced elite
education, that what we know of the 9/11 bombers points to their deep immersion
in so-called western culture and practices and that the 7/7 bombers were ordinary
and unremarkable British lads, including among their number the son destined
previously to take over the family fish and chip shop.
It is the discomfort of this creeping realisation coupled with the framing of the
War on Terror as a battle between them and us that has led to new distinctions of
ethnic and national identity. Croft reminds us that,
Prior to 9/11, no-one spoke of the category: ‘British Muslim’. It is a category
entirely created by those attacks, by government, media and broader community
responses. (Croft, 2007, 319)
Ethnicity and Politics
Ethno-nationalism has been a key arena in which claims have been made about
the connection between ethnicity and ethics. Although it can be argued that the
modern notion of the nation-state already implies a connection between land,
belonging and ethnicity, recent mobilisations for the claims of ethnic nationalism
have led to a reinvigorated debate about these issues. The religious element of
some of these mobilisations heightens the sense that ethnic belonging is a matter
of (supposedly) ethical behaviour. The extensive discussion of the break-up of the
formerYugoslavia and the array of conflicts that arose from that shift has suggested
that we live in an era where religious and national identities blend into each other,
where contemporary conflict plays out the violent tensions of a centuries-old
historical conflict and that ethnic identity is made through this tortured memory,
and where the violence of inter-ethnic struggles for nationhood comes to animate
the global arena and international politics.
There is, of course, a long-standing and extensive literature discussing the
relationship between nationalist movements and religious identities (Hastings,
1997; Inglis et al., 2000). Coming to nationhood in a range of locations has been
a process deeply connected to the expression of religion and a number of modern
nations retain explicit or implicit reference to religious values in both the formal
processes of nationhood and in everyday narratives of national belonging. Nations
that have adopted an explicit prohibition on the public declaration of religion or
adherence to official secularism or separation of church and state also include
official narratives of shared values in public utterances on behalf of the state – this
is the appeal to secular tolerance that the Hindu right can misappropriate to suggest
that other religious traditions are alien to the Indian nation or the central role of the
values of the Republic in the public life and political discourse of France.

Despite the considerable scholarly and political attention that has been given
to analysis of the resurgence of exclusionary nationalist movements, not least in
terms of the possible threat to peace and stability of such movements, there has
been little attention given to the influence of other strains of religious nationalism
on the foreign policy decisions of ostensibly secular and non-racial states. Those
who wish to reinsert a consideration of ethnicity and racism into the analysis of
international relations have argued that all nationhood is ethno-national, despite the
various developments that try to accommodate diverse groups within one nation
(Chowdhry and Nair, 2004). The transformation of tests of blood and belonging
into tests of supposed ethical belonging serves to translate the logic of foreign
policy into domestic politics.
Dangerous and Endangered Migrants
To illustrate and extend these points, it is helpful to consider a recent instance of
state utterances that are shaped explicitly through an appeal to moral mission.
Recent developments in British law and public debate in the areas of prostitution
and forced marriage have presented a strong moral argument for state intervention
against the sexual exploitation of migrant and minority women. However, in both
the detail of proposals and in the presentation by government, immigration control
is the central focus and primary technique of intervention.
In effect, immigration control is reframed as a form of ethical intervention,
whether this is in the form of a ‘saving’ of trafficked women or a ‘protection’ of
young people from ‘forced marriage’. Liz Fekete has commented on the (mis)use
of feminism to legitimise state attacks on migrant and minority ethnic communities
across Europe (Fekete, 2006). The public presentation of policy changes in the
areas of prostitution and forced marriage in Britain could be seen as examples
of harnessing alternative progressive ethical codes, such as the need to prevent
sexual exploitation, for the purposes of immigration control.
The overall message is, it seems, that government is stemming the tide of
dangerous migrants – under the veil of an intervention against sexual exploitation.
There is no doubt that sexual exploitation exists, and that it is widespread,
including in minority and migrant communities. However, there also remains a
question about the work that the claim of effective immigration control performs
in this debate.
Shared Values?
Each Christmas in Britain the Queen issues an address to the nation at 3 pm – to
allow completion of the festive lunch and to signal the beginning of television
time. This ritual has a heavy element of self-parody, as, it could be argued, is
true more generally of the mediatised Royalty of Britain. However, it remains an

identifiable marker of banal nationalism and is an indication of official accounts of
the year’s events and challenges.
In response, Channel 4, an independent television channel, for a number of
years has issued an alternative Christmas message, scheduled to compete with the
BBC broadcast of the Queen.At some times this has been played for entertainment,
at others speakers have been chosen to give voice to a key political issue of the day.
For example, previous addresses have been given by Doreen Lawrence, mother of
murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence and Ru Paul, drag queen and media
personality.
In 2008, in a significant shift of focus and after a year of intensive international
activity and threat in relation to the allegation that Iran is developing nuclear
capabilities , President Ahmadinejad of Iran presented this alternative Christmas
message. His message was to assert the shared morality defined through religions
of the book.
All Prophets called for the worship of God, for love and brotherhood, for the
establishment of justice and for love in human society. Jesus, the Son of Mary,
is the standard-bearer of justice, of love for our fellow human beings, of the
fight against tyranny, discrimination and injustice. (Timesonline, 24 December
2008)
As UK commentators were quick to point out, this alternative Christmas message
was most notable for its anodyne quality. This was almost a parody of War on
Terror rhetoric. There is a familiar appeal to the shared roots of Abrahamic faiths.
There is some speculation about what Jesus would have done, where he would
have stood.
If Christ were on Earth today, undoubtedly He would stand with the people
in opposition to bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers. If Christ were
on Earth today, undoubtedly He would hoist the banner of justice and love for
humanity to oppose warmongers, occupiers, terrorists and bullies the world over.
If Christ were on Earth today, undoubtedly He would fight against the tyrannical
policies of prevailing global economic and political systems, as He did in His
lifetime. (Timesonline, 24 December 2008)
Despite the all too obvious rhetorical moves of the Ahmadinejad statement, each
aspect of its construction can be seen as a direct response to the moral claims
made in defence of the War on Terror and the escalating demonisation of Iran in
international arenas. If proof were needed of the existence of a shared framework
of understanding and common values, this demonstration of similarity in structure
of argument and rhetorical reference points should serve to remind us all that Bush
and Ahmadinejad have inhabited a shared space of theatricalised international
politics. Far from being unable to converse because of their radically opposed
world views, these public pronouncements employ highly similar language. In the

sphere of grand-standing, appealing to the shared and world-changing values of
the Abrahamic faiths has become a standard indicator.
Of course, Ahmadinejad’s address is most of all a response to a War on Terror
rhetoric that assumes the moral centrality and superiority of western interpretations
of right and religious obligation. The absolutist tendency of Bushisms throughout
recent years has painted enemies as incarnations of evil, the ‘bad men’who deserve
to be detained indefinitely in Guantanamo.
This continues the larger framing of the War on Terror in that it places morality
at the centre of international affairs. However, as well as the abstract claims of
good and evil, this has been a conflict or set of conflicts that has placed a particular
focus on gender roles and sexuality. This discussion returns to these more particular
debates about values, gender and sexuality and the manner in which such terms are
circulated in the service of securitisation. A number of writers have commented on
the misuse of feminist rhetoric in the War on Terror. Zillah Eisenstein designates
this as a strategy of deploying sexual decoys in order to allow a continuation of the
dehumanising practices of supremacist thinking, but under the cover of a veneer of
gender equality or tolerance of sexual diversity (Eisenstein, 2007). Not for the first
time, women, bodies and sexuality have taken on a heightened symbolic role and
complex narratives have been constructed that link all three and in turn link this
assemblage to the responsibilities and choices of states. In common with others
(Eisenstein, 2007; Shepherd, 2006), I have argued that this utilisation of concepts
of women’s place, proper bodies and free and unfree sexuality is not unique but that
there are distinctive features in their take-up in our time (Bhattacharyya, 2008).
The exploitation of an appeal to feminism, however insubstantial and uninformed
such an appeal might be, is one aspect of this distinctiveness.
The parallel narrative to this misuse of feminism is a demonisation of Islam that
rests on key elements of alleged ‘extremism’: attitudes to women, homosexuality
and sexual freedom, refusal of democratic culture in favour of authoritarianism
and violence, intolerance towards other faiths, allegiance to a world-wide Islam
and refusal of any local or national civic responsibility. In this context, there is a
continuity between foreign policy, security talk and more local state initiatives
that focus on the supposed cultural dangers of migrants when formulating policy
responses.
Black feminists have argued against this misappropriation of an idea of
women’s rights for many years. In particular, the suggestion that an otherwise
racist state may develop a sudden interest in defending the rights of black women
when, and only when, such rights are threatened by the actions of black men has
been critiqued (Mirza, 1997).
However, in the absence of any sustained black feminist movement in the
UK in recent years, the state and some women’s organisations have started, once
again, to proclaim the need for authoritarian state intervention against the gender-
oppressive practices of some communities. At worst, this has taken the form of
developing highly racialised forms of law, such as prohibitions against ‘forced
marriage’. Amrit Wilson analyses this rediscovery of the ideology of ‘white men

saving brown women from brown men’as a symptom of the wider surveillance and
criminalisation of black communities through the War on Terror (Wilson, 2007).
Unfortunately, this critical stance, which was once much debated and respected in
progressive circles in Britain, now appears to be almost unspeakable. The horror
of ‘forced marriage’ has re-entered popular imagination and serves as an exciting
counterpoint to the scare stories about terrorists under the beds.
Forced Marriages – Symbolic Prohibition and the Politics of Race
The issue of forced marriage has been highlighted as one of a number of key
practices that exemplifies the alleged tension between multiculturalism and
feminism (Moller Okin, 1999). In popular discourse, the repeated suggestion that
these people behave in these despicable ways towards their women has been a
central refrain in the discrediting of multiculturalism. However, as has been noted
by Phillips and Dustin, forced marriage is not a practice that is defended in the
name of any culture.
although some form of arranged marriage is still practised in Britain’s minority
communities (particularly those of South Asian origin), and some parents in
these communities will have particularly strong expectations of filial obedience,
none of their spokespeople claims forced marriage as part of their cultural or
religious heritage. All officially share in its condemnation. Forced marriage then
stands apart from other standard topics of multicultural debate, the issue being
not so much whether public authorities have a right or responsibility to eliminate
a particular practice, but how best to achieve this. (Phillips and Dustin, 2004,
533)
Despite the staged dilemma between the need to defend universal rights while
respecting the identities of cultural minorities, this is not an instance of a cultural
practice that a minority community wishes to defend and continue in resistance to
the homogenising force of mass or majority culture. Instead, this is an example of
a shared value – something that all parties agree is undesirable. The only issue of
debate is whether the state should intervene and what the nature of that intervention
should be.
Given this context, my interest is in understanding why forced marriage
continuestoappearasanexemplarytropeindiscussionsoffailingmulticulturalism.
My argument is that forced marriage appears as a focal point of public debate and
state activity around delegitimising multiculturalism precisely because it is an issue
that cannot be defended as a cultural practice that defines community. Instead, this
is an issue that allows space for the state to institute show-piece legislation with
minimal controversy and present an appearance of disciplining unruly cultural
minorities to a wider electorate.

Despite the early pronouncements suggesting that attacks on Afghanistan were
a response to the oppression of women, in recent years UK media has displayed
a fitful and uneven coverage of issues of women’s rights in any community. In
common with many other globalised media forms, UK media has increasingly
presented women as hyper sexualised beings whose agency is best expressed
through consumer activity. Mainstream press and television is characterised by
a surfeit of reality shows, plastic surgery exposes, dieting and dating tips and
an endless parade of transformative promises through makeovers, physical and
mental challenges, canny shopping, psychological reflection and other highly
commodified techniques of self. Inevitably, the shift to so highly individualistic
an account of fulfilment shapes discussion of feminism and women’s rights
(McRobbie, 2007). If some women in some communities or in some locations
are regarded as oppressed, this tends to be presented as a lack of access to such
consumer-based agency. Although these narratives are not so crass as to suggest
any equation between freedom and shopping, the horrors of sexual exploitation,
for example, in popular accounts become the tragedy of lost romance.
Media accounts of forced marriage can fall into this framework. Forced
marriage appears as a cruel parental response to separate young lovers, abduction
steals victims away from the pleasures of girlhood, romance is crushed. Overall
the press interest contrasts the barbaric cultural beliefs that disregard the feelings
and freedom of women with the unspoken ideal of romantic choice, agency and
the right to choose a life path. Whatever attempts are made to highlight an abuse
of rights, popular presentation continues to perpetuate an opposition of free and
unfree that is identified with West and East.
Such an approach can be discerned even in statements from high-profile
campaigners such as Jasvinder Sanghera, co-ordinator of a centre and help-line
for women facing forced marriage and someone who has become a favourite
interlocutor for government. In an article arguing that forced marriage will be the
issue of 2009, because a tipping point has been reached, Sanghera’s own battle
to escape a forced marriage is introduced as an old-fashioned clash of cultures
– that is, a clash between backward migrant culture and liberal western values as
opposed to the more recent suggestion of a clash between civilisations.
Sanghera’s autobiography, Shame, published in 2007, became a bestseller
because it so tellingly reflected the dilemmas of many teenage girls, born in liberal
Britain but expected to follow suffocatingly strict Asian customs at home. ‘To my
family I was wild, but I was just a teenager,’ she says. ‘I wanted to perm my hair
and have a paper round to earn some money.’
But my parents had come from a village in India and they wanted to continue
that life. We were told white people were dirty, we weren’t allowed to have
white friends. But I loved everything about the white girls at school. They had
what I wanted – freedom. (Sunday Times, 4 January 2009)

This is a narrative that pre-dates multiculturalism – the young Asians caught
‘between cultures’, the exclusionary racism of the Asian community, the desire to
enjoy the same freedoms as white friends. It is an agreeably complimentary account
of ‘white’ culture as an object of aspiration and desire, a cause for understandable
envy. There is no space to think about racism or the exclusions faced by migrants
in such a story, because all of that is the cause of suffocation. Elements of this
account remain in other contemporary discussions of forced marriage, but,
increasingly, this is intertwined with a commentary on multiculturalism and the
responsibilities of minority communities. It is in this context that Baroness Warsi,
an Asian Muslim from Yorkshire who has been elevated to the House of Lords and
the Conservative front-bench under David Cameron’s leadership,
has called for such marriages to be treated as crimes to send a clear signal that
they are intolerable. (Express, 11 March 2008)
The performance of such a statement by a high-profile right-wing Asian Muslim
woman serves to restate one element of the ongoing case against multiculturalism
– tolerance is not a social virtue in the face of practices that are intolerable. The use
of ‘intolerable’works to summon up this wider debate about the limits of tolerance
and the politics of race that has been expressed through this formulation. Warsi
goes on to expand her comment,
‘As a society we draw a line in the sand,’ she said. Baroness Warsi continued:
‘This is not a culturally sensitive issue, this is an abhorrent act which we must
stand together on ...’ (Express, 11 March 2008)
A repeated theme in the popular demonisation of multiculturalism has been the
suggestion that the good-natured tolerance of host societies has been abused and
stretched to its limits by migrants and minorities who are addicted to backward
and barbaric customs and who have no appreciation or respect for the values of
liberal democracy. The line in the sand is the not-so-coded bottom-line beyond
which the majority cannot be pushed, the place where spurious claims of cultural
sensitivity no longer hold sway. This is a reassertion of the claims of majority
values as the glue that can hold us together. Such assertions of the need for shared
majority values to shape understandings of social responsibility have come from
both major political parties in Britain and have served as both the respectable
compromise that allows diversity within the limits of shared key values and an
element of more strident protests against the impact of multiculturalism. This
doubleness allows Warsi and others to express their concern that alien practices
are overwhelming common values of decency and to remain within the boundaries
of respectable politics, while others, with less invested in electoral consequences,
can resurrect the more explicitly racist rhetoric of being swamped or invaded. The
appeal to majority values – even the consensual appeal to that ‘which we must

stand together on’ – becomes another coded reference to popular fears that the
majority is under attack by migrant intrusion.
The comment page that follows the web version of this article demonstrates
how easily these connections are made. One comment combines racist venom with
the observation that political parties pretend concern for the welfare of minority
women only when they wish to distract attention from other issues,
‘You really are as stupid as you look and act ?
Labour always bring up a touchy subject to take the heat of the real issue?
they really dont give a monkeys about “forced marriages “
If you choose to follow 4th Century ideology then tough !
put up with it !
You chose the hard way ! stop whinging (muslim women) put up with it!
MORE FOOL YOU
– Posted by: BratislavaUK’
Another contribution blames the supposed multiculturalism that tolerates some
cultural practices but not others, before asserting that immigration is the real issue
for all parties.
‘WHY BOTHER
11.03.08, 4:59 pm
If it’s ok to pay for his four wives then a Muslim man wouldn’t expect any
opposition to him forcing his daughter into marriage.
Why does the gov. think it can cherry pick which Muslim customs to turn a
blind eye to.
Wake up you labour scum ,they are living in and off Britain and should be
forced to comply with British law.
You could always prevent the entry of these unwanted husbands into our
country, which let’s face it ,is the whole object of the excercise. Entry to benefit
Britain and the gravy train that runs parallel to the Westminster one.
– Posted by: thewarlord’
None of the comments engage with debates about forced marriage or express
any concern for women suffering forced marriage. Another recognises the
importance of the speaker’s identity – because this is seen to silence lobbyists for
multiculturalism. Again this contribution argues that immigration is at the heart of
this problem.
if this statement had been made by anyone other than a muslim woman the
bbc would have been crying racist and inflicting that awful chakrabati woman
on us to tell us its there cultural right to marry their children (for that is what
they are,children)of to their cousins,uncles,friends etc.in exchange for a dowrie

they get a teenage wife and a fistful of visas and benefit claim forms. if the
new husband and his extended family were refused entry to the uk i think this
practice might disappear overnight
– Posted by: sexpistol’
Allowing for the strong possibility that such contributions are co-ordinated by
groups who have an explicit interest in whipping up racism and transforming
all political issues into debates about the dangers of immigration, it is still note-
worthy that the debate about forced marriages can be framed as a problem of
illegal immigration so easily. It is likely that the racist claims of commentators
will be comprehended by readers immediately, and that the implicit message of
the respectable call to stand together will be understood to be that we are standing
together against alien practices and aliens who push us too far.
Earlier David Cameron, young leader of the Conservative Party, had
described the practice of forced marriage as ‘bizarre and unacceptable’ (Express,
21 February 2008). Cameron has worked hard to ‘detoxify’ his party, who still
suffer from the negative legacy of Thatcherism. As a result, he has reinstated a
‘caring conservatism’, characterised by green sensibilities, a concern for social
cohesion and a move away from racism, homophobia and other attitudes that had
been associated with the ‘nasty party’, as the conservatives had been regarded
previously. The appointment of Baroness Warsi to a frontbench position is itself
a demonstration of this desire to alter the public image and audience of the party.
However, Cameron, too, makes a decision to intervene in this debate in order to
make a point about border control,
He will commit a future Conservative government to a series of measures to
tackle the problem - include a requirement that both would-be brides and grooms
coming to Britain to get married and their partners in the UK are at least 21.
British nationals going abroad to marry would have to register in the UK
beforehand if they want their marriage to be recognised for immigration
purposes.’ (Express, 21 February 2008)
Cameron’s proposals clearly borrow from other initiatives in Europe, such as the
Danish requirement that both parties in a transnational marriage must be at least
twenty-four years old. His suggestions also fall within the range of responses that
Phillips and Dustin characterise as ineffective because discriminatory and therefore
unlikely to foster co-operation among minority communities. After this article, the
comment board included a discussion of whether Cameron was stealing policy
from the BNP (British National Party – a far right party) and whether it was only
the BNP who were willing to ‘stand up’ to such unacceptable practices.
Anonymous comment boards in response to British media often display this
descent into racism and it is impossible to judge the extent to which such discussion
reflects more general opinion in Britain. However, in both of these examples

comment-makers understand immediately that this is a story about immigration
and the politics of race. The issue of forced marriage is so heavily racialised in
popular (and policy) understanding that all interventions in this debate can be
interpreted as statements about racial politics. Attempts by mainstream parties to
demonstrate their commitment to upholding the supposed values of the majority in
the most careful and coded of manners become replayed as weak echoes of the real
resistance of racist parties. The assertion of the values of rights is understood as
a comment on the need to safeguard national borders. Groups that adhere to alien
practices threaten to corrupt the internal coherence of the nation – more than a
threat to the rights of minority women, here forced marriage is redrawn as a threat
to vulnerable white Britain.
Intimately linked to this sense of purported threat is the much asserted
foreignness of the practice. There are two levels to this. Firstly, the alleged
adherence to forced marriage is taken as an indication of the failure of some
communities to integrate, or even to adapt to their new homes. The fact that such
homes are often far from new, and that forced marriage is alleged to take place not
only among new migrants, only increases the force of condemnation. Continuing
such practices is an indication that some people do not wish to stop being foreign,
despite having opportunities to lose this hated status. Choosing not to integrate
is regarded as a worse crime than failing to integrate. The allegation of forced
marriage dramatises this refusal for public consumption.
The other important sense of foreignness in accounts of forced marriage is
the constant reference to overseas contacts. Although a marriage may be forced
between any two parties, much of the public debate has assumed that British or
British-based women are forced to marry overseas. Phillips and Dustin identify
this trend as continuing in policy initiatives. They write that,
Although A Choice by Right [government report examining the issue of forced
marriage] had not presented forced marriage as an exclusively transcontinental
affair, subsequent initiatives have largely focused on what is known as ‘the
overseas dimension’. Two months after publication of the report, the Home
Office and the Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) announced a joint action
plan to ‘tackle the overseas dimension of forced marriage (Phillips and Dustin,
2004, 535)
Phillips and Dustin describe the concrete activity that has taken place through this
initiative, including a community relations desk in the FCO’s consular division,
collation of statistics, the strengthening of links with police forces overseas, and
provision for female victims of forced marriage to be seen by trained female
members of staff in overseas consulates (Phillips and Dustin, 2004, 535).
These measures, all laudable, mirror other developments in policing and
security. Over a period of time, with escalating intensity and political patronage
with the advent of the War on Terror, transnational co-operation in key aspects of
security practice has become a marker of participation in the civilised world. In

relation to forced marriage, the focus on overseas marriage helps to transform the
issue into one of border control. As Phillips and Dustin comment, such a focus
implies that ‘families only set up these marriages in order to facilitate access to
the UK’ (Phillips and Dustin, 2004, 545). Inevitably, such presuppositions lead
to a discriminatory focus on migrant communities – it is marriages with overseas
partners that are subject to scrutiny and suspicion and spouses from places of
continuing migration that are likely to be questioned. This link to larger anti-
immigration agendas compromises the effectiveness of initiatives against forced
marriage, making it less likely that minority communities will be willing to co-
operate with law enforcement agencies. It also confirms suspicions that even long-
settled communities continue to be regarded as problematic immigrants (Wilson,
2007).
Trafficked Women and the Impossible Test of Consent
The figure of the trafficked woman forced into sexwork is unlike the representation
of the victim of forced marriage in that one is regarded as absolutely foreign and
with an uncertain agency in her own migration while the other is potentially British
(if able to take up the freedoms of white girls) but also associated with a stigmatised
minority group. Both tropes place women as the embodiment and carrier of
dangerous foreign practices even as it is confirmed that it is women who suffer.
In the UK, debates about the status of trafficked women have gained publicity in
relation to changes in the legal framework around prostitution. Although there is
a recognition that undocumented migrants are vulnerable to the exploitation of
forced labour more generally (Commission on Vulnerable Employment, 2008), it
is the indignity of sexwork that has captured public imagination. Television serials
have focused on the underworld existence of the trafficked sexworker. Well-
publicised raids on massage parlours and brothels have highlighted the nationality
and questionable immigration status of the women arrested (‘Sex slaves’ rescued
in massage parlour raid, Telegraph, 1/10/2005). Anti-prostitution campaigners
have publicised the horror of trafficked women who have been raped and then
sold into prostitution, in order to influence wider debates about the future legal
framework for sexwork (Cowling, 2008). As a result the phrase ‘trafficking’ has
taken on a sexualised connotation in popular usage and far older terms, such as
the ‘white slave trade’ (ignoring that many of those trafficked are not white), have
returned to public debate. Jo Goodey summarises the misapprehension in popular
debate about the ‘innocence’ or ‘guilt’ of the trafficked woman,
The trafficked woman can be cast as innocent victim of evil transnational forces
– but only if she has not ‘consented’ to enter prostitution, consent to work as
a prostitute, as the UN protocol stipulates, is not an issue as women will not
have consented to the ‘slave-like’ conditions under which they are held at their

destination, nor will they have consented to the abuse they may incur en route.
(Goodey, 2003, 420)
The debate about trafficked women returns all too easily to a discussion of innocent
virgins or guilty whores – in popular debate, knowingly entering prostitution wipes
out any concern for the treatment and welfare of migrant women. In practice, this
uncertainty about who, in fact, is the offender and who is the victim has hampered
initiatives against traffickers. Despite the manner of their entry, trafficked women
have not been recognised as legitimate asylum-seekers. The POPPY project, who
support women trafficked into prostitution, found that all of their clients who
claimed asylum were refused, although 80% then went on to win their cases at
appeal if supported by the project (Richards et al., 2006). One outcome of this
policy is that potential witnesses against traffickers face deportation and are
unlikely to testify.
The sanctuary provided by a grant of asylum is critical for the protection
of victims of trafficking for two reasons. First, it prevents the risk of repeat
trafficking by not returning the victim to her country of origin. Second, it
affords her the opportunity for a period of security, recovery and rehabilitation
in the UK. This in turn enables her to become involved as a witness in criminal
proceedings, and may make it more likely that she will be prepared to provide
evidence against her traffickers. (Richards et al., 2006, 6)
The POPPY Project go on to explain the consequences of this approach, not
least in the confusion felt by trafficked women. They argue that there is a central
contradiction in viewing trafficked women as both ‘victims and potential witnesses’
and as committers of ‘immigration offences’ (Richards et al., 2006, 21).
In relation to both interventions against forced marriage and attempts to save
women trafficked into sexwork, the common theme is the return to issues of
border control. Both issues embody particular fears about insecure borders – with
overlapping anxieties about state sovereignty and cultural integrity combining to
inform official responses. However, whereas forced marriage has been represented
as an indication of the continuing threat to national integrity that resides within
settled migrant communities, concerns about the exploitation of trafficked women
seep into a different set of fears about leaky borders. Although the two issues have
been connected indirectly in the formulation of UK government announcements
and the wish to demonstrate an authoritarian kick against the exploitation of
women, in wider debates trafficking has tended to be linked to a wider concern
with transnational movement. Jo Goodey warns against this too easy association
between trafficking and security.
The connections that are readily made between migration, crime and security do
not, on closer examination, provide a complete picture of the migration–crime
experience. In particular, recent emphasis on the role played by (transnational)

organized crime (TOC) in human smuggling/trafficking has, arguably, over-
played the importance of organized crime and, in doing so, has allowed
governments to legitimate their security efforts against this ‘new’ threat.
(Goodey, 2003, 418)
Goodey is speaking generally of the move towards securitisation and the role played
by particular depictions of people trafficking in legitimising the augmentation of
state powers. However, the British instances discussed here fit this model very
well. Jacqui Smith attempted as Home Secretary to revitalise a flagging interest in
authoritarian state initiatives, with a well-planned media campaign that included
a week of saturation coverage of new prostitution laws and laws against forced
marriage (for an example, see Bindel, 2008). This comes on the back of an
ongoing campaign to keep the fear of terrorism alive in a somewhat sceptical
British public. It may be that Smith and others have reached the understandable
conclusion that fears of immigration are a more reliable motivator of support for
state authoritarianism than fears of terrorism. If so, this emphasis is echoed in the
political responses of other nations, particularly in Europe. Friesendorf outlines
the place that anti-trafficking initiatives occupy in a wider policy context.
Actors’ motivations to ‘fight’ trafficking varies. Governments are primarily
concerned about links between human trafficking and other forms of crime, such
as money laundering, drug trafficking, the illegal weapons trade, and document
forgery, as well as the risk of profits from human trafficking financing terrorist
activities. These fears are exacerbated, particularly in wealthy countries, by
concerns about illegal migration. (Friesendorf, 2007, 382)
In contrast to this, NGOs and campaigning groups argue that trafficking is a human
rightsviolationand,Friesendorfarguescontroversially,‘Internationalorganizations
play a prominent role in anti-trafficking not least because of significant funding
opportunities’ (382). He concludes his list of actors and factors with the point,
moral outrage about sexual slavery and/or prostitution has also contributed to
pushing human trafficking onto the security agenda. (Friesendorf, 2007, 382)
This appears to be the framework in which the UK has introduced the criminal
offence of purchasing sex from a trafficked woman forced into sexwork – an
offence that reinstates the division between the innocent and the guilty prostitute
and which introduces a law that appears almost impossible to enforce. Allan
Gibson, Head of the Metropolitan Police’s Human Trafficking Unit, has stated in
evidence to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee,
that it was very difficult even for police to estimate the numbers of women
trafficked into the UK for prostitution or precisely which ones were working
against their will. (Telegraph, 10 December 2008)

The distinction between innocent and guilty prostitutes continues to render this
law unworkable. Others view the overall proposals as increasing the potential
dangers faced by prostitutes, without offering effective counter-measures that
lessen sexual exploitation (Cowling, 2008). Instead, we see a resurrection of
the figure of the dangerous foreign sexworker – this time as an embodiment of
the violent exploitation of prostitution and as a confirmation that these luckless
creatures are not part of the nation. If the goal is to persuade the British public that
prostitution causes the trafficking of women, then, it seems, the government may
also believe that erecting further barriers against the movement of undocumented
women will end prostitution. Despite the apparent focus on the ‘demand side’,
there is an implication that, once again, everything comes down to effective and
unyielding border control. Trafficking represents a crisis because it reveals the
fictionality of this central test of state sovereignty and power. The combination of
this border anxiety and the complicated outrage about sexual slavery (as opposed
to other forms of contemporary slavery or the dangers of sexwork that is not the
result of trafficking) shows a particular set of anxieties on the part of a government
that wishes to demonstrate both authoritarian intent and liberal values (of a sort).
Petersen argues that the representation of the ‘Baltic’ sexworker similarly
revealsparticularpoliticalanxietiesforDenmark.OverallPetersenarguesthatthere
is a tension between Danish commitments to extending co-operation with Baltic
neighbours and defending its borders against the dangerous in-flow of foreign
prostitutes, Here also the trafficked woman is central to public imagination,
thedebateoverBalticprostitutionevolvesaroundaconstructionoftheprostituted
subject as both gendered and ‘Baltic’. The gendered subject is constructed
through a discussion of whether prostitution is forced or voluntary and whether
the woman in question is responsible or a victim. The ‘Baltic’ element of this
construction situates the subject within a particular symbolic geography and it
provides a link to the realm of foreign policy. (Petersen, 2001, 214)
Petersen describes the construction of a particular public mythology of ‘Baltic’
prostitution in Denmark, and highlights the link between the media focus on
this issue and wider fears of drug-trafficking and ‘Russian’ organised crime. In
this context, the term ‘Baltic’ signals the particular boundary fears of the Danish
state in this moment, at once eager to consolidate the potential benefits of greater
co-operation with Baltic neighbours and simultaneously anxious that a shadow
globalisation may overrun its borders.
However this also represents an attempt to bolster increasingly fragile
borders against the perceived threats of shadow globalisation, corrosive cultural
difference and terrorist outrage. That these disparate folk demons should become
so intertwined in both policy and popular representation is itself an indication of
the particularity of this era of securitisation.

Immigration Control as Determinant of All State Legitimacy
In some accounts, immigration control retains its central role in the armoury of
the state that wishes to demonstrate authority precisely because borders have
become so uncontrollable. Although debate has moved on to reach the conclusion
that nation-states do not crumble away in the face of global integration, there is
also some agreement that previous markers of state sovereignty have undergone
significant change,Assertive control of state borders, accompanied by much public
fanfare, appears to have become an important demonstration of sovereignty.
The transformation of initiatives against sexual exploitation into yet further
reiterations of this border authority may be an attempt to inject additional authority
into both projects. The unquestionable moral imperative to combat sexual slavery
gives legitimacy to (yet another) augmentation of immigration control. The
popular authoritarianism of anti-immigration initiatives enables the pursuit of
policies against women’s exploitation, policies that may not garner a great deal of
popular interest or support without the mobilising pull of xeno-racism. The wider
context of War on Terror rhetoric gives credence to government initiatives against
‘foreign’ practices of sexual exploitation and allows an integration into the (more
sexy and monied) field of security. All round, strident reassertions of the benefits
of ‘our’ values and the requirement that migrants and minorities accommodate
themselves to the ways of the majority are resurrected in the name of security,
because the internal dissonance represented by the alien practices of foreign
cultures threatens ‘our’ values, and in turn, undermines the basis of ‘our’ moral
and political authority in local and international arenas. In the face of this need
for a multi-level reassertion of authority, it does not seem to matter if the much-
publicised initiatives are ineffectual, poorly conceived or out of touch with the
immediate concerns of those most affected. In the global battle of good and evil,
western values confirm their status as ‘good’ – and the antipathy of many western
citizens to migrants and foreigners is justified as no more than good moral sense.
War on Terror and Racialising IR
The War on Terror was heralded as a defence of western values but not on ethnic
grounds. Much of the presentation by key players in the early days following 9/11
stressed the decidedly non-racial nature of the conflict (see Croft, 2006). This
concerted disavowal of racism could be regarded as a central element of the public
discourse of the War on Terror. Although much of the political controversy within
national spaces has centred around the dangers represented by ethnic diversity
in a time of terrorism, the over-arching narrative of the conflict has presented
terrorism as an attack on multiculturalism and co-existence. The ability to tolerate
and even celebrate diversity is presented as one of ‘our’ values. Such a claim
greatly complicates the process of establishing a new racial enemy, because
familiar methods of creating and consolidating racial mythologies must be framed

as a defence of multicultural living. However, the pursuit of a series of highly
racialised military campaigns that mobilise popular support through reference to
the dangerous culture and values of the enemy (however often it is declared that the
enemy is not Islam) and are conducted through the processes of dehumanisation
familiar from other wars of occupation has created another version of the ‘racism
without racism’ that Lentin and McVeigh identify as a new technique of the racial
state. Much of this volume analyses the manner in which the components of this
technique are translated to local contexts. In some instances, this includes explicit
reference to a global context of conflict. More often, in the manner of legitimising
all state interventions as aspects of an immigration control that seeks to exclude
those who cannot or will not adhere to ‘civilised’values, the chapters here describe
how ideas of the uncivilised or of those with problematic or lesser values operate
in particular examples of exclusion and demonisation.
Some of the debates here about the relationship between values and ethnicity
may appear parochial to some readers. In Europe there has been a period of
intensive activity relating to such issues as national identity and culture, the
apparent threat of alternative allegiances and belief systems and the impact of
these differences on such diverse matters as the status of women, adherence to
law and order and the cohesion of disadvantaged neighbourhoods. However, this
range of concerns about the coherence of national communities in the face of (in
fact quite longstanding) ethnic diversity reflects a particular moment in European
political debate. Elsewhere similar issues have taken on their own local political
colour (see Madan, 2009; Lindow and Perry, 2008). This volume does not attempt
to compile a comprehensive overview of such developments across locations.
However, each contribution seeks to use a particular case-study to suggest some
transferable lessons for analysis of a world where the imputation of certain values
to certain groups has become a theme of much local and global political life.
This volume was being compiled as one section of the US population attempted
to construct its own particular version of post-racial politics, while another
struggled to defend racialised divisions using the language of racial equality. The
presidential candidature of Barack Obama played out the question of ethnicity
and values in a manner that linked debates about community cohesion at a local
level and the possibility of diplomacy internationally. In popular debate, there has
been an understandable and loudly proclaimed desire to view this event as the
confirmation of our resolutely post-racial era. The ascent of Obama provided an
opportunity for the discomfiture of anti-racism to be replaced by an insistently
deracialised public rhetoric in which hope replaced any revisiting of long-held
grievances about social and economic injustices.
Some of the contributors in this volume identify a similar optimism and will
to overcome the barriers of racism through the force of concerted good behaviour.
However, at the same time, the accounts here of how racialised communities
respond to demonisation and articulate alternative visions of values and human
worth also confirm that the systematic disadvantage and everyday disrespect of
old-fashioned racism persists in many locations. The challenge is to retain a critical

perspective on racialised disadvantage while appreciating the impact of discourses
of ethics, values and morality on the politics of race in many places.
An Ethical Vision for Studying Race and Ethnicity
This volume begins with a piece by Howard Winant arguing for the continuing
need for an ethical vision for race and ethnic studies. Winant argues that we have
been living through a crisis of racial meaning and that this presents a challenge for
‘racial pedagogy at the start of the 21st
century’. He describes a world where the
impact of anti-racist movements, patterns of globalisation with their accompanying
flows of people, capital and information and the legacy of colonialism reshape
racialised discourse. However, despite this tumultous backdrop, Winant argues
for a focus on the matter of education and how race is discussed and taught.
He explains the forces that have remade race and ethnic studies in recent years,
including the tension between the global connectedness of a world where diaspora
consciousness and critiques of contemporary imperialism compete with more
localised conceptions of racial justice. Inevitably, these tensions feed into what
Winant calls ‘the racial curriculum’, these shifts in social and political structures
influence a debate about what the focus of investigation should be. Overall, Winant
asserts the continuing need for a scholarship of conscience in relation to racism.
Although there may be inevitable debates about the proper focus of study and the
impact of wider social changes, it is important to defend the belief that some forms
of knowledge are important as part as a larger project in pursuit of social justice.
Parminder Bhachu suggests something similar to this, although she couches
her analysis in different terms. For Bhachu, the project is to articulate and give
space to the range and innovation of diaspora cultural production. In the face of
limiting and sometimes demeaning representations of what diasporics can do or be,
Bhachu describes the importance of creative interventions that extend dominant
frames and both clear space for new kinds of articulation and show that racialised
groups can show imagination and innovation in the expression of their identities,
regardless of the narrowness of dominant accounts of their communities. Bhachu
argues, forcefully, that a scholarship that does not extend what can be said and
thought, that does not, in the manner of the cultural producers that she analyses
have ‘an innovative edge ... not doing what has already been done before’, has
little social value. In common with Winant, Bhachu also argues that scholars who
study ethnic identities and relations or contemporary racisms continue to have
a responsibility to produce accessible work that can change public perceptions.
Otherwise, as she says succinctly, ‘you should just shut up’.
Ronit Lentin argues that migrant women’s networks in Ireland represent a new
articulation of ethnicity that operates through transnational and diasporic frames
of reference. At the same time, she argues that Irish state racism has assumed
gendered forms and that through this, migrant women have come to be hailed and
persecuted as problematic mothers. Lentin is identifying the particular conjunction

that arises between a reinvigorated state racism that mobilises popular support by
adopting vigorously exclusionary tactics and the unlikely dialogue between such
a state formation and the emerging networks of migrant women that at once build
solidarity within and beyond Ireland and act as interlocutors to a state attempting
to demonstrate mastery of both acceptable diversity and dangerous migrants. The
piece argues that Ireland’s rapid economic growth through recent decades has led
to an adoption of state strategies that confirm Ireland’s status as a racial state,
one where the racialised categorisation of useful migrants, dangerous aliens and
unwanted non-citizens is central to the exercise of state power. For Lentin, this
is an indication of how racism can be absorbed into the workings of the liberal
state. In a continuation of a long-standing demonisation of (some) mothers, the
Republic of Ireland has deemed ‘non-national’ mothers as enemies of the state
– no longer examples of the ethical care that human beings can offer to each other
and instead regarded as producers of corrosive aliens who undermine the nation
and its internal coherence. Migrant networks that work within state frameworks
tread a difficult path between confirming a state machinery that divides migrants
into good social assets and bad unwanted aliens and being able to challenge state
racism through consolidating the power of their own networks.
Abel Ugba also considers the emergence of new articulations of ethnic identity
in Ireland, with a focus on Pentecostal churches and their role in African migrant
communities.Ugbasuggeststhat‘bymeansofthemAfricanimmigrantsaremaking
distinctive marks on Ireland’s socio-cultural landscape and inviting the majority
society to acknowledge, cherish and debate ‘difference’. Ugba goes on to argue
that these religious organisations also take a central role in linkingAfrican migrants
to each other and to other groups and that the beliefs that shape Pentecostalism
offer a particular repertoire of cultural values through which African migrants
articulate their notions of self, of others and of society. This is, Ugba argues, in
direct challenge to the dominant portrayal of Africans in Irish society. Instead of
an account of ethnic belonging based on blood or land, Pentecostalism provides a
framework to express self and belonging on the basis of values. This is occurring
alongside an increase in levels of participation across religious groups, including
mainstream Christian churches. Ugba argues, however, that the ‘most innovative
and dramatic changes on Ireland’s socio-religious landscape in recent years is
not the participation of immigrants in mainline churches but the birth and spread
of immigrant-led religious groups’. He goes on to explain that Pentecostalism
offers a mode of self-understanding that can challenge the demeaning and racist
representation of Africans in Irish society. In opposition to the popular discourse
that presents Africans as socially marginalised economic migrants, Pentecostal
African migrants regard themselves as ‘agents of religious and social change’, sent
to Ireland on a divine mission to re-sacralise an Irish society that has fallen into
moral decay. The expression of religious identity serves as an ethical challenge to
the lived popular values of the nation and a refusal to be contained in the racialised
terms of the reference of the state.

Robbie McVeigh analyses new waves of state attacks on gypsy communities
across Europe and argues that these demonstrate the emergence of ‘novel forms
of racism’. Both McVeigh and Lentin suggest that we are entering a phase where
states adopt tactics of ‘racism without racism’, issuing statements of moral outrage
against racism while developing increasingly draconian techniques of racialised
exclusion and discrimination in state practices. At the same time, McVeigh argues,
the interventions of state racism are presented as ‘being in the interests of the
racialized’. This is linked to what McVeigh terms ‘ethnicity denial’, a process
by which there is an official denial that some groups are constituted by ethnicity
and, therefore, an assertion that such groups cannot be victims of racism. In these
circumstances where states are developing novel forms of exclusionary racism, the
issue of what ethnicity is, how it is defined and who can claim its label all become
urgent questions in the formulation of anti-racist resistance. McVeigh argues that
this can be seen in the continuing consequences of the denial of gypsy experiences
of genocide, a denial that consolidates contemporary anti-gypsyism by reasserting
that these people are not an ethnic community and therefore they cannot face
antipathy on the grounds of ethnicity. The piece goes on to describe recent instances
of this formulation in which explicitly racist anti-gypsy propoganda is defended as
arising in response to the ethical failings of gypsies not their ethnic identity. This
tactic has wider implications for all those seeking to combat racism, because it
both reinstates the fiction that racism is an understandable and legitimate response
based on ethical judgement and it disallows the claim of collective identity that
can offer a rallying point against racist persecution.
Carlos Sandoval-Garcia writes about La Carpio, an area of Costa Rica that
embodies a range of social fears. This is a space of high unemployment and
low incomes, regarded as dangerous home to crime and migrants, particularly
to the much hated group, Nicaraguans. As Sandoval-Garcia writes, ‘the
criminalisation of La Carpio, combined with its association with the immigrant
population, has allowed words such as “migrant,” “Nica,” and “criminal” to
become interchangeable’. This, the piece argues, is the space of abjection – where
Costa Rican society can expel the unclean matter that it deems to be ‘not us’.
This symbolism is increased by the location of a garbage dump at the entrance
to the neighbourhood and plans to locate a water treatment plant nearby. The dirt
and material excess of the city become associated with the poor and racialised
community that inhabits this marginal site. This serves to confirm again that
the urban segregation that is ‘the most apparent material reality through which
stigmatisation occurs’. This stigmatisation translates into the everyday experience
of residents, so that respondents describe their sense of shame at belonging to La
Carpio and their reluctance to reveal where they live. However, others tell of how
they have overcome this shame that is projected onto to them from all corners,
and instead have come to view themselves as achieving autonomy, family and
survival through affirmation of an ethical grounding that refuses the terms of their
exclusion.

John Gabriel and Jennifer Harding also describe the manner in which a
stigmatised group seek to offer an alternative set of values. Their piece examines
the life histories of a diverse group of refugees who were interviewed in London
as part of a project designed to document the ‘positive’ contribution of refugee
communities to the city. Gabriel and Harding identify the shortcomings of such an
approach, including the reliance on positive representations as a counter to racism
and the potential to reduce all migrants to ‘a shared set of virtuous characteristics’.
In response to these issues, project participants developed an understanding of
‘contribution’ that referred to ‘both ‘achievement’, which inferred high status
and recognition, and ‘participation’, which was worthy but low status’. In this
piece, the researchers interrogate these concepts and their meaning in the lives of
the respondents. They found that, perhaps inevitably, refugees were influenced
by public debates about their ‘worth’ and included descriptions of mainstream
‘success’ such as qualifications and high status employment as well as recounting
the sacrifices that they had made to ensure that their children had access to routes
of mainstream success. However, alongside this apparent acceptance of the terms
of mainstream concepts of worth, there is also a critique of inequality and injustice,
including the injustices faced as a refugee. Respondents refer to wider sets of
values that link their experiences in different locations and narrate a continuity
of values between resisting oppression in their homelands and forging alliances
as refugees in London. Gabriel and Harding explain that, far from being simply
rebuttals of media and popular demonisation of refugees, the ‘transcripts present a
more complex relationship to notions of ‘achievement’, ‘contribution’and ‘virtue’.
The accounts that arise celebrate a range of everyday survivals and achievements
that must be understood in the context of family and community ties and a refusal
of the limits implied by the category of ‘refugee’. Gabriel and Harding analyse this
material to argue that proposals to enhance ‘community cohesion’ which assume
that all will participate in a set of shared values and culture that is defined by
the majority are not helpful. Instead of seeking to show that refugees are really
‘good’, our collective well-being may be better served by learning to appreciate
the particular interpretations of ‘right’ that emerge through experience and social
interaction.
In his chapter, Max Farrar extends the debate about ethnicity and values to
address some urgent questions of our time. He links recent concerns about the
rise of Islamism (used in his piece as a short-hand for ‘that version of Islam which
adopts an explicitly political agenda and espouses violence as its strategy for
achieving power’). He proposes that instances of urban violence ranging from
‘riot’ to ‘terrorism’ should be understood as ‘violent urban protest’, not in order
to detract from the seriousness of violence but in order to place such violence
in historical context. Farrar outlines a history of recent violent urban protest in
Britain and argues that the challenge is to uncover the ‘proto-politics’ that informs
these events. Importantly, he argues for a distinction between terms such as
‘uprising’, which imply a conscious politics and programme, and ‘violent protest’,
which can encompass both an embryonic political impulse and a decided refusal

of the terms of reason or mainstream political engagement in favour of violence.
Farrar argues that we must understand the long history of valorising political
violence in Western political discourse if we are to make sense of contemporary
urban violence, including acts of terrorism, and, in fact, this resort to violence
marks a continuity between the ethical framing of Islamism and earlier modes of
revolutionary thought.
Overall, the volume demonstrates, again, the adaptability of racism. However,
at the same time, the contributors to this volume consider the extent to which
marginalised communities also engage in processes of attributing ethical value
to the actions of themselves and others and the social consequences of these
attributions. The question of what it is to be good continues to animate social
activity – and although there are many interpretations in play, the suggestion that
the world is divided into more and less deserving people who behave in differing
ways continues to inform both state policies and everyday life. The chapters that
follow consider the implications of this and whether there may, indeed, be other
ways of living.
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Chapter 2
Teaching Race and Racism in the
21st
Century: Thematic Considerations
Howard Winant
Introduction
This is a crucial moment for those of us who teach about race and racism.
People, there’s a crisis of racial meaning going on out there. In the classic
definition, a crisis is a situation in which ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be
born.’ Well, that’s the situation in which racial pedagogy finds itself at the start of
the 21st century.
There is a lot more at stake than just what we teach. What we teach is what
people learn, and what they learn is what they know. Higher education curricula,
taken as a whole, embody what is known in a given society at a given time.
This
certainly applies to curricula that deal with the complex subject of race: its history,
theoretical and philosophical status, multiple manifestations in socioeconomic,
political, and cultural relationships, embodiment in artistic production and in
the toils of the human psyche, etc. Race is a big topic. Sociopolitical confusion,
uncertainty, and anxiety about such a complex theme will be reflected in curricula
focused upon it, and will be fostered in the hearts and minds of those students who
seek knowledge about it. Such is the present situation in the academic treatment
of race.
It’s no secret that much of what is taught about race is outmoded, that ethnic
studies departments are often riven by fierce controversies and antagonisms,
and that in mainstream disciplinary settings too there is confusion: the post-
civil rights era racial ethos has become ‘common sense’; decades of advocacy
of ‘colorblindness,’ diversity, and multiculturalism have taken their toll. Space is
Previously published in Howard Winant. New Racial Politics: Globalism,
Difference, Justice, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. © 2003 Howard Winant.
Also in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (Institute for
Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University, vol. 6, nos. 3–4 (2004).
Of course I don’t mean this in the Arnoldian sense in which culture is seen as ‘the
best that has been known and thought’ (Arnold, 1921), for what is best and even what is
known are subject to continuous contention. But the point that what is taught and learned in
university represents the general summa of intellectual life in a given society – including all
the debates and controversies being explored – remains valid, it seems to me.

not available here for a full assessment of the conflicts and uncertainties besetting
racial studies today, but it is at least possible to provide a glancing overview of the
crisis. In what follows I first discuss the changing meaning and political dynamics
of race at the start of the 21st
century. Next I take note of the centrality of racial
studies in the curriculum. I conclude with some notes, necessarily preliminary and
sketchy, towards a new racial studies.
The Changing Meaning and Political Dynamics of Race
In the post-civil rights period, after decades of political and cultural conflict
over the meaning of race and the persistence of structural racism in the US,
the outlines of the country’s 21st
-century racial crisis are beginning to emerge.
New racial formations have developed from the processes of confrontation and
accommodation, of conflict and reform that swept across much of the world over
the past few decades. Changing racial dynamics are in part the effects of anti-
racist movements and of the achievement of democratic reform in the latter half
of the 20th century. They are linked as well to new patterns of globalization, to
the unsteady and unfulfilled postcolonial situation that obtains across the world’s
South, and to the tremendous international flows of people, capital, and information
around the planet. Here, however, I propose a narrower ‘take’ on the changing
meaning of race, focused on what is to be taught and studied about race in the
American university during the 21st
century.
These changes, I argue here, have set off a crisis in racial pedagogy. Generally
speaking, the crisis comes from two sources. The first of these proceeds from
the politics of post-civil rights era, from what I have called in other work ‘racial
hegemony’ (Omi and Winant, 1994). As the US underwent a transition from the
fairly explicit white supremacism and racial domination of the pre-civil rights era
to the reform-based and incorporative logic of ‘colorblindness,’ diversity, etc. that
had become the new racial ‘common sense’ sometime in the 1970s, racial studies
had also to confront the newly emergent, hegemonic situation. To be sure, the old
issues that had spawned the movement still remained highly salient: discrimination
and white privilege, structural and cultural racism, etc. But because reform had
occurred, because the incorporation of movement demands (and persons) had
taken place, racial studies were beset with a host of new challenges: pedagogical,
empirical, and theoretical. Just as fierce debates took place across the country about
the supposed ‘declining significance of race,’ so too conflicts engulfed numerous
academic departments, both mainstream discipline- and ethnic studies-based, over
curricular content.
The second source of crisis is linked to globalization. It may be seen in terms
of national v. transnational perspectives on race. This debate of course had a long
history, stretching back to controversies over slavery, conquest, and colonialism,
and touching upon such complex issues as pan-Africanism (and other panethnic

Teaching Race and Racism in the 21st
Century 37
movements), nationalism, dependency, world-systems theory, and migration. Here
I can offer only the most schematic characterization of this complex question.
Briefly, the post-WWII world racial scene was shaped jointly by racial reform
in the global North and decolonization in the global South, two processes that
were themselves highly related. As this dual transition unfolded, racial politics
became more global: a sustained period of nationalism linked anti-racist struggles
in the US to anticolonial revolution, for example, and ‘internal colonialism’
theories enjoyed a significant vogue. Later, while civil rights reforms marginalized
racial radicals in the US, postcolonial regimes also lost favor because they
descended into corruption, dictatorship, brutal civil war, and new forms of
dependency and neocolonial subordination.
Complicating this huge transition in
the US was burgeoning immigration to that country after its 1965 immigration
reform – which was itself an important and often neglected piece of civil rights
legislation. Finally, the ever-expanding quest by the US for global economic
power – embodied in NAFTA, the WTO, and other forms of interventionism –
began to cast transnational political economic issues in a newly racialized mold.
This process reached new heights at the 2001 UN World Conference on Racism
in Durban, South Africa, where the US did its best to undermine and marginalize
demands for global racial justice; new global racial politics have also inflected the
Bush administration’s ‘war on terrorism’ and its Iraq intervention in various ways.
Advancing globalization tends in general to internationalize the racial curriculum.
For example, teaching about various racial diasporae is heightened: African,
Chinese, Filipino, Dominican, and others. Even Afrocentrism – which in my view
is largely an inchoate and retro effort to revive the black cultural nationalism of
the late 1960s – in some measure works to direct greater attention to diasporic
issues. At the same time the internationalization of the racial curriculum disturbs
and alienates more locally- and nationally-oriented scholars whose commitments
to specific racially-defined communities or to equality and justice is focused on
domestic US racial conditions. This pattern of divergence and debate isn’t going
away; it is driven by social structure itself. The US increasingly throws its weight
around in the big world: neo-imperialism is the name of the game. And it does
this at a historical moment when its own demographics are more nonwhite, more
replete with recent immigrants from the global South, more diasporic in short,
than ever before. At the same time domestic racial discontent is rising, as the US
tears up its residual commitments to the welfare state, jams its prisons with more
and more people of color, and exports poverty and unemployment as much as
possible to the ghettos, barrios and reservations.
All these tensions and conflicts flow inevitably into the racial curriculum. It
seems apparent that these post-WWII racial transformations and upheavals, most
centrallythereformsofthepost-civilrightseraandtheonsetoftheracialideologyof
‘colorblindness,’have unmoored the higher learning inAmerica, racially speaking,
A partial exception to this pattern was the belated but triumphant South African
transition to racial democracy, but even this was fraught with difficulty.

leaving faculty, students, and administrators (even those specializing in this area)
uncertain as to what should be taught, and what is to be learned, about race and
racism. The significance of race (‘declining’ or increasing?), the interpretation of
racial equality (‘colorblind’ or color-conscious?), the institutionalization of racial
justice (‘reverse discrimination’ or affirmative action?), and the very categories –
black, white, Latino/Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American – employed
to classify racial groups have all been called into question over recent decades. The
paradigmatic approaches to studying these issues – both in traditional academic
disciplines (my main focus here is on the social sciences) and in the widespread
interdisciplinary programs that may be grouped under the ‘ethnic studies’ rubric
– largely derive from sociopolitical and cultural conditions that have now been
superseded, at least in part.
Exclusion of critical race-oriented problematics from the curriculum and the
disciplinarycanonshaslargelyended,reflectingthetransformationoftheuniversity
setting from an apparatus of racial domination to one of racial incorporation. By the
1980s,manyuniversitiesandcollegeshadmadewatchwordsoftheterms‘diversity’
and ‘multiculturalism,’ although the practical meaning of this was debatable: as
‘diversity’ was being celebrated, affirmative action programs were coming under
attack and racially-defined minority enrollments were decreasing. Did attention
to racial and ethnic studies, whether proceeding from traditional disciplines or
from the newer ethnic studies departments and programs, benefit from this new
approbation, or was serious academic commitment to these areas of study being
rendered symbolic in the newly dawning ‘post-civil rights,’ ‘colorblind’ era?
More recently affirmative action has found new defenders, not in the relatively
debilitated organizations and thinkers (myself included) who see themselves
as carrying forward the movement’s legacy, but in such mainstream and often
conservative sectors as large corporations and the military, whose spokespeople
have argued that ‘diversity’ and upward mobility for racially-defined minorities
are crucial to their organizations’ efforts to maintain market share and loyalty in
the ranks. This situation, in which formerly radical democratic demands now serve
to undergird elite power, at first seems highly ironic. It calls forth cynicism, and
perhaps even mockery, of the movement’s legacy. But hold on there, my friends.
When we look more deeply, we can see that every successful social movement
realizes its goals by embedding them in the heart of the establishment, the power
structure. That is what success means: lodging the arrows of your movement’s
demands in the bosom of your antagonist, most often the state but sometimes
corporations, cultural elites, or other power-wielding groups. These elites and state
administrators generally come to understand that honey works better than vinegar:
moderate reform/hegemony are strategically more effective in maintaining
consensual rule than intransigence, repression, or domination could ever be
(Gramsci, 1971, 182; Winant, 1994).
Atthesametime,thereisanimplicitcontradictioninthesuccessthatmovements
sometimes achieve. What Omi and I characterized as the political ‘trajectory’ of
racially-based movements sets in here (Omi and Winant, 1994, 84–88). Achieving

Century 39
your goals as a movement involves becoming incorporated: again, within the
state, the corporation, etc. Success means that ‘moderate’ versions of movement
demands are accepted and institutionalized, while more radical versions (and
voices) are marginalized, or worse. Winning counts; winning reforms can mean
accomplishing great transformations in patterns of social injustice; it can mean
bring the light of democracy to places where only the darkness of dictatorship
existed before. But winning is also losing: it means that not only the state and
power structure have made concessions, but that the movements that previously
opposed them have compromised as well. In the aftermath of intense political
conflict, when reforms have become institutionalized and movement opposition
has waned, the political ‘trajectory’ reenters a period of abeyance. But during
this period, uncertainty, doubt, and anger simmer: in cultural forums, in political
organizations, in the ‘hood,’ and in the academy as well. How much did we (or
previous generations) accomplish with all our movement blood, sweat, and tears?
How much has changed, and how much remains the same? What new issues
confront us now, in the age of ‘colorblindness’ and multiculturalism?
The Centrality of Racial Studies in the Curriculum
Whatever one’s answer to those questions, the evidence remains strong that
approaches to teaching race and ethnicity have hewed closely to the political and
cultural climate of the times. There has always – always! – been some version
of ‘racial and ethnic studies’ in operation on American campuses. At one time
there was racial theology; Drs Morton and Agassiz were once prominent racial
authorities; Herbert Spencer and E.A. Ross had their day. When racial segregation,
quotas on Jews, and immigration restrictions were in place, the predominant view
was white supremacist, restrictive, and given to eugenicism. For a long time –
let us say until the aftermath of WWII – the study of race was almost entirely
a conversation among whites. Only in a few places – notably the HBCs – were
racially-definedminoritiesevenpresentinanysignificantnumber.Inthemainstream
and elite universities, only an occasional scholar, often beleaguered and derided,
could make his voice (and it was almost inevitably a male voice) heard. Only in
the 1960s, when students brought pressure on the universities to make changes
– impelled by shifting demographics, social movements, and political changes
at the national and even international levels – did the institutions finally respond.
Only then were ethnic studies programs created and some measure of affirmative
action instituted in hiring, admissions, etc. And often this came grudgingly and
unevenly. Only in the 1970s, when ethnic studies programs were already in place
and the problems of racial inequality and ethnic difference widely studied, did the
histories, identities, and cultural varieties of the American ‘mosaic’ even begin to
be treated with any degree of respect across the curriculum.
What has happened in recent years? A notable stasis has developed: a gap may
be opening up again, as has certainly occurred in the past. The teaching/learning

strategies in place today at American institutions of higher learning developed
in parallel with the racial and ethnic political and cultural milieux of the 1960s
and 1970s. Now, more than three decades later, a new situation confronts this
pedagogy, one for which it is unprepared. Such themes as hybridized identities,
ethnically- and racially-based experience and ‘role-taking,’ generational shifts
in specific groups and communities, global and national patterns of racial/
ethnic stratification, ethnonationalism and ethnoglobality, race/gender/class
‘intersectionality,’ and overlap and antagonism between racially- and ethnically-
based concepts of difference/identity/stratification, a new attentiveness toward
‘whiteness,’ and a resurgent interest in genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing,’ to name
just a few (!) of the many issues that confront teaching and learning strategies in
this area, seem to call for new investigation and new responses.
Ironically, these new challenges are emerging at a moment when movement
activity has waned, when ‘diversity’commitments are under attack, and when new
claims of meritocratism, postraciality, and ‘colorblindness’ are being advanced
from numerous quarters (usually from the center-right, but sometimes even from
the left or from liberal quarters, and sometimes from interventive courts and
legislatures). It is no accident that debates over race/ethnicity on campus, conflict
over the legacy of the civil rights movement, and discord within ethnic studies
departments have become disturbingly familiar phenomena.
Towards a New Racial Studies
These large themes have been the subjects of a great deal of recent work, including
my own (Winant, 2001). It is not my intention to address them all in the context
of a single paper. Rather I offer a tentative list of emergent issues in racial studies.
This is but a hint of some of the axes of promising new work being developed
in ‘new racial studies.’ These are at least some of the issues given us by the new
sociopolitical conditions we face in the 21st
century.
Consider the following themes:
Diaspora/globality/migration as racialized processes
Here I am thinking of contested borders and citizenships; the racial continuity
of the North-South divide, as expressed in debt peonage, unequal exchange etc.
Micro-macro racial linkages: Here I mean the zone where the whole comparative/
historical approach to race (the ‘macro’ stuff) meets the whole experience-based,
identity/difference dimension of race (the ‘micro’ stuff).
Means of communication/media as racial phenomena
HereImeantheaccelerationofculturecontactasboth(1)adiasporic(orifyouprefer,
‘global’) organizational phenomenon: hip-hop in São Paulo, ‘one nation under a

Century 41
groove,’ the globalization of reggae, etc., as well as films, internet connections,
etc.; and (2) a means of cultural domination, ‘appropriation,’ delocalization and
thus disempowerment and suppression of people’s expressive needs.
The legacies of conquest and slavery
These can be seen, for example, in labor processes and ideologies, concepts of
‘freedom,’ local/national/global divisions of labor, state form, mobilizational and
political capacity, and concepts of personal identity.
Race and revolution
This is an evident but under-explored connection visible, for example, in the
historical legacy of the Haitian revolution; and in parallels between 19th
-century
decolonization in the Americas and 20th
-century decolonization in Africa and
Asia.
Race and capitalism
Here I mean the need for rethinking the world-system’s development as a racially
instituted process; even old Karl Marx denounced ‘the turning of Africa into a
warren for the commercial hunting of blackskins.’
C.L.R. James’s (1989 [1938]) account of the sugar industry as foundational
to industrialism, Du Bois’s (1977 [1935]) analysis of the US Civil War/
Reconstruction as a process of national (and global) realignment, Williams’s
(1994 [1944]) work, and the huge contemporary literature on the economics of
race need to be reintegrated into the curriculum; Race and democracy: Patterson’s
concept of ‘freedom’ is premised on a thorough (though problematic) analysis of
slavery (1982); abolitionism was a central factor in actualizing democracy and
indeed propelling concepts of popular sovereignty forward (Keck and Sikkink,
1998). Some signals of this complex of problems include: Du Bois’s (1935)
account (again!) of the US Civil War/Reconstruction as a failed attempt to break
the world-historical democratic bottleneck; and the continuing presence of racial
dictatorship in the form of structural racism (Feagin, 2000), as evidenced in
reparations controversies and lawsuits. In general continuing racial pluralism and
the equalization of ‘life-chances’ across racial lines are effective indices of the
presence of democracy.
Race/gender as co-constitutive in modernity
Here I mean sex-based enforcement of racial subjection and its consequences (like
hybridization)incolonialandslavery-basedsettings,andthegeneralizedsubjection
of women’s bodies in racial oppressions of the most varied types (Stoler, 2002);

all of it carrying forward in one way or another to the postcolonial, ‘emancipated’
world; as well as sex-based resistance, women’s resistance, from then to now.
Whiteness as a central theme
What does it mean to think of whiteness as non-normalized? This is still a relatively
new and difficult subject. What does it mean to see ‘white’as a negative category?
To experience whiteness as a beleaguered identity? How should we understand
ethnicity within whiteness? Are whites a racial group? Is there white subjectivity
in the same sense as there is black or Latino subjectivity?
Regarding ethnicity
When does it trump, and when does it get trumped by, race? Non-racialized
subjects/groups are always racializable. Hitler’s goons had to make my dad pull
down his pants to check if he was a Jew (my dad became a refugee from his native
Vienna, made it to the US, and thus survived the Holocaust), but the fact that
the Nazis couldn’t tell who was a Jew just by looking didn’t keep the Volkischer
Beobachter from printing a hook-nosed caricature of ‘the Jew’ on every page. The
Brits still racialize the Irish when they need to, and so did the Americans in the
19th
century. The Bosnian Serbs racialized the Bosnian Muslims, reinterpreting
an ostensibly religious distinction racially. The Hutus and Tutsis racialize each
other; Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine (cousins whose languages and
appearances deeply overlap) do the same. That’s going in one direction, from
ethnicity to race. Going in the other direction, from race to ethnicity: in the liberal
(and some radical) versions of anti-racism, race will become ethnicity, a more
benign version of difference, by and by, when the age of sweet tolerance arrives.
But in the meantime, what do we do with the persistence of ethnicity within racial
categories, as noted above? What do we do when ethnic divisions become quasi-
racial chasms, as in Rwanda or Srebrenice?
A Final Note
This chapter is far from a fully worked-out program for the revitalization of the
racial curriculum in the contemporary US academy. Adequately to formulate a
‘new racial studies’ pedagogy will require a much more systematic effort than
is possible here. What is intended instead is an overview of at least some of the
‘thematic considerations’ (as this chapter’s title puts it) that would be involved in
such an endeavor. I hope that this brief sketch will at least contribute to the effort
to reinvent the racial curriculum as the 21st
century advances. We must build on
what we have accomplished thus far, and what our predecessors did in their time.
But we cannot rest. Racial oppression is dynamic, ever-changing, adaptable and
absorptive. That is what hegemony, racial hegemony, means in the 21st
century: the

Century 43
ability to incorporate opposition, to neutralize critique, to ‘get beyond’ – and thus
preserve – racism. Can we teach this to our students? Can we learn it ourselves?
References
Arnold, Matthew. ‘Preface,’ in Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets. London:
Macmillan, 1921.
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part
which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America,
1860–1880. New York: Atheneum, 1977 (1935).
Feagin, Joe R. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations.
New York: Routledge, 2000.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International
Publishers, 1971.
James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution, 2nd ed. New York: Vintage, 1989 (1938).
Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy
Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From
the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate
in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1994 (1944).
Winant, Howard. Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Winant, Howard. The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War
II. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Chapter 3
Diaspora Conversations:
Ethics, Ethicality, Work and Life
A conversation between Parminder Bhachu and Gargi Bhattacharyya
Parminder Bhachu was born in Tanzania, and raised in Kenya and Uganda. She
moved to Britain, South London in particular as a younger teenager. She trained
as an anthropologist and held research posts at the Centre for Race and Ethnic
Studies, Warwick University and the Institute of Education in London. She has
published a series of highly influential books, including Enterprising Women:
Ethnicity. Economy and Gender Relations, Twice Migrants: East African Sikh
Settlers in Britain and Dangerous Designs: Asian Women Fashion the Diaspora
Economies. Parminder has added a consistently innovative voice to debates in the
fieldofdiasporastudies,exploringtheemergentculturaleconomiesofglobalization
and migration, the leitmotivs of our times. Her scholarly work highlights the
transformative role of multiple migrants as cultural and economic entrepreneurs
who are generating the new frontiers of hybrid cultural expressions that are being
forged in global markets. Her recent ethnography of globalization examined
the cultural and commercial agency of migrant women and their diasporically
assertive second generation daughters in London, the border crossing designers,
style innovators and creators of new worldly economies.
She explores these themes in depth from her own unique perspective of a
diasporically-produced, multiply migrant citizen of Europe and the USA, who was
born inAfrica and is of Indian origins, and is now a highly localized New Englander
of Massachusetts having spent half her adult life there, i.e. a border-crossing,
melding, blending, responsive-to-the-moment multidisciplinary intellectual. She
is a product of five countries located in four continents - Africa, Asia, Europe and
now the USA. She was educated in eight schools in four countries by the age of 14.
By her mid-30s, she had migrated ten times across both national and international
borders. It is this perspective from which she looks at the world.
These experiences bring a ‘diasporic’ depth to her scholarly work in a way
that many scholars writing about movement, displacement and cultural production
from a cultural studies perspective who comment on contemporary cultural
products cannot. Their focus is almost entirely on the present and not on the
longer term processes that are so critical in defining and determining the shape
of contemporary diasporic cultural forms. The latter are as rooted in previous
experiences of movement, as they are routed through their current locations of
production. Parminder has lived in the multiple sites in which the diaspora cultures

she writes about have been produced and reproduced and has also examined their
historical sources, that is, the roots and routes through which diasporic creative
work has been imagined and re-imagined by its cultural agents in previous works.
In her recent work, she continues to interrogate these themes further both to
increase our understanding of diasporic cultural production, and to develop deeper
historical expertise about the impact of movement on the cultural practices of the
diaspora. She is also one of a small number of BritishAsian women to have risen to
prominence through the heated debates of the 1980s and the gradual establishment
of race and ethnicity as legitimate topics of study in British, European and
American contexts.
Parminder moved to the United States in 1990 to take up a fellowship at UCLA
and from there moved to Clark to take up an interdisciplinary Henry R. Luce
Professorship in Cultural Identities and Global Processes, a position she held from
1991–2000. She lives and teaches in Massachusetts, USA, at Clark University
but travels to Britain regularly. Her work continues to explore the dynamics and
economic and cultural production of diasporic communities.
Parminder Bhachu spoke to Gargi Bhattacharyya about her recent work on
cultural producers, the context that informed her own intellectual development
and the continuing relevance of a cultural politics of ethnic identity.
GB: Your most recent work has examined the work of South Asian cultural
producers. What is the understanding of ethnic identity that emerges from
this fieldwork?
PB: They spoke about the curbing of possibility, especially after 7/7 and all
that, a closing down of the spaces where they could work.
GB: Are all the people that you have been interviewing South Asian and
did they all feel that 7/7 had that impact on them? Not just Muslim, but
Sikh and Hindu as well?
PB: No, no, everyone.
GB: Did they say how they know?
PB: Parv Bancil (UK-based South Asian playwright) talks about it. For
example, you remember what they did with the BAFTA award winning
drama Britz, the television drama series in two parts which was on
Channel 4 in Britain. You see what the story is. These British Asian
Muslims – siblings, one of them, the brother goes to join M15 and the
other one, the sister, goes to Pakistan on an opposite trajectory and trains a
suicide bomber. She returns to Britain and carries out her bombing mission
successfully in a part of England, some part of London I think. This is the
type of story they want.

A Conversation between Parminder Bhachu and Gargi Bhattacharyya 47
They [South Asian cultural producers] say that spaces that they had opened
are essentially closed now. They (the television commissioning editors)
want them to write about British Asians becoming terrorists and that is
all they want – a reductionist and narrow vision of how Asians should
be represented. So there has been this enormous curbing of creative
possibility.
It is like going backwards. You see, in the past anyone could write a play
on arranged marriages and that was what was wanted – it is essentially the
same DNA reproducing itself.
PB: I don’t know if things are going to change with the election of Barack
Obama. It has already started to change here in the US, certainly for blacks
… in every domain they are looking for black representation, things are
opening up for black communities.
So now the cultural impact of 9/11 has been reduced – but I don’t know
how that is going to change things for Asians and I don’t think things are
going to change that significantly for Asians in the UK. I think deeply
entrenched attitudes and mores persist and remain resilient. And of course
they reproduce themselves and travel to settings outside Britain when
people travel.
For example, I was in Los Angeles and I was in the airport, I was with two
relatives who live there. One of these guys was a commonwealth scholar,
a prestigious award he won educated at Cal Tech in Pasadena. He is an
eminent Sikh scientist, a professor at Southern California University. As a
Sikh, he wears a turban and has a beard.
At the airport, there was this English woman and she was looking for
someone to help with her luggage. She looked round, and seeing he wears
a turban, she came to him. She obviously assumed he was a porter who
should carry her luggage. Only the English do this and often I. Think, they
obviously think that we are all still coolies and should be carting their
luggagearoundforthem.Thecolonialattitudesstillendureespeciallywithin
certain class groups, though of course California is utterly confusing for so
many Europeans, especially those from more homogenous communities, as
it has such a range of many people of colour. They don’t expect to find this
complex multi-ethnic population nor the enormous diversity, which is not
easy to read if you come from relatively white homogenous communities
in which you can dominate. They have not had the experiences familiar to
minorities on a daily basis. The east coast is easier for most Europeans to
decode as it feels more familiar and European. It is more comfortable for
them and they are more at ease with it.

GB: What about the lives of Asians in the US?
PB: In the US it is a completely different racial trajectory. Here they think
of South Asians as a model minority. Immigration was only opened up to
allow in the most highly educated from India – so they only recruited the
highest levels from India. It is a much more skewed immigration especially
for communities that mushroomed after the mid-60s when immigration
was opened up for the elite of India and Pakistan. Britain has a much more
varied conception of its migrant population. Their class and migration
experiences were and are more varied though of course in the US there is
a wider range of classes then the model minority myth that is applied to
South Asian communities.
It is so common to see here in Massachusetts and in other places in the US
that both partners are doctors, for example, and there are very successful
[South Asian] communities here in a way that you don’t see in Britain
despite the success of so many British Asians in many domains of life.
However at the same time there are very poor South Asian communities in
NewYork and San Francisco – in fact all over and their continuing struggles
are forgotten. Life is very hard for them and their narratives do indeed get
submerged through the focus on model minorities.
GB: Barack Obama has had a strange impact on the imaginary of the
political class in Britain – there is loads of stuff written here about this shift
and someone wrote in one of the weekend papers that Obama is the most
influential person in British politics. I think there is a fantasy about the
great black hero who can redeem us all – and in the British political class a
feeling that ‘if only we had one of those ...’
PB: I think that one of things is that they must have a frightened psyche. It
means that they have to deal with a powerful man of colour - which they
never had to deal with before, it reminds them that things are changing and
not always in their favour. There is a new world out there in which the power
dynamics are shifting. And of course there has been much talk here in the
US and the British Press about the subdued rather dismissive celebration,
in fact, the press referred to it as ‘snubbing’, of the British prime minister
Gordon Brown’s official visit to the US this month. There were none of the
high profile White House dinners, only ‘a working lunch’, nor were there
special gifts to honour the ‘special relationship’ with Britain by the Obama
administration. The relationship is no longer special as obvious from the
return of Churchill’s bust which had been returned before the visit. I am
especially interested in how the British academy which is largely closed
to people of colour, even though there have some inroads especially in
your generation of locally born British Blacks and Asians, deals with this.

I am curious about disciplines like British Anthropology and the fields of
race and ethnic relations which essentially study people of colour. How
will they deal with a black man of power? It will be interesting to see
how the public rhetoric gets sophisticated and elaborated to manage this
development. You know what I mean, sophisticated thinkers and writers
who can engage in the most anti-racist sounding rhetoric and language
in their public discourses whilst actually being quite racist in their daily
interactions and in perpetuating with tenacity their small highly defended
power bases. I wonder if there will be any dent in the power structure and
the knowledge producing circuits, perhaps there might be some space
created in some peripheries. I doubt if there will be a fundamental shift in
favour of opening up some creative spaces for people of colour to become
powerful and influential producers of knowledge and as representers and
interpreters of the contemporary experiences on their own terms.
GB:IthinkinBritainthereisabigdifferencebetweenpoliticalandacademic
worlds in their responses, because for some reason British politics is still
more open than British academia. Perhaps because politics retains some
contact with popular feeling, but the academy does not feel that it has to
respond to shifts in popular consciousness or sentiment at all.
PB: I don’t think the academy is a powerful domain – it is just not a
particularly powerful place to be in, unless perhaps if you are an economist
or a lawyer who has access to circuits of power and can act as advisors and
consultants to the power brokers of the world. I don’t think that any of the
disciplines that we are involved in have any mainstream power. They might
have influence, yes, but that is the limit of most academic writing – the
spheres of influence are small indeed.
Parminder spoke about moving to the US and the different reception of her work
in the US and Britain at that time.
PB: The reason I came out here is that my book Twice Migrants made
enormous sense to Americans because it applied to so many American
communities – settlers and immigrants – who have that experience of
multiple migrations and many who do not have a myth of return and are
not particularly home orientated, my central argument in the book that the
multiply moved and often multiple sited people do not have a desire to
return – that made a lot of sense here. This was a surprise to me.
A couple of months before I was due to leave for UCLA in 1989, I gave a
paper at London university. I was severely attacked for it by some Oxbridge
male academics colluding with each other – a bandwagon. In this paper, I
talked about the identities of Asian women as dynamic and fluid and liquid,

as people in a global world who shared their sensibilities and cultural mores
with the rest of the world in which people were continuously forming and
imagining their lives. That these women were as much products of the local
and regional British niches they occupied, as they were of the varied class
positions and migration histories. I was saying that their multiple identities
were complex and in flux – the ideas we are so used to hearing now –
and that their worlds are not dominated by cultural conflict and arranged
marriages and battles with the patriarchy. I was illustrating this by giving
examples of some high profile women in the past who have been forgotten
to point out that Asian women have been in a range of occupations and
that their lives were about much more than the reductive ways in which
they were defined through the ‘arranged marriages and the between two
cultures model of cultural and ethnic pathology’ which was so pervasive
at the time. I was exploring the stories of people like the famous academy
award winning actress Merle Oberon, Mrs Alexandre Korda who had an
Indian background, though she negated it in the Hollywood of that period,
and also Noor Inayat Khan, the secret agent who was amongst the first
women to be trained as a WAAF and Special operations and send to Nazi
occupied France as a wireless operator. She wasn’t a known figure at that
time though there is now a book on her called Spy Princess by Shrabani
Basu and the film rights for the book have been bought, a script for which is
being developed by Shyam Benegal. Her story was completely submerged.
I found it captivating and found out about her through a 1950s book when I
worked in a library as a school kid in the late 60s, my Saturday and holiday
job. She was one of the most effective wireless operators and had sent
critical information back to Britain but was betrayed by a double agent,
captured and tortured very badly by the Nazis and posthumously awarded
a George Cross and the Croix de Guerre with a gold star – the highest
civilian honours in France and England for gallantry outside the battlefield.
I was making a point that Asian women had been in a range of occupations
and occupied varied class locations, that their ethnic identities were as
mediated by the regional and local cultures they occupied in Britain as by
their complex migration and settlement trajectories. And that Asian women
should not be represented through the enormously reductive frames through
which they were represented at the time. It was an attempt to represent
Asian women in a complex and deeply nuanced manner to show that the
complexity of their social, economic, cultural and political locations is
reflected in their consumption styles and cultural sensibilities – as nuanced
dynamic diasporic agents.
After I had presented it, a key person in the audience who was very
influential at that time completely trashed it like I had written nothing. It
was very threatening to anthropologists of a certain ilk – the studied had
become knowledge producers within their own circuits and the erstwhile

studied subject was not reproducing the established and hegemonic frames
of the master narratives and the subject was an Asian woman who was
not going to go home – we were claiming our British Asian identities and
representing them. Gurinder Chadha’s award winning documentary film
I’m British but … had just been released and won the British Film Institute
new Directors award as the best documentary. I wrote a section on that in
the paper on the themes of the film as I had been to its opening in 1989
and also on Gurinder’s very innovative cutting edge hybrid personal style.
She wore Doc Marten shoes, union jack socks, a leather bomber jacket, an
embroidered Indian skirt with a duppata worn diagonally across the front
and back and a bull dog on leash – the complex hybridiities encoded in her
clothes were the themes of my paper. She was doing for film what I was
doing in the academy. We were ahead of our time I think. I was so stunned
by the attack which came from three men and all one after the other and
it was aggressive and powerful. The message was how dare you even be
present in this room- let alone speak and assertively. You know it is like
being hit on the head by a group of people. Then someone said something
in my favour and that gave me a couple minutes to gather myself to
retaliate and reinforce my points. Afterwards my supervisor who happened
to have watched this whole interaction and had cringed through it said to
me that I really had something powerful here and that I must pursue it and
more significantly his advice was that I needed to leave this country. And
indeed it was that paper that brought me three job offers in America, one in
Vancouver, Canada and two in the US one on the west coast in California
and one east coast, during my 1990 fellowship year at UCLA.
It was so obvious that what I was saying was important and challenging to
their conceptions of Asian women – and that here was someone who was
not afraid of the world.
Before leaving Britain I had suffered a very serious attack. I think that
generation, the first of locally produced children of immigrants who had
made it to university and had entered peripheral academic domains i.e.
most of us had soft money research positions, there really was no place
for us to take up permanent university positions. The opportunity structure
had not opened up for us nor was there any attempt to loosen it a little. In
fact people were openly hostile especially when we became marketable
and had many more fine academic credentials that were required for these
positions i.e. books and top-rated excellent publications, plus research
and administrative skills – many more than our white counterparts of that
period. I use strong language but I really do think there was an attempt
to kill us intellectually and I saw that happen to a few people. One had
to have a great deal of confidence and courage to not allow oneself to be
broken by the opposition which was often sophisticated and hard to fight

and decode but its power and consequences were powerfully felt and in
obvious ways. There was always and still is the role of the supporting
secondary researchers, the ethnic fieldworkers – the primary information
generators who do the donkey work and ‘penetrate minority communities’
the word that was used in my time but there still are no positions of
command and control. I see projects on Asians and the diaspora are still
lead by white researchers, often with very little experience of working
with British Asians. They employ junior researchers of colour to do their
slave and shit work as an academic friend of colour states, whilst they
control the academic prestige work of publishing, trips to conferences
abroad, that is all the public and institutional recognition that gets them
their institutional promotion and pre-eminence. I am amazed at how much
this white gaze persists and with stubbornness and virulent ruthlessness
that goes especially with an anti-racist sounding sophistication that many
of them can now engage, but which is often deeply racist if you really
decoded the discourse and the actions in which they engage. One sees how
superficially the opportunity structure has actually changed. Very little I
think though there are some pockets of fluidity – power indeed endures and
perpetuates itself through the new personnel of your generation in much the
same way as in mine except that it was much more explicit in my time and
in some ways easier to deal with. You knew where you stood – they could
not stand your presence, full stop. And then to come here, it was wonderful
– I felt I could develop my voice and discover that there are places that are
nothing to do with Britain and in which British power, especially that of
the academy is weak.
At that time I got the fellowship at UCLA. I did not know what this UCLA
thing was going to be, so I didn’t go for six months. I arranged to start later
– and it turned out to be one of the most exciting years of my whole life.
There were so many things going on that were so relevant to my work,
and second and third generation Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Hispanics
around who were resonating with it. I made so many exciting connections
on a campus of UCLA which is referred to as University of Caucasians
Lost amongst Asians. It was a perfect place for me after my very negative
British experiences in the academy. There was none of the resistance that I
was facing in Britain. In fact I felt and was told that my work represented
the future and that I had the most ‘politically correct biography’ for the
times. I felt that my cultural sensibilities and ways of being and viewing the
world were becoming the modus Vivendi of the world, my deeply felt and
deeply experienced biography of multiple migration across three continents
and rooted cultural politics and experiences felt centrally relevant to people
in a ‘university of Caucasians lost amongst Asians’. It was a reinforcing
experience, an antidote that I really needed at the time when I felt battered
by the British academy. Migration was good for me – it helped develop and

assert my voice in a much more powerful way. At UCLA, I co-organized
the first conference on the west coast on immigration and entrepreneurship,
which resulted in a book with Ivan Light, a professor of sociology at UCLA
who had offered me my fellowship and with whom I worked closely.
I felt that thing that Barack Obama says, that I was relevant in the world,
I felt that my biography, my experiences, all of that was important and
relevant. And indeed, a multiple migrant, a man who is also product of
three continents is now the leader of the US, a new kind of person with a
new kind of politics and biographical experiences and who is creating the
new licences of participation. All this has happened within less than two
decades.
In Kenya, a year or so before we left for London, I got an award at my
primary school from Tom Mboya who was then a cabinet minister for
economic planning and development in Kenyatta’s government for a
good KPE (Kenya Preliminary Examination) result – the eleven plus
type – more like a 12/13 plus in Kenya – the official examination that
you needed to pass with high level grades to enter secondary school at
the time- all the more so for Asians whose entry into secondary schools
was being greatly restricted after independence. Mboya came to my school
for the Prize giving ceremony. He was a Luo, the same tribe as Barack
Obama’s father. He was educated at Ruskin College, Oxford, in the 1950s
via a scholarship funded by the British Trade Union Congress. He was in
Kenyatta’s generation and he initiated the Airlift Africa project which was
funded by African American Students Foundation in the USA and which
facilitated the education of Kenyan students at US universities in the late
50s and 60s. These American funded Tom Mboya scholarships, facilitated
the education at University of Hawaii of Barack Obama senior in the early
60s. Tom Mboya opened upAmerican universities for KenyanAfricans and
some who were not from the powerful and influential Kikuyu tribes. And
many of the leading US educated Kenyan figures who went on to become
powerful political figures were exposed to the Pan Africanist movement
and African American political figures and their politics in the USA. They
took some of these political sensibilities back with them to struggle for
Kenyan independence.
The Luo were not always on good terms with the Kikuyu, a situation that
applies till today as reflected in the recent leadership struggle between the
current Prime Minister Raili Odinga, a Luo and President Mwai Kibaki,
a Kikuyu, Kenya’s dominant power elite. The Luos were also much more
socialist in orientation and committed to the trade union movement. One of
the first trade union organizers in Kenya was Makhan Singh – he was a Sikh
and spent time in jail as part of the generation of people with Kenyatta who

went to prison for their anti- British activities. The freedom fighter Makhan
Singh’s story, his organization of the trade union movement which was so
critical to Kenya’s independence struggle and the general involvement of
East African Asians in the decolonization process has yet to be properly
told – it is a missing narrative in the history of African independence
movements and also much elided by the writing on the struggles for
independence. We hear little of these African Asian interventions many of
which were critical.
I think this is something that people directly from India do not understand,
they are always saying that we have no love for the nation, we were not part
of the independence struggle, but people of my brother’s generation and
maybe older, we were part of the Kenyan independence struggle. India is
not a point of reference for us, it is not even now. Of course we listened to
Bollywood songs and all of that, but India was not an emotional reference
point.
I think what has been very good for me, and I really had to leave at that
time, is that I am institutionally secure. It was very important for me that
I got out and that people understood what I was about intellectually and
that I had space to grow. I might not have thought about globalization,
for example, unless I had come here to Clark to take up a professorship
whose brief was to develop new curriculum around the themes of cultural
identities and the rapid globalization that was in process in the early 90s.
And it was so important to realize that there are places beyond Britain.
But I also think it is a very big price to pay – because there [in Britain]
you have enormous cultural capital especially if you are a product of that
place. For example, I don’t drive as well here, especially in Boston which
is a hard city to drive in and unlike American cities not well labelled. I am
not naturally familiar with its cartography in a way I am in London where
I lived since my early teens and so drive in organically. If you had seen
me drive in London, I am like a tiger. You know I don’t feel lost because I
know that Brixton is connected to Streatham etc., I have that cultural and
unselfconscious geographic ease there.
PB: I find the fact that I am a Sikh and I pray that is very significant, because
I have to believe that God is on my side. I am not part of an established
power structure which can open up my paths for me. I have to believe that
some ‘higher powers’ will act in my favour.
I was talking to a colleague at UCLA about his question to me: ‘why are
you so vibrant?’ Apparently people who have a high level of well-being

are people who have a belief that something beyond is helping them, it
doesn’t have to be God, it could be Elvis Presley or angels or anything that
is significant in your world to you. Melvin Pollner, an ethno methodologist
who was at UCLA, who studied how people produce and sustain their sense
of reality and community wrote about this in much of his work, the ways
in which people code their everyday world and sustain realities as they
understand them – the world of bubbles that we are all in and sustain – his
famous book was Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological
Discourse (1987).
GB: So you have to believe that you are chosen even if the world is telling
you that you are not.
PB: No, not that I am chosen but that despite the odds and, despite the
negatively charged location I might find myself in, that there are forces
beyond the power structures which might help one along – forces that
the power structure has no control over and might indeed be much more
powerful than the exerting power. So you see or imagine the world as coded
in your favour even if the framework in which you might be located and
its personnel might work against you or might be greatly restrictive. You
remain optimistic and therefore vibrant at many levels because you know
it will be fine for you and people like you because of all these positive
nebulous forces out there. That is, you code reality in a positive way in the
manner describe by Melvin Pollner.
The discussion moved to questions about studying ethnicity in Britain and the
increasing diversity of higher education.
PB: There is more of a critical mass in your generation i.e. academics in
their 30s and early 40s who are truly local, locally born and raised. They
are not migrants but children of settlers who have come of age and into
representation. In our case it was a very hard fight because the academy and
its personnel were not used to people like us. We were new on the scene
and not subcontinental elites who have been around at British universities
for a more than 150 years, most of whom went back to their countries of
origin, often in leadership positions once they acquired British credentials.
They were no threat in fact they were celebrated as they were the elite of
another country which the British elite could benefit from. We, on the other
hand, were not going anywhere – we were locally produced progeny of
immigrants in Britain and were going to stay. And we were much more
powerfully politicized and racialized and also assertive of our British Asian
and Black identities and also culturally confident, new ethnicities to use
Stuart Hall’s term. In fact, in the end some of us did not end up having

a space in the British academy and did indeed leave to make a life for
ourselves elsewhere.
My young British Asian academic friend says that it seems like there are
a lot of jobs now but compared to the number of people looking for jobs,
it is not enough. She always tells me that the opportunity structure has not
opened up in the way that I think it has from the outside.
But I don’t always understand the mindset of some of the younger scholars.
I think they want to make a big theoretical breakthrough right away, there
is a great deal of ambition which is good and they want to make a mark
and fast and many of them write in this way that is so complex and difficult
to understand especially those who want to impress by using obfuscating
language. But who reads this stuff?And the academy is not such a powerful
arena, or I should say it is a domain of weak power and therefore marginal.
Yes in that way there is some peripheral power in a small way. But I am
really really pleased they are emerging – they are the academic change
agents of the present and future.
Of course, there are people like X and Y [key figures in British race and
ethnic studies who are also white but from marginal class locations] and
so on who are critical – they create opportunities and support the younger
generation of academics of colour – they are indeed trying to open up
academic institutions and some have succeeded in small pockets.
GB: British academia is just very small and when times are hard they don’t
want to make space for people who are not like them – so there are lots of
people on short-term contracts because that is where the expansion of the
sector has taken place.
PB: I always think that maybe because there are younger academics that
are in positions of power in Britain that there might be more openings for
a certain point of view.
The difference is that in my generation there were no jobs to be had, whereas
in your generation there is not a critical mass but some of you have jobs.
GB: The great expansion of universities and the overall massification of the
sector means that some of us are getting jobs, but it is still only some.
Parminder spoke about her own family history and the impact that history
has had on her understanding of the world.
PB: My father died very quickly after coming to the UK. He came in 1967

and in the space of 7 years he had had four heart attacks. He died in 1974.
These were very racist times and life was hard for turban wearing Sikhs for
whom jobs were not easy to find. Plus migration to a new land is very hard
in your 50s.
The thing is if you are a migrant, it takes a great toll. You know, I couldn’t
be a migrant now, I did that it in my mid-30s but could not do it now. My
father moved when he was 55 and it was too much. I think if you move you
have to do it by late 30s max.
GB: I also just think it is exhausting – even though I laugh at my parents
and the way that their lives are apparently unplanned in every regard, I also
have a huge admiration for their ability to do this huge thing and just up
sticks and start again.
PB: And when they moved, things were much harder. When I moved here
[to the US] I used to speak to my mother twice a day on the telephone. But in
their day they could not do that, it was a much more isolating experience.
GB: Can you say something about what you think is so culturally distinctive
about multiple migrations?
PB: You don’t have a recognizable style – I think you are much more
threatening. I think what they [dominant groups in the UK and US] have
seen are all the directly migrant Indian elites. These people have all been
around in all of these elite institutions forever. But I think we multiple
migrants were a new kind of person in a sense. We were not going to go
anywhere.Inourpersonalstyle,ourcode-switchingandculturalproficiency,
we were locally produced.
Indian elites are much more willing to be obsequious – their intellectual
frame remains similar to that of the colonizer or one could say that there is
stronger colonization of consciouness . Even someone like Rushdie, he is
almost like a pet of the English elite – even though he has developed a new
way of writing that expresses something different, he seems to live his life
on their terms.
I think the difference is at multiple levels, it is not just a style of thought, it
is a style of clothes, a style of being. It is, as another very diasporic Jewish
friend of mine Ilan Stavans, the eminent ‘king of Latin American’ culture
states, a deep rooted way of life. It is harder to tame. It does not give into
master narratives easily – it is resilient and much more independent having

established itself in the case of multiple migrants in previous settings of
settlement where it has honed its minority skills – rather the management
of minority status – an expertise multiple migrants travel with and transfer
rapidly in new settings of settlement.
And in fact the people who are interesting in cultural production terms also
display these characteristics. I think it is something about that diasporic
experience that allows this innovation. It is not to do with a reproduction
of elite narratives. It is to do with the creation of the new licences of
participation and the new narratives of discovery as Basil Bernstein says
in his work. They are bolder in bringing in the new on their own terms, the
power of the diaspora to define the cultural world in new ways.
GB: How and why did you become interested in cultural producers?
I became interested in cultural producers because it moves on from some
of the themes that I explore in Dangerous Designs which are also the long
term themes of my work. In the same way, some of the designers I spoke
to came from an East African background, although I didn’t know that at
the time.
The designers were referencing other cultural forms and at the same time
that I was meeting these designers I was also meeting these other people
who were involved in something else – these producers, musicians, artists.
These people were working with the same aesthetic that I discuss in
Dangerous Designs. That, the improvization, the ability not to only reframe
what is already there, really applies to most of the people who I interview.
East African Asians crop up in a lot of places. The pioneering group of
people who started Bhangra music and gave it wider exposure, people like
Kuljit Bhamra and the men who were part of the pioneering bands like
Alaap were from this background. Freddie Mercury, aka Farrukh Bulsara,
of the famous and supremely influential rock band Queen was another
one, an Ismaili Muslim who was born Zanzibar. Also the actor who played
Gandhi – Ben Kingsley – Krishna Bhanji whose father, also an Ismaili
Muslim, was also from Zanzibar, the island off the coast of Tanzania. There
are so many of them around and it is just invisible to us. That is also a part
of my interest in cultural producers. I was writing on Gurinder Chadha
[the film-maker and screen-writer] and all the connections played through.
We are connected through the same networks – Bubby Mahil, the designer
who is central to my book Dangerous Designs also designs clothes for
Cherie Booth and also Gurinder’s clothes and was involved in making the
costumes for Bride and Prejudice [a film by Gurinder Chadha], so it is all
connected. So it actually follows that theme of following the progeny of

multiple migrant and their diasporically mediated cultural roots and routes.
They [East African Asians] are in so many domains that are not to do with
literary production, that are not textual. Whereas the Bengalis and people
from India control that arena of literary culture much more.
GB: That is a really interesting distinction – why do you think that is?
PB: The English language was used for much longer there than for a number
of people who moved from east Africa. In the 1950s and 60s when India
became independent English was such a prestige subject in the universities,
from what I hear. So many people held English in such high esteem and
majored in it at University, I am told. Many of the literary theorists from
India have done English degrees, the high prestige subject for a certain
generation of Indian elites. That must have to do with the power of the
colonial legacies.
I think their use of obfuscating language is way of showing the colonizers,
look, we can work in your frame – it is a colonization of consciousness.
Whereas the east Africans and the Europeans built east Africa together,
they were both outsider groups who had to construct a life in a new land in
which they were not the indigenous populations, even though one group had
the stronger colonization drive. This situation was different in the Indian
subcontinent where the Indians were indigenous to the land and the British
came as outsiders to colonize and succeeded in doing so. In East Africa
they ruled the place for a short time, so the colonization of the mind was
not the same for East African Asians. In fact, the commercially orientated
East African Asians had been in east Africa many hundreds of year before
the European presence in East Africa – the Indians had been trading in
the Indian ocean since 10th
century or before. In fact they were bankers to
the British in places like Zanzibar and Dar-es-salaam in Tanzania in the
19th
century and there are some very interesting narratives of how their
commercial banking and financial prowess was crushed as the British got
better established in the 19th
and early 20th
centuries both in Kenya and
Tanzania. So I think East African Asians emerge from a very different
location to that of indigenous Indians who were colonized by the British in
their own homeland. East African Asians were partners in the settlement of
East Africa, though the British were the more ruthless colonial agents in a
way that Indians never were.Their interests were commercial and in the case
of the railway workers recruited in the late 19th
century to build the Kenya
Uganda railways, not commercial at all. They had become East Africans as
workers and through socialization and birth in the East African countries
which had become their diasporic homelands. They became settlers in co-
partnership with the British. They were never dominated by the British
in the ways in which the hegemony and the colonial power of British Raj

operated. This is a major difference in how colonization of the mind works
– I think it was much more powerful in India where it was such a totally
pervasive colonial force for more that 300 years, a long period in which
they were able to sophisticate colonial rule through brown sahib agents as
described in the 1835 Macaulay Minute on Indian Education to produce
a class of Indians with English tastes who could act as an intermediary
agent for the British to rule the Indian masses. I think there is a much more
powerful absorption and transmission generationally of this colonial frame
to which many Indians were powerfully socialized directly and through its
legacies, hence the more pervasive remnants which I think are encoded and
reflected in the more colonized psyches of subcontinental elites.
I think there is a kind of cultural timidity [in the take-up of literary culture].
Diasporics have much less of that, and by diasporics I mean people who are
multiply migrant, the older diasporics.
GB: Are all the cultural producers that you interview British-based?
PB: Yes – all of them are UK-based, and some are more influential and
known widely. Their stuff is all over. Not all of them. Some of them are very
committed to their communities, they are products of those communities
and they are very devoted to those communities. They work in Punjabi
theatre, poetry, Punjabi folk-songs. And some others, they want to make
a mark beyond their domain but really their work does not allow that –
poetry, Punjabi folk-songs – it’s a very different kind of cultural product.
These forms are very viable and very vibrant, but they are not going to have
a huge audience.
GB: So are your respondents mainly working in mass media?
PB: They are not all in mass media, although there are some. Gurinder
[Chadha, the film-maker] is an obvious case but not all. The twin artists
Rabindre and Amrit have reimagined miniature art through their Wirral
bred British Asian lens . Then there are people who are playwrights whose
work is essentially only known in Britain and then there are people like the
architect who is a partner in Richard Roger’s innovative firm,Amarjit Kalsi
who was a designer of Terminal 5 [of Heathrow Airport] and the Lloyds
building. Some of them their work is only in Britain, but all of them have
an innovative edge. I like their aesthetics, politics and creative courage to
work on their own terms. It is not doing what has already been done before,
they all contest and their background is what allows it.

GB: Why did you choose to have everyone who was UK-based?
PB: This is probably the last piece of work that I will do on Britain. It is part
of the last phase of my London life and partly springs out of my previous
work. It was the culmination of that phase of my work, the last phase of that
work that is London-based.
GB: How important was it to arrive in the US and start mixing with minority
scholars who understood your work and experience immediately? How do
you think that move has shaped your work?
PB: I work in a place where a number of my colleagues are Jewish and
what I would never have cottoned on to is how similar the experiences of
British Asians are to all kinds of Jews. I don’t mean their experiences of
the Holocaust and the virulent anti-Semitism that they have suffered for
generations. I mean the nuanced and deep understanding of the experiences
of marginality and discrimination and not being allowed ‘in’. I find they
‘get it’ in a way that many powerful groups just don’t and don’t want to.
What I have found that I love is that the stuff I am writing about is applicable
to so many groups. The kind of innovation that I am talking about was
being done by African Americans and Jewish Americans, you know jazz,
blues.
In any kind of Jewish cultural production there is a lot of similarity and I am
very attracted to that – because immigrants have formed some of the most
influential cultural products, you know. Hollywood is almost an entirely
immigrant product, Jewish people from eastern and central Europe and so
on who contested the Anglo-Saxon establishment that ruled Hollywood
prior to their arrival – they were a ‘foreign diasporic influence’ that made
this such a globally influential and successful entertainment force (see the
work of Catherine Portuges, 1998, ‘Accenting LA.: Central European in
Diasporan Hollywood of the 1940s’ in Borders, Exile, Diasporas edited by
Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton).
My first editor was Jewish – any opening I have ever had was through
Jews. My first book, Twice Migrants, it was pushed by Debbie Spring who
is Jewish. She pushed it over two years – then Verity Saifullah-Khan gave
it a wonderful review and things took off. If I hadn’t had a Jewish editor it
would never have happened.
And then Basil Bernstein, who was then the Karl Mannheim Professor of
Sociology of Education at London University’s Institute of Education, who
played a critical role in getting me to become a principal investigator on

a project which made me amongst the first Asian women to be principal
investigators of research projects. Remember that before that we were all
on research assistant contracts.
So Jews and Americans – most of my chances came in that way.
I found that in the first few years in the US I attracted a lot of people who
had moved themselves. Now in my class more than half are people who
have similar experiences, not the same trajectory, but other diasporas.
GB: It seems that one of the things that you get from the US perspective
is a way of appreciating the breadth and cultural ambition of South Asian
cultural producers, which, frankly, I don’t think is recognized in Britain at
all.
PB: I don’t think it is recognized by many of the people who write in cultural
studies either. Les [Back] always says to me that what I can bring to the
public in a way that other people can’t is my understanding and experience
because I have lived that life. I don’t think, for example, that this is
something that my nieces and nephews would pick up on necessarily. Their
generation is entirely British born and locally produced – the experiences
of multiple migrations and multiple sited biographies are not theirs – they
are more determined by their local experiences of race and class.
I have been a multiple migrant and then I moved here and I have an
understanding of what it was to be completely displaced. I knew no-one
when I came to the US, I had one friend in Berkeley and I knew some
people in Washington. I am the only member of my wider family who is
here. There are no close relatives.
That means that I am very attuned to what happens and I have an
appreciation of how courageous you have to be to do these things. It gives
you an understanding of how cultures are reproduced, of how the genes,
the DNA of your cultural base, are constantly re-imagined and reproduced
and how significant the context is and also how significant what you bring
to that context is.
GB: But going to the US also gave you intellectual affirmation in ways that
were not happening in Britain – and one of the ways that you are talking
about Asian cultural production is that you are comparing it with things
like Hollywood, you are suggesting that it has that kind of cultural import
potentially.
PB: Yes … the birth of Hollywood, the birth of Jazz, Blues.

I had already started thinking of those things and I think that is very
significant – and I don’t think I would have necessarily picked up on that if
I hadn’t been here and if I hadn’t moved myself.
When I was looking at the cultural producers I was not trying to find
multiply migrant people, I was looking at specific domains – but then you
find that some of the most innovative people are from that background.
Why is it that some of the most influential people are from that group?
GB: All of these people that you have been interviewing, they are also
trying to be cultural producers in this space where possibility has been shut
down and people think they are coolies – do they talk about where ethnicity
sits in their professional lives or their everyday lives?
PB: They talk about their ethnicity all the time, it is the thing that defines
them. Each and every one of them has had multiple experiences that confirm
that this is what they are about. You cannot avoid it as a person of colour,
the experience of race and ethnicity.
In the case of the twin artists the fact that they innovated from Mughal
miniatures meant that their work was not considered to be art. In Gurinder’s
case, they wanted her to produce an account of bhangra that is very bland
and not at all political. It was a fight for her to present it as an aspect of
ethnic politics and an aspect that is very fundamental to the form. The case
of Parv Bancil where they want him to write about Asians as terrorists
– which is not at all what he wants to write.
GB: Do they describe their choice to be cultural producers as part of that
ethnic politics? There was a moment when cultural production was very
explicitly considered to be central to ethnic politics for migrant communities
in Europe – but that seems to have become so much more dispersed and
you are talking about fields from art to architecture to financial advice.
Does the idea of an ethnic cultural politics still fit?
PB: Someone like Amarjit Kalsi, who wouldn’t describe himself as
politically engaged overtly, you find his architectural aesthetic is very
much to do with his diasporic roots, the use of repetition, his understanding
of space, his family history as a man who belongs to the caste of builder,
carpenter and engineers. These are all part of his diasporic inheritance
which is significant in his designs.
He [Kalsi] would not explicitly describe himself as defined by his ethnicity
and the politics that goes with trying to push that sensibility and that identity
– whereas theatre people are absolutely articulate about it, very explicit

about it, for example explaining their problems with East is East and the
abusive father and how Asian fathers are always portrayed as abusive.
For someone like Amarjit Kalsi, his experience of being a racialized Briton
produces a certain sensibility and the architecture that he produces has the
codes of his experiences, but I don’t think that he would necessarily say
that.
GB: Why did you choose this group of cultural producers to interview?
PB: I chose these people because I liked their work and I liked their politics,
they were courageous in a way. It was also to do with networks that I had.
But it is what Paul Gilroy says in one of his lectures here at Clark University
in the mid-1990s – I work on what engages my imagination.
I am interested in what are the creative processes through which people
produce their work, how people think about you and how to extend the
range of ways that people perceive you, their perception of whatAsians and
people of colour are about.
I think that is critical otherwise what are you doing? You should just shut
up.

Chapter 4
Migrant Women’s Networking:
New Articulations of Transnational Ethnicity
Ronit Lentin
Introduction
In June 2004 the Irish government held a referendum on citizenship, in which
nearly 80 per cent of the electorate voted in favour of rescinding the right to
birthright citizenship for all children born in the island of Ireland regardless of their
parentage. This right had prevailed since the establishment of the Irish Free State
in 1922. The Referendum means limiting automatic citizenship only to children
born in Ireland who have one parent who is a citizen or is entitled to citizenship.
The state based its argument in favour of the Referendum on the gendered claim
alleging that migrant women were coming to Ireland to deliberately give birth to
Irish citizens, and thus gaining residency rights for themselves and their partners.
The Referendum followed the 2003 ‘Irish born child’ Supreme Court ruling,
which withdrew the process whereby migrant parents in the Republic of Ireland had
the right to apply to remain to give ‘care and company’ to their citizen children.
This chapter has two parts. In the first part I argue that the state of the Republic
of Ireland has created what GiorgioAgamben (2005) calls a ‘state of exception’, in
which state racism combines with what Michel Foucault (2003) calls ‘biopolitics’,
in a contemporary move from institutional to constitutional racism (Lentin and
McVeigh, 2006). My argument here is that state racism assumes gendered forms
specifically targeting women migrants through their mothering role. Putting this
in a wider historical context, I argue that while childbearing (Irish) women had
always been central to articulations of nation ever since the establishment of the
Republic of Ireland as a confessional state, the 2004 Citizenship Referendum
Ronit Lentin is a senior lecturer in Sociology, director of the MPhil in Ethnic and
Racial Studies, and founder member of the Trinity Immigration Initiative, Trinity College
Dublin. She has published extensively on racism in Ireland, gender and racism, and Israel-
Palestine. Among her books are Gender and Catastrophe (2007), Racism and Antiracism in
Ireland (with Robbie McVeigh, 2002), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation:
Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (with Nahla Abdo, 2002), Race
and State (with Alana Lentin, 2006), After Optimism: Ireland, Racism and Globalisation
(with Robbie McVeigh, 2006), Performing Global Networks (with Karen Fricker, 2007),
and Thinking Palestine (2008).

shifted the control of women from ‘Irish’ (m)others to ‘non-national’ (m)others
as subverting certainties of nation, state and citizenship. Throughout the chapter I
conceptualize mothering as having a component of othering, which, as argued by
Bhattarcharyya et al. (2002) has sexualized connotations, hence my use of brackets
when discussing migrant (m)others.
Thesecondpartisbasedonmycurrentresearchwithmigrantwomen’snetworks.
Theorizing migrant networks as fluid forms of social association (Fuchs, 2001,
252), some nascent migrant women’s networks in Ireland have already become
structured organizations which support migrant women locally and at the same time
build up transnational ties of solidarity – with Irish, European and International
groups – as they engage with global issues around gender, migration, citizenship
and gendered violence. In doing so, some migrant networks, organized on putative
ethnic ties, reinforce articulations of ethnic affiliation while at the same time staking
new claims in their country of settlement. This practice of transnationalism moves
away from a bi-national circulatory model which highlights migrants’ movements
between two countries and privileges economic and political strategies spanning
two nation-states rather than entertaining and developing the notion of a ‘rooted’
transnational mode of being. I focus in particular on AkiDwA – which begun as
the African Women’s Network, and has expanded to include migrant women of
other ethnic and national origins – and which, among its other activities, had been
instrumental in campaigning against the exclusion of migrant parents of Irish
citizen children from residency, by initiating and being an active member of the
Coalition against Deportation of Irish Children (CADIC).
My examination ofAkiDwA’s work leads me to explore how migrant networks
are able to negotiate their presence in a terrain which is powerfully marked by
the powers of the state, and resist and extend the boundaries of ‘intercultural’
Ireland’s narrow articulations of race, ethnicity, citizenship and nation, creating
new dimensions of transnational ethnicity and gender equality struggles. In post-
Referendum Ireland migrant networks are creating and demarcating relatively
autonomous and empowering spaces of identity, belonging and solidarity which
resist the state’s racialising violence. At the same time, they are moving in the
dangerous minefield of Ireland’s ‘intercultural industry’ where they walk a thin
line between co-option and ‘strategic essentialism’, which de Certeau terms as
manoeuvres on ‘enemy territory’ through which individuals reappropriate the
space (or fragments thereof) organized by the totalizing bio-powers of the state
(de Certeau, 1984: xiv).
Before proceeding, I want to stress that this chapter centres on the relations
between the state and migrant networks in the Republic of Ireland, despite the
obvious triadic theoretical link between the Republic, the North of Ireland and
the Irish diaspora. As Robbie McVeigh (forthcoming) argues, ‘Most recent work
on racism in Ireland or Irish racism might be characterized as Republic of Ireland
studies. In this sense it is partitionist by default and rarely addresses the centrality
of either the north or the Diaspora in the dynamics of Irish racism’, as will become
apparent in my discussion of the implications of the Citizenship Referendum.

Migrant Women’s Networking: New Articulations of Transnational Ethnicity 67
However, as my current research concentrates on women migrants’ networking
activities in the Republic, I have to make do with this theoretically short-sighted
limitation (see Lentin and McVeigh, 2006).
The Republic of Ireland: Racial State of Exception?
The Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1995, 2005) draws on the
Foucauldian concepts of biopower and biopolitics to develop an argument about
the tendency of modern states to withdraw legal rights and protection from
specific populations. Michel Foucault argues in Society Must be Defended (2003)
that whereas the pre-modern sovereign addressed his power to killing unwanted
people, the modern state’s biopower is addressed to living beings, and, more
specifically, to their mass – as population. Put simply, Foucault charts a difference
between the sovereign power of the old territorial state (‘to make die and let live’)
and modern biopower (‘to make live and let die’). If the old order exerted the right
to kill, the new biopower aims to make the care of life the concern of state power,
exercised by governmental technologies such as the hospital, the psychiatric clinic,
the prison, and I would add, also the maternity ward, as well as the refugee camp,
refugee hostel and direct provision asylum centre. The duty to defend society from
itself (often articulated as the need to defend the body of the nation from migrant
and indigenous others) means that the modern state can scarcely function without
racism. Rather than serving one group against another, as theories of racism as
competition for scarce resources would have it, race, Foucault argues, becomes a
tool of state conservatism, a racism that society practices against itself.
Developing Foucault’s ideas, Agamben argues that while biopower may be
more marked in modern states, theorized by David Theo Goldberg (2002) as
‘racial states’, it has always existed as part of sovereignty. Although biopower
peaked in Nazism’s concentration and extermination camps, Agamben updates
the concept to the 21st
century in relation to refugees in detention camps (and,
I would add, reception centres) and ‘unlawful’ combatants in detention camps
such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In each of these spaces ‘zones of exception’ are
formed, where, like in the Nazi lagers, inmates exist in a zone of indistinction,
both at the mercy of sovereign power and outside the protection of the law. Today,
particularly after September 11 2001, ‘the state of exception comes more and more
to the foreground as the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to
become the rule’ (Agamben, 2005, 10). As we have seen in the conduct of the war
on Iraq, in states of exception the application of the law is increasingly suspended
as different categories of people are reduced to what Agamben calls ‘bare life’
– the roman legal category of homo sacer (sacred man – he who can be killed at
the sovereign’s whim yet cannot be sacrificed).
See also Kundnani 2007 for a discussion of the new post 9/11 ‘global sovereignty’.

In the wake of the Citizenship Referendum there is no longer any doubt that,
like all modern nation-states, though in its specific form, the Republic of Ireland
must be theorized as a ‘racial state’. Racial states, according to Goldberg (2002),
each in its own way, exclude in order to construct homogeneity (which, according
to Goldberg [2002, 16], denotes ‘heterogeneity in denial’), while appropriating
difference through celebrations of the multicultural. The racial state is a state
of power, asserting its control over those within the state and excluding others
from entering its borders. Through seemingly innocuous mechanisms such
as constitutions, the law, border controls, policy making, bureaucracy, census
categorizations, but also invented histories and traditions, modern states are
defined in terms of their power to exclude and include in racially ordered terms.
Goldberg outlines two traditions of thinking about racial states. The first,
naturalism, fixes racially conceived ‘natives’ as pre-modern, and naturally
incapable of progress. The second, historicism, elevates Europeans over primitive
or underdeveloped others as a victory of western progress (Goldberg, 2002,
43).
Understood as the prerogative of white men of property, the racial state’s
historicist progressivism aims, through amalgamation and assimilation, to assist
its racial others to ‘undo their uncivilised conditions’. But beneath what seems like
benevolent liberalism, historicism camouflages racism, and is ultimately about
the ordering zeal of modernity (Goldberg, 2002, 92–3). According to Goldberg,
the law – as a technology of racial rule – is central to modern state formation,
promoting ethnoracial categorisation and identification and shaping national
identities through legislating on immigration controls and citizenship rights,
shaping race in legal terms, and threading it into the fabric of the social (Goldberg,
2002, 141–7).
Bearing in mind the global context in mind of the Republic of Ireland’s recent
economic and social transformations (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006), my argument
is that the Republic of Ireland’s exponential economic prosperity during the 1990s
and the early years of the current decade has led to its restructuring as an exclusive
racist state. Labour migrants are articulated as crucial to ensuring ‘our’ continuing
economic growth, while asylum seekers are increasingly prevented from landing to
present their applications (Kelly, 2005), and undocumented non-EU migrants are
allowed to exist precariously, if at all, and citizenship parameters are continually
being re-defined.
See Ní Shuinéar, 2002, and Lentin and McVeigh, 2006, 11 for a discussion of racial
naturalism and historicism in the Irish context.
The proposed Immigration Residence and Protection Bill discussed below restricts
the rights of asylum seekers and refugees (falling short of international standards) while
cherry-picking ‘useful’ migrants. The Minister for Integration comments that ‘Ireland
would have to “fight hard” to retain migrants at a time of global competition for skilled
workers … For this reason, the Immigration Bill currently going through the dail will need
to be amended, and in a fashion that explicitly makes us more attractive to immigrants’(The
Irish Times, 21 April, 2008).

The 2004 Citizenship Referendum – which made jus sanguinis (blood-based
citizenship) the principle upon which children born in Ireland are entitled to
automatic citizenship (overturning 83 years of jus soli – soil-based citizenship
entitlement, in place since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922) –
provides a starting point for analysing Ireland as a ‘racial state’, moving the focus
of the analysis from institutional racism to constitutional racism. Furthermore,
the situation where the state declares itself anti-racist while enacting increasingly
draconian immigration legislation leads to ‘racism without racism’ (Lentin and
McVeigh, 2006, 164). As McVeigh and I argue, rather than being generated by
individual or institutional prejudice, or by extreme right-wing ‘new racism’ as in
other European states, racism in the post ‘Celtic Tiger’ 21st
century Republic of
Ireland is absorbed into the very structure of the liberal state.
Gendering Racism: Irish Woman and Nation
Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception is compelling, though it is
surprising that, like other state theorists, he engenders neither his theorization of
the ‘state of exception’ nor his concept of ‘bare life’.
In my own work on women
Holocaust survivors, I have extendedAgamben’s concept of homo sacer to include
the female femina sacra – she whose life, but also sexuality and productivity stand
at the mercy of the sovereign power of the racial state (Lentin, 2006). Following
Bhattacharyya et al.’s (2002, 104) argument that the term ‘other’ always has
sexualized connotations, and that the self is marked by casting out all that is other,
including the disorder of sexual desire, my point here is that these categories are
not only racialized, but also inescapably gendered.
Not paying specific attention to the gender aspect of ‘the state of exception’
is surprising as Agamben does focus on the centrality of birth as a marker of
citizenship entitlement (Agamben, 1995, 126). He cites Hannah Arendt (1979)
who argues that in the system of nation-states, the so-called sacred and inalienable
‘rights of man’ (sic) ultimately lack protection at the moment in which they no
longer take the form of rights of citizens. The term ‘nation’ derives from nascere
(to be born), thus the passage from divinely authorized royal sovereignty to
national sovereignty means that in the transformation of ‘subject’ into ‘citizen’,
birth – or bare natural life as such – becomes the immediate bearer of sovereignty.
This is implicated in the passage from jus soli (birth in a certain territory) to jus
sanguinis (blood-based birth from citizen parents), hence the centrality, but also
the ambiguity, of the notion of citizenship in modern political thought (Agamben,
1995, 128–9). This transition from jus soli to jus sanguinis citizenship was the
main consequence of the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, bringing the Republic
See Siphathisiwe Maphosa (2007) on the gendered implications of reception centres
as ‘zones of exception’ – zones in which women’s rights are suspended or endangered
precisely because of their sexuality and migrancy status.

of Ireland firmly into the family of racial states where full rights are reserved
only for blood-based citizens. Indeed, as Zygmunt Bauman (2003) reminds us,
birth is usually the only ‘natural’, no-questions-asked entry into the nation; yet
by securing a victory in a referendum aimed at outlawing birth right citizenship
for the children of migrant (m)others, the Irish state has broken this link between
birth and nation.
Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989) theorize women as the producers of future
generations and the symbolic tropes of nations, suggesting women are marked
and controlled differently from men, despite universal claims to gender equality.
As the nation-state makes nativity the foundation of its sovereignty, when they
step outside ethno-national or moral boundaries (and when they are the producers
of ‘racially undesirable’ others), women are banned as impure and transgressive
(Yuval-Davis, 1997). This can be illustrated by the positioning of child-bearing
migrant women in the lead up to the Citizenship Referendum in what became
known as the ‘Irish born child’ controversy, which however was indelibly tied
to the relationship between the states of Ireland, north and south (McVeigh,
forthcoming), as my discussion demonstrates.
The debates on immigrants’ citizenship and residency rights occasioned by
increased in-migration since 1996 highlighted the fact that jus soli citizenship
right was a consequence of the 1998 Constitutional amendment of Article 2 as part
of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) on Northern Ireland. However, the GFA
amendment also meant, as was ruled in the 1990 Fajujonu Supreme Court case,
that migrant parents of children born in Ireland, and thus Irish citizens, had a claim
to residency in the Republic of Ireland to provide ‘care and company’ to their
citizen child.
However, this ruling, which resulted in several thousand migrant parents
gaining residency rights, was overturned in January 2003 when the Supreme
Court ruled in the Lobe and Osayande appeal, that migrant parents (dubbed ‘non-
national’ parents by the state and its courts of law) no longer had a strong case to
be allowed to remain in Ireland to bring up their children (Maddock and Mallon,
2003). The Lobe and Osayande case involved two families of Czech Roma and
Nigerian origin respectively against whom deportation orders had been made. The
parents claimed that their decision to remain resident was in their children’s best
interest, yet the Supreme Court ruling privileged the State’s right to deport, and
the ‘integrity of the asylum process’ over these citizen children’s rights (Mullally,
2005; Lentin, 2007). The ruling illustrates Agamben’s argument that refugees (or
in this instance migrant parents of Irish citizen children, many of whom were
asylum seekers) form an unstable category between ‘man’ (sic) and ‘citizen’. In
this sense, the refugee (or the migrant parent) ‘is truly the “man of rights”… the
first and only real appearance of rights outside the fiction of the citizen that always
covers them over. Yet this is precisely what makes the figure of the refugee so hard
to define politically’ (Agamben, 1995, 131).
Media debates following the January 2003 Supreme Court ruling exposed a
contradiction between articulations of nationality and citizenship. While the jus

sanguinis-based rights to Irish citizenship allows up to third generation Irish
emigrants to claim Irish citizenship (Lentin, 2007), the state was contesting the
jus soli citizenship rights accorded to children of migrants and consolidated by the
GFA insertion of Article 2 into the Constitution.
It is worth remembering, however, how deeply the Referendum debates
implicated the trialectic of the relationship between the Republic, the north and the
Irish diaspora, as McVeigh demonstrates. For all the rhetoric about pressures on
the Dublin maternity hospitals as discussed below, and concerns about pregnant
migrant (m)others, the main reason for the Referendum was what became known
as ‘the Chen case’. The government used the case of Mrs Chen, a Chinese national
residing in the UK, who chose to have her baby in Northern Ireland, and who won
a European Court recommendation to be allowed to reside in Britain having had an
Irish citizen child (since prior to the GFAAmendment all children born on the island
of Ireland had the right to Irish citizenship regardless of their parentage) (Lentin
and McVeigh, 2006, 54). The Chen case, according to McVeigh (forthcoming),
crystallized issues arising from GFA-related changes to the Irish Constitution
which constitutionalized citizenship and nationality for the first time in a way that
threatened the integrity of EU member state sovereignty and border control.
It bears emphasis, however, that while the Chen case had almost no implications
for the Republic of Ireland (since people who acquired Irish citizenship this way
were living in the north and aspired to relocation elsewhere in the EU), it had huge
implications for British and EU citizenship through British jurisdictional control
of Northern Ireland. Citizenship guaranteed to people born in the north of Ireland
through the GFAmeant that Britain could not control its sovereignty.Yet this reality
provoked a crisis for Irish, not British, nationality and citizenship. Moreover, the
Irish State intervened in ways that profoundly undermined the GFA. Both Irish
citizenship and the GFAwere reconfigured profoundly by a situation (children born
in Northern Ireland to non-EU citizen parents acquiring Irish citizenship) that had
little immediate effect on the Republic of Ireland. In other words, the racialization
of the Republic of Ireland, gendered as it is, can not be understandable only with
reference to internal dynamics in the Republic of Ireland.
Furthermore,myargumenthereisthat‘non-national’women(aneweuphemism
for non-EEA migrants and a strange definition of ‘Irish citizenship’) became
central to the public debates surrounding both the Irish citizen children crisis and
the Citizenship Referendum, and thus signified new gendered racial configurations
of 21st
century Ireland. These debates illustrate not only the orchestrated moral
panics about ‘floods of refugees’, but also the positioning of sexually active
women as a danger to the state and ‘the nation’, a long standing claim made in
relation to sexually active Irish (m)others having children out of wedlock. Indeed,
Irish representations of ‘woman’ and ‘nation’ have been historically intertwined,
with Ireland represented as ‘Dark Rosaleen’and ‘Cathleen Ní Houlihan’, and with
‘Irish’ women seen as securing the ‘common good’ through their maternal roles
and their ‘life within the home’ as articulated in Article 41.1 of the Constitution
(Lentin, 1998; Meaney, 1993; Robinson, 2003). By contrast, in the Citizenship

Referendum debates, ‘non-national’ (m)others were othered and posited by the
state as subverting the nation and the ‘common good’ by (m)othering the next
generations of Irish citizens.
Thus political and media debates regarding migrant parents of Irish children
and the Citizenship Referendum were not only racialized, but also profoundly
gendered. This gendering was evident in media accounts describing migrant
(m)others as ‘being pregnant on arrival’, and arriving in Ireland without booking
a maternity hospital place (O’Doherty, 2003), positioning them as central to the
racial configuration of the Irish state (Lentin, 2003; 2004; 2005). Furthermore,
politicians accusing migrant (m)others of ‘flooding’ Dublin’s maternity hospitals
illustrate what Etienne Balibar (1991, 217–8) describes as ‘crisis racism’, which in
the context of the Citizenship Referendum, assumes gendered meanings, putting
the blame for the Republic of Ireland’s over-burdened and under-staffed maternity
services on migrant (m)others allegedly all arriving ‘at the last moment’ to have
children-citizens in Ireland (even though the actual figures do not support such
accusations).
The racial state initially used the maternity discourse to tighten Irish citizenship
laws, even though the directors of Dublin’s maternity hospitals firmly denied
claims by the Minister for Justice that they had ‘pleaded with him to change the
law on the citizenship issue’ (Reid, 2004). Moreover, the argument later shifted as
the Minister admitted the maternity crisis was a ‘side issue’ and that the real issue
was ‘the integrity of the Irish citizenship law’ (Brennock, 2004). Thus migrant
(m)others were cast as the racial state’s scapegoats, described as intentionally
subverting the integrity of Ireland’s citizenship laws, even though the Minister
admitted that the increasing numbers of ‘non-national’ births were a symptom
rather than a root cause.
According to Foucault, biopower’s control of populations means that the
nation is conceived as a ‘body’ and that state power becomes essential to the
‘life’ of the nation (this explains the utility of genocide in getting rid of ‘lives
unworthy of living’ in order to protect the body of the volk). This argumentation
is substantiated by Nira Yuval-Davis’s argument that as the nation is invested in
women as carrying the burden of its representation, women’s bodies demarcate the
symbolic and material boundaries of national, ethnic and religious collectivities
while also being the sites for contesting these boundaries (Yuval-Davis, 1997,
45–6).
Eithne Luibhéid (2004) argues persuasively that discourses and practices
which target childbearing asylum seeking women have allowed the government of
Ireland to reconstitute the Republic as a sovereign space while also generating new
According to Dervla King (2004), despite government claims, no comprehensive
figures were produced by the Dublin maternity hospitals on the residency status of the
women who presented for delivery. King stresses the heterogeneity of immigrants into
Ireland having babies here, including returning Irish emigrants, EU nationals, labour
migrants, asylum seekers, refugees with status, students and spouses of non-EU nationals.

modes of racialization and racial hierarchies. Not only do migrant (m)others ‘re-
nationalize the nation’, they also reconstruct Irish heterosexuality, precisely when
it has been deconstructed following the decriminalization of homosexuality and
in relation to current debates on partnership rights of non-heterosexual partners
(Lentin and McVeigh, 2006, 108).
It is important to remember, however, that positioning ‘non-national’(m)others
as intentionally mothering the next generation of Irish citizens continues the
insidious positioning of sexually active Irish women as a danger to themselves, to
men, and to ‘the nation’, and as subverting traditional constructions of Irishness.As
Fintan O’Toole (2003a) argues, stigmatizing ‘non-national’ (m)others continues a
200-year-old tradition of policing unwed ‘Irish’ (m)others by incarcerating them
in ‘Magdalen Laundries’ where they were silenced and enslaved by church and
state, powers that ‘had long been the focus of suppressed Irish national identity’,
and whose moral authority in relation to everything to do with morality, sex, and
the family had been tacitly accepted by successive Irish governments’ (O’Toole,
2003b).
Indeed, focusing state attention on female reproduction has a long history
in the Republic of Ireland, which Ailbhe Smyth (1992a), writing about the
constitutional prohibition on abortion in relation to the 1992 ‘X case’, named ‘a
police state’, where women with unwanted pregnancies were (and still are) forced
to seek abortions in another jurisdiction. And, I would add, where ‘non-national’
(m)others, whose bodies demarcate the nation’s boundaries through giving birth
to future Irish generations, are specifically targeted by the racial state when the
boundaries of who is entitled to reside in its territory are at issue.
To sum up, the debates relating to Irish citizen children and the Citizenship
Referendum were both deeply gendered and marked a disavowal of racial
harassment, assuming Irish ‘whiteness’ as unproblematic. Fintan O’Toole (2003b)
made the only media comment on the racism implicit in the January 2003 Supreme
Court ruling. His argument was that while Irish citizenship passes from one
generation to another if the person is ‘white’, even if not residing in Ireland, it
does not apply ‘in those foreign countries that we see as somehow not part of “us”’
(see Lentin, 2007).
Declaring itself ‘raceless’ and anti-racist, the Irish state has enacted a series
of integrationist policies, dubbed ‘interculturalism’ by contrast with French
assimilationism and British multiculturalism. Racial states and their raceless
extensions, Goldberg argues, ‘have maintained firm control over social resources
by setting agendas for a wide range of social concerns’, including ‘the shape
of immigration and so the demographic profile of the nation’ (Goldberg, 2002,
233). This serves to explain the impetus for the Citizenship Referendum.
Having positioned the gendered, racialized migrant subject as the target of state
redefinitions of citizenship and entitlements, I now move to repositioning migrant
women as agents of resistance to state racialization, albeit bearing in mind, as
Goldberg writes, that ‘raceless states set social agendas to which resistance is by
definition a reaction’ (2002, 232).

From ‘Irish Born Children’ to Migrant Women’s Networks: Do Migrant
Women’s Networks Subvert or Reaffirm ‘Intercultural Ireland’?
Despite everything, we walk tall … I think we are transforming Ireland. (Salome
Mbugua, cited in McKay, 2008)
In July 2003, as migrant African (m)others of Irish citizen children started
receiving deportation letters, Salome Mbugua, national director of AkiDwA – the
African Women’s Network – contacted me and together we convened a group of
representatives from Irish and migrant NGOs and founded the Coalition Against
Deportations of Irish Children (CADIC) to campaign against the removal of the
right of residency for migrant parents of Irish citizen children. CADIC campaigned
for nearly two years during which the Minister for Justice consistently refused to
consider any en masse regularization of the residency rights of migrant parents
of Irish citizen children, whom the state categorized as ‘Irish born children’, thus
racially differentiating them from all other children born in Ireland.
The ruling
had made 11,500 migrant parents candidates for deportation. Among the 341
people actually deported there were 20 Irish citizen children who were made to
leave Ireland with their deported parents.
In January 2006, six months after winning the Citizenship Referendum with
a landslide majority of 78.9 per cent, the Minister reversed the ruling according
to which migrant parents of children born in Ireland were not allowed to apply
for residency. AkiDwA’s initiative brought about the subversion of one of the
consequences of the racial state’s re-drawing the boundaries of Irish citizenship –
granting residency rights, albeit temporarily, to migrant parents of citizen children.
Interestingly, however, not unlike the writing out of history the participation of
women in the Irish national struggle until the advent of Irish feminist history,
AkiDwA’s pivotal role in CADIC’s success was initially written out of the
history of this particular struggle, seen as led by white Irish NGOs such as The
Children’s Rights Alliance and the Irish Council of Civil Liberties. Paradoxically,
only when CADIC abandoned its campaigning role and became an advice and
information service to migrant parents of citizen children, has AkiDwA’s role been
acknowledged.
The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform established a special section
to deal with these children and their parents, under the heading IBC – Irish Born Children
Section.
The campaign’s success was, however, circuitous and arguably due to reasons which
had nothing to do with humanitarian considerations but rather with the state’s reluctance to
engage in costly legal proceedings. For a full account see Lentin and McVeigh (2006).
The title of the group was changed from The Coalition against Deportation of
Irish Children to The CADIC Coalition, erasing the origins of the campaign. At present,
CADIC uses state definitions, and is no longer a campaigning group; the CADIC Coalition
concentrates on providing ‘information on the IBC/05 Scheme renewal process for non-

By redressing this omission and re-inserting AkiDwA as a central player in
this campaign (see also Integrating Ireland, 2007a) I want to reinscribe migrant
women as agents of resistance. More generally, I argue that the increasing
influence of the integrationist agenda of Irish ‘interculturalism’ – based on the
Canadian-style ‘politics of recognition’ (Taylor, 1994) – gives networks such
as AkiDwA a role in a new migratory reality, which constructs new ethnicized
spaces, yet at the same time aims to absorb them, as ‘the new Irish’, into the
Irish intercultural consensus. Migrant networks, which are given a voice in the
new integrationist agenda, supported by the appointment in 2007 of a Minister of
State for Integration, comply by inscribing ‘integration’, rather than anti-racism,
as central to their ‘strategic plans’, with the understanding that this is the only way
to be funded and included in the intercultural conservation (Lentin and McVeigh,
2006, 184). This move from anti-racism to integration can also be understood as
a consequence of an under-theorization of racism and anti-racism and signals the
ultimate success of the racial state in disguising and normalizing its techniques
of racialization by promoting the ‘elimination of racism’ and consequently by
declaring the obsolescence of anti-racist discourses and struggles.10
As more women migrate, increasing numbers are establishing their own
gendered migrant networks, transferring skills and resources and transforming
notions of appropriate gender behaviour (De Tona and Lentin, 2006). While
networks are fluid forms of social association (Fuchs, 2001, 252), some migrant
women’s networks become structured organizations which support migrant
women globally. Because women often send home a greater proportion of their
income as remittances (UNFPA, 2006), and because they are often more inclined
to invest in alternative networks, migrant women’s networking is much more
than an attractive metaphor for describing transnational migrant organizations.
Interestingly, Castells argues that global capitalism network society has resulted
in the rise of networked modes of social life which are historically gendered: ‘new
social relationships of production translate into a good fit between the “flexible
woman” (forced to flexibility to cope with her multiple roles) and the network
enterprise’(Castells, 2000, 20). In the network society people need more than in the
past to rely on networks; to find forms of togetherness that are more fluid, capable
of countering the strains of dislocation, distance and uncertainty. ‘Networks’ thus
come to describe new forms of ‘life-sharing’ which bear the markers of gendered
modes of social interaction in as much as they rely on ‘form[s] of sociability and
solidarity tested by millennia of living “underground”’ (Castells, 2000, 20).
Irish national parents of Irish citizen children granted permission to remain in the State
under the Irish Born Children Scheme 2005 (IBC/05)’ (see www.iccsi.ie/resources/cadic.
pdf). Interestingly, CADIC, like most groups campaigning against the Referendum, avoided
using the word ‘racism’ in line with the government’s argument that the re-definition of
citizenship was ‘anti racist’ (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006, 179).
10 I thank Elena Moreo for this comment.

Indeed – probably due to their pre-migration activities with development
organizations in their countries of origin – the term ‘network’ is often retained by
women migrants’ diasporic organizations
AkiDwAwas started by a group of sevenAfrican women in 2001 when Salome
Mbugua, originally from Kenya, felt that racist stereotypes againstAfrican migrant
(m)others needed countering. The early meetings were aimed to heal the pains of
migration:
In the first meeting the seven of us shared our experiences and we realized that
racism was a big issue in this country. And we said we have to do something, we
have to speak out, we have to heal … and then we said if we are experiencing
that, what about the other women. At this stage we said we restrict the group to
only African women and if it works we can open to other women… we had one
thing in common, we were out of our countries, we were in a new land where we
experienced that loneliness and lack of support … (interview, 2005)
The seven African women were particularly concerned about the experiences
of migrant (m)others during the Citizenship Referendum debates:
At that time women were attacked verbally and some time physically. It was a
time when the media portrayed a negative image of migrant women coming to
this country to get children so that they can get their status … I was actually a
victim of that attack myself, I was spat at and told ‘don’t bring another nigger
into this country’; I was pregnant, so I could actually understand the experience
of other women who didn’t have the courage to challenge or say something. So
we said we would do something and when we started AkiDwA, people started
knowing about AkiDwA and we were invited to make presentations. (interview,
2005)
AkiDwA members used their experience as development workers,
businesswomen and social workers in their countries of origin to conduct a
needs analysis, run training courses, go into schools and participate in seminars
and conferences. Within a very short time, through a broad range of activities
despite being insufficiently funded, AkiDwA has become the voice of African
women in the Republic of Ireland. AkiDwA activities include providing support
and information for African women, awareness raising programmes, education
and training, combating domestic violence and providing individual support
to gender-based violence, influencing state and local authority policy, cultural
events. At the same time AkiDwA has been networking with other migrant
women’s networks in Ireland and abroad and with state and NGO players in the
Irish context. Mbugua defines AkiDwA as a ‘network of networks’, linking with
regional and local networks of African women throughout Ireland, mostly defined
by their ethnic origin (e.g. a Nigerian women’s group, a Yoruba women’s group),
with other migrant women’s networks (e.g. The Women’s Group of the Islamic

Cultural Centre of Ireland), and with Irish NGOs and statutory bodies (e.g. the
National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, the Equality
Authority, Women’s Aid). AkiDwA published Herstory, ten stories of women
migrating (AkiDwA, 2006), conducted research into the experiences of African
women in the labour market (AkiDwA, 2007), and into gender-based violence
from an African perspective (AkiDwA, 2008). The intersection of gender and race
underpins the group’s raison d’être for coming together, in that members do not
want to be spoken for by either white women or African men (as expressed by the
AkiDwA mission statement).
New transnational networks of migrant women operating in 21st
century Ireland
signal networking processes beyond and across the home country / new country
trajectory, as new transnational spaces of cross-national boundary alliances, some
based on occupational status (e.g., the network of women domestic workers, or
international nurses’ networks), others based on imagined ethnic origins. Thus,
while AkiDwA constructs ‘Africa’ as its members’ common ethnic origin, across
their national and ethnic heterogeneities, Salome Mbugua’s vision for AkiDwA
reflects a broader agenda beyond putative ethnic connections:
My vision for AkiDwA … as we are working on the networking, we are letting
people know about AkiDwA, and we are saying that it’s mainly about women
speaking out about issues that are affecting them… my vision is to see AkiDwA
having a women’s centre… my hope is also that the issue of migrant women
will be more visible in the Irish system. Because at the moment, it’s still very
invisible … (interview, 2005)
It is worth remembering that while the networking activities of women migrants
in Ireland owe to 21st
century Ireland’s increasing globalization, where new forms
of migration – labour, asylum and other – are shaping the re-racialization of
Irishness in new ways, we also have a ‘racial state’ determined to construct an
integrationist policy and declare its ‘intercultural’ intentions while at the same
time restricting immigration.
The 21st
century Irish ‘interculturalism industry’ (Lentin and McVeigh,
2006: 164) has spawned new spaces for migrant-led networks, which, although
mostly seriously under-funded and under-resourced, through incorporating their
representatives in a variety of state and NGO fora, are being invited to take part in
new conversations on integration and interculturalism. Thus, on the one hand, ‘old’
informal networking processes, like those engaged in by more established groups
of migrants (such as Jewish, Italian or ‘old’ Chinese migrants) have not become
part of the integration and intercultural conversations. On the other hand, newer,
perforce more formal networking processes, like networks of domestic women
migrants (facilitated through the Migrants Rights Centre Ireland), or African
women migrants, are supported by the ‘intercultural industry’through state, church
and NGOs, bringing them into the integration and intercultural conversations
about, inter alia, needs, discrimination, citizenship status and labour rights and

entitlements, but also about gendered concerns such as violence against women,
FGM, sexual discrimination, and the connections between migration, marriage
and family reunification.
Furthermore, the state and its social partners (for a critique of the Irish social
partnership model see Allen, 2000; Lentin and McVeigh, 2006) have apportioned
spaces for diverse migrant groups, constituted in cultural terms, in celebratory
events such as Chinese New Year and Africa Day. The latter, according to the
Minister for Integration Conor Lenihan (2008, 17), ‘gets bigger and better’, with
a ‘significant attendance of Africans living in Ireland’. Yet Africans participating
in the event in 2008, are seen by the Minister as contributing above all to ‘a level-
headed debate about aid and the perils of corruption undermining aid efforts’, and
less to a serious discussion of African lives in contemporary Ireland. AkiDwA’s
participation in the Africa Day celebrations was a seminar titled ‘African Women
Creating and Celebrating Change’, addressed by twoAfrican women ambassadors.
The seminar, hosted by Irish Aid, a Department of Foreign Affairs body, also saw
the launch of AkiDwA’s publication on understanding gender-based violence. The
AkiDwA seminar celebrated the contribution of African women to both Africa and
Ireland; it was not about Irish foreign aid politics as envisaged by the Minister,
pointing to the contested space into which migrant networks have to fit in order to
partake in the integration conversation. The ambiguities of the integration agenda
were highlighted by another contributor to the seminar, a solicitor specializing in
migration issues, who powerfully denounced the legally endorsed mode of state
violence in relation to family reunification issues, pointing to a deliberate state
strategy of keeping migrant families apart.
These ambiguities – recognizing AkiDwA’s as a legitimate interlocutor in the
intercultural dialogue while refusing to extend the inclusion rhetoric to asylum
seekers – was also highlighted in the certificate award ceremony for women
who graduated from AkiDwA’s training courses which ended the proceedings.
The majority of the asylum seeker women graduates were unable to collect
their certificates as, since completing the course, they had been moved by the
immigration authorities to other hostels outside the capital.
Conclusion
A poignant illustration of the contradictions between racelessness and the
increasing Irish emphasis on ethnic diversity, albeit seen as ‘doing things our
way’,11
and hiding a homogenizing impetus which, as Goldberg (2002) suggests is
‘heterogeneity in denial’, is the proposed Immigration, Residence and Protection
11 This was illustrated in a recent conflict between the Garda Siochana, the Irish
police force, and the Sikh community when a Sikh recruit to the Garda reserve force has
been disallowed to wear a turban while on duty. The Minister of Integration has backed up
the police chief by saying that migrant police recruits must ‘do things our way’, pretending

Bill. Among other things, this bill compels ‘non nationals’ (defined as non-EEA
nationals, an interesting re-definition of the category ‘Irish national’) to carry
identity cards at all times; prohibits foreign nationals to change their names, except
where authorized; forbids foreign nationals to marry without first notifying the
Minister for Justice;12
and forbids asylum seekers and holders of non-renewable
residence to marry at all (Integrating Ireland, 2007b).
Some of these prohibitions have clear gender implications, yet gender
considerations are not a significant feature of the proposed legislation or of the
opposition to the proposed bill. AkiDwA, together with several immigrant support
groups and women’s rights groups, has again taken the lead in pointing this out and
has been in the forefront of a submission regarding the proposed bill to the Dàil
Committee on Justice, Equality, Defence and Women’s Rights. The submission
focuses on Ireland meeting international legal obligations for female asylum
seekers and refugees. It notes that gender related abuse and sexual violence may be
traumatic and impact on women’s ability to present their asylum applications, and
proposes that procedural and evidential barriers which may hinder women’s access
to the asylum determination process be removed. The submission recommends
following the UNHCR’s Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women (1991).
Allaying government fears that a large number of applications might result from
such guidelines, the submission notes that Canadian Immigration has provided
for gender-based claims for over a decade yet Canada has not seen a huge rise
in gender based asylum applications (Submission, 2008). This submission has
indeed been the only document to discuss the gender implications of the proposed
bill, and it could definitely become a focal point for a gendered campaign around
issues of immigration, the redefinition of Irishness and (m)otherhood.
I want to conclude by asking whether co opting representatives of migrant
networks in state and municipal integrationist initiatives is a governmental
technology which ultimately serves the de-linking by the state of continuing
immigration restrictions from its declared aim to integrate those migrants already
in Ireland. I want to further ask whether migrant networks succeed in ‘transforming
Ireland’ and subverting the racial state – as AkiDwA’s initiatives in relation to
migrant parents of Irish citizen children and to the new immigration bill illustrate.
Or do these networks, in their struggle to integrate members into Ireland’s ever-
changing ethnoracial migratory reality, in fact re-affirm the racial state’s biopower,
assisting it in claiming its commitment to racelessness, which, as Goldberg (2002)
argues, grows out of the state’s self-promotion in the name of rationality and the
recognition of ethnoracially heterogeneous states. Through their involvement with
actual networking processes, but also through becoming increasingly integrated
that the Garda are a secular police force, while in reality it celebrates a Catholic ethos (for
a discussion see O’Toole, 2007).
12 According to The Irish Times, 21 April 2008, this requirement has been removed.
See article ‘Lenihan to make 200 changes to his own immigration bill’, http://www.ireland.
com/newspaper/frontpage/2008/0421/1208468936238.html.

into coalitions, alliances and organizations in Ireland and beyond, key network
organizers, such as Salome Mbugua, are helping their networks mature, while at
the same time facilitating their cooptation into the new spaces of integration and
diversity as ultimately determined by the racial state.
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Chapter 5
‘The people do what the political class
isn’t able to do’: Antigypsyism, Ethnicity
Denial and the Politics of Racism
without Racism
Robbie McVeigh
When Councillor Gorgio Bettio called for Nazi methods to be used to ‘deal with’
foreignersin December2007inthecontextofrisingantigypsyismin Italy(Popham,
2007), he shattered one of the last shibboleths of post-war European anti-racism.
It was possible to openly admire Nazi policies on race once again and get away
with it.
His remarks presaged an ongoing assault on the Roma population in Italy
as the Italian Government introduced draconian measures to address its ‘Roma
Emergency’. Alongside violence against Roma and Travellers that is all too
depressingly familiar, we also see novel forms of racism emerging in the context of
contemporary antigypsyism across Europe.
These are often examples of ‘racism
without racism’ (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006: 17–18, 169–171). Increasingly states
and governments and politicians eschew any identification with racism precisely
at the point their actions become most racist. Moreover this racism without racism
is presented as being in the interests of the racialized – in Italy anti-Traveller
initiatives are not only not racist but also intended to ‘bring dignity back’ to the
Traveller population.
‘If an immigrant commits a crime against an Italian, ten immigrants should be
punished for it, following the method used in Nazi concentration camps: this is the recipe for
racial harmony advanced by Giorgio Bettio, a town councillor in Treviso, near Venice. Mr
Bettio belongs to the Northern League, the xenophobic north Italian party which advocates
secession from the south, and his suggestion is in the League’s tradition of calculated racist
outrage … Treviso’s Jewish community yesterday proposed joint legal action against Mr
Bettio with the city’s Roma community, the main target of recent racist anger’ (Popham,
2007).
In the British and Irish context, the term ‘Traveller’ includes Roma, Romanichals,
Irish Travellers and Scottish Travellers. Following Hancock, the analysis accepts that the
term ‘Gypsy’ is a racist one – albeit one adopted by some Travellers – and is consequently
only used with scare quotes. Antigypsyism is the amalgam of ideology and practice which
attaches to the racialized ‘Gypsy’as routine targets of racism and genocide (Hancock, 2002:
xvii–xxi).

This situation connects with a specific phenomenon of ethnicity denial. This
concept has reference to many groups but it assumes specific relevance with regard
to racism against Travellers. Ethnicity denial is the implicit or explicit assertion
that a given group is not an ethnic group. Its key consequence is the implication
that those whose ethnicity is being denied cannot by definition experience racism
or genocide. This is emblematic of a wider process of racism without racism –
the growing tendency of governments to repudiate the language and ideology of
racism while reproducing racial inequality and subordination in practice. Almost
no one now wishes to be labeled ‘racist’, yet states and governments continue to
reproduce institutional and constitutional racisms and to visit racist violence of the
most brutal kinds upon their minority ethnic populations. In this context they must
produce different strategies to allow them to be ‘non-racist’. Of course, hypocrisy
remains a key tool but ethnicity denial is becoming an increasingly useful strategy
towards this end.
If the Italian Government is currently in the vanguard of ‘emergency’ mode
antigypsyism in Europe, the Irish government is leading in the more sophisticated,
though no less damaging strategy of ethnicity denial. For the last five years the
Irish State has been actively denying the ethnicity of Irish Travellers (McVeigh,
2007a; 2007b). This policy has had profoundly negative implications for Irish
Travellers in the Republic of Ireland. It has arguably done as much damage to
Travellers in Ireland with a velvet glove of liberal ‘interculturalism’ as the iron
fist of Italian ‘post-fascism’. When we juxtapose these parallel Irish and Italian
situations, we begin to raise specific questions about ethnicity and morality in 21st
century Europe. The Italian model reprises racist violence from the fascist period
while the Irish model offers a more post-modern take on how to destroy an ethnic
group. The Irish model is perhaps the purest form of ethnicity denial and offers a
template for any state wishing to ‘get away with’ racism. It also provides a stark
warning for anyone struggling against racism. In both Italy and Ireland the state
remains adamant that it is not racist and that it is fully committed to equality for
Travellers. Both governments square the circle between theory and practice on
racism with ethnicity denial. This process also raises profound questions about the
nature of ethnicity itself – until some notion of ethnicity has been constructed, it is
difficult to deny that a group possesses it.
Ethnicity – Between the Mandla ‘Conditions’ and Strategic Essentialism
From one perspective ethnicity is an odd thing for any Traveller population to
mobilize or organize around – ideas like empowerment and consciousness-
raising appear more radical, more internationalist, more engaged. Why would any
people struggling against racism choose to organize around the issue of ethnicity?
‘Ethnicity’is not a term that trips off the tongue of most communities of resistance
in Europe or North America. Yet ethnicity continues to matter – especially to
those groups whose ethnicity is denied. Of course ethnicity is also a contested

Antigypsyism, Ethnicity Denial and the Politics of Racism without Racism 85
concept – the ethnicity defined by different academic and legal and human rights
perspectives is often profoundly different.
Different notions of ethnicity form a continuum between objective ‘essential
conditions’ and subjective ‘self-identification’. The Mandla v Lee judgement
remains the definitive attempt to ground the concept in objective standards (Mandla
Another v Lee [1983] IRLR 210, HL). This 1983 British court case addressed
the nature of ethnicity as part of its examination of the scope of discrimination
under the Race Relations Act 1976 (Commission for Racial Equality 2008). The
judgement found that the two ‘essential conditions’ of ethnicity are: (1) a long
shared history, of which the group is conscious as distinguishing it from other
groups, and the memory of which it keeps alive; and (2) a cultural tradition of its
own, including family and social customs and manners, often but not necessarily
associated with religious observance. The additional ‘relevant characteristics’
are: (3) either a common geographical origin, or descent from a small number of
common ancestors; (4) a common language, not necessarily peculiar to the group;
(5) a common literature peculiar to the group; (6) a common religion different
from that of neighbouring groups or from the general community surrounding it;
(7) being a minority or being an oppressed or a dominant group within a larger
community (Commission for Racial Equality, 2008).
The Mandla focus on conditions is thus profoundly different from the self-
identification principle of ICERD and CERD:
Having considered reports from States parties concerning information about the
ways in which individuals are identified as being members of a particular racial
or ethnic groups or groups, is of the opinion that such identification shall, if
no justification exists to the contrary, be based upon self-identification by the
individual concerned. (CERD 1990)
Once the principle of self-identification is established, the argument can be made
that ethnicity is only about ‘strategic essentialism’ (Spivak, 1985). In other words,
in stark contrast with Mandla, this approach suggests that there are no ‘essential
conditions’of ethnicity. From this perspective, there is no definitive ‘cultural stuff’
at all, ethnicity is a political resource to be utilized by the group rather than a
‘thing-in-itself’.
Even at its most subjective, however, the reality is that for strategic
essentialism to work, there has to be something that makes collective identity and
collective action more than arbitrary. With the CERD approach, the need for some
‘justification’is retained allowing some interrogation of the case for ethnicity. This
implies that arbitrary collectivities should not be able to self-identify as ethnic
groups without reason. There is a crucial reason for this. Arguably ethnicity only
Similarly, for Barth ethnicity is essentially dialectical. His focus is on the ethnic
boundary and its maintenance, not the ‘cultural stuff’ the ethnic boundary encloses (Barth,
1969).

became politically important in the context of Mandla v Lee decision because
it offered protection from racism. Few people other than anthropologists and
sociologists would be exercised about whether Travellers – or indeed Rastafarians
or Muslims – constitute an ethnic group if this decision did not have practical
consequences. Crucially ethnicity became the most permissive category in British
race relations legislation. (In the legislation, ‘racial grounds’ ‘means any of the
following grounds, namely colour, race, nationality or ethnic or national origins’).
Following Mandla v Lee, if a group could ‘prove’ its ethnicity against the Mandla
conditions, it had secured a place within the ambit of British state anti-racism.
The group had ipso facto proved that it could – at least in theory – be the subject
of racism. As we know Sikhs and Jews ‘passed’ while Muslims and Rastafarians
‘failed’. ‘Gypsies’ and Irish Travellers both also had to run the Mandla gauntlet.
This of course seems quite obscene in the case of ‘Gypsies’ – they were, after all,
already the survivors of genocide. Nevertheless, ‘Gypsies’in 1988 (CRE v Dutton)
and Irish Travellers in 2000 (O’Leary v Allied Domecq) had to pass the Mandla
test. Arguably the way in which these different Traveller groups had to speak
about ethnicity ‘proves’ a degree of ‘strategic essentialism’ – insofar as the Race
Relations Act 1976 was and is an effective protection from racism, groups had to
pass the Mandla v Lee test. But this is no different from the strategic essentialism
of other ‘uncontested’ ethnic groups – it was British law – not the nature of their
identity – that forced the examination.
From this perspective ethnicity matters not so much because it is the chosen
identity of communities struggling against racism but because it has become the
key to protection from racism within both state and transnational institutions. But
this also gives some sense of how important the practice of ethnicity denial was to
become. Once it became possible to deny protection from racism through denying
ethnicity at either national or international level, states had found a mechanism
to facilitate racism and repudiate accusations of racism. This strategy of ethnicity
denial is, of course, not only a recent phenomenon – it has a long European history.
Moreover, this history is specifically important to Roma and Travellers because it
was associated with genocide.
While Travellers usually find themselves at the cutting edge of ethnicity denial, the
phenomenon is not by any means confined to them. Thus internationally we find claims of
the denial by Denmark of the identity and continued existence of the Inughuit as a separate
ethnic or tribal entity:
The Committee reiterates its previous concern regarding the delay in resolving the
claims of the Inughuit with respect to the Thule Air Base. The Committee notes with
serious concern claims of denials by Denmark of the identity and continued existence of
the Inughuit as a separate ethnic or tribal entity… (CERD, 2002).
Likewise the application of the Race Relations Act and Mandla v Lee decision itself
has also involved forms of ‘ethnicity denial’ in a British context. The Dawkins v Crown
Suppliers case denied protection to Rastafarians and other cases have denied protection to
Muslims (Jones and Gnanapala, 2000: 53–55). Thus Islamophobia – perhaps the definitive
form of racism for the 21st
century – remains a non-racism in the context of the RRA.

Travellers, Ethnicity and Genocide Denial
The notion that Roma and Travellers should be regarded as something other
than an ethnic group has a long pedigree. They have variously been described as
‘criminals’or ‘vagrants’or ‘hereditarily sick’or ‘lives unworthy of life’(Hancock,
2002). Moreover this repudiation of peoplehood has been central to both the
genocide of Roma and Travellers and the denial of that genocide. Genocide denial
either ‘questions’ or actively denies that a genocide has happened. Classically, of
course, it challenges the historical fact that the Nazis systematically exterminated
Jews and Travellers in Europe during the 1940s. After the end of the Second World
War in 1945, Holocaust denial was promulgated by a small number of Nazis and
Nazi sympathisers. Since the 1970s, however, it has become more widespread
(Lipstadt, 1994; Shermer and Grobman, 2002). It has also become increasingly
challenged. Holocaust denial is currently a crime in Austria, Australia, Belgium,
Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland,
Romania, Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland (Guttenplan, 2002; Shermer and
Grobman, 2002: 11).
Travellers have specific place within the broader process of genocide denial
for two reasons. First, antisemitic Holocaust denial usually denies other Nazi
genocides like that of the Gypsies or African Germans alongside its denial of the
Shoah or Jewish-specific dimensions of Nazi ideology and policy. (Holocaust
deniers are unlikely to reject Nazi atrocities against Jews but accept them against
Travellers.) Second, the genocide of Roma and other Travellers is routinely
understated because some researchers and activists on the Shoah emphasize the
‘uniqueness’ of the genocide of the Jews. Novick (1999), for example, argues
that portraying the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish catastrophe has the effect of
diminishing the significance of other genocides. More specifically this can lead
to a denial or at least a downplaying of the importance of the Porrajmos or the
‘Gypsy Holocaust’ (Hancock, 1991).
For example, Lipstadt’s influential review
of growing Holocaust denial contains only one reference to ‘Gypsies’ (Lipstadt,
1994: 174). Thus there is no discussion at all of Travellers or ‘Gypsies’experience
of genocide in Lipstadt’s debunking of Holocaust denial. As Ward Churchill
suggests, ‘Denying the Holocaust is thereby reduced to an exercise in holocaust
denial’ (1997: 31). Certainly Romani activists and intellectuals have made a very
strong case for the specific inclusion of Roma experience (Rose, 1991; Hancock,
2001) and this has been supported by non-Romani scholars (Churchill, 1997;
Finklestein, 2003). Other scholars, however, continue to deny that Travellers
experienced either ‘Holocaust’or genocide. Lewy, for example, suggests that Nazi
crimes, ‘do not constitute genocide within the meaning of the genocide convention’
(Lewy, 2000: 223). Yet, as Hancock point outs, Raphael Lemkin (who coined the
term genocide) had signaled the genocide of the ‘gypsies’ even before the end of
World War II (Hancock, 2001: 123).
Porrajmos is ‘great devouring’ in the Romani language.

The Porrajmos therefore occupies a specific and contested space in the politics
of genocide denial. It is usually actively denied by those who deny the Shoah,
it is sometimes actively denied by some analysts of the Shoah and it is denied
by omission by many others. Nevertheless it appears intellectually and morally
untenable not to acknowledge Travellers as victims and survivors of the Nazism
and therefore as one of the key subjects of the ‘Holocaust’. With stronger reason,
the Nazi – and other Axis – treatment of Roma and Travellers should be regarded
as a genocide.
It follows, therefore, that denying this history is properly regarded
as ‘genocide denial’.
Nazi antigypsyism drew on a much longer tradition of both European and
specifically German antigypsyism (Hancock, 1987; 1991). Hancock details how as
early as 1890 a conference was organized in Germany on the Zigeunergeschmeiss
‘Gypsy scum’ and the military were empowered to regulate movements of
Gypsies; in 1899, the ‘Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance’ was
established; in 1909 a policy conference on ‘The Gypsy Question’ was held, and
the recommendation made that all Gypsies be branded for easy identification;
in 1920 the notion of ‘lives unworthy of life’ appeared suggesting that Gypsies
should be sterilized and eliminated as a people. By 1922 all Gypsies in German
territories were to be photographed and fingerprinted and in 1926 a law was
directed at controlling the ‘Gypsy plague’; this was followed by the creation of
concentration camps to incarcerate ‘Gypsies’ in 1927 and by 1928 all ‘Gypsies’
were placed under permanent police surveillance (Hancock, 1991). All of this
policy and practice developed under the Weimar constitution and before the Nazis
assumed power. In this sense the Nazi movement towards Porrajmos after 1933
evidences continuity with established German antigypsyism as much as a radical
shift towards genocide (Hancock, 1991).
There are a series of specific works on the Porrajmos which detail the specific
Nazi (and other fascist) anti-gypsy projects (Hancock, 2002: 34–51; Kenrick, 1995;
United States Holocaust Museum, 2008). The Nazis sometimes treated Travellers
as a ‘criminal’ anti-social class and sometimes as an inferior racial minority.
‘Gypsies’ were officially defined as non-Aryan by the Nuremberg laws of 1935,
which also first defined Jews in this way; both groups were forbidden to marry
Thus, according to the UN Convention on Prevention of Genocide:
[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole
or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the
group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e)
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
More broadly it is possible to avoid the politics attached to including/excluding
different groups from the term ‘Holocaust’ by using the concept of ‘genocide denial’ in the
same substantive human rights analysis.

Germans.
In 1936 a Central Office for Combatting the Gypsy Nuisance opened in
Munich. This office became the headquarters of a national data bank on Gypsies.
At the same time the Ministry of Interior directives for ‘Combating the Gypsy
Nuisance’ authorized the Berlin police to arrest Travellers and take them to a new,
special ‘Gypsy internment camp’or Zigeunerlager established near a sewage dump
and cemetery in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn. Similar camps appeared in many
other German cities as well as in other countries under Nazi occupation. Gypsies
were also labeled as ‘asocials’ by the 1937 Laws against Crime, regardless of
whether they had been charged with any unlawful acts. In 1938 Himmler defined
the issue as ‘a matter of race,’ discriminating ‘pure Gypsies’ from ‘part Gypsies’
similarly to the way in which Jews were categorized (Hancock, 2002: 40–1).
The legal status of Gypsies and Jews was finally determined by an agreement
removing both groups from the jurisdiction of any German court, ‘transferring all
criminal proceedings concerning [Travellers] to Himmler [because] the courts can
only feebly contribute to the extermination of these people’. The ‘final solution’
to the ‘Gypsy Plague’ was decided by the ‘Auschwitz Decree’ of December 1942
(Hancock,2002:44–5).ThisledtothetransferofTravellerstoAuschwitz/Birkenau.
By the end of the war, 15,000 of the 20,000 Roma and Travellers who had been
in Germany in 1939 had died (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2009).
Hundreds of thousands more were killed in the ‘great devouring’ under Nazism
across Europe. The UNESCO estimate is 500,000 deaths (Novitch, 1984) while
other commentators believe the numbers of Porrajmos dead to be far greater.
After the Porrajmos – The Continuity of Denial
Despite the horror of the WWII genocide of Roma and Travellers, however,
widespread discrimination against Travellers continued in peacetime. Most
outrageously the Federal Republic of Germany decreed that all measures taken
against Roma and Sinti before 1943 were legitimate policies of state and were not
subject to restitution. Incarceration, sterilization, and deportation were defined by
the post-war German state as appropriate policies towards Travellers. Furthermore,
Robert Ritter, the Nazi racial expert on Roma, retained his credentials and returned
to his work in child psychology. The Bavarian police took over Ritter’s registry
of Roma in Germany. It was not until 1982 that German chancellor Helmut Kohl
formally recognized the fact of the Nazi genocide against Roma. (In other words,
the German state formally practiced genocide denial toward the Roma for nearly
forty years.) By 1982, of course, most of the Roma eligible for restitution under
The Nuremberg racial laws of September 15, 1935, (‘Law for the Protection
of German Blood and Honor’ and ‘Reich Citizenship Law’) did not explicitly mention
Gypsies, but in commentaries interpreting these laws, Gypsies were included, along with
Jews and ‘Negroes,’ as ‘racially distinctive’ minorities with ‘alien blood.’

German law had already died (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
2009).
This specific denial of the genocide of European Roma and Travellers
continued long after the war in many other countries as well. For example, in
1994 the Czech Government suggested that there were no living survivors of Lety,
the Second World War Romani death camp in Bohemia. Paul Polansky, however,
located more than one hundred Lety survivors living in the Czech Republic and
documented their experience of the Porrajmos (Polanksy, 1998).
In the midst of
this kind of genocide denial, we find ideas about ‘Gypsy’ criminality routinely
invoked. This is often explicitly connected to the denial of Traveller ethnicity. For
example, in Austria:
A ‘Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsy Nuisance’ was established in
Vienna in 1936. The first deportation order for Burgenland Roma to the Dachau
and Buchenwald concentration camps was issued on 5 June 1938, two months
after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. Thousands of Gypsies were
exterminated in concentration camps between 1938 and 1943. They died through
forced labour, gassing, medical experiments and other forms of murder. Some
20,000 Roma and Sinti were killed in Auschwitz alone. Of the estimated original
7,000 Burgenland Roma only about 10% survived the holocaust. Gypsies had to
continue their fight for survival and the recognition of their rights even after the
war ended. As late as 1948 the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Vienna issued
an edict on the “Gypsy nuisance”, and first reparations were only granted in 1961.
The ethnicity of (autochthonous) Gypsies was finally officially recognized on 24
December 1993. A few days later there was a shooting at the Romano Centro
in Vienna and in 1995 four Roma were killed in a bomb attack in Oberwart,
Burgenland. (Das Internationale Zentrum für Kulturen und Sprachen, 2008)
Thus there was a concerted effort across Europe to deny the Porrajmos and to
suggest somehow that Roma and Travellers were interned and murdered because
they were criminals rather than because they belonged to a specific ethnic group.At
this point, of course, we begin to hear pre-echoes of contemporary racist attitudes
towards Travellers across Europe. By this cruel finesse, the subjects of genocide
become seen as somehow responsible for their treatment – not victims of racism
but rather agents of their own annihilation.
It follows therefore that any contemporary denial of Traveller ethnicity should
appear immediately problematic because it resonates so immediately with a key
feature of the Porrajmos – a defining element in denying the genocide of Travellers
The former concentration camp at Lety – where hundreds of Roma died – is being
used as a pig farm. A campaign was launched to remove the farm and build a memorial
on the site. However a survey showed that less than a quarter of the Czechs polled would
support erecting a memorial – another quarter were indifferent, and two fifths were against
(Johnston, 2008; Roma Rights Centre, 2007).

during the Second World War has been the concomitant denying of their ethnicity.
We might expect contemporary governments, therefore, to be especially sensitive
to anything that might echo previous genocide denial. Given their increasing
commitment to Holocaust memorializing and the criminalization of Holocaust
denial, we might expect them to err on the side of caution when addressing the
situation of those ethnic groups directly affected by this policy. This has not,
however, been the case. Roma and Travellers across Europe – whether they are
citizens, migrants or refugees – find themselves under increasingly brutal racist
attack. Travellers remain ‘a special category’ within European racism:
While the average European says he is very comfortable with having someone
from a different ethnic origin as a neighbour (with an average result of 8.1 on
a scale of one to ten, where ten represents ‘totally comfortable’ and one ‘very
uncomfortable’), the situation is completely different when it comes to having
a Roma neighbour. In the Czech Republic as well as in Italy, almost half of
respondents (47%) would feel uncomfortable (average Czech score 3.7; average
Italian score, 4.0). This is also the case in Ireland (40%; 4.8), Slovakia (38%;
4.5), Bulgaria (36%; 4.8) and Cyprus (34%; 5.6). (Euractiv, 2008)
Much of the reporting assumes that these ‘Roma neighbours’ have arrived from
nowhere. However, the prescient Helsinki Watch publication Destroying Ethnic
Identity: The Persecution of Gypsies in Romania (1991) helps to situate the
increase in the numbers of Roma refugees and migrants across Europe over the
last two decades:
Ethnic hatred and violence directed against Gypsies in Romania has escalated
dramatically since the 1989 revolution. During the last 20 months, rarely a month
went by without another Gypsy village being attacked. Gypsy homes have been
burned, their possessions destroyed, they have been chased out of villages and,
in certain areas, have not been allowed to return to their homes. At least five
Gypsies have been killed during mob violence. Many have been beaten.Yet there
has been an absolute failure by Romanian authorities to investigate and prosecute
those responsible for the violence…. One of the unintended consequences of the
escalation in ethnic violence is the corresponding rise in ethnic consciousness.
In the last 20 months, many Gypsies have begun to believe that their treatment
is directly linked to their ethnicity. (1991: 1–2)
It bears emphasis that this report appeared in 1991. The Roma diaspora from
Eastern and Central Europe which followed the collapse of communism was and
is driven by racist violence and profound racial inequality and the refusal of states
to protect their Roma citizens. When we turn to examine the specific case studies
of Italy and Ireland, it bears emphasis that Roma and Travellers under physical
and ideological attack in those countries carry a menacing European legacy with
them. As Acton so powerfully suggested, ‘when the Rom of Eastern Europe face

Travellers of Western Europe, it is the survivors of slavery facing the survivors
of genocide (1994:49). As these two groups of survivors are brought together by
contemporary migration, they both now face the phenomenon of ethnicity denial.
Ethnicity Denial – The Italian Model
Italy has recently seen a series of anti-Traveller pogroms. In response, the Northern
League leader Umberto Bossi declared: ‘The people do what the political class isn’t
able to do (Milne, 2008). This drew on longstanding institutionalized antigypsism
in Italy (Roma Rights Centre, 2000) and marked a disturbing return to the violent
antigypsyism of European tradition. But this has not simply reflected a rise in
fascism and casual racism among ‘the people’, the Italian state has also mobilized
against Travellers over recent years (Roma Rights Centre, 2000). Antigypsyism
became a dominating theme in the Italian general election of 2008 (Marinaro,
2008). Despite the moral panic about ‘foreigners’, many of those Roma attacked
have Italian citizenship, most others – as citizens of EU counties – should enjoy
freedom of movement within Italy and the rest of the European Union. The
situation is summarized by a submission by the Roma Rights Centre and others
to CERD:
Threats to non-citizen Roma have been severely heightened following the
[Italian] election in April 2008 and the formation on 8 May 2008 of a new
right-wing national government including extremist xenophobic and racist
elements, as well as success in local elections by the extreme right in a number
of municipalities, including the capital Rome. This, combined with years of
anti-Roma propaganda by the Italian media, which has unceasingly portrayed
Roma primarily as vagrants and criminals, has resulted in exceptional levels of
discrimination throughout Italy, as well as other issues implicating emergency
aspects of the Convention. Romani camps have been destroyed and their
inhabitants ejected by the state police and/or other representatives of the public
authority, often without notice and without the option of alternative shelter.
Other camps in various regions throughout Italy have been the target of arson
or vandalism based on racial hatred. The perpetrators of these crimes are rarely
prosecuted or even investigated by local authorities. (Centre on Housing Rights
and Evictions, 2008: 1)
The Italian government did not take this kind of criticism lying down. When the
European Parliament demanded an end to the fingerprinting of Roma and Sinti,
ministers repudiated any accusation of racism. Moreover they insisted that such
measures were in the interest of ‘Gypsies’:
Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni … told a news conference, ‘With this
measure we want to give dignity back to ‘shadow children’ who suffer from

trafficking in human beings and organs.’ Carrying out a census of the Roma was
a way to protect children against being forced into begging, and instead getting
them into school, he said, adding, ‘The Italian government will go all the way’
… European Affairs Minister Andrea Rochi told the news conference, ‘Today’s
resolution by the European Parliament is one of the worst aspects of the EU
institutions. We reject with vigour and indignation the accusations of racism.’
(Eubusiness, 2008)
Crucially the Italian legal system also colluded with this analysis. In the same
week as the Italian government was defending its fingerprinting of Travellers
in parliament, Italy’s highest appeal court opened the door to anti-Traveller
discrimination with a perverse judgment:
The judges overthrew the conviction of six defendants who signed a leaflet
demanding the expulsion of Verona’s Gypsies in 2001. Among those convicted
of racially discriminatory propaganda was Flavio Tosi, an official of the anti-
immigrant Northern League, who has since become Verona’s mayor. He was
quoted by a witness at his trial as having said afterwards: ‘The Gypsies must
be ordered out because, wherever they arrive, there are robberies.’ The court
of cassation decided this did not show Tosi was a racist, but that he had ‘a deep
aversion [to Roma] that was not determined by the Gypsy nature of the people
discriminated against, but by the fact that all the Gypsies were thieves’. His
dislike of them was ‘not therefore based on a notion of superiority or racial
hatred, but on racial prejudice’. (Hooper, 2008)
Similarly the Italian government was keen to emphasise its propriety in its
approach to the racial registration of Travellers: ‘There is no breach of European
rules, or of the charter for childhood rights, no violation of any regulation’(Owen,
2008). This kind of ambiguity encourages some commentators to remain unsure
about what is happening to Travellers in Italy at present. For example, a Council of
Europe series on ‘Roma History’ includes a section on ‘The Nazi Period in Italy’
which insists:
[W]e have to appreciate that even if the fascist persecution of the Roma cannot
definitely be categorised a part of a racist policy on the part of the regime, aimed,
like Hitler’s at actually exterminating the groups in question, the fact remains
that the Roma were always discriminated against, singled out and persecuted as
‘zingari’ (‘Gypsies’). And that definitely means something. (Council of Europe,
2008: 1)
On the one hand this is a well meaning attempt to address the issue of antigypsism
in Italy – it details the attempts of the Italian state from 1926 onwards to expel ‘all
foreign Gypsies’ from the country and ‘cleanse the country of Gypsy caravans’.
But this approach also colludes with the transference of responsibility from

Italians and Italian fascism onto the Nazis. The ‘Nazi period’ in Italy – when the
Nazis effectively controlled the unliberated parts of Italy – lasted only from July
1943 to April 1945. Most antigypsyism in Italy from the 1920s to the end of WWII
was promulgated by Italian fascism not ‘Nazis’. Moreover, political parties in the
current Italian government have a direct link back to that period (through MSI
and the ‘post-fascist’ National Alliance). In this context it is hardly surprising that
they draw on their antigypsy antecedents. In other words, antigypsyism in Italy
is not simply a temporary phenomenon attributable to ‘Nazis’ but a core element
of Italian racism. Even worse, the Council of Europe analysis colludes with the
astonishing notion that Nazi race policy is the key metre for defining whether
something is a racist policy or not. In other words we refer to Nazi race policy
– not the opinions of Travellers or human rights organisations or intellectuals – to
decide what the persecution of Roma and Travellers ‘means’. Here we find pre-
echoes of the process of ongoing ethnicity and racism denial: if the Nazis said
their policy was not racist, ipso facto it cannot have been racist; if contemporary
European governments insist that their policies are not racist, ipso facto they are
not racist. Denial becomes the only defence necessary against charges of racism.
Ethnicity Denial – The Irish Model
When the Irish Government first turned its attention to the ‘Traveller problem’ in
the early 1960s, it immediately couched its response in terms of a ‘final solution’
(McVeigh, 2007b). This ‘logic of genocide’ continued to be applied in most
subsequent interventions on Travellers (McVeigh, 1998). The state also responded
with ethnicity denial in the 1963 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy:
Itinerants (or travellers as they prefer themselves to be called) do not constitute
a single homogeneous group, tribe or community within the nation, although the
settled population are inclined to regard them as such. Neither do they constitute
a separate ethnic group. There is no system of unified control, authority or
government and no individual or group of individuals has any powers or control
over the itinerant members of the community (Government of Ireland, 1963:
37)
Through the 1960s and 70s this assessment was largely supported by NGOs who
colluded with the notion that ‘itinerant settlement’ provided the ‘final solution’
to the ‘Traveller problem’. As the Traveller Support Movement moved away
from crude anti-nomadic and ‘subculture of poverty’ explanations for Traveller
inequality in the 1980s, the notion of Traveller ethnicity became absolutely central
to Traveller politics (Dáil Éireann, 2003; McCann et al., 1994: xiii–xi; O’Connell,
1994). If Traveller experience was to be explained in terms of racism rather than
pathologies of Traveller culture, it needed to establish that Travellers were an
ethnic group. Once again the Mandla v Lee decision was crucial. While it had

no direct legal bearing on the situation in the south of Ireland, it provided the
paradigm for much advocacy by Travellers and non-Travellers alike. It also had
a specific relevance in the north of Ireland. The Race Relations Act did not apply
in the north but, since Northern Ireland was part of the UK, there was obviously a
direct legal overlap that made this issue immediately relevant (McVeigh, 1992). In
other words, ethnicity recognition was perhaps more central to Traveller activism
than it has been to any other anti-racist struggle in Ireland.
This debate appeared to be resolved on both sides of the Irish border as
acceptance of Traveller ethnicity – and an associated acceptance of the reality of
anti-Traveller racism – was gradually mainstreamed across NGO and government
thinking on race and racism. Travellers were specifically named as a protected
‘racial group’ in the Northern Ireland Race Relations Order 1997 (which finally
extended the British Race Relations Act 1976 to the north). Travellers were
protected by anti-racist legislation in the south from the Incitement to Hatred Act
1989 onwards, albeit that ‘membership of the Traveller community’ rather than
ethnicity became the defining ground for their protection. The Irish state had never
formally moved away from the denial of Traveller ethnicity it has established
in the 1960s (ní Shuinéar, 1998). By the late 1990s, however, Irish presidents,
taoisigh and government departments all appeared to have accepted the principle
of Traveller ethnicity – they used the notion of Traveller ethnicity in a completely
unproblematized way (Dáil Éireann, 2003; McVeigh, 2007a: 96–7). It was shocking
therefore when in its report to CERD in 2003, the Irish Government announced
that Travellers were not an ethnic group (Government of Ireland, 2004). This
move was widely seen as being driven by Minister of Justice, Micheal McDowell
and he provided the definitive articulation of the views of the government on
Traveller ethnicity in a ministerial presentation to the Joint Committee on Foreign
Affairs: Sub-Committee on Human Rights (Dáil Éireann, 2004). This reiterated the
Government position as presented to CERD and the Dáil:
Travellers do not appear to fall within the definition of racial discrimination
adopted by the convention in that they do not appear to constitute a distinct
group from the population as a whole in terms of race, colour, descent or national
or ethnic origin. (Dáil Éireann, 2004)
This at least had the virtue of clarity – once ethnicity denial takes place, ‘racial
discrimination’ against the group in question is also impossible in principle. The
denial of ethnicity therefore leads directly to the denial of racism. Under question,
the Minister went on to articulate the context for this decision:
I do not think it is entirely positive and without negative possibilities for the
Government to determine that Travellers are an ethnic minority. It might
reinforce prejudicial attitudes if it were stated that they are ethnically different
from the settled community. It is not an unalloyed advantage to have one’s
differences categorised as ethnic differences. I can see the possibility that

such a categorisation would compound a mental attitude that there is an ethnic
distinction between the settled and Travelling community. Once conceded as
a fact, such a distinction could, in turn, feed into different attitudes at a later
stage…. [I]t is not 100% great news to be defined as ethnically different. It says
in a subtle way that there is an issue of race, which may or may not be a good
thing. (Dáil Éireann, 2004)
At no point, however, was there any recognition of the fact that all contemporary
Traveller representative organizations supported recognition of Traveller ethnicity.
The Minister may have genuinely believed that the recognition of Traveller
ethnicity was not in the interests of Travellers but this is not what Travellers were
telling him. The wider implications of this ethnicity denial were also signaled by
another deputy in the discussion:
Another problem arises…. The question of who will call themselves an ethnic
group in the future has been raised. An equally big problem arises in the history
of European decision making at a political level. Should governments decide
who is an ethnic group or not? If this decision is in the realm of government,
uninformed by scientific opinion, where does that leave self-definition? It is a
complex area but being complex does not make it unreal. (Dáil Éireann, 2004)
The former Minister of Justice lost his seat in the last Irish general election but
the position McDowell articulated for the Irish state and Irish government has
not changed. The Irish state still denies that Travellers are an ethnic group with
all the negative implications that analysis carries with it and despite the analysis
and recommendations of its own equality watchdog (Equality Authority, 2006).
Neither is it any accident that this ethnicity denial presaged a whole series of
negative interventions for Travellers in Ireland over the past five years (McVeigh,
2007a,b). The Irish model has confirmed that the theory of ethnicity denial directly
facilitates the practice of routine, institutionalized and state-led anti-Traveller
racism.
Conclusions
There is no doubting the existence of widespread and profound antigypsyism across
Europe and no hyperbole in signalling a disturbing recrudescence of Nazi theory
and practice on the ‘Gypsy problem’. It is clear that deep-seated antigypsyism
has not gone away. It is also clear that this antigypsyism has been and can be
mobilized in powerful and shocking new forms. This is possible, in part at least,
because Europe has failed to confront its relationship with Travellers. Thus
profound unresolved histories at the heart of Europeaness continue to structure the
contemporary treatment of Roma and Travellers. Ethnicity denial implies racism
denial, racism denial implies ethnicity denial. If Travellers do not constitute an

ethnic group then they cannot experience racism; if what is being done to Travellers
is not racism then their ethnicity must be repudiated. And behind all this hangs the
long shadow of genocide denial. For all the increase in Holocaust ‘remembrance’
and education, the one genocide that no European government seems keen to
remember is the Porrajmos. All this suggests, of course, that governments are less
interested in learning the lessons of Nazi genocide than they are in constructing a
specific politics of remembrance. This allows them to forget and deny one of the
key victim groups of Nazism. Moreover it allows them to ignore all the continuities
with Nazism and Fascism in contemporary European antigypsyism.
This reality also connects very directly with the issue of the interface of ethics
and ethnicity. Ethnicity denial does immense damage to Roma and Travellers.
But it also threatens to harm everyone else as well. Pastor Niemoeller, famously
acknowledged that when the Nazis came for the ‘Gypsies’, ‘we’ did nothing
because ‘we’ were not ‘Gypsies’. In 21st
century Europe, the forces of European
‘post-fascism’have come first for the Roma and Travellers. This new antigypsyism
has implications not only for Roma and Travellers but for everyone else. It remains
a simple if unlearned truth that governments that begin by attacking Travellers
often end up attacking other groups as well. Governments that get away with
denying Traveller ethnicity and denying that Travellers experience racism will no
doubt be emboldened by their achievement. The Irish Government has honed a
powerful defence for any Government planning a racist assault on its people – they
‘do not appear to fall within the definition of racial discrimination’. The Italian
Government has led the way in moblising antigypysyism in a new and effective
political form – yet ‘there is no violation of any regulation’. These interventions
continue to do huge harm to Roma and Travellers and yet avoid the mechanisms
put in place since World War II that supposedly protect groups from racism and
genocide. Put together these tendencies threaten a catastrophic synergy. It is not
hyperbole to suggest that in tandem they present a prescription for genocide. Here
discussion of ethnicity leaves the realm of academia and enters the squalid world
of contemporary European racism. Antigypsyism initiates a vicious triad of denial
– denial of ethnicity, denial of racism, denial of genocide – that has implications
for everyone struggling against racism. We ignore it at our peril.
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Chapter 6
Violent Urban Protest – Identities, Ethics
and Islamism
Max Farrar
Introduction
This chapter traces the violent urban protest (that others call ‘riot’) which have
punctuated British cities since the 1970s. It discusses sociological responses to
‘riot’ and argues for a re-framing of this type of activity, conceptualising it as
‘violent urban protest’. It places the bombing of London on 7th
July 2005 by
Leeds-based British Muslims in the context of this history of urban upheaval, in
particular the protests by British Muslims in four northern cities in 2001. The
chapter utilises the sociology of ‘identity’ and ‘identifications’ as a means of
analysing the emergence of Islamism in the UK. It explains the parallels between
the ethical legitimation of violence by supporters of violent urban protesters and
those who advocate violent jihad.
Violent Urban Protests in the UK since 1975
This chapter argues that to properly understand the so-called Islamist violence, and
plans for violence, in Britain in the 21st
century we must place this in the context
of a long and bitter history of violent urban protest by white, black and brown-
skinned British youths since 1975. The trauma of the destruction in New York
and Washington on 9th
September 2001 (“9/11” as it became known) displaced
attention in the UK to violence and arson in four northern British towns just a few
months before 9/11. The events that most commentators mistakenly summarise
as ‘riots’ began in Oldham, Lancashire, at the end of May, 2001 (Saturday 26th
to
Tuesday 29th
). There was a firebombing of the home of the British Asian Deputy
Mayor, Councillor Riaz Ahmad, on Friday 1st
June. Violence took place in several
parts of Oldham with high populations of residents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi
origin. CouncillorAhmad’s house was extensively damaged and he, and his family,
narrowly escaped with their lives (Oldham Independent Review [OIR], December
2001: p. 71). Just over a month later, over the night of 5th
June, violent protest took
place in the Harehills area of Leeds, in West Yorkshire (Yorkshire Evening Post, 6
June 2001). Harehills is an inner city area which has a high proportion of residents
of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. Just over two weeks after this, violent protests

took place in Burnley, Lancashire (23rd
–25th
June) (Burnley Task Force Summary
Report December, 2001: p. 5). After about another fortnight, urban violence took
place on the afternoon and evening of 7th
July, in Bradford, West Yorkshire, mainly
in the inner city area, where there is a high proportion of people of Pakistani origin
(Yorkshire Evening Post, 9 July 2001).
The press usually defined these events as the worst riots in the UK for
fifteen years. Since there were no significant ‘riots’ in 1986, their marker must
be presumed to be the major events of 1985. Violent urban protest took place in
Liverpool on 30th
August (an attack on a police station), in the Handsworth area of
Birmingham on 9th
–11th
September (two dead, 50 properties gutted by fire), in the
Brixton area of London (a siege of a police station on 28th
September, and protests
on the streets in response to the shooting by police of a black mother, Mrs Cherry
Groce); in the Tottenham area of London when violence erupted in response to
the death of another black mother, Mrs Cynthia Jarret, during a police raid on her
house, culminating in the murder of a police officer, Keith Blakelock (Benyon
and Solomos, 1987: pp 15–21, Hiro, 1992: pp. 97–9, Gilroy, 1987: pp. 236–45).
Reference might also have been made, had the journalists done their research, to
the violent disorder that broke out throughout the UK during 1981. On the night
of 10th
July 1981, so-called riots took place in Moss Side (Manchester, 53 arrests),
throughout London (385 arrests), Birmingham (42 arrests), Wolverhampton (22
arrests), Liverpool (65 arrests), Preston (24 arrests), Hull (27 arrests) and Luton
(one arrest). Over the weekend of 10th
–11th
July 1981 there was further disorder
in Manchester, London and Birmingham, and in another 25 cities and towns,
including Leeds, Bradford and Tunbridge Wells, with a further 1,065 arrests.
The precursor to this conflagration was violent protest in the St Paul’s area of
Bristol (2nd
April 1981, 100 arrests), in Brixton, London (9–13 April, 244 arrests),
Finsbury Park, London (20th
April, 91 arrests), Southall, London (3rd
July, 23
arrests), Toxteth, Liverpool (3rd
–8th
July, 200 arrests) (Farrar 1982: p. 7, Benyon
and Solomos, 1987: pp. 3–15). And the ‘2,000 mainly black citizens, many in
their mid-teens’ who fought the police during and after a raid on the Black and
White Café in St Paul’s, Bristol, on 2nd
April 1980 should also be mentioned in
this context (Hiro, 1992: p. 85, Gilroy, 1987: pp. 237–40), as should the attack on
the Leeds’ police launched by black youth in Chapeltown on 5th
November 1975
(twelve arrests) (Farrar, 2002), and the violent battles between black youth and the
police at the Notting Hill Carnival in London on 30th
August 1976 (both of which
are undocumented, so far as I can see, in the published histories of black Britain).
Table 6.1 summarises these events.
This listing is no substitute for a proper history of violent urban protest in the
UK. But it is important to list them, in order to place the events of 2001 in the
Northern towns in the context of more than twenty years of violent urban protest
involving significant numbers of black (African-Caribbean and Asian) British
youth.

Violent Urban Protest – Identities, Ethics and Islamism 105
Violent Urban Protest – Not ‘Riot’
In popular discourse, these events are described as ‘riots’. Stronger terms are often
used, as in this editorial after the protests in Harehills (Leeds) in 2001:
Barbaric episodes of rioters hurling petrol bombs, bricks, wooden crates, bottles
and stones, produced a depressing tableau depicting a city at odds with itself and
communities uneasy with each other. (Yorkshire Evening Post 6.6.02).
Jack Straw, then the Labour government’s Home Secretary, was quoted as saying
that there is ‘no excuse’ for this ‘criminal behaviour’. This framing device
powerfully positions the people engaging in these protests as mindless barbarians,
for whom prison is the only answer.
Table 6.1 Violent urban protest in the UK since 1975
2001 26th
–29th
May Oldham, Lancashire
5th
June Harehills, Leeds, West Yorkshire
23rd
–25th
June Burnley, Lancashire
7th
July Manningham, Bradford, W. Yorks
1985 30th
August Toxteth, Liverpool
9th
–11th
September Handsworth, Birmingham
28th
September Brixton, London
6th
October Tottenham, London
1981 3rd
July, Southall, London
3rd
–8th
July Toxteth, Liverpool
10th
July 1981 Moss Side, Manchester
″ throughout London
″ Birmingham
″ Wolverhampton
″ Liverpool
″ Preston
″ Hull
″ Luton
10th
–11th
July 28 cities, including Leeds
2nd
April St Paul’s Bristol
9th
–13th
April Brixton, London
20th
April Finsbury Park, London
1980 2nd
April St Paul’s Bristol
1976 30th
August Notting Hill, London
1975 5th
November Chapeltown, Leeds

Sociologists have been coy in their re-framing of these protests. The events in
Chapeltown (1975) and Notting Hill (1976) were not presumed significant enough
to be allocated a chapter in the book titled Racism and Political Action edited
by Robert Miles and Annie Phizaklea and published in 1979. But John Rex’s
chapter ‘Black Militancy and Class Conflict’, made some interesting points. Rex’s
Weberian studies of the Handsworth and Sparkbrook areas of Birmingham in the
1960s and 1970s (Rex and Moore, 1967, Rex and Tomlinson, 1979) had provided
him with the opportunity to observe black community and political organisation at
first hand. Rex concluded ‘that the black political movements are moving towards
a posture of defensive confrontation and that they are quite realistic in doing so’
(Rex, 1979: p. 91). Although he made no reference to the protests it provoked, Rex
described the police operation against pickpockets at the Notting Hill Carnival of
1976 as ‘extraordinary’ (Rex, 1979: p. 90).
Inacollectionofarticlesontheso-calledriotsofthe1980seditedbyBenyonand
Solomos (1987), John Beynon provided a typology of the discourses surrounding
these events. There were three identifiable positions among those who offered
explanations of what they usually called riots:
conservative: these are criminal activities by morally degenerate ‘riffraff’
who have no respect for law and order, possibly stimulated by political
agitators;
liberal: poverty and relative deprivation give rise to aggression and/or
cognitive dissonance; and
radical: alienated, politically marginal people perceive the injustice of their
situation and respond violently (Benyon, 1987).
While there is no specific critique of the concept of ‘riot’ in this book, Benyon
seeks to establish the term ‘urban unrest’ in place of ‘riot’, the term which is
unreflectively used in the conservative and liberal discourses. Rex’s concept of
‘defensive confrontation’, if applied to so-called riots, would fit in the radical
category since he situates his analysis within the systematic exclusion of black
people from the trade union movement, the housing market and the education
system, and he sees their confrontational response as rational and justifiable. In
his chapter in the Benyon and Solomos book Stuart Hall picks up the term ‘urban
unrest’, arguing that ‘the central question concerns the extensive alienation of the
black population in this society, and urban unrest flows from that deep sense of
injustice’ (Hall, 1987).
Another sociological analysis of the 1981 and 1985 so-called riots appears in
the final chapter of Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987).
Gilroy makes an interesting attempt to employ Tourraine’s, Castells’and Melucci’s
1980’s social movements theories to what he initially terms the ‘disorderly protest’
(1987: p. 224) exemplified in the events of 1981 and 1985. Later he uses the terms
‘disruptive protest’ (p. 236) and ‘riotous protests’ (p. 244), but his shorthand
throughout the chapter is riot, without scare quotes or other qualifiers. Gilroy
1.
2.
3.

is perfectly clear, however, that these events are to be understood as rational,
organised, and as ‘conveying antagonism to the world as it is’, embodying ‘a view
of how participants would like it to be’. They are not reducible to ‘“marginality”
and “deviance”, terms which imply that they are nothing more than crude reactions
to crisis, lacking cognitive, affective and normative dimensions’ (1987: p. 237).
My initial characterisation of the so-called riots in Chapeltown and Harehills
in Leeds in 1975 and in 1981 would be also be placed in the ‘radical’ category,
since I sought to theorise those events as ‘uprisings’ by black and, in 1981, white
working class youth who were responding politically to racism, unemployment
and police brutality (Farrar, 1982). Linton Kwesi Johnson, then in the Race
Today Alliance, published a poem about ‘insurrection’ of black youth (Johnson,
1984), and even some journalists adopted ‘uprising’ as their descriptor (Kettle and
Hodges, 1982). In his important study of policing the black populations of Notting
Hill, in London, Michael Keith (1993) uses scare quotes for ‘riots’ and seems to
prefer the term ‘uprisings’. By the end of the 1990s, however, my own ‘uprising’
analysis seemed inadequate. The growth of ethnic segmentation and apolitical
professionalisation and individualism; the collapse of radical, local organisations;
the growth of hard drug sales and use, and other criminal activity among a small
but significant section of the youth would not have progressed so swiftly had the
radical politics I had detected in the 1975 and 1981 violent protests been real,
and firmly embedded in local society (Farrar, 2002). Thus I now reject the term
‘uprising’as a replacement for ‘riot’, since it imputes conscious political meanings
to these events which are not usually held by the majority of the participants.
But the other proposed alternatives – ‘defensive confrontation’, ‘unrest’, ‘riotous
protest’, ‘the violence of hopelessness’ – have significant drawbacks. Rex’s use
of ‘defensive’ is misleading in relation to these events, since participants have
engaged in a violent attack on the police and property; Benyon and Hall’s ‘unrest’
fails to capture the intense hostility that underlies these attacks; and Gilroy’s use
of ‘riotous’ fails to undermine the effort to establish as hegemonic the theory that
these events are mere acts of criminality. But even these formulations disappeared
in a response to ‘the fires that burned across Lancashire and Yorkshire through the
summer of 2001’byArun Kundnani of the Institute of Relations, a Marxist research
group and library. Contrasting these events with the ‘uprisings’ and ‘organised
community self-defence’ of 1981 and 1985’, Kundnani (2001) described them as
‘the violence of hopelessness ... the violence of the violated’.
The phrase I now seek to substitute for ‘riot’ is ‘violent urban protest’. This
picks up Benyon’s point that these are specifically urban phenomenon, and suggests
we should examine the spaces in which they occur – spaces which are socially
produced, as Lefebvre (1991) has argued, within the political and economic
processes of the modern city. It also picks up Gilroy’s point that these events
are best understood as forms of protest, and that, therefore, social movement
theory will be relevant to their analysis. What I have termed the ‘proto-politics’ of
these events, therefore, require examination (Farrar, 2002). Re-phrased as ‘urban
protest’, one set of the ethical implications can be clarified. In modern democratic

society, protest is ethically legitimate, and within radical democratic discourse it
is positively valued, by references as varied as the Levellers of the English civil
war, the Suffragettes in early feminism, the civil rights movement in the USA or
the Miners’ Strike in Britain in 1983–4. But I want to stress the use of ‘violent’ as
an important constituent of the term I propose. It is the forceful and dramatic use
of violence which distinguishes these phenomena from the other types of political
action we observe and engage with in the inner city. It is the move away from
the seminar and onto the street as the form of negotiation with the police, and
the decision to destroy the urban fabric rather than to debate the best methods of
regeneration that draws a fierce ideological line between the participants and the
rest of the inner-city population. The ethical implications of the public adoption of
violence as a proto-political tactic will be explored later in this chapter; at this point
I simply note that even the radical democratic tradition normally eschews violence
as unethical, either by explicit adoption of the Gandhian ethic of non-violence or
by the argument that worthy ends cannot be achieved by unworthy means. It is
because of ethical qualms like these, I suggest, that even radical commentators
such as those cited above have deployed concepts like ‘defensive confrontation’
or ‘riotous protest’, backing off from the violence, destruction, and sometimes
death (e.g. PC Blakelock’s murder in the Broadwater Farm violent urban protests
in Tottenham, London, on 6th October 1985) that characterises ‘riot’.
The tumult of the 2001 protests in northern English towns was brushed aside
when political Islamists attacked New York and Washington in September of
that year. When supporters of Al Qu’eda who grew up in my own city of Leeds
bombed London in July 2005 public discourse turned to a ferocious attack on the
adoption of a multiculturalist ideology in Britain since the 1960s. Elsewhere I
have denounced this retreat from multiculturalism (Farrar, 2008), but here I want
to explore one of the results: the failure to examine the sociological continuities
between the long history of violent urban protest in the UK’s multi-ethnic inner
city areas.
Identities and Identifications in the British Inner City
The assumptions commonly held by political radicals include: ‘the people’ will
always ‘rise up’ in protest against the State’s mis-management of society; these
‘uprisings’ will regularly undermine the smooth running of the State, thereby
inciting repression; and that all these disturbances have similar causes, namely the
oppression felt by those who believe that their well-being is unfairly circumscribed
by the State. Radicals’ ethical objections to capitalism and its State apparatus,
results in us tending to legitimise these protests, despite holding some anxieties
about their violent aspects. Conservatives and liberals, as we have seen, reject
this effort at legitimation because they regard both capitalism and its agencies of
management as ethically well-founded, despite its practical imperfections (which
they believe to be corrected over time by the normal democratic process).

While these ethical arguments are important for the process of forging good
governance in the city, they fail to address the sociological processes of shifting
identities in the multi-ethnic inner cities of the UK and the ready availability of
an identification with violence which may be mobilised not only in the hum-drum
routines of everyday life, but, much less often but equally easily legitimated, in
violent urban protest. I follow Richard Jenkins’approach to the concept of identity,
which he derives from George Hebert Mead’s pioneering work on ‘the self’. Thus,
identity is a process of negotiating relationships of similarity and difference:
the systematic establishment and signification, between individuals, between
collectivities, and between individuals and collectivities, of relationships of
similarity and difference . . . Social identity is no more essential than meaning;
it too is the product of agreement and disagreement, it too is negotiable . . .
[i]dentity can in fact only be understood as process. As ‘being’ or ‘becoming’.
(Jenkins, 1996: pp. 4–5).
But, as Stuart Hall points out, this process can and does congeal and at certain
points in time people will both adopt, and have imposed upon them, relatively
stable formations of self which they call identities. But to further stress the
processual, even dialectical nature of identity, and to insist on the instability of
identities, he argues for the concept of ‘identification’. Hall states:
I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on
the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak
to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and
on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct
us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’ . . . . [This] suturing has to be thought of
as an articulation, rather than as a one-sided process, and that in turn places
identification, if not identities, firmly on the theoretical agenda. (Hall, 1996: pp.
5–6).
Hall’s work inspired the now commonplace assertion that the identities of the
‘new black British subjects’ of the last decades of the 20th
Century were complex,
changing, hybrid and, even ‘diasporic’ (Gilroy, 1997). What is hardly researched,
however, is the variety of identity positions which have been forged over the past
30 or 40 years by the populations African, Caribbean and Asian in the UK. The
goal of white racist and racialising processes to interpellate these black and brown-
skinned subjects as, variously: athletic, musical, excitable, criminal, hard-working,
lazy, entrepreneurial, inscrutable, intelligent, stupid, split and, overall, inferior to
whites has been exposed and effectively critiqued. But, apart from the work of
Claire Alexander (1996, 2000) and Miri Song (2003) little of substance has been
written which captures the results of the suturing processes through which black
and brown citizens produce their own identities. In my study of Chapeltown, the
area of black and Asian settlement in Leeds, I charted over a period of about 30

years from 1970 the rise and fall of various types of political identifications (radical,
proto-political and reformist), the construction of ethnically particular identities
(often but not always with specific religious elements) and of individualist and
professional identities (Farrar, 2002). All of these positions, I would argue, are
observable throughout the UK and shift in their form and their social significance
as social conditions change.
For the purpose of this chapter, the proto-political and ethnically/religious
particular positions are the most relevant. Proto-political identifications were
manifested within all the violent urban protests listed in the Table at the start of
this chapter, and were often flavoured by particular ethnic identifications. In the
protests of 1975 and 1976 the protagonists were overwhelmingly young men
of African-Caribbean origin (mainly second generation). (So ‘black’ were the
Notting Hill events that the white punk-rock band The Clash released a song in
1977 called ‘White Riot’, whose refrain was “I wanna riot, a riot of my own”.) In
the protests during 1981 thousands of white youths, and some Asians, took part
alongside the black youths. The 1985 protesters also included whites but were
predominantly young people of African-Caribbean descent. In 2001 the protesters
in Bradford and Leeds were almost exclusively young men of South Asian origin
and largely Muslim by religion, but in Oldham and Burnley white youths fought
against the South Asian, largely Muslim protesters. The concept ‘identification’
is particularly appropriate here because it captures the transience of the political
engagement undertaken by these young men. Just as the term ‘proto-political’
hints at the inconclusive and hardly thought-out nature of the political element in
these protests, fully political identities are not being forged during these activities.
In 1975, 1981 and 1985 there was a temporary identification with protest against
racism and injustice, repeated by the mainly brown-skinned protesters in 2001;
in 2001 the white racists were, similarly, temporarily identifying with a protest
against unfairness. The common characteristic for all these protesters – including
the racist whites who fought in Oldham and Burnley – is their sense of exclusion
and alienation from the dominant social order. Among the black and brown
skinned protesters their belief that their exclusion is partly, or wholly, based on
their ethnicity adds a particular vigour to their cause since they concur with the
dominant societal view that racism is ethically invalid. (Significantly, the British
National Party now claims that working class whites are unfairly discriminated
against in areas black and brown citizens reside, a view which has been given some
credibility by mainstream politicians, pundits and even by some sociologists (e.g.
Dench, Gavron andYoung, 2004), and this no doubt legitimates their own protests.)
While Rastafarianism provided some authentication to the violent urban protests
in 1975 and 1976, the religious dimension of ethnicity was not prominent in these
events, nor did Islam find any public reference points in the 2001 protests. But the
major contrast between the violent protests of the earlier period and those of 2001
is the absence in the latter of any effort at political legitimation for the protests.
Public campaigns led by white, black and Asian radicals, usually organised around
the slogan ‘self-defence is no offence’, were set up in all the main cities after the

events of 1975, 1976, 1981 and 1985. These campaigns explained that these ‘riots’
were the result of years of racial, often physical, harassment by whites, especially
white policemen, of black and brown people, and argued that the response –
violent urban protest – was legitimate. They had varying degrees of success in
terms of mobilising support and securing acquittals – only the campaign in 1982
for the Bradford 12 was a complete success – but the point is that constituencies
existed which legitimised the protests. The proliferation of branches of the Asian
Youth Movement throughout British cities during the late 1970s and early 1980s
provided a visible pole of attraction for young British Asians who were opposed to
racism and injustice. AYM members emphasised their Asian identities, rather than
their particular religious backgrounds, and, while they were not explicitly secular,
their support for socialism, internationalism and women’s emancipation indicated
the priority of their political-ethnic identities (Tandana, 2009).
After the 2001 protests, no campaigns were established, and large numbers of
young British Asians went to jail for long periods without any community support.
Thus, in the campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s that arose from the violent urban
protests attempts were being made to forge stronger political identifications among
the protesters by activists (such as myself) who had already formed fairly stable
radical, political identities. To the extent that people joined our demonstrations and
court-room pickets, read our leaflets and newspapers and attended our meetings,
these identifications did stabilise politically. But the decline of community politics
during the 1990s, and their absence in the 2000s – most strongly indicated by
the absence of any campaigning after the 2001 protests, indicates that these
identifications had shallow roots. Thus, it remained possible to construct what we
might call proto-political identifications from the 1970s right through to the 2000s
(as displayed in the violent urban protests of 2001), but more fully formed secular
political identities were hardly visible in the multi-cultural inner cities of Britain
from the 1990s onwards.
The absence of political identities as a social resource is crucial to the
formation of ethnically, and religiously based identities in more recent years.
Despite the critique of multiculturalism that has developed over the past ten
years or so, I would argue that it remains hegemonic in the UK, evidenced by
the fact that only the small minority on the far right of politics argues for ethnic
segregation or expulsion, while all the other political parties commit themselves
to equal opportunity and the outlawing of racial discrimination. For many white,
black and brown-skinned Britons, alongside hegemonic multiculturalism has
come the process outlined by Hall, Gilroy and others of hybridised and multi-
faceted identities in which the salience of ethnic origin is reduced and plural
identifications increase. The emergence of white Rastafarians, the pirating of south
Asian clothing by women of all ethnicities, the dominance of music of black origin
within popular culture, the adoption of black and Caribbean idiomatic expression
by young British men of all colours are just some of the manifestations of the
multiplication and cross-fertilisation of ethnic identifications in the 21st
century. It

is significant, however, that these mobile identifications have cultural, rather than
secular, political manifestations.
Even more significant is the countervailing process that has also been at work
among some minority populations. My study of Chapeltown over the last three
decades of the 20th
century argued that, while in the 1970s there was evidence of
social solidarity across ethnic boundaries, a combination of neo-colonial political
manipulation by the city council and internal changes within ethnic groups
resulted in a rise in what Paul Gilroy called ‘ethnic absolutism’ – a ‘reductive,
essentialist understanding of ethnic and national difference’ (Gilroy, 1993: p. 65).
This process crystallised for Muslims in the UK (and abroad) after the publication
in 1989 of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Muslims were enraged at
the novel’s depiction of the Prophet Muhammad and contemporary Muslims and
demonstrations erupted all over Britain. As Tariq Modood puts it, within ‘a very
short space of time, Muslim became a key political identity’ in the UK (2006:
42). As al-Qu’eda’s military campaign developed during the 1990s, culminating
in the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the bombing of Madrid in
2004 and London in 2005, Islamophobia grew throughout the West and many
Muslims who formerly wore their religious identities lightly became more devout.
Much less commented upon has been the consolidation of religious identities in
Britain among Sikhs, Hindus, Jews and Christians in recent years. Among the
Christians, the growth of black-led churches makes visible the ethnic dimension of
this development, but only because the ethnicity of white evangelism is rendered
invisible by the popular supposition that to be white is to be ethnically neutral.
Islamism and Political Violence
For this chapter, the most relevant type of absolutism is that version of Islam
which adopts an explicitly political agenda and espouses violence as its strategy
for achieving power. Muslims are of every ethnicity, so this is a type of religious
absolutism, whose ‘essence’ is a particular set of beliefs and practices. In Tariq
Ramadan’s typology of Islamic thought, this tendency is the ‘political literalist
Salafis’. They make an unmediated reading of the Qu’ran and the Sunna and their
‘discourseistrenchant,politicized,radical...theycallforjihadandoppositiontothe
West (always considered as dar al-harb, the realm of war) by all means’(Ramadan,
2004: p. 27). Ramadan includes Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajirun in this grouping;
both are committed to violent jihad, with Al-Muhajirun openly supporting Al-
Qu’eda, while Hizb ut-Tahrir regards Al Qu’eda’s warfare as premature, arguing
that it should only take place when there is a properly formed Islamic army. The
genealogy of the discourse of violent jihad goes back to the Fourteenth century
(Christian calendar) when Ibn Taymiyya responded to the Mongol and Christian
invasions of Muslim lands by arguing that resistance was obligatory (Ahmed, 2007:
p. 35 and Wikipedia entry for Ibn Tamiyya). Osama bin Laden cites Taymiyya
in his justification for killing innocents and children (Lawrence, 2005: p. 118).

Sayyid Qutb (executed by the Egyptian government in 1966) was a key thinker in
the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, one component of the political literalist
Salafi tendency. He argued that there was a logical progression for jihad, starting
with a peaceful proclamation of the virtues of Islam, followed by ‘limited warfare,
to avenge the wrongs done to the Muslims, to the final stage of unlimited warfare’
(Cook, 2005: p. 104). ‘Qutb is the intellectual who shaped the thinking of Usama
bin Laden and most of today’s Islamist groups’ (Ruthven, 2004: p. 91). In the late
1940s, the Brotherhood ‘unleashed a carefully planned campaign of terror, which
involved the assassination of nationalist and left-wing leaders, the bombing of
theatres and, after the birth of Israel, the repeated dynamiting of Jewish business
(Ali, 2002: p. 98). While bin Ladin, the figurehead for the al Qu’eda network,
has done nothing to develop the theory of jihad, his movement is the inheritor
a series of interventions by Muslim scholars (Qutb being the best known) who
have broken with the majority interpretation of jihad as either a personal striving
for religious truth or a collective defence by the Muslims against external attack
(Cook, 2005). Arriving in Saudi Arabia after their expulsion from Egypt, the
Muslim Brotherhood expanded its ideology to embrace Saudi Wahhabism. ‘The
Saudis offered all the money, security and support the Brothers needed to fight
back against secularist nationalism in their home countries’ (which included Syria
and Iraq). Since its foundation in 1962 the Saudi-based Muslim World League has
spread ‘a new kind of pan-Islamism: one based on the austere, uncompromising
and extremist ideology of Islamic fundamentalism’ (Aslan, 2005: p. 246). While
the extreme religious orthodoxy of this movement, including its violent split-offs,
captures most public attention in Britain today, it is important to recognise that the
Muslim Brothers, in their original formation under Hassan al-Banna (born 1906,
assassinated in 1949) ‘began as little more than an informal grassroots organisation
dedicated to changing the lives of people through social welfare [and then] was
formalised into the world’s first Islamic socialist movement’(Aslan, 2006: p. 236).
As noted above, its socialist leanings were short-lived, but compassion and charity
for the poor, opposition to nationalism and colonialism are progressive features
that remain in the contemporary Islamist movement, along with its reactionary
homophobia, opposition to sexual freedom and advocacy of violence.
This is the confused and contradictory belief system which has found some roots
among alienated British youth (black and white, as well as brown) in recent years,
and some support among privileged sectors of the British Muslim population. The
soil for the growth of the Islamicist identification or identity has been fertilised by
British andAmerican foreign policy on Israel,Afghanistan and Iraq, the infusion of
resources from SaudiArabia to support recruitment in prisons and neighbourhoods
of Muslim settlement, the rise of Islamophobia and educational underachievement
among young males of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. If, sociologically, we
see identifications as multiple and identities as forming and re-forming as social
situations change, the interesting point in the formation of the Islamicist position
is that it has grown at a time when other possible identifications and identities
seem to have been in retreat. While for some, this is an identification with a more

devout and orthodox form of Islam, performed alongside other identifications, for
the political activists, Islamism becomes a more stable identity which overwhelms
other identifications. Both gain ground as competing positions lose salience. As
noted, the secular, political position is now hardly available in the inner cities, and
in the universities it is represented by the tiny Marxist and anarchist organisations.
While the Respect Party, strongly influenced by the Socialist Workers Party,
briefly mobilised considerable support among British Muslims opposed to
the West’s invasion of Iraq, its split in 2008 indicated that an alliance between
revolutionary socialism and Islam could not last. The cross-cultural identifications
manifested in fashion and music remain available and popular among significant
sections of the British Muslim population (of all ages and both genders) but
these are heavily critiqued by the Islamicists (following Qutb’s denunciation of
the amoral, decadent, sexualised, hedonistic culture he witnessed in the USA in
the late 1940s). The wearing, or not, of the hijab by British Muslim women is
the most visible sign of the split in Muslim communities over the legitimacy of
cross-cultural identification. (Halima Begum (2008) effectively outlines these
competing positions among British Muslim women in London.) Identification
with the peaceful, religiously tolerant and relatively non-political type of Islam
remains the position of the overwhelmingly majority of Muslims in the UK. But as
Ed Husain’s autobiography demonstrates, it is under severe pressure from groups
such as Hizb ut-Tahrir (Husain, 2007), while the biography of one of the 9/11
bombers indicates parallel processes at work in France (Moussaoui, 2003). It is
this religiously devout and politically active identity which is increasingly evident
in Britain today. The dividing line between identification with mainstream Islam
and Islamism is over the role of activist politics in general, and the use of violence
in particular.
In tracing the continuity between the violent extremism of 21st
century British
Islamists and the violent urban protest of the latter part of the 20th
century we
need to see origins of the valorisation of political violence in Western political
discourse. It has a long and dramatic history with specific claims that violence
is ethical. The Russian nihilists, the anarchists who practised ‘propaganda of
the deed’, the revolutionary violence of the Nazis and Communists, the military
actions of the anti-colonial movements, and the armed factions of the revolutionary
movements in Britain, Germany, Greece, Italy and the USA all justified the death
and destruction they caused by the claim that the oppression of the people was so
extreme, and conventional political methods so impotent, that violence was an
ethically legitimate means through which a new society would be created. Perhaps
the best known source for the late 20th
century apologia for violence is Malcolm
X’s slogan, often reproduced as a caption under a photograph of him holding a gun:
‘By any means necessary’. At that time Malcolm was a leader of Organisation of
African American Unity, having left the Nation of Islam, whose version of Islam
he had come to see as invalid (Haley, 1968). As he put it, stressing the discourse of
legitimate rights, but embracing violence:

When the Black man starts reaching out for what America says are his rights,
the Black man feels that he is within his rights – when he becomes the victim
of brutality by those who are depriving him of his rights – to do whatever is
necessary to protect himself. [He goes on to give examples of demonstrations
where black people used:] a hail of rocks, a hail of bricks [and] . . . Molotov
cocktails. It will be hand grenades tomorrow and whatever else is available the
day after . . . When I say fight for independence right here, I don’t mean any non-
violent fight, or turn-the-other-cheek fight. Those days are gone . . . Revolutions
are based on bloodshed. (Malcolm X, 1964: pp. 11–12)
This mode of thought was already established in Europe and its prime example
was Jean-Paul Sartre’s reading of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Fanon,
the Martiniquan intellectual whose shock at being hailed as ‘a Negro’ by a young
white girl in France provides the core of his Black Skins, White Masks, argued that
‘The colonised man finds his freedom in and through violence’ (Fanon, [1961]
1967: p. 68). In his preface to this book, Sartre elaborates: Fanon ‘shows clearly
that this irrepressible violence is neither sound nor fury, nor the resurrection of
savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself .
. . no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy
them’ (Sartre, [1961] 1967: p. 18). Sartre goes on: ‘We [whites] have sown the
wind; he [the black] is our whirlwind. The child of violence, at every moment he
draws from it his own humanity. We were men at his expense, he makes himself
a man at ours: a different man; of higher quality’ (p. 20). This is an argument not
simply for the legitimacy of violence as a political strategy, but makes the further
claim that violence has an additional ethical attribute: it makes a ‘higher quality’
man. Coming from an internationally renowned philosopher who was also fully
identified with French (and therefore European) revolutionary movement of the
1960s and 1970s, this view – echoed by Malcolm X – was enormously influential
among those of us who later offered ideological and practical support for the urban
protesters who employed violent tactics during the upheavals of the 1970s and
1980s.
Conclusion
This chapter has shown that political violence has punctuated British cities
throughout the past 30 years and that there are important parallels between the
current levels of extreme violence perpetrated by militant Islamists and the violent
urban protests witnessed in Britain up to 2001. Specifically, it argued that the
ethics of violence – that it justified by the extreme oppression and denial of rights
among the mass of people, and that other methods of protest have failed – are
similar among Islamists and other types of revolutionaries. It is important to note,
however, that the ethic of violence that has been deduced from some of the writings

of Western revolutionaries is something of a mis-reading. Sartre, for instance, in
his valorization of violence, failed to emphasise Fanon’s humanism.
Fanon noted that in the ‘break-up of the old strata of culture, a shattering which
becomes increasingly fundamental’is the trigger for ‘the rebirth of the imagination’
and the reorganisation of culture. He went on:
[T]his struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between
men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people’s culture.
After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the
disappearance of the colonised man. This new humanity cannot do otherwise
than define a new humanism both for itself and for others (Fanon [1961] 1967:
p. 198)
Malcolm X, towards the end of the speech quoted above, argued that the USA
‘is the only country in history in a position to bring about a revolution without
violence and bloodshed . . . [if] the Black man [is] given full use of the ballot in
every one of the fifty states’ (Malcolm X, 1964: p. 20). He did not believe that
America was ‘morally equipped’ to do this, and the election of Barack Obama
in 2008 was not a revolution, but it does appear that the electoral system was
made to work non-racially in that year. The emergence in Turkey in 2002 of a
Muslim government inspired by the Qu’ran, the Sunna and modernism (i.e. it is
committed to science, democracy and human rights) demonstrates that there is a
real alternative to the Wahhabism of SaudiArabia and the Islamic authoritarianism
of Egypt and Syria. As Mosques and Madrassas in Britain become increasingly
assertive in their rejection of the violent political Islamists, that tendency will
decline. Violent urban protest, however, will not disappear until racism, alienation
and oppression are eliminated.
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Sartre, Jean-Paul ([1961] 1967) ‘Preface’ to Fanon, Frantz ([1961] 1967) The
Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Song, Miri (2003) Choosing Ethnic Identity, Cambridge, Polity
Tandana (2009) Archiving the struggle for social and political rights http://www.
tandana.org/index.php?option=com_frontpageItemid=1.

Chapter 7
Beliefs, Boundaries and Belonging:
African Pentecostals in Ireland
Abel Ugba
Introduction
Africans are among the immigrant groups that have arrived in Ireland in increased
numbers since the mid-1990s. According to the 2006 Census, 35,326 nationals of
African countries were living in Ireland. In 2002 there were only 20,981 (CSO
2006). The increased presence of African immigrants in Ireland from the end of
the 20th
Century must be viewed against the backdrop of post-Second World War
increase in global migrations (Ugba, 2007a; Faist, 2000; Martin, 2001; Zlotnik,
2001). Among other factors Ireland has attracted immigrants from the African
continent because of the historical, linguistic and political connections between
Africa and Ireland. Although the Irish state did not participate in the scramble for
and the colonial domination of theAfrican continent, the Irish have interacted with
Africans for many centuries through commerce, missionary activities, anti-slave
trade movements and the arrival of Irish people to Africa as participants in the
British colonial enterprise (Rolston and Shannon, 2002; Ugba, 2003).
Another reason for the increased migrations out of Africa in recent times is the
massive socio-political and economic upheaval in many parts of the continent since
the 1980s (Kabbaj, 2003; UNHCR, 1997). These upheavals and the uncertainties
that accompanied them have provoked more voluntary and involuntary migrations
within and out of the African continent in recent decades than at any other time,
except during the slave trade. My research shows that immigrants from African
countries where English is the official language or is spoken widely have migrated
to Ireland because they believe it is less difficult for them to realise their ambitions
or fulfil their dreams there than in other non-English speaking European countries.
TheotherfactorthathascontributedtotheincreasedpresenceofAfricanimmigrants
is Ireland’s geographical proximity to the United Kingdom, where there has been
a larger and more settled population of Africans. Many recent African immigrants
in Ireland had either lived in the United Kingdom or passed through it on their
way to Ireland. Others have friends there, or consume ‘ethnic’ products, including
newspapers and magazines, produced by Africans there. A critical analysis of the
increased presence of Africans in Ireland must also focus on changes in Ireland’s
immigration policies that encouraged inflows of migrant workers to meet the
needs of a ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy. While some recent African immigrants came

to Ireland as workers, students and spouses of EU nationals, the majority came as
asylum seekers (Ugba, 2004).
The greater and more diversified inflows of African immigrants have resulted
in the formation of social and cultural groups aimed mostly at facilitating their
‘acculturation’ and upward mobility. Pentecostal churches formed, led and
mostly populated by sub-Saharan Africans are unique among these groups. They
constitute some of the most visible signs of the presence of Africans in the country.
By means of them African immigrants are making distinctive marks on Ireland’s
socio-cultural landscape and inviting the majority society to acknowledge, cherish
and debate ‘difference’. These groups also play a pivotal role in facilitating
communication and interaction among African immigrants and between them and
other groups. But more importantly specific Pentecostal beliefs directly impact
on the ways African immigrants define themselves, ‘others’ and the society. They
constitute the basis for constructing commonality, sameness and difference.
This chapter is based on four years of empirical investigation of four churches
in the Greater Dublin Area. The data were obtained through a survey of 144
church members, ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews with members
and officials and analysis of secondary documents, including mass media reports
and in-house publications. Relying on Rogers Brubaker’s (2004) notion of identity
and on sociological interpretations that emphasise the contents of religion, I argue
that Pentecostalism is critical both to the notion of self articulated by African
Pentecostals in Ireland and to the boundaries they delineate/acknowledge. Their
self-understanding contradicts and subverts the image of them portrayed by the
larger society. Sameness and difference are defined mostly by membership of
Pentecostal group and the ‘rebirth’ experience, rather than by ‘blood and soil’
(Gilroy 2000). In the first part of this chapter I discuss the history and organisation
of African Pentecostal groups in Ireland. This is followed by a brief explanation
of Pentecostalism and an analysis of Brubaker’s concept of identity. Relying on
empirical data from interviews I attempt to demonstrate in the conclusion the
interrelationship between specific Pentecostal teachings and the definition of self,
boundaries and sameness by Ireland’s African Pentecostals.
African-led Pentecostalism in Ireland
Before I discuss the history and nature of African-led Pentecostalism in Ireland I
want to argue that religious activism among African immigrants in Ireland extends
beyond Pentecostalism. The 2002 Census attributed the rapid growth of Muslim
communities and the resurgence in the membership of many ‘mainline’ churches
to the presence of immigrants. According to the 2006 census, the number of
Muslims increased from 19,147 to 32,539 (almost 70%) between 2002 and 2006,
a period that coincided with the recent dramatic increases in in-migration. During
this period, the Hindus increased from 3,099 to 6,516, the Orthodox experienced
99% growth while the Buddhists increased by 66% to 6,516. The gains of the

Beliefs, Boundaries and Belonging: African Pentecostals in Ireland 121
mainstream churches have been moderate. Membership of the Church of Ireland
increased by 8.6% to 125,585 while Catholics increased to 3.7m (CSO, 2006).
Despite these increases in the memberships of the mainline churches, I contend
thatthemostinnovativeanddramaticchangesonIreland’ssocio-religiouslandscape
in recent years is not the participation of immigrants in mainline churches but the
birth and spread of immigrant-led religious groups (Ugba, 2007b; 2006a; 2006b).
The participation of Africans in these churches has been intense, less problematic
and apparently unhindered by precarious residence status or length of stay in
Ireland. As a result both of their rapid development and the pivotal role they play
in facilitating interaction and communication, Pentecostal groups led and mostly
populated by sub-SaharanAfricans have become dynamic community institutions.
Whereas other institutions formed by African immigrants in the early and mid-
1990s waned almost as soon as they were born, African-led Pentecostal groups
have proliferated. Religious attachment appears to be one of the first relationships
African immigrants in Ireland re-activate as soon as they arrive in the country.
Participation in Pentecostal groups led or mostly populated by Africans appears to
be unproblematic and unhindered by precarious residence status.
The first group was formed in Dublin in 1996 by Congolese-born Mr. Remba
Osengo, who had migrated to Ireland that same year. Since then many groups have
been formed and the membership has increased substantially. In the absence of
official statistics the estimates of the numbers of African Pentecostals and of the
groups they have formed vary and they have come mainly from mass media sources.
Official statistics suggest dramatic increases in the numbers of Evangelicals and
Pentecostals although they make no distinction between African Pentecostals and
other Pentecostals. For example, the 2006 census shows that memberships of
Pentecostal/Apostolic groups increased by 156% to 8,116 between 2002 and 2006
while Evangelicals grew by 40% to 5,276 (CSO, 2006).
The first African-led Pentecostal groups were based in and around the Greater
Dublin Area but over the years they have spread to major cities and towns. Their
spread has been aided by the Irish government policy of ‘dispersing’asylum seekers
all over Ireland. Until 2000, the majority of asylum seekers were housed in and
around the Greater Dublin Area. In December 1999, the government announced
a new policy of ‘dispersal’, which meant that asylum seekers would be assigned
to designated accommodation centres all over Ireland (Trόicare and ICJP, 2002).
The implementation of this policy from 2000 has resulted in greater and noticeable
presence of African immigrants and African-led Pentecostal churches in smaller
cities and towns in far-flung corners of Ireland. Some of these churches were born
in state-run accommodation centres in and outside of the Greater Dublin Area.
Church leaders have also sought to establish a presence in other parts of the
country in a bid to fulfil what they say is their God-given commission to spread
the gospel in the whole of Ireland before judgment day arrives. In the words of
one church leader:

… we believe God is leading us to pray for a spiritual revival in Ireland…We
pray every day… I would really love to see that people in the Irish society
experience the power of the Holy Spirit. Ireland is a Christian nation but the
bible says, ‘by their fruits you’ll know them’. You don’t measure Christianity
by what they say; you measure it by the fruits they show. And as I look around
there seem to be so many fruits that do not look like Christian fruits…so that is
what God is leading us to do, to pray for this land, for this country. And we’ve
been doing that.
The Redeemed Christian Church of God is acknowledged by the majority of
researchparticipantsasthelargestandthemostwide-spreadAfrican-ledPentecostal
church in Ireland. Registered in 1998, the church had close to 40 branches in
Ireland at the end of 2004. The other large and prominent African-led Pentecostal
churches include the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry (MFMM), the Christ
Apostolic Church (CAC), the Gospel Faith Mission International (GFM), Christ
Co-Workers in Mission (CCM), Hope and Glory Ministries (HGM) and Christ
Ambassadors Ministries.
Based on their historical background and the transnational links they maintain,
there are three distinct groups of African-led Pentecostal groups in Ireland. The
first category of churches are those established by African immigrants with no
support from or links, at least in the initial stages, to groups in Africa or elsewhere.
Immigrants who have taken such initiatives are usually experienced Pentecostals
who had been active members of Pentecostal groups in their home-countries and
have had some experience of leadership. The majority came to Ireland to seek
political asylum and the period before they gained refugee status, when state
policies prevented them from gainful employment and formal education, provided
ample opportunity and the incentives for religious activism.
The second group are churches established by disgruntled members of existing
churches. For example, Mr. Ade had been the pastor of Christ Apostolic Church
(CAC) before he started his own group – Christ Glory Ministries – and his church
is located not far from his former one. Usually a disgruntled leader who leaves to
form a new group takes some members of the congregation with him. They do not
see themselves as rebels or disgruntled fellows but persons called by God to fulfil a
different and often greater mission from that being fulfilled by the group they have
deserted. On the surface, those who stay appear not to harbour resentment against
those who leave and those who leave still see those they forsook as members of
one large family of Pentecostals. The third category comprises of churches which
have their parent-bodies in Africa. They were started either by trained pastors sent
by the parent-bodies or by ordinary members of the church who, when they arrived
in Ireland, found no other Christian group that suited their style and expectations.
Spiritual and material support for these churches came directly from the parent-
bodies or their European headquarters in the United Kingdom in the beginning.
Such support includes the exchange of personnel and training of pastors and other
church officials.

Demographic Features
Demographically, African-led Pentecostals churches resemble the larger African
communitiesinIrelandandthefeaturesofonechurchtendnottodifferconsiderably
from those of the other. In general, there are more women than men and a large
number of children in any group. More than 75% of those who participated in my
survey said they have children while over 72% were married. The vast majority
(93%) are married to fellow Africans but 83% of the minority not married to
Africans were males. In the majority (85%) of cases, husband and wife belong to
the same Christian group but over 60% of the 15% who said their spouses were not
members of their groups were women. On the disproportionate number of women
worshippers, some respondents believe that housewives and single mothers rely,
more than other categories of members, on the community support and social
network that group membership provides. However, one particular church leader
says that women have historically and scripturally showed a higher tendency
towards spiritual devotion: ‘If you look at the scriptures you’ll find that many
places that our lord Jesus Christ went to, women went there’.
Over 80% of the survey respondents have third-level educational qualifications.
Their occupational profile includes medical and veterinary doctors, nurses,
accountants, computer specialists, teachers, diplomats, engineers, medical
technicians and writers. There are no major disparities in the educational
attainments of males and females but the employment rate was higher among
males while the 10 respondents who said they were full-time parents were females.
About 70% of those who described themselves as students were females. The
percentage of female office holders was slightly higher than men because many
offices, for example membership of the choir, are mostly dominated by women.
The majority of office holders are married and they are selected on the basis of
‘spiritual maturity’ and demonstrated zeal, including regular attendance at church
activities. Usually office holders and members of church committees have a greater
sense of belonging and responsibility than non-members.
Church Activities
The majority of churches have three regular public meetings each week. They
include a Worship Service on Sundays, usually from mid or late morning till late
afternoon, a Bible Study on Wednesdays, from about 7pm to 9pm and a Prayer
Meeting at about the same time but on Fridays. Other meetings held regularly but
less frequently include all-night prayers (usually monthly), women’s prayer group,
Love Feasts and evangelistic seminars and conferences. Groups and committees
also meet but their meetings are open to members only. A typical Sunday service
begins with a Sunday School, where adults, youths and children meet in groups of
about 10 or 15 and are taught lessons from the bible by a Sunday School teacher.

The end of the Sunday School marks the beginning of the actual service, which
includes prayers, songs, special numbers (or songs rendered by an individual),
testimonies,prophecies,announcements,tithesandofferings,altarcall(orinvitation
to new members or visitors to stand up or come forward to be born-again and be
prayed for) and the sermon, usually given by the pastor or an official designated
by him or her. Prayers as well as songs and the sermon are loud, animated and
emotional. They are also very participatory involving speaking in tongues and
enthusiastic response from the audience. The general atmosphere during Sunday
worship is festive and different from Wednesday bible study or Friday prayer
meetings. Most members, especially children and women, dress in African attires
on Sundays unlike other days when they are more likely to dress less formally. In
some churches children are fed biscuits and soft drinks on Sundays and on special
occasions
History and Substance of Pentecostalism
The arrival of African-led Pentecostal groups in Ireland is predated by the arrival
of similar groups first in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and later in continental
Europe (Adogame, 2000, 2003). The groups that arrived in the United Kingdom
were offshoots of Pentecostal churches founded in the 1950s and 1960s either
by Africans who had embraced the faith during their sojourn in the west or by
missionaries from the west, especially African-Americans who interpreted
their activity as a God-ordained assignment to preach the gospel in the land of
their ancestors. The version of Pentecostalism that developed in many African
countries and among African immigrants in Europe, including Ireland, is therefore
connected theologically and historically to the modern-day Pentecostal movement
that began in America at the beginning of the 20th
century. Despite this common
antecedent, Pentecostalism lacks a generally-acceptable definition or agreement
on its contents. It is in fact a generic term for a wide variety of Christian practices
based on or inspired by the Holy Spirit experience of the first century Christians as
documented in the bible book of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1–36). The account
states:
Now while the day of the [festival of] Pentecost was in progress they were all
together at the same place, and suddenly there occurred from heaven a noise
just like that of a rushing stiff breeze, and it filled the whole house in which
they were sitting. And tongues as if of fire became visible to them and were
distributed about, and one sat upon each one of them, and they all became filled
with Holy Spirit and started to speak with different tongues, just as the spirit
was granting them to make utterance – New World Translation (NWT) of the
Holy Bible.

Although the majority of Pentecostals cite the above bible passage and
others as the inspiration for their unique practices, there is a great divergence of
interpretations and application (Hollenweger). Such diverse interpretations and the
conscious efforts of many to make Pentecostal doctrines respond to and reflect their
unique cultures and socio-political situations have created a diverse collection of
groups and churches across space and time under the umbrella Pentecostal banner.
As Corten and Marshall-Fratani (2001,7) note, “each society, each group invests
Pentecostalism with its own meanings.” The divergence and differences that exist
among the various groups are doctrinal, methodical, structural as well as racial.
Pentecostal believers, as Anderson (1999) puts it, “range from the fundamentalist
and white middle class ‘mega churches’ to indigenous movements in the Third
World that have adapted to their cultural and religious contexts to such an extent
that many western Pentecostals would probably doubt their qualifications as
‘Christian’ movements”. Evidence of racially or culturally-motivated divisions
in the development of African-led Pentecostalism in Ireland has equally been
noticeable. For example, the pastor of one African-led group had been a member
of an Irish-dominated Pentecostal group before he left to form his group. In his
own words: “…their way of worship was quite different from the way we pray in
Africa”. Some Pentecostal groups number into the millions while others are little
groups of 50 worshippers of even less.
Despite these controversies and divergence of views, classical Pentecostals are
unified by what Poloma (2000, 5–7) describes as “a particular Christian world-
view that reverts to a non-European epistemology from the European one that
has dominated Christianity for centuries”. In other words, Pentecostals have not
only relocated the geographical centre of Christianity from its European axis to
many centres around the world, they have redefined the understanding of specific
Christian teachings/practices, mostly by grounding them in non-European social
and cultural practices. They have established ways of ascertaining or validating
the Christian experience different from the long-established ones that are saturated
by European values and cultures (Kalu, 1998, 2003; Ter Haar, 2003; Cox, 2003).
There are other traits and practices that are common to most or even all
Pentecostal groups. Most Pentecostals believe in the Bible as God-inspired and
they adhere to a literal interpretation of it. The Bible has relevance for their
everyday conducts and experiences and it serves as a practical manual for life’s
processes. Margaret Poloma (2000, 6) puts it like this: “The Word of the Scriptures
and the Spirit of the living God are in dialogical relationship, playing incessantly
within and among individuals as well as within the larger world.” The concept of
spiritual re-birth or ‘born-again’ is perhaps the most prominent of the traits that
unite Pentecostals. It is also central to my analysis of identity and difference in this
chapter. As Corten and Marshall-Fratani remark: “The experience of getting born-
again reproduces itself in an almost identical form across the world” (Corten and
Marshall-Fratani, 2001, 11). The majority of Pentecostals, even those born and
brought up in Pentecostal families, claim this experience and they say it marks the
beginning of a personal and intimate relationship with God.

For example, although Mr Godswill was born and raised by Pentecostal parents
he still had to undergo the ‘rebirth’ experience:
…at a point in my Christian life I discovered that apart from being born in a
Christian family, there is a time you personally make up your mind that you
want to live for God. I came to the realisation that serving God is a personal
thing, that it’s not a collective thing… at a point I had an encounter…the word
salvation now started to mean a different thing to me, so much that I felt like
crying, I just felt that I should give something back to someone that has shown
so much love to me…I gave my life to Christ.
Pentecostals are fairly uniform in their interpretation of the significance of the re-
birth experience. While mostly emphasising its transformative qualities, they say
it is a prerequisite for salvation for those who would escape the destruction that
awaits this ungodly world and go to heaven to be with Jesus Christ. They identify
the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus, as recorded in the gospel of John, as
the basis of this unique interpretation. That accounts reads:
Now there was a man of the Pharisees, Nic·o·de´mus was his name, a ruler of the
Jews. This one came to him in the night and said to him: “Rabbi, we know that
you as a teacher have come from God; for no one can perform these signs that
you perform unless God is with him.” In answer Jesus said to him: “Most truly
I say to you, Unless anyone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Nicodemus said to him: “How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot
enter into the womb of his mother a second time and be born, can he?” Jesus
answered: “Most truly I say to you, unless anyone is born from water and spirit,
he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. What has been born from the flesh is
flesh, and what has been born from the spirit is spirit. Do not marvel because I
told you, YOU people must be born again (John 3:1-7). (New World Translation
of the Holy Bible).
Pentecostal interpretation of spiritual re-birth tends to include not only a deeper
commitment to God but also a rupture with the past and many aspects of the
present. They develop new scripture-centred interpretations of the present and
future and of their relationship to the ‘others’. The person who has undergone
spiritual rebirth is a “new creation” who has forsaken ‘worldly’ or fleshly habits
like drinking alcohol, smoking, visits to discos/pubs, sexual relations outside
or before wedlock, quarrelling, fighting, resentment and enmity. The human
race is one and fellow Pentecostals, especially members of the same group, are
considered brothers and sisters. Ethnic, social and racial differences should pale
into insignificance, replaced by love for humanity and concern for the ungodly. To
buttress their point, Pentecostals often quote the Apostle Paul: “Consequently if
anyone is in union with Christ, he is a new creation; the old things passed away,

look! new things have come into existence” (2 Corinthian 5:17). Godswill, for
example, had to “sort out” himself after he became born-again. He says:
You see, giving your life to Christ must cost you something. I had to give up
my girlfriend. I stopped going to parties. I loved music so much. I had a huge
collection, getting the latest releases, keeping abreast with the latest dance-steps.
I had to give them up. That was very painful, that was the really painful one, not
the girlfriend. I didn’t think I could survive without my music, secular music.
Corten and Marshall-Fratani (2001), however contest the Pentecostal interpretation
of re-birth that emphasises rupture with the past. Conversion, they argue, does
not imply “a straightforward trajectory in which the individual is liberated from
an imagined collective history and moves to a monolithic form of ‘modern’
individuality. Rather, it offers believers a plurality of “technologies of the self”.
My research demonstrates that the re-birth experience and the Pentecostal identity
do not necessarily replace or obliterate other identities and relationships but rather
it makes additional relationships and identities or new ways of thinking about
oneself and the ‘other’ possible. For African immigrants in Ireland Pentecostalism
is a major, but by no means the only, window on the social world. The other
windows, less important though they may be, include race, immigrant status and
their ethnic minority status in a racial society.
Boundaries and Belonging
In interpreting the beliefs and activities of Ireland’s African Pentecostals I have
triangulated functionalist, critical and substantive interpretations of religion.
Inspired by Nicole Toulis’s (1997) analysis of Pentecostal Jamaican women in
the United kingdom and Stephen Hunt’s (2002a) research on Pentecostal African
immigrants, the core of my research eschews functionalism in favour of substantive
analysis and I attempt to establish the multiple and complex connections between
Pentecostalism and the interpretation of ‘self’, ‘others’ and social reality by
African immigrants.
The theoretical foundation of my substantive approach is rooted in MaxWeber’s
(1930) contention that the substance or contents of Protestantism served as definers
of social reality for the Calvinists in 17th
century Europe. Weber conceptualised
religion as a relationship between the actor and a super mundane being, which
has implications not only for ethical and moral conducts but also for the actor’s
interpretation of self and social reality (Marshall, 1982; Weber, 1930). Like Weber,
theorists like Clifford Geertz (1966), Peter Berger (1973) and Robert Bellah (1976)
have also theorised religion as a meaning-making instrument. In his analysis of
the transformation Olaudah Equiano from a slave boy to an articulate anti-slave
trade crusader, Paul Gilroy clearly enunciated the role of religious beliefs in the
transformationofidentities:“Thesuperficialdifferencesofgenderandsocialstatus,

race and caste, marked on the body by the trifling order of man, were…set aside in
favour of a relationship with Christ that offered a means to transcend and thereby
escape the constraints of mortality and the body-coded order of identification
and differentiation” (2000, 119–120). Robert Bellah (1976) similarly argues in
Beyond Beliefs that religious beliefs provide a framework for social actors to
interpret their experiences and construct social realities. With specific reference to
Pentecostalism, Toulis (1997, 210) notes that beliefs offered Jamaican women “an
alternative basis for the construction of identity and difference...Rather than define
themselves as ‘Black’ in White society, church members identified themselves
as model ‘Christian’ in an imperfect Christian society.” Empirical data from my
research similarly shows that specific Pentecostal beliefs have informed the notion
of self, of ‘others’ and of society held by this category of African immigrants in
21st
century Ireland.
Beliefs, Boundaries and Belonging
My research participants perceive Pentecostalism as different from ‘ethnic’ or
ancestral religions (Gans, 1994; Herberg, 1960; Winter, 1996) and they portray
it mostly as a social category which they have consciously and actively acquired
and nurtured. For them identity and boundaries are not marked by ‘natural’
characteristics connected with ‘blood and soil’(Gilroy, 2000) but they are the result
of specific religious choices, social performances and interactions. The subjective
experience of spiritual rebirth marks both the beginning of a new and heightened
consciousness of their relationship with God and the believer’s admission into
the core of the Pentecostal fold. For Pentecostal African immigrants in Ireland,
religious beliefs rooted in the experience of re-birth constitute the main basis for
articulating a new self understanding, which has direct implications for a broad
range of social actions, including the construction of difference, commonality,
connectedness and groupness.
In analysing the interfaces between beliefs and understanding of self/social
reality, I have relied on Roger Brubaker’s (2004) re-articulation of the term
‘identity.’ While asserting that identity remains a relevant tool for, among other
things, “making political appeals in identitarian terms,” he notes that the concept
“bears a multivalent, even contradictory theoretical burden.” Brubaker (2004,
41) proposes three clusters of words to replace ‘identity’ in order to eliminate
the conceptual confusion: Identification and categorization; Self-understanding
and social location; and Commonality, connectedness and groupness. He defines
‘commonality, connectedness and groupness,’ as “the emotionally laden sense
of belonging to a distinctive, bounded group, involving both a felt solidarity or
oneness with fellow group members and a felt difference from or even antipathy
to specified outsiders.” He notes that ‘Commonality’ denotes “the sharing of
some common attributes” while ‘connectedness’ describes the relational ties that
link people. Neither commonality nor connectedness alone engenders groupness

defined by Brubaker as “the sense of belonging to a distinctive, bounded, solidarity
group”. But commonality and connectedness together may result in groupness. (p.
47) In addition to connectedness and commonality, the feeling of groupness is
deepened by “particular events, their encoding in compelling public narratives,
prevailing discursive frames…” Brubaker further makes a distinction between
the “strongly groupist, exclusive, affectively charged self-understanding and
much looser, more open self-understandings, involving some sense of affinity or
affiliation, commonality or connectedness to particular others, but lacking a sense
of overriding oneness vis-à-vis some constitutive ‘other’”. Although both the
strongly groupist and the much looser version (and the many affinities in between)
are important, Brubaker argues that “they shape personal experience and condition
social and political action in sharply different ways”.
I have neither adopted Brubaker’s suggestions un-problematically nor accept
every idea he associates with these clusters of words. However, the concepts he
proposes provide suitable thematic frameworks to examine the interrelationships
between beliefs and understanding of self/social reality. The rest of this analysis
focuses on the self-understanding of Ireland’s African Pentecostals and the
construction of commonality, connected and groupness.
Alternative/Subversive Conception of Self
Pentecostalism provides African immigrants a basis for an empowering self-
understanding that contrasts with and subverts the way they are perceived by
the ‘other’ in Irish society. Their self-understanding attenuates racial/national
identity markers while emphasising their Pentecostal credentials, beliefs, activities
and mission. “As a born-again Christian and a child of God, the first thing you
learn is to listen to God and to obey. That is what the new relationship with him
means,” says female member. Whereas they are perceived in media and popular
discourses as economic sojourners and a minority group on the fringe of Irish
society, PentecostalAfrican immigrants construct themselves as agents of religious
and social change who have come by divine ordination to Ireland to preach the
‘true’ Christianity, restore Ireland’s past religious glories and rescue the younger
generations of Irish men and women who, according to their interpretation, have
swapped the spirituality of their fore-fathers for a life of sexual immorality, drugs,
alcohol and night-long revelries in pubs. A female church leader puts it this way:
The present Ireland is unconnected with the Ireland of the past where Christianity
and Christian values thrived. Parents are not handing over the spiritual heritage
that they had received from their parents, grand-parents and great grand-
parents…the link is broken and we are here to try and restore it…our main
mission is to restore Christianity in this country…Our presence in this country
is divinely-ordained although that may not be manifest at the moment. As time
goes on, it will become clear. In the years and decades to come people will look

back and understand that we had been brought to Ireland by God for a specific
reason.
Commonality, Connectedness and Groupness
According to Eisenstadt (1998), the major codes used in constructing collective
identity include primordiality, civility, and transcendentalism or sacredness.
Describing these codes as ideal types, Eisenstadt notes that real life application
usually combines elements of the three and the relative importance of each code
is situational. His notion is useful for understanding the ways Pentecostal African
immigrants construct commonality, groupness and difference. As with self-
conception, they rely less on national/ethnic and phenotypical markers and more
on specific Pentecostal teachings on salvation/redemption and moral uprightness.
They construct categorical distinctions or boundaries between the ‘saved’ and the
‘unsaved’ (the defining criteria being spiritual re-birth and active membership of
a Pentecostal group) and construct commonality and connectedness on this basis.
In the quotation below the respondent makes a categorical distinction between the
‘born-agains’ and ‘others’ and compares the latter to ‘Christmas chicken’ that are
destined for the slaughter:
To me, people who don’t know Jesus are like children walking towards fire… A
life without Christ is like a chicken in a cage… The lives of these chickens are
like the lives of people who do not know Christ.
Whereas the interpretation of groupness always seems to apply to members’
particularPentecostalgroupandbiologicalfamily,commonalityandconnectedness
are constructed in multiple and complex ways. For example, the connections to
mainline churches in Ireland do not always translate into closer spiritual or even
social association despite the fact that some African-led Pentecostal groups have
used the meeting halls of these churches for little or no fee. In the words of one
church leader:
As a born-again Christian, my life should be based on the bible. When people see
me they should know that I live by the bible…this is not common in the Catholic
Church (Ireland’s largest religious group). They just go through catechism and
the Simple Prayer book.
Although Pentecostal African immigrants construct the larger non-Pentecostal
African communities as the ‘others’, they unintentionally but sometimes
strategically articulate some connections and commonalities, especially when they
discuss the larger social and political conditions of their voluntary or involuntary
presence in Ireland. In the quotation below the respondent makes no distinction
between Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal Africans:

Unfortunately we don’t at the moment have an environment that is conducive
for the work we’ve been called to do, where we can really get our message
across to the Irish people. Our people…because of some challenges they face in
this society – verbal abuse, racial abuse and everything – they are really hiding
in their shells, they are afraid, they are withdrawn from society and people even
without realising it sometimes.
While portraying Pentecostalism as the major, or sometimes, the only definer of
social reality, they occasionally appropriate racial and ethnic symbolisms to either
articulate commonality/difference or to explain the discrimination and social
isolation they encounter in the dominant society, as the quotation above illustrates.
Generally, the multiple and complex boundaries they construct homogenise in
order to essentialise sameness within distinct Pentecostal groups or the larger
‘born-again’ family. Boundaries are not enforced with equal severity. The degree
to which a particular boundary is enforced depends on who the constitutive
‘other’ is. For example, the boundaries that separate them from the larger African
communities admit some connections and differences are sometimes, even if
unintentionally, weakly articulated.
The boundaries between them and the larger non born-again Irish society are
constructed as binary opposites and strongly articulated, as this view by a female
respondent demonstrates:
It takes the grace of God to bring up children in the Western world …This is a
country where his (her son) classmate was asking him, ‘why is it that you don’t
smoke?’ The child is being made to feel anti-social because he does not smoke
and do all those other things that the Christian tenets we’ve taught him say are
not good…they want to teach her (her daughter) to go to the pub, to the cinema
and to go out with guys.
The supposed commonality between them and Irish-led Pentecostal groups is
tainted with cultural or even racial biases. Their encounter with ‘Irish’ Pentecostal
‘other’ is as important for self-definition and entrenchment of boundaries as
the encounter with non-Pentecostals generally. Some African Pentecostals have
deserted Irish-dominated groups and joined those led or dominated by sub-
Saharan Africans because of cultural or racial reasons. The boundaries between
Pentecostal African immigrants and the larger society allow for some connections
and interrelationships which, some Pentecostals argue, would facilitate their
eventual integration into and more active participation in the larger Irish society.
Conclusion
Pentecostalism has offered African immigrants in 21st
century Ireland new/
additional basis for constructing understandings of self, ‘others’, commonalities

and boundaries. The new basis emphasises Pentecostal credentials while de-
emphasising race, nationality and immigrant status. The new understanding of self
contradicts and subverts the dominant interpretation of African Pentecostals (and
African immigrants in general), which emphasises race, nationality, immigrant
status and social marginality. It is also an empowering self-understanding that
confers noble purposes on their journey to and presence in Ireland.
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Chapter 8
On Being a ‘Good’ Refugee
John Gabriel and Jenny Harding
This chapter engages in critical discussion of the everyday ethical frameworks
employed by refugees, through analysis of life history interview material. It
draws on life history interviews with 164 individuals from 15 different refugee
communities conducted in 2005–06 as part of the Refugee Community Histories
Project (RCHP).
The RCHP was specifically set up to document the contributions of refugee
communities to the history, culture and economy of London since 1951. The
core assumption underpinning the project, and shared by Labour politicians at
the time, was that refugee communities did indeed benefit the UK’s economy
and culture (Roche, 2002). The Evelyn Oldfield Unit, an umbrella Refugee
Community Organisation (RCO), based in north London and the lead organisation
in the project, had begun discussing the idea of documenting the ‘positive’
contribution of refugee communities across London in the mid 1990s. The focus
on documenting and publicising their contributions represented an attempt to
redress the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of refugee communities
(Article 19, 2003). At one level, therefore the RCP sought out success stories
amongst refugee communities along the lines of The Refugee Council’s ‘Credit
to the Nation’, which provided a series of such cases studies. This approach was
reminiscent of debates in multicultural education in the 1970s in which negative
portrayals of ‘immigrants’ were countered with ‘positive images’. There were
then, as now, limits to this kind of intervention. It assumed that racism could be
countered rationally simply by presenting alternative ‘facts’. It took the negative
images as the starting point and tried to counter them on their own terms. It
presupposed what counted as ‘positive’ rather than exploring differences within
as well as between ethnic groups and sought instead to reduce immigrants to a
shared set of virtuous characteristics. As it transpired, in the case of the RCHP,
none of the 164 interviewed fell into the household name category. There were no
‘Ben Eltons’, Albert Einsteins or Sigmund Freuds or anyone comparable in terms
of public profile amongst the sample. That said, ‘contributions’ were identified,
underlined and celebrated via public outcomes of the project including a major
exhibition at the Museum of London (‘Belonging: Voices of London’s Refugees’
We would like to thank Stephanie Linkogle for her detailed comments and
suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter.

27th
October 2006–25th
February 2007’) as well as RCO-based events, films, and
publications.
The idea of ‘contribution’ therefore framed the project design, including
identification of potential interviewees and key relationships, notably between
fieldworkers conducting the interviews and their respondents, and, to a large
extent, shaped the life histories recorded and archived at the Museum of London
and their dissemination. This focus, in turn, created the notion of the successful
or ‘good’ refugee, who gives something back. It rests on an individualistic and
meritocratic value system in which integration is often seen as the means by which
an effective contribution to mainstream culture is achieved.
Against this wider political background, there was much discussion among
project partners and fieldworkers about the meaning of ‘contribution’ and how to
create accounts within individual interviews. It was felt that contribution should
be understood in the broadest possible sense. In other words, the project should
attempt to capture the high profile activities of people who are prominent in the
arts, business, education, politics, and at the same time also be committed to
documenting the less visible, but vitally important, activities of those who work in
the service industries, voluntary sector, or care for others, including their families.
It was agreed that this perspective would form part of the conceptual map guiding
interviews. In practice, project partners, refugee community organisations,
fieldworkers and respondents interpreted the notion of contribution and what it
meant to be a ‘good’refugee in a variety of ways. It was apparent that contribution
was used to refer to both ‘achievement’, which inferred high status and recognition,
and ‘participation’, which was worthy but low status.
For the purposes of this chapter, we want to extend the notions of ‘contribution’
and ‘achievement’ beyond the assumptions of mainstream political opinion to
understand what these terms meant to those interviewed. We decided to explore
the interview data in the expectation that we might find different understandings of
achievement and contribution and then see what values these imply or are explicitly
associated with them.We then became interested in how such values were explicitly
sanctioned by moral motivations and how, in terms of practice, ethical outcomes
were achieved. These explorations would also, it was hoped, contribute to wider
debates around ethnicity and identity and the current government pre-occupation
with the notion of cultural cohesion.
Unlike Christina Boswell (2005) we were more concerned with the ethical
frameworks deployed by refugees than the ethical principles underpinning refugee
policies. Boswell offers a persuasive account of why liberal universalism will not
work as a basis for policy because it is no match for those ‘national interests’ that
are mobilised against the interests of refugees. Where her argument does resonate
with that developed below is the need to explore the sources of motivation (in
her case what motivates us to respect the rights of others) not in reason alone but
arising from inter-subjective notions of what is good.
Of course, a number of those interviewed, no doubt prompted by the publicity
surrounding the project and the purpose of the interviews as understood by the

On Being a ‘Good’Refugee 137
fieldworkers, punctuated their life histories with descriptions of mainstream
‘success’, as evidenced in the attainment of UK qualifications, high status and/
or well paid employment, in ways that in some cases allowed them to distance
themselves from their refugee status. Other interviewees described sacrifices
made in order to support their children’s ‘success’ in conventional terms. These
sacrifices often meant low paid work, more than one job, long hours as well as
caring for the family. Such paid work is integral to service economy but was
not seen as a ‘contribution to society’ in and of itself. Rather it was the way in
which such work provided economic resources for families and children, which
was noted by the interviewees. In this way, family values were a higher order
analytical category for the participants even if work to sustain these values was not
as well recognised as more ‘public’ contributions. The importance of paid/unpaid
refugee sector work also emerged strongly in the interviews. There was a sense of
empathy for and obligation to the community by way of reciprocating the support
they had received on arrival in London. This often went had in hand with a wider
commitment to social justice and equality.
In this chapter, we discuss how people talk about their achievements in the
context of forced migration, and create (in conjunction with the interviewer)
the figure of the ‘good’ refugee. We discuss both high status and less visible
contributions and focus especially on the articulation in interview of individual
interviewees’sense of themselves and core values. Here we are interested in values
associated with individual’s sense of themselves and the numerous ways in which
refugees both identified with and sought to distance themselves from cultural
practices associated with gender, age, and space as well as ethnicity. We are also
interested in interviewees’ ideas about how to live, and how to behave towards
others. Such values and ideas, which tended to emphasise the collective over the
individual – a concern for the well being of others as much as self – also play a
positive part in the everyday life of individuals and communities, and, indeed,
mainstream society and could be described as a kind of ethics. We explore the
various ways in which refugees developed their own ethical frameworks often in
opposition to both dominant western narratives and/or those commonly associated
with their own countries/ ‘cultures of origin’ and reflect on the ways in which they
variously adopt or reject available routes to success.
A Note on Methodology
Life histories provide insight into how values, ideas about how to live, and forms
of identification change and are negotiated over time and how these might be
understood in terms of both individual and wider socio-economic and political
developments. We consider the implication for thinking about ‘refugee identity’
and identity more generally. Oral testimony also provides a mode of access to
lived experience (especially that of a more private, personal, intimate, domestic
kind) missing from other sources (Stuart, 1994). The oral history interview, through

which oral testimony is collected, involves asking the interviewee/ narrator to
recall events from his/her past and reflect on and interpret these (Bryman, 2004).
As Portelli argues, oral sources are valuable precisely because they are subjective
and tell us ‘less about events and more about their meaning’ (Portelli, 1998: 67).
They show us how narrators attempt to ‘make sense of the past and to give a form
to their lives’ (Portelli, 1998: 69).
The broader context for refugees relating the past may also include pressure to
forget as part of the ideological conditions of adaption. In this sense, what is unsaid
can be as important as what is said. The social relationship, between interviewer
and interviewee, entails a complexity of intentions and emotions on both sides,
which are crucial ingredients in the production of accounts of the past. In this way,
oral testimonies are undoubtedly collaborative co-productions (Portelli, 1998;
Rapley, 2004; Tonkin 1995).
Experience is reworked through memory, language, genre, and culture. The
past is always reconstructed from the position of the present and the telling of
the past is part of the ongoing process of constituting the speaking subject in the
present. Through oral history interviews, we can begin to understand what matters
to individuals and groups and how they experience and make sense of events. We
can also begin to understand what it means to be part of a specific social group
or political minority and how these categories and the subjectivities involved (as
for example, in being a refugee and living in exile) are constructed, contested and
transformed in specific historical, cultural and political contexts.
Oral history interviews were used in the RCHP since it was felt that oral history
research methods offer the possibility of representing the lived experiences of
(often marginalised) individuals and groups from their own perspectives as part of
a process of empowerment.
Approaches to interviewing were discussed with fieldworkers, in particular the
advantages of pursuing a chronological approach or a thematic approach (Harding
2006). There was concern that using a strictly chronological approach which
involved starting with early childhood memories might too quickly evoke painful
experiences and cause the interviewee to withdraw (Harding, 2006). It was felt
that interviewees might find it hard to talk about their pre-flight experience at the
start of the interview process and therefore feel uncomfortable about participating
in the project. Fieldworkers were advised to begin interviews by inquiring about
the interviewee’s current life in London as a way of warming up and developing
rapport. Following this, interviews were to be organised around a series of key
themes in two main phases. The first phase of interviewing would focus on arrival
in the UK/London and work towards the present focusing on specific themes and
establishing a chronology within each theme (for example, sequence of jobs, places
of residence, patterns of social relations). The second phase of interviewing would
focus on life prior to arrival in the UK and also inquire about this in relation to key
themes, drawing out contrasts with subsequent life in London. When it came to
conducting the interviewees, the fifteen interviewers adopted different approaches

but variously covered many of these topics and allowed interviewees to talk about
what mattered to them.
In this chapter, we focus analysis on 30 of the 164 transcribed interviews and
on moral frameworks, although the project did not set out to explicitly explore
questions of morality and values. We selected 30 transcripts randomly by including
every fifth one from the list of interviews conducted in date order. This yielded a
varied sample in terms of gender, age
, occupations and countries of origin. This
sample is not representative of a specific demographic in any statistical sense, just
as the 164 were not statistically representative. However, they did reflect a broad
range of experiences and concerns with ethical issues.
We should also point out that, although we were involved in the project
planning, design and training of fieldworkers with other partners
we did not
conduct interviews ourselves.
We are looking at the interviews through a different lens from that identified
at the start of the project, but one justified, we feel, by the interview texts. Indeed,
assumptions about values, ethics and commitment to community were part of the
project’s design, and self-identification/interpellation of participants, from the
outset.
Thus, although the project did not set out to investigate the ways in which
those interviewed saw meaning in their lives in moral terms, the transcripts did
lend themselves to such an analysis. In particular respondents did express their
reasons for undertaking paid or unpaid work and these in turn were often couched
in terms of a wider moral agenda, which was both informed by and helped to
make sense of their lives. In the vast majority of cases, the respondents shared
what might be described as a heightened social consciousness and conscience
with a focus on the collective over the individual. We have identified three sets
of values associated with this conscience: those concerned with human rights/
social justice; those with a strong commitment to family and/or community and
finally those traditional cultural values associated with their countries of origin.
These in turn were reflected in patterns of work undertaken by the respondents
and their more general responses to life experiences (family break up, racism,
violence against women and children, etc.). Whilst the project set out with the aim
of foregrounding the positive contribution of refugees to London, only a small
handful echoed more conventional measures of ‘success’ and achievement. For
the most part they were concerned to represent themselves and their lives in terms
of values with their own distinctive moral or ethical underpinning and measured
their achievements and successes whether at work, in their families and/ or on
behalf of their communities, accordingly.
Not all the interviewees referred to their age, hence its omission in some cases
below. Otherwise it was felt helpful to include it in order to relate to life cycle patterns and
wider experiences.
These included the lead organisation, The Evelyn Oldfield Unit, The Museum of
London, Trust for London and the fifteen Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs).

Human Rights and Social Justice
A loosely defined discourse built around ideas of social justice, human rights and
a commitment to equality prevailed amongst a number of respondents. Sometimes
these were more explicitly associated with political values or perspective but not
always. Amalan
, for example, a Tamil who arrived in the UK in 1986 rooted his
life in his commitment to egalitarianism, anti oppressive practice, and women’s
rights. He worked for voluntary organisations and was able to make films about
inequalities and oppression as a means of expressing these values. On the other
hand, Carlos, 48, who arrived in London in 1990 from Columbia describes his
commitment to human rights (which he saw integral to his role as a forensic
scientist) without making explicit a commitment to a wider political agenda, as
the following extract illustrates:
There were a lot of dangers there. There was mainly the drug cartels. (It) was a
big problem – (the) Medellin cartel and Cali cartel. And ... between them there
was a kind of a war .. blowing up each others shopping malls and businesses. So,
initially we had a lot of work … and we had to go and do all the assessments of
physical injuries in the hospitals .. but the main problems that caused me…(to
be) here was my involvement as a professional in cases of human rights abuses,
unlawful killings ….with situations that involved ‘influential’ people in my
country and I put (that word) in commas because we are talking … corruption.
Power is abused and very well manipulated and there is a lot of injustice and
when you have a profession and a duty to serve as a professional ….then you
feel proud of yourself..... And I got very passionate about the work I did and
consequently because my reports and reports of my other colleagues were .. were
going to be detrimental (to those) … involved in either torture ..or murder.
His sense of passion and obligation to these principles, regardless of who
perpetrated such violations or where they took place, shaped his work in the UK.
He (with the help of scientists and friends) set up the first international centre
for forensic investigations, funded by the British Foreign Office and the United
Nations desk at the British Foreign Office. The Centre provided evidence that
led to successful prosecutions of war crimes in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
Carlos’ commitment to the documentation of human rights abuses emerged form
his experiences in Columbia. However, he, himself, was never tortured.
In contrast, Rabiah, aged 50, who arrived from Turkey in 1989 in her early
thirties, had been physically tortured in Turkey. Ironically, although she found
safe haven in the UK, she found parallels between the attitudes of her torturers
and UK immigration officers. ‘It was like as if they do not see us as humans but
rather like something else’. She was then taken to a detention centre where to
Pseudonyms have been used throughout this chapter.

her surprise she found many others in situations similar to hers, who had been
detained for months. The following is her account of what happened then,
I collected some people around me who were involved in politics [in] one way
or the other and told them that they could wait like that forever but those people
will not care at all and consequently the right thing to do would be to express
themselves with a type protest and that is to be done with an immediate action.
And we decided to hunger strike ... [It] ... lasted for 26 days and they released
everyone from Turkey as a consequence of that … strike …And the camp doctor
…told me that they should not hold me there at all and … in Turkish, he said
“they can not hold you there under these conditions” because the scars on my
body as a result of torture was showing the damage…
Mercedes, a Chilean in her early fifties, came to England in 1975. Given the
nature of the coup, the socialist and democratically elected regime it deposed,
and the systematic torture and murder of its supporters, it was not surprising
that they formed a strong political community (along with like minded allies) in
their countries of exile. She expresses the strength and dominance of her political
commitment in the following extract. In doing so she makes it very clear that
she is concerned with individual achievements or successes, but rather with the
realisation of a wider set of values. As she expressed it,
… On the other hand, … as a political animal, in, in a way, you, you know I
would always find a way to be political, in, in that sense. So, in a way… because
you are driven by, by, by it somehow, it doesn’t matter whether you end up in
Kathmandu, or Kenya, or wherever, you know, you will find, what your place is,
you know? So in terms of, my personal gain, my personal position, I didn’t have
any intents. Of politics I have a hell of a lot, yes, and in that sense I would, yeah,
participate in everything that was going…
Unsurprisingly, in England she sought to realise those political ambitions and
foregrounded such issues in her interview. She first settled in Birmingham in the
mid-1970s where she was introduced to feminist writing and politics. She left
England in 1979 after the Conservative Party’s victory in the general election of
that year and went to Spain, where she lived for a year until she was deported, and
then returned to England. This time she settled in Brixton, South London, where
she witnessed the ‘riots’ of 1981, which for her highlighted the treatment of black
people and the limits of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, she was drawn to the
vibrancy and cultural creativity of this part of London, an energy that infused other
forms of political activity, for example, the feminist and squatters movements.
Her politics subsequently influenced her decision to train as counsellor, which she
used to establish a counselling service for lesbians with an emphasis on supportive
therapyforwomenfromdiverseculturalbackgrounds.Shesubsequentlyre-oriented
the service to provide trained Latin American therapists to work with women from

Latin America. ‘And fifteen to eighteen years later we are still providing that
service. And it has become a very normal part of a women’s needs.’
Much of Hanushe’s life had been shaped by the political conflict in the former
Yugoslavia. She was 36 when interviewed, an Albanian from Kosova who
arrived in the UK in 1994. She described herself as ‘very political’ with a focus
on the global distribution of power. She saw parallels for example in the political
situation in the Balkans with Palestine and the middle-east. She was active in the
campaign against the Iraq war and hoped to study a course in global politics that
would help her gain an advisory position in an international development NGO.
In the meantime she had been working as an interpreter in hospitals and then with
Refugee Action, which entailed working with air-lifted refugees from the camps
in Macedonia. This involved flying to Macedonia to help with this effort. She
was currently working with refugees from Kosova as an advocate of people with
mental health and alcohol and substance misuse issues to try to support their lives
in the community rather than in institutional care by helping with benefits, rent
payments etc.
Zahra, a mother and teacher from Afghanistan, arrived in the UK in 1993. She
speaks very passionately about the worsening situation of women in Afghanistan
and her own commitment to equality and justice.
I wish I could live in a society – and I [would] love a society – in which
people live with an equal status, a society free of exploitation, a society free of
oppression against other people. I love a sort of society in which all scientific
and technological developments and resources are used to serve people.
She described her long-standing concern about social justice and oppression
and experience of political involvement in her teens. As a teacher, she did not
see teaching as her only duty and was deeply concerned about the poverty and
deprivation of students and creating a safe environment conducive to learning
…When I saw that a child came to school barefoot and did not have shoes, I
could not bear it. I could understand that another pupil, who has a better life
and can afford to buy the other pupil shoes, belongs to which class. I would take
this pupil’s hand to the other one who had a better life and I would tell them
that you can see that s/he does not have shoes and he would say that yes, that’s
right. I would ask if s/he could bring him a pair of shoes. They would say ‘I
will try’, I would tell them that they had to bring him/her a pair of shoes … For
example I would see that some of my students do not have uniforms and they
could not afford it. I could not do much myself, as there were not any official or
governmental institutions to assist them. What I would do was that I had a list
of businessmen, those who had private businesses. I would go to their homes,
their offices or place of work and would give them the list and would tell them,
for example, that so many of my pupils do not have school uniforms, and ask
them how many of those they could provide. From some of them I would take

material, shoes, veils, and would provide school uniforms for the students. This
was despite the fact that this was not part of my duties as a school headmistress
the roles were set by the school.
She goes on to describe how she helped the families of students by establishing
a ‘co-operative chest on many occasions could be a vital help to someone who
is in real hardship’ based on a collection from teachers who donated from their
salaries.
In all of the above narratives, questioning the established order permeated
the lives of Amalan Carlos, Rabiah, Mercedes, Hanushe and Zahra. These
values provided all with a sense of purpose and meaning, prompted or motivated
them to make decisions about where to live, their education and training, and
their employment. Their sense of their own lives was in part informed by their
own refugee experience but only in part. Their experience as refugees may have
sharpened their ambitions and lent focus to their actions but was always subsumed
under a wider set of values and motivations.
Family and Community
The second set of discourses where we found a strong underlying moral
component was a shared commitment to family and the community. Although all
the respondents were identified in terms of their legally defined refugee status, we
were interested in exploring the extent to which their commitment to both ‘family’
and ‘community’ accommodated heterogeneously defined groups, comprising
children, partners, men and women, old and young, who were perceived differently
and hence associated with a diversity of practices. For many of our respondents,
decisions about the kind of paid and unpaid work undertaken were borne of a strong
commitment to their ‘community’ articulated through a shared understanding of
the refugee experience. What varied was their commitment to particular groups
within their communities and the nature of their activity. Some like Aatifa shared
a strong commitment to women’s experiences but unlike Mercedes in the previous
section, theirs was more rooted in a commitment to their sense of community and
family than tied to a wider political discourse, e.g. socialism and/or feminism.
This is not to say they did not share such values, but just that others seemed more
significant and meaningful, at least according to their own testimonies. Like Zarha,
Njoki had worked for almost 20 years in the UK since arriving from Uganda, set
up a number of community organisations but not in his case (for the most part at
least) specifically around gender. For Mulogo, faith-based values underpinned his
community involvement. Hakim, in contrast, saw his sense of community service
in another way, this time through providing employment opportunities resulting
from his own success in business.
When Aatifa, 67, first arrived from Eritrea in the mid-1970s, there were no
Eritrean community organisations apart from the Eritrean Mass Association. She

met three Eritrean women, who worked at the Ethiopian Embassy and she used to
visit them there every Sunday. Other Eritreans would join them and they would
all have lunch together, drink traditional coffee, chat and laugh and generally feel
like they were ‘back home’ again. She also attended meetings organised by the
Eritrean Workers Union and Eritrean Students Union to support the Eritrean armed
struggle against Ethiopia. Women were a key to these fund raising efforts and
often sent their entire wages towards the struggle. As she said,
We used to work hard support our family and stand on the streets in freezing
cold to collect money and send back to support the fighters. We had really a hard
life. I can say we were freedom fighters in the cities. We are proud of what we
contributed to our struggle for freedom.
Her other struggle was to bring her six children to the UK. She had been forced
to leave them behind in Ethiopia and spent several years alone in London making
arrangements for their safe passage to England. Her feelings during this period
are worth recording again, since they reflect the strength of her commitment to her
family. Asked how she felt at being separated from her children she said,
Oh… I can’t explain this. I do not have words to explain this. When the sun
sets and I went back home I used to stand in front of my window and my tears
[would] flow down non stop and used to say “O my children! I left you alone”
I cried for almost two years…. I planned and worked hard to bring my children
here….
Aatifa organised passports and other relevant documents and with the support of
the Eritrean freedom fighters and the UN she was eventually reunited with her
children in the UK. In her words, ‘at last I managed to embrace my children in
my arms’.
To support herself, her community back home and now her family in England
she worked in low paid jobs; as a cleaner, a hotel chambermaid and then as a
clerk in the dispatch department of British Rail. Ultimately her commitment to
her community led her to found an organisation for Eritrean women, the Santa
Antonio Eritrean Women’s group. To support this work, she enrolled at Morley
College to improve her English and a management course to acquire the knowledge
and skills to run her organization. She described the struggle to secure funding
for a community centre through attending meetings, lobbying, explaining the
objectives of the organisation, etc. Once funding was approved (initially from the
Refugee Council), sewing machines were bought for a tailoring class and a tutor
was employed to teach English twice a week. Aatifa, herself, taught a language
class of her mother tongue (Tigrinya) and an exercise class as well as a weekly
social event to ‘chat about our country and enjoy each other’s company’. The 10th
anniversary of the centre, itself a testimony of success, was marked by a festival

which was attended by the Eritrean ambassador to the UK with traditional music
dance and refreshments.
Aatifa’s activism was focused on her community and the struggle for the
emergence of the Eritrean nation rather than to a more general commitment to
human rights as we saw in Carlos’ praxis. Not all the testimonies fall neatly into
one of other of these moral frameworks and Zahra’s is one such example. Whilst
we have already illustrated her vision of an egalitarian society, her own life has
been primarily devoted to her family and the young people in her community.
Zahra came to London from Kabul in 1990. For our purposes, her testimony is
important because it illustrates an understanding of the role of women within the
community both in terms of paid employment and in relationship to their families
and children and a commitment to support them. Zahra makes an interesting
comparison between the circumstances of women in Kabul prior to the period
of the Mujahedin and the Taliban and their current lives in the UK. In Zahra’s
experience, in pre-Taliban Kabul there were opportunities for women to be
educated and lead successful careers. There was freedom of expression and whilst
they were limited in terms of their political and religious roles, they were at least
able to influence such decisions through their conversations with men. In the UK,
the situation faced by women was harder in many respects.
On arrival many of the women were ‘psychologically shattered’, added to
which they encountered a new system that was ‘difficult and problematic’. Some
women overcame such circumstances but many faced an additional problem, that
of gender discrimination both at home, where men assumed the traditional role
of breadwinner, and in the public sphere as a consequence of inadequate child
care, lack of proficiency in English, and the fact that their qualifications were not
recognised in the UK. These factors all conspired to make it extremely hard for
professional women to assume their former careers as engineers, teachers, civil
engineers or doctors. ‘The consequences of this problem for women are anxiety,
depression, low self-esteem and a range of similar pressures’. We will return to this
shortly but there is a further dimension to Zahra’s testimony that is relevant here.
It is when she described what she refers to as the ‘huge responsibility’ all parents
have in the moral education of their children. For her, women have a particularly
important role in building strong relationships with their children based on trust
and sincerity. These views are sanctioned, she stated,
from the religious point of view, – all religions – and from the logical point of
view; each individual should behave in a way that is helpful to others. God loves
people who avoid committing bad acts and do good.
Zahra’s understanding of the particular issues facingAfghan women in the UK and
her powerfully held commitment to the role of parents and mothers in particular, in
the moral education of their children goes someway to explaining her own career
as a teacher. She managed and taught at an Afghan school in south Harrow. She
taught mother tongue and Afghan history and culture as a way of passing on the

‘positive and praiseworthy points of our culture’. At the same time she worked
with theAfghanAssociation as a member of their management committee, and was
responsible for the Association’s Women’s Group. She also organised seminars
and meetings around women’s issues. According to Zahra,
These meetings could play a positive role in terms of making positive changes
in the psychological state of these women. It is true that during the last 25 years,
the circumstances resulting from the war in Afghanistan have had an impact on
all Afghan people, but women have been affected most. It was women who lost
their husbands because of the war, they lost their breadwinners. They lost their
brothers. They lost their fathers, and as a result women had to look after the
family and their children on their own.
In the course of these meetings Zahra took notes documenting the stories and
experiences of her friends and eyewitnesses from Afghanistan and turned them
into short stories. She continued,
We then had a gathering organised by Jennifer’s organisation in Margate, where
I read one of these stories, in the presence of approximately 180 people. My
story was about the life of an Afghan woman who had lost her husband and
had to live with her children under the torture of the fundamentalists’ rules. In
that story, the problems faced by the Afghan women as well as her struggles
were described. This story received a welcoming and warm reception by all
audiences. I also read my second story at another gathering
Since 2002, she had worked as an advisor to Afghan refugees, assisting on such
issues as housing, education, health and asylum.
Njoki, inspired by his own early experiences as a refugee went on to establish
and participate in a number of refugee organisations. Like Aatifa, he emphasised
the difficulties in starting up refugee community organisations. Njoki appeared to
draw on three sources of motivation to undertake this work. The first was his faith,
or more specifically his understanding of the common ethical discourse across
world religions. What binds them, according to Njoki, was their common bond of
devotion supported by the ethical prescriptions as laid out in the Old Testament’s
Ten Commandments, all leading to mutual learning and respect. The following
extract helps to establish where this fits into Njoki’s motives:
You give to the poor you know, support those in need, refugee groups are
vulnerable needy people, some of them have fled from different circumstances,
very, very grave circumstances some of them, they’ve escaped death and they’re
really desperate people in need, honourable and the faith, the churches (help)
the British people understand, (make) them support them, take away wrong
feelings and wrong things from their minds and therefore take away things like
discrimination and racism and negativity to the refugees.

Racism, according to Njoki, has increased, at least in relationship to refugees
and asylum seekers. Legislation and media coverage have created an environment
in which services are harder to access, and destitution a more likely alternative.
Hence, the need for organisations to promote independence and empowerment
by providing information, training and advice on such matters as housing and
employment.
Of course, even when organisational support is recognised as a priority, the
process of building community organisations is not straightforward as he described
in the following extract:
…You got a passion, you got a conscience, you try to mobilise yourselves..
I love working with people. Bringing them together, looking at their history,
you know their life, why they’re here, what circumstances. (You have to) link
up with the relevant people here in the UK who can support such a group of
people, support such organisations you know. It wasn’t easy but we had to
sit down with some other community leaders .. and other relevant agencies
and other organisations who have resources who can support, target group for
refugees and asylum seekers, to come together you know, assess the needs, you
see, because this country being signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, is
obliged to, you know …to support refugees, people have fled from persecution
of all kinds.
In south London Njoki was involved in setting up the Uganda Mpya. As a starting
point, the aims and objectives were developed in consultation with a target group
of Ugandan refugees. Subsequently, the target group was broadened to include
all refugees and asylum seekers. This meant addressing different languages and
cultural traditions whilst at the same time seeking to provide a common voice for all
participating communities. Njoki went on to be involved in refugee organisations,
notably Aqua and the Organisation of Positive African Men (OPAM), both aimed
at settled refugee communities and new arrivals.
Like Carlos in the previous section, 56-year-old Hakim had a medical
background. In his case he had worked as a GP in Iraq and then in Algeria before
coming to London in 1992. However, in common with other refugees with medical
qualifications gained overseas, the educational and financial obstacles to gain UK
registration proved too much. It was during his unsuccessful attempts to pass the
MRCR exam that his wife began to run a small business to produce falafel with
some neighbours (who were Iraqi Jews) and sell it to small Arabic shops. As the
business grew, Hakim spent more time helping out until he made the decision to
abandon his efforts to secure his UK medical registration and focus on the business
full time. When asked directly, he described his own sense of achievement in terms
of the switch from his chosen profession to one where he had no experience and
no financial support. Over seven to eight years he built, according to his own
testimony, a successful business with its own factory, employing around thirty

people and with a reputation extending beyond London. For Hakim, an important
marker for both himself and his employees was that he and they moved from a
state of reliance on state benefits to one of independence.
There were numerous other examples of the interviewees involvement
in community development projects. Mehmed, aged 46, from Bosnia and
Herzegovina describes help that he received from community organisations and
how together with others he formed an organisation to help other refugees and
isolated older people, involving a variety of activities… taking older people to
hospital, organising the Bosnia and Herzegovina club in the Willesden area,
helping to translate leaflets and documents, organising social events for children
and teenagers and older people. He described it in the following extract:
for example… we have a Bosnian… supply school for Bosnian children, they
learn (the) Bosnian language and also some(thing) about Bosnian culture.
We have 11 supplementary schools in Great Britain, and (the) Bosnia and
Herzegovina UK Network organise… seminars for teachers and help them (find)
books and other things for school. You know, (it) is very important to have books
from Bosnia and it’s… Now … we also have some idea about (how to) organise
(the) Bosnian Diaspora in our ward.
Neylan, aged 34, who arrived in the UK in 1999 from Turkey, describes
voluntary work with children and taking a mental health advocacy course. She
also discussed working with women who have experienced domestic violence.
At that moment I said to myself we just have this language barrier to beat and
not knowing the language does not make us stupid. Surely not all refugees
are well educated but there are educated ones like me and it really hurts when
you experience such thing. I also witnessed it in that school where I worked
as a volunteer. Those children were capable but had language barrier and the
parents had difficulties explaining their concerns. I helped with that as well. I
also worked for a research project for women who were subjected to domestic
violence ran by a women’s organisation called Imece. I interviewed women who
were subjected to domestic violence.
Ana from Colombia has worked as a volunteer with different Latin American
groups, including women and older people, and has studied counselling in order to
be able to help refugees from Latin America. She has also taught Spanish songs to
school children to help them learn their culture and language. Such involvement
in community projects were explained by participants as rooted in a commitment
to family and community.

Cultural Tradition
The third value domain by which the participants understood their actions and
beliefs encompasses what are understood as traditions and beliefs, cultural forms
(literature, history, artefacts and so on) associated with their countries of origin.
However, the emphasis on tradition for both Asha and Abuna was not to value it
for its own sake but for a wider purpose that was to develop a sense of cultural
worth and belonging, particularly amongst the young. Moreover, neither Asha
nor Abuna believed in the essential goodness of all things past and/or the culture
exclusively associated with their countries of origin. On the contrary, they sought
to acknowledge the ‘good’ from the ’bad’ in all cultures in both their countries of
origin and the UK where they settled.
22-year-old Asha, living in the UK since 2000 and a student from Somalia
saw her role as a volunteer at her mother’s school and her studies as reflecting
her obligation to the Somali community. Her aim at her mother’s school was to
motivate others to ‘become someone’, and her degree was providing her with the
knowledge of African/Somali culture and history to help build a sense of self-
confidence and self- respect among young Somalis. The following serves to
illustrate the roots of Asha’s moral inspiration.
ZH
:And where did this passion come from?
Asha: .. I think the passion came from my mum the most .. she struggled so hard
to take care of us … (then) she decided she wanted to open a Somali community
(centre) to help her people like... I think in a sense I saw my mum fighting for her
own life....and I thought why not (me) like? I’m still a young kid I wanna give
back to my people as well.. educate my people in a sense because you know.. if
we don’t do it who else is gonna do it kinda thing.
Her experience working with her mother, for example taking elderly women to the
job centre, or helping them write letters pay bills, etc., raised her awareness of the
circumstances of others as she recalls in the following extract:
It’s a good thing doing the voluntary work, I get to know what.. how people
are living .. what people are doing, you know and just gives you back a lot of
respect and you just look back on your life and you’re like I’m taking a lot of
stuff for granted.
Her voluntary work coincided with her studies at the School of Oriental and
African Studies (SOAS) where she specialised in African and Somali culture. Her
ZH was one of the fifteen fieldworkers who were attached to each of the RCOs and
responsible for conducting oral history interviews from those communities (i.e. at least ten
in each case)

sense of obligation to the community, inspired by her mother, was now harnessed
to a thirst to learn where she came from, the values and achievements of Somalia
and its people, so that she in turn would be able to instill this sense of pride and
belonging in others.
Abuna, 46, living in the UK since 1993, was working as an editor for the
EthiopianArmedForces RadioProgramme,hisarticlesbroadcasteveryWednesday
and Sunday. However, when the Woyane [Tigray Liberation Front] government
took control of the Country he was one ‘of the army of Journalists’ to be sacked.
His commitment both to writing and to Ethiopia, prompted him to send 8–10 page
‘brochures’ or ‘Kimshas’ on the history of Ethiopian patriots to the children of his
friends. This in turn led him to work as a volunteer for an Ethiopian community
organisation distributing these Kimshas to Ethiopian children throughout London.
After studying photography at the college of North West London, he combined
free-lance photography with his interest in Ethiopian history. SOAS played a part
in shaping his interests and commitment, as it had for Asha. He describes this
process in the following extract:
After this day I started going to SOAS to discover what it has in its library. So
one day, (I) just accidentally got a book about the history of Postal Services in
Ethiopia. It was an old book written in about 1902. Due to this coincidence
therefore, I made a point of tracing the Postal History of Ethiopia. And
subsequently, I started visiting museums regularly. So one day I met some
stamp and coin collectors and asked them where I can find Ethiopian coins and
showed me where. Gradually my interest increased and continued digging about
our past and continued meeting intellectuals of different disciplines, political
leaders big and small, Ethiopian Veterans including the president … I am now
engaged in collecting and organising cultural Ethiopian antiques to organise a
cultural exhibition. I spent most of my time on that. And in addition, I have also
embarked on taking ceremonial pictures, like weddings, birthdays, etc. of the
Ethiopian Community in London.
And it was this growing interest in museums that sparked a more critical stand on
western museums as he indicates when he states:
If you go to British Library, they have acquired more than one thousand Ethiopian
church books of parchment; and they are available only in a controlled room.
When you come face to face with such priceless items that are separated from
their country of origin, you feel passionate for them and angered with those who
handed over them to foreign collectors. I have carried out different interviews
with the former Ethiopian officials, including the ex-president [Colonel Mengistu
Hailemariam], on the question of how much effort they made to bring back these
lost items to their country of origin, Ethiopia.

Henceforward, his ambition, successfully realized, was to organise exhibitions,
aimed particularly at the Ethiopian community in local venues, sometimes to
coincide with wider symbolically significant events, e.g. Black History Month
and the 20th
anniversary of the Ethiopian community in the UK. On display were
photographs and artefacts (medals, coins books, etc) to commemorate Ethiopia’s
cultural heritage.
Conclusions
There is obviously much in the data, even from the sample of thirty transcripts,
that we have not been able to consider. Moral motivations are obviously not the
only source of action and behaviour, hence there is much in the lives of the thirty
respondents omitted from this discussion. For example, many shared a sense of
attachment to London that did not derive directly from those moral frameworks
discussed above. On the other hand, we also omitted those testimonies, like that
of Binh, aged 50 from Vietnam, who worked in community organisations, but for
whom there was no sense of underlying motivation. In Binh’s case, it does not
appear that a question that might have elicited such a response was put to him (nor
did he voluntarily discuss his reasons). Hence, whether there was a consciously
held, ethically rooted motivation remains unclear. Fortunately for our purposes,
Binh was the exception. Others, as we have illustrated, did provide an account of
their lives in terms of a set of values that can be understood in moral terms, and
that were also reflected in their everyday actions and decisions and used to make
sense of, as well as refined by those experiences re-visited in their interviews.
Overall, there are a number of conclusions to draw from these testimonies. Of
interest here, are those that can inform wider debates surrounding refugee (and by
implication ethnic) identity and cultural cohesion. It has already been suggested
that an important assumption underpinning the Refugee Community Oral History
Project was that media coverage of refugees was both overwhelmingly negative
and undeserved and that the project sought to redress this by collecting a set of
narratives through the RCHP and disseminating them via a major exhibition that
illustrated the positive contribution of refugees to London. Whilst it is undoubtedly
the case that many of the testimonies collected fell into that category, it would also
be misleading to encapsulate their accounts simply in these terms. The transcripts
present a more complex relationship to notions of ‘achievement’, ‘contribution’
and ‘virtue’ as we have attempted to show.
Of course, there are many common strands running through the 164 interviews
reflecting the circumstances surrounding their flight to the UK, their treatment
on and since arrival and their relationships with diverse communities and groups
including their own in exile. However, underpinning their life stories were values
that steered their narratives and filtered events and experiences. Overwhelmingly
their stories reflected moralities that transcend our everyday accounts of success
and achievement. A ‘good’ refugee in this sense was not about being a celebrity,

nobel prize winner, or millionaire. On the contrary, what was aspired to was
invariably more mundane, less visible and less material, but arguably no less of a
contribution or achievement for being so.
Many of the thirty respondents expressed values that were by no means peculiar
to the refugee experience. We identified three value domains in this respect. In the
case of human rights and social justice there were differences in the extent to which
these ideas formed part of a broader political ideology (socialism, feminism etc.)
but whatever form they took, they looked remarkably similar to a spectrum of views
common across culturally distinct groups. Likewise, our sample’s commitment to
family (and to children, women, heterosexual and homosexual family/community
members) also resonated with discourses that transcended those of their particular
refugee community and indeed refugee communities in general. The strength of
commitment and obligation to community, understandable in the context of the
traumatic and shocking circumstances surrounding their forced migration and
settlement in the UK, relied on values (e.g. religious, feminist) that have a wider
appeal. Even in the case of the third domain, cultural tradition, which might well
be associated with more static, absolutist definitions of ethnicity, those indigenous
values associated with the country of origin were not celebrated to the exclusion
of others nor were they simply endorsed because they were seen as part of that
tradition.
Nevertheless, as we have already inferred, there were some experiences the
interviewees described which were specific to refugees, e.g. first hand experience of
war, violence and loss as well as their experiences of the UK systems encountered
for the most part with a sense of shock, anxiety and oppression. Importantly,
however, these experiences were both understood and helped to shape those values
referred to above. In other words, there was a process of negotiation, adaptation
and development. Nothing remained fixed.
This dynamic also applied to their subsequent life decisions e.g. to support
refugees in voluntary and paid work. In other words, their sense of moral motivation
and identity was forged through these experiences. Their accounts offer a way of
understandingthedynamicsofethnicityformation,amixofvalues,motivationsand
practices (Appiah, 2006) that form the basis of both differences and commonalities
within refugee communities and well as across those communities and beyond. It
is very likely that the process of selection skewed the sample of 164 refugees to
those with close ties to refugee community organisations. However, what was
interesting from our respondents were the ways in which conventional measures
of contribution and achievement, conceived within the context of meritocratic,
individualistic and materialistic values were redefined and reworked within
different value systems and moral imperatives.
It was clear from the interview transcripts that ‘refugee’, though a key category
in defining the project and its participants, was not a social identity readily taken
up and fully inhabited by those interviewed. Interviewees tended to reject refugee
as an identity connoting disempowered victimhood, passivity and dependence. In
contrast, through their accounts, they tended to position themselves as active and

independent agents working in their communities. In other words, they did not
speak about themselves working in organisations as refugees.
The evidence here raises serious doubts over the usefulness of the concept of
cultural cohesion, a term that has appeal in the context of post 9/11 developments
and the backlash against multiculturalism (see for example Runnymede, 2002).
Cultural Cohesion implies a static notion of culture, simplistic models of
‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ and a rationalist model of integration. What these
narratives confirm is the opposite, that cultures evolve as lives unfold, that new
stories are told, decisions made, and that experiences reflect these changes.
Secondly, that however hard we try to distinguish groups on the basis of a single
set of characteristics, not only do we have to contend, as we have shown, with the
impact of change on culture, but also with the infinite ways in which sameness
and differences can be understood. Finally, we have argued that there is more to
be gained from looking at values, moral motivations and how these serve to make
sense of experience and guide decisions and actions than an appeal to rationality.
To adapt a point made by Kwame Appiah, the goal is not cultural cohesion or
a shared identity but co-existence despite difference (Appiah, op.cit.). The
optimism that derives from these accounts is not that we are all cohering around a
common culture. Nor is it refugees are really are ‘good’ and have made a positive
contribution to London, but that our respondents developed their sense of what
was ‘right’ through experience and social interaction and negotiated their varying
ontological takes on the world accordingly, a process amenable to us all.
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Chapter 9
Narrating Lived Experience in a Binational
Community in Costa Rica
Carlos Sandoval García
Introduction
This chapter is based on a research project that looks at the interplay of social
factors, intersubjective relationships and processes of subjectification at work in
La Carpio.
Bordered on the north and south by polluted rivers and on the east
by the largest garbage dump in Costa Rica, La Carpio is a impoverished urban
community. Set in the western region of Costa Rica’s capital, San José, the
community was founded in 1994, when a small group of families took possession
of land owned by the Costa Rican social security system. With access to the
settlement limited to a single road, the community is effectively isolated from its
neighbours and from the metropolitan area. La Carpio’s population is relatively
young as 36.9 per cent of the community’s inhabitants are under the age of twelve.
The unemployment levels within the community are two points above the national
average at 8.11 per cent. A mere 0.69 of La Carpio’s households have personal
computers, a striking fact in times of technological optimism.
Carlos Sandoval-García is Professor at the Communication Sciences School and
the Institute for Social Research, both at the University of Costa Rica. His books include
Threatening Others. Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica
(2004, available also in Spanish) and Fuera de Juego. Fútbol, masculinidades e identidades
nacionales in Costa Rica (2006). He is coeditor of Nuestras vidas en Carpio. Aportes para
una historia popular (2007) and editor of El mito roto. Inmigración y emigración en Costa
Rica (2007).
This chapter is based on the project “La Carpio. La experiencia de segregación
urbana y estigmatización social”, which was carried out at the Social Research Institute
of the University of Costa Rica. Thanks must be given to the University of Costa Rica,
the Jesuit Migration Service of Central America and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for the
Anthropological Research for financing some of the stages of this initiative. My co-workers
in the project, Mónica Brenes-Montoya, Karen Masís-Fernández and Laura Paniagua-
Arguedas are not responsible for what is said here but they do deserve a very big thanks
for constituting a vibrant research team. Megan Rivers-Moore contributed to improve my
shaky English. The community of La Carpio deserves our gratitude for allowing the team
being confident of their collective history.

Perhaps most significant in the extreme marginalisation of La Carpio in the
national imagination has been its association with Costa Rica’s most stigmatized
immigrant population, Nicaraguans. In the media and in Costa Rican society
more broadly, Nicaraguan immigrants are represented as violent, dark skinned and
uneducated. As such they are often seen as a “threat” to Costa Ricans’ national
identity as white, peaceful and educated citizens (Sandoval, 2004). According to
the latest, 2000 census, 5.7 per cent of the Costa Rican population is of Nicaraguan
descent. Under the current migration law, which came into place in 2006, migrants
are entitled to apply for residency only if s/he has a child born in Costa Rica or the
husband or wife was born in Costa Rica; free union is not recognized for residency
purposes. There are temporal job permissions allowed for three occupations: paid
domestic work, agricultural jobs, and jobs in agroindustry. These permissions
have to be negotiated by the employers and the employees are not allowed to
change occupations. Job permissions do not authorize for applying for residency.
A rough estimation would suggest a third of the Nicaraguan community in Costa
Rica do not have a regular status and about a 40 per cent of irregular migrants
satisfy the requirements to apply for residency. However, often the costs of the
documentation process, the endemic bureaucracy of the Costa Rica’s General
Direction of Immigration as well as the lack of commitment of the Nicaraguan
authorities make it particularly hard to go through all the stages of documentation.
Of course, being ‘legal’ does not avoid being discriminated against but at least
formally means being considered with the same rights and duties as any other
citizen.
With a total population of approximately 22,000 people, almost one-half of the
La Carpio community is of Nicaraguan origin. The criminalisation of La Carpio,
combined with its association with the immigrant population, has allowed words
such as “migrant,” “Nica,” and “criminal” to become interchangeable.
The hypothesis of the research upon which this chapter is based is that the La
Carpio is both the geographical as well as the symbolic place where Costa Rican
society abandons what it does not recognize as its own. It is highly relevant that
the major garbage dump of the country was installed at the end of the community,
which implies that hundreds of trucks containing garbage cross the community
every day. Additionally, at the entrance of the community the public institution
responsible for supplying water is considering installing a treatment plant of
residual water, which is called in Spanish “aguas negras”, a highly racialized
utterance.
In short, both in the material domain – garbage and residual water – as well
as in the human domain – Nicaraguans and poverty – La Carpio is a site and
signifier of abjection. Nonetheless the desire to expel is not definitive since what
is expelled is required by the “core” society. Domestic workers, private guards
– outnumbering the public police – and construction workers who live in La
Carpio and similar communities all are required for the progress and modernity
of the country. Similarly, the obsoleteness of a vast number of artefacts and their
packages produces a growing amount of garbage that is required to be expelled from

Narrating Lived Experience in a Binational Community in Costa Rica 157
the human eye. In short, La Carpio illustrates ways in which what is considered
residual is at the same time indispensable.
This chapter is organized around three main themes. First, it locates La Carpio
in the wider context of urban segregation and cultural fundamentalism that prevail
in contemporary societies. Second, this chapter explores ways in which insecurity is
a major topic of conversation within the community and the extent to which media
imagery about the community provides the framing upon which the experience of
insecurity is thought. Third. it shows ways in which discrimination is internalized
by members of the community, especially by references to shame and the extent to
which discrimination can be contested. Lastly, this chapter also reflects on some
of the multiple factors that could explain why they often do not translate their
mobilizations into their narratives. It also explores the implications of this lack of
a more visible communal counter-memory for their collective identity formation
and their pursuit of practical not only formal citizenship.
Cultural Fundamentalism and Urban Segregation
In2004,twoimportantconflictsbroughttheLaCarpiocommunitytothefrontpages
of newspapers throughout Central America, further criminalising the residents. In
an initiative to verify residents’ immigration status, busloads of police entered the
community at 5:00 am on January 30th, pulling residents off buses and completing
a house-to-house search. Despite the detention of over 500 Nicaraguans, only 21
qualified for deportation. Several months later, the Constitutional Court condemned
the Costa Rican State for violating the human rights of those individuals who were
illegally detained. On May 31st, local organisations went on strike to protest the
Ministry of Health’s refusal to fulfil its agreement to assist the community. After
the police launched tear gas into the community to break up the protests, hundreds
of children in respiratory distress were rushed to nearby hospitals. A week later,
the police arrested a number of residents and held them in prison for over six
months.
La Carpio illustrates inequalities that are familiar in other Latin American
countriesandbeyond.Criminalisationofpoverty(Auyero,2001:19),foreignnessof
poverty (Grimson, 2005), and spatialization of inequalities are intrinsically related
to the community everyday life. Despite neoliberal promises, in communities like
La Carpio, the weak presence of public institutions has not been compensated for
by the active presence of the market. La Carpio might be considered a case study
of what Mike Davis (2006) has arguably termed a “Planet of Slums.”
Costa Rican society generally blames Nicaraguan immigration for the
undermining of social services and living conditions. There is a popular “fear”
that immigration “floods” are increasing. Hegemonic discourses on immigration
in Costa Rica maintain important similarities with what in Britain has been termed
“new racism” (Barker, 1981) or in France is known as “differential racism”
(Taguieff quoted by Balibar, 1991:21). In Costa Rica, Nicaraguan migrants are

perceived as “threatening others” (Sandoval, 2004). Difference has reinforced
inferiority as a key form of representing otherness. Racism, given its negative
socio-political meaning, is masked under anti-immigration discourses. This is
an example of “racism without race”, as several analysts have noted (Balibar,
1991:21; Stolcke, 1995:4).
In this context culture has become a crucial political arena. Verena Stolcke
(1995:5) has argued that “Contemporary cultural fundamentalism is based on
two conflated assumptions, the first that different cultures are incommensurable
and the second that, because human beings are inherently ethnocentric, relations
between cultures are by ‘nature’ hostile.” A key political implication of cultural
fundamentalismis that “culturalsameness is the prerequisiteto access to citizenship
rights.” (p. 8). Stolcke (1995:8) points out that “Instead of ordering different
cultures hierarchically, cultural fundamentalism segregates them spatially, each
culture in its place.”
This horizontal rather than vertical segregation coincides with material
processes that have driven cities in Latin America and elsewhere to new forms
of urban segregation (Wacquant, 2001:171–179). Interestingly, rhetoric about
inclusion/exclusion utilizes space as a key reference. Widening of income gaps,
cuts in public investment, post-fordist labour regulations, alongside new forms
of capital accumulation, especially associated with exportable products and
tourism, are among the main contributing factors to new changing forms of urban
segregation (Robinson, 2003:147–294; PEN, 2004:96).
Though the so called post Washington Consensus claims that social cohesion
is the clue for preventing exclusion, as has been stated by the European Union and
the latest summit of Latin American presidents held on Chile in 2008, it belongs
rather to the rhetoric than to the social fabric. In the mundane world, cohesion
emerges through exclusion. Gated communities and privatized consumer places
make possible the cohesion of the few and the unsatisfied expectation of the many.
Even though income gaps in Costa Rica are among the lowest in Latin America
(the most unequal region of the world), these have been increasing in recent years
(PEN, 2004:97). Urban segregation is perhaps the most apparent material reality
through which stigmatisation occurs. The growing income concentration that has
been taking place in Costa Rica throughout the 1990s is, for example, evident in
the contrast between high-income residential developments, which coexist with
impoverished communities, such as La Carpio, where public facilities are scarce.
Quoting Philippe Bourgois, one might say that La Carpio is a case of an inner city
enclave where “state policy and free market forces have inscribed spatially the
rising levels of social inequality” (Bourgois, 1995:322).
Thus the ideological shift from “race” to culture and the changing forms of
urban segregation reinforce one another, creating conditions for exclusion and
hostility. Both developments have been approached separately (though in Latin
America research on urban segregation has had much more attention than new
forms of racism) and, currently, it is time to consider their mutual implications.

Research on urban segregation has noted the irruption of fortified enclaves
as well as new forms of social exclusion. Fortified enclaves have been described
as “... privatised, enclosed and monitored spaces of residence, consumption,
leisure and work” (Caldeira, 2000:4). Urban exclusion is often coupled with the
criminalisation and racialization of impoverished communities. There is thus a
“spatialisation of inequalities” that in the case of Costa Rica’s capital, San José,
takes the form of exclusive urban developments which coexist with impoverished
communities. Many residents of these impoverished communities are domestic
workers employed by residents of these fortified enclaves. Discourses on citizens’
insecurity have come to replace social welfare policies as the frame for thinking
about the sense of community.
Economic segregation is scarcely new, recall Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail
Snyder (1997:85). What fortified or gated communities introduce are “physical
barriers to access, and they privatized community space, not merely individual
space.” (p. 88) Poverty then is no longer concentrated in the central city, but
dispersed into the suburbs (p. 89). As poor neighbourhoods are often isolated
from public services and other facilities we see a social and spatial move towards
what has been termed “dual cities,” where a weakened sense of community and
responsibility are often found (Auyero, 2001:11-12; Saraví, 2004:36).
Since stigmatisation is symbolically constructed through discourses but at the
same time is deeply related to material inequalities, this chapter is informed by
approaches that discuss what Marc Edelman (1999:5) terms “the complex interplay
between culture, power, and material realities and the possibility of a responsible
account.” The interplay between stigmatisation and material inequalities leave
traces in terms of subject formation. Social suffering (Kleinman, Das and Lock,
1997; Hayden, 2003:138) is a crucial concept through which it might be possible
to apprehend ways in which social forces such as stigmatisation and urban
segregation “become embodied in individual experience” (Farmer, 1997:261–2;
emphasis in the original).
“Your Life History Matters”
Social suffering as a point of encounter of the social, the intersubjective and the
subjective is not only an analytical tool to be explored empirically, but also an
ethical dilemma (Bajtín, 1977; Elias, 1990; Levinas, 2000). Rather than producing
another narcissistic account, the ethical and moral dilemmas around social suffering
require ethnographers to examine the implications of social research for the lives
of the dispossessed (Scheper-Hughes, 1997; Bourgois, 2002:419).
Loic Wacquant (2001:43-45) points out three methodological precautions. The
first is not to consider these communities as an aggregate of people, but instead
as an institutional form of life. Second, it is necessary to go beyond views that
assume these communities are an alien and exotic space, noting only what is
considered different from what is supposed to be the mainstream space. Third,

these communities do not suffer from “social disorganisation.” Instead these
communities are organized in a different form around intense competition and
conflict over scarce resources (emphases in original).
The community of La Carpio is a point of encounter for internal migrants
from rural areas (though they do not always perceive themselves as such) and
international migrants (mainly from Nicaragua). Although for many residents the
community has provided them with their first opportunity to own a house and to
share in a sense of community, La Carpio is differentiated and shows similarities
and contrasts within itself. As Wacquant (2001:131), notes “What from outside
seems to be a monolithic entity, is seen by its members as a subtly differentiated
pile of micro-localities.” From the outside, La Carpio is a symbol of criminality
and immigration, terms that have become interchangeable within Costa Rica. Thus
La Carpio means both the familiar and the threatening; articulating and mobilising
contradictory meanings.
Based on the above methodological considerations, the project invited the
community to write, draw or record their live experience in the community.
Adults, teenagers and children were invited to write about their lived experience as
residents of La Carpio. Within each category there was a male and female winner.
Illiterate contestants were invited to tape their testimonials. Small prizes were
given to the winners in each category. Media ads, posters and brochures were used
to promote this initiative. The initiative was launched as “Your life history matters.
Our lives in Carpio” and in the end 438 pieces were received. About half of the
pieces were done by children from the local primary school.
Testimonial writing has the peculiarity of being on the borderline between
fact and fiction, the personal and the social, the popular and the academic, the
everyday and the literary (Marcus, 1994). As Carolyn Steedman (2000:25) notes
“the production of written forms has something to do with the production of
subjectivities.” Testimony and autobiography offer the opportunity to explore
how gender, class, nationality, ethnicity are inscribed within a narrative (Stanley,
2000:45; Skeggs, 2004). This invitation was intended to mobilize the community
around the production of a counter-memory that “looks to the past for the hidden
histories excluded from the dominant narratives” (Lipsitz quoted in Easton,
2000:175). Rather than take for granted a repository of authenticity, “experience,”
following Ann Gray (2003:25), can be understood as a discursive ‘site of
articulation’ upon and through which subjectivities and identities are shaped and
constructed.”
Talk of Crime: Insecurity as a Major Narrative
In a good number of pieces written by members of the community as well as in
taped interviews, insecurity emerges as the main topic. Gangs and the police are
the main actors of most of the stories in which insecurity is the main topic. Gangs
are commonly known as “chapulines”, the Spanish word for grasshoppers, which

was popularized in the 1990’s by the government as a way of labeling children
and youths who live in the streets and were considered responsible for forms
of “mugging.” Despite the fact that “from outside” La Carpio is assumed to be
divided by criteria of nationality, “from within” the main distinction is established
between “chapulines” and the rest of the community.
Doña Isabel, a founder of the community, described the ways in which these
narratives of insecurity are subjectified. She remembered that some time ago a
priest visited her and said that the people from the community would leave it as a
consequence of fear. She replied: “‘No, not only because of fear but also because
of hurt.’ We feel ashamed when we have to say where we come from, especially
because of the media.” Doña Yamileth expressed a similar feeling: “It is sad to see
how the press and the media degrade us, sincerely it is depressing, I have lived
very hard times”. Sadness, hurt, shame are common words for expressing the
subjective consequences of being interpellated for these discourses.
The media discourse about criminality seems to provide the framing through
which often members of the community make sense of their lived experience
regarding criminality within the community. In most cases, criminality is
explained as a consequence of gangs (“pandillas”), which dispute territories among
themselves. The (ab)use of the term ‘gangs’ for describing young residents of
impoverished communities has been generalized both in media discourse as well
as by members of the community. Rare are cases in which lack of opportunities
and resources are mentioned as critical factors for the presence of crime. The
media visit the community only when an irregularity has taken place. Interviews
with members of the community who appear in the news often confirm what the
journalists have said about the community.
Crime news has replaced “national news” as the main journalistic narrative
about current events, especially in television and the press (Fonseca, 2005;
Fonseca y Sandoval, 2006) Tabloid press has its own forms in televisión (Langer,
1998, Glyn, 2000) Thus insecurity is not only an issue of everyday life and a media
event but also a way of approaching the social. Insecurity and fear have replaced
other ways of thinking in which public institutions and projects of future used to
be of primordial importance.
Nonetheless, the interpellation of discourses on insecurity among members
of the community is not absolute. A case in point is the piece written by Yesenia,
a teenager, who confirms that “the local is the place from which de-legitimacy is
resisted” as Beverly Skeggs (1997:11) has noted. She wrote: “I am in 8th grade
in the secondary school and this year my friends ask me ‘where do I live’. I reply
that in Carpio. They say that if they would live in Carpio they would feel ashamed
because it is an ugly place and there are many assaults. I tell them that it is what
people say. Delinquency is everywhere…” Yesenia is able to respond to what
friends think of her community. She compares La Carpio with other places and
above all she argues that the criminalized imagery of La Carpio is not the reality
but a discourse elaborated by those in power.

Doña Patricia, who participated in a focal group in 2004, gave an oppositional
reading on the media discourse on the community:
Journalists have marginalized us without taking notice that many working people
live here, who leave the community early in the morning seeking to make ends
meet, ticos, Nicaraguans, and from other nationalities too. This is what they
must look at. It would prevent us from being blamed when we to go clinics,
when we walk on the street or when we meet people and hardly say ‘we live in
La Carpio’. I am a person who does not care to say to anybody that I live in the
community of La Carpio.” (VV.AA, 2004:51).
It is surprisingly the similarity between what has being found in La Carpio and
what Loic Wacquant (2001:148–9) considers to be a common feature of the ‘citès’
in France. Wacquant (2004:22) argues that the withdrawal of the welfare state has
been replaced by the reinforcement of the penal system. Urban violence and youth
as main actor is part of the media framing which seeks to redefine social problems
in terms of insecurity and social control (Wacquant, 2004:69). The decline of
public investment has been coupled with an ideological inversion through which
depravation, a sort of moral weakness, is made responsible for rising criminality
(p.27). Depravation has replaced deprivation and surveillance has succeeded social
support as a precondition for the well being of a community (p. 48). Representing
insecurity as a major threat is a key way of justifying force as a method of social
control.
From Discrimination to Self-recognition
Members of the community note that the hegemonic view of them and their
community deploys images that depict them as “marginals”, “dirty people”,
“lowest class”, “animals”, “rascals”. Meanwhile the community is portrayed as
“dangerous”,asa“valuenessplace”.Theseimageshaveinterpellatedthecommunity
and often are subjectified in terms of shame, suffering and humiliation.
Shame is a particular manifestation of social suffering documented as part
of my preliminary research in La Carpio. As described in Voces de La Carpio
(2004), an edited selection of testimonials gathered during the second half of
2004, residents often either feel ashamed or are made to feel ashamed by others
when they have to report their place of residence. Nonetheless, while shame is
a common experience among migrants and other poor communities (Auyero,
2001:18; Wacquant, 2001:133), it is has not been a matter of systematic inquiry,
at least in Costa Rica.
Shameseemstoemergewhenhonourandrespectabilityareperceivedtobeunder
threat (Skeggs, 1997). “Shame is experienced,” says John Jervis (1999:172), “as a
fundamental flaw in identity.” Shame refers to the situation of being consciously
exposed to being seen. “One feels that one is seen under conditions that one would

not like to be seen.” (Grinberg y Grinberg, 1996: 122). Thus shame is a way in
which the experience of urban segregation and stigmatization is internalized. In
the interviews, images of shame came out.
For example, Alejandro, one of the leaders of the community said in a taped
interview: “Do you know what makes me feel full of sadness? To being visited by
my extended family and to see that here we have nothing, nothing but nothing.”
The repetition of “nothing” is highly relevant in itself. Later in his interview he
remembered the sensation of being framed by a TV news program as a drug dealer
and a speculator with housing projects in the community. A third experience he
quotes is a more institutional one. He remembers an occasion in which he visited
the National Company of Power and Light (Compañía Nacional de Fuerza y Luz).
He asked permission to enter the building and heard when the person with whom
he was going to meet say: “Let the son of a bitch in.”
Humiliation is the sensation produced by being ashamed and could be a way of
making sense of these three episodes narrated by Alejandro. Each of them located
experience in different settings: the family, the media and the institutional domain,
in all three settings shame refers to the lack of recognition and moral degradation.
Shame emerges as a way of experiencing power (Sayer, 2005:153).
Nonetheless, Elspeth Probyn (2005:xiii) notes that shame could enable people
to feel entitled to demand other forms of conviviality. In fact, members of the
community mention their wish both for personal recognition but also for the
recognition of La Carpio as part of Costa Rican imagery. Some of them note that
the point is not to ignore issues of drugs or criminality, these do exist, but the
question is why this is the only issue that is translated into a media event. Juan,
formerly member of a gang, argues that economic policies have pushed people to
live there. He continues:
When I came to Carpio I had feelings of humiliation. I came from a calm
neighborhood, from a nice neighborhood to a slum, where there were only tins:
It was humiliating for me as well as for my friends. Now I don’t feel ashamed of
saying I live in Carpio. I have overcome it even considering all those prejudices
people have about this place. I don’t care what they think. But I already spent
four, five, six years during which I didn’t say that I lived in Carpio. I didn’t want
to be judged by the place [of residence]. If I said my name is, people judged me
for what I was, but if I said that I lived in Carpio they treated me differently.
Thus to arrive to Carpio, in personal terms, was a feeling of humiliation and
rancor towards the society and the law came out. Later I felt love towards my
partner, towards my son, towards my family and towards God, without their help
I would go nowhere.
Juan insists in drawing a distinction between himself and his place of residence. It
took him several years to recognize in front of others that he lived in La Carpio. But
also he reflects on the fact that shame, the subjectification of being discriminated
against, produced in the context of social practices, came back to practices in terms

of his association with gangs and rancor towards what he calls “society and the
law”. In a third stage, his religious experience and the possibility of constituting a
family and being a father allowed him to transform rancor into love. These three
stages narrated by Juan share a search for identification and belonging. First, it
was an experience of disarray which is subjectified as shame and humiliation, then
it was a time for identification with gangs and lastly a religious conversion and
the possibility of having a nuclear family gave him a sense of being recognized.
Overall, Alejandro and Juan associate shame with their place of residence,
illustrating the centrality of place for the constitution of subjectivity and identity
formation.
Doña Maodi, another resident of La Carpio, who came from Nicaragua more
than 40 years ago, openly defies the sense of shame. She says: “I don’t feel ashamed
saying that I live here. Because I do know many people that feel ashamed of living
here. Then if I meet somebody and they ask me: ‘Where do you live?’. I respond:
‘In La Carpio. Any problem? If you have any problem, let me know now’”. Doña
Maodi is able to revert what she perceives as discrimination. The understanding of
the way in which she takes distance from the discourses that attempt to interpellate
her requires us to know her own life history:
I lived in a nice place… I had to pay rent. Over the years, employers don’t give
you a job because you are getting older. You don’t get a pension because a year
of quotas is missing. You don’t get a State pension because you are not old
enough … Then I live here with a modest sum of money that my husband gives
to me though we are separated. It allows me to pay water, electricity, phone and
nothing else. With the rest I make ends meet. Thank God I don’t pay rent.
Even though nobody in the community has legal property documents, having
a house gives Doña Maodi enormous satisfaction:
I feel very important because I, I, I, I got it , without the help of anybody else. It
had a cost for me. I did it based on my buttocks. Because I am dressmaker, I am
a tailor. I worked in a sweatshop. Well, my little buttocks can’t be seen. I saved
five out of every 10 cents I earned. I deprived myself of many things; I earned to
improve my house, to build it with concrete blocks. For me, for me it is nice. I
feel important. I feel important. I feel it is mine, I feel it is mine. In my poverty,
in my aging, I feel tranquil.”
Having her own house gives Doña Moadi a sense of self-worth; it allows her
the possibility of inscribing herself in the community and at the same time to be
recognized. It might be argued that she repeats the “I” many times not only to make
clear her claim to the interviewer, but because she would like to listen to herself as
a subject. She constitutes herself as a classed-woman (Skeggs, 2003:2–3).
Her self-worth comes not only from her more personal lived experience but
also emerges from a wider communal experience. She worked in the construction

of the primary school, the water supply system and the electricity network. She
remembers, for example, that after some mobilizations, the installation of the
water supply system was announced. “On my street, we all united and the water
was installed in two months and a half. It was because of the strike we did. And
all of us dug canals […] Ah, I danced in the middle of the street: ‘We deserve
it! It is our own! We got it! We don’t need somebody else!’” She values the
sense of autonomy. If in the process of narrating the building of her house the “I”
emerges, remembering the installation of water makes possible the “we”. In both
experiences, identity formation takes place in localized practices.
Missing Narratives for Lived Experience and Collective Memories
Although recognition is a key issue in Doña Maodi’s views, often members of
the community do not embody their own history of communal mobilizations
around public facilities. This gap between what has been lived and what is often
represented might have a relation with the available narratives and imageries by
which life histories are framed.
On the one hand, they do not have available framings by which to inscribe
narratives, nor sites into which to materialize their recent past. Important dates
such us the opening of the primary school, the beginning of the water supply
system or the establishment of the electricity network pass uncelebrated. Thus
lived experience does not enter into the domain of collective memory, and even less
in the field of the public history. On the other hand, listening is scarce. Elizabeth
Jelin (2002:85–86) mentions the importance of a “listening will”; David Morris
(1997:40) terms it “moral communities”. Others are required with capacity to
interrogate and to express curiosity for a painful past, combined with the capacity
of compassion and empathy. “Alterity in dialogue”, rather than identification, is
for Jelin (p 86) a clue. Such a position has not been performed by the Left. In fact,
for most of the academic or political Left, La Carpio is an “alien place”.
This difficulty of inscribing the efforts of everyday life tells us something
about the under-appreciation of it. Women, for example, who perform domestic
work, or a man who repairs shoes are not subjects of representation. This evidence
suggests that the task of representing everyday efforts requires narratives by which
to frame lived experience, but the translation of lived experience into narratives is
not an easy step.
Despite the fact that the community shares a large amount of collective
experience to secure services such as water, housing, education, electricity,
among others, such an effort is not a frequent topic in the stories. Nor members
of the community described in the stories as performing a job. As Elizabeh Jelin
(2002:28) has noted “forgetting is no absence or lack. It is the presence of an
absence.” A preliminary conclusion is that this absence is the consequence of a
lack of narratives through which to make sense of lived experience. Daily efforts
do exist but it is not easy to inscribe them into a collective narrative. Members

of the community often talk about their struggle to make ends meet, but they do
not consider either the possibility of writing about it or inscribing it in the wider
history of the community. The community does not have material referents about
its own history, such as places to remember the struggle for the water supply or
electricity, just to mention two cases. Clientelar politics is a critical factor for
explaining this difficulty. Clientelism diminishes community’s agency. People
perceive themselves as recipients of politicians who appear to be providers of
facilities.
Meanwhile, the media provides most of the available narratives, which portrays
the community as a “not to go place” in which migrants live. La Carpio is a sort
of inner border in the Costa Rican imagery. These imageries, produced especially
through stigmatized media discourses, do not register the everyday efforts made
by the community; they are naturalized without recognition of the enormous
individual and collective work which is invested in constructing a humble house
or a collective facility. La Carpio is often classified as “urban-marginal”, a
technical vocabulary in which public institutions and academics alike coincide.
This technocratic vocabulary has its correlative correspondence in everyday life.
Expressions such “Don’t be Nica” (No sea nica) and more recently “You seems
from La Carpio” (Parecés de La Carpio) translate hostility into common sense and
everyday life.
Members of the community do know that their community can not be reduced to
criminalized stories provided by the media. In fact they criticize such accounts, but
what is more difficult is how to advance a collective self identification from which
to claim citizen rights. Their main reservoir is their own history, but the translation
of it into narratives and collective identifications is not an easy challenge.
A political culture based on lived experience of impoverished communities
is a challenge not only for La Carpio and communities alike, but also for the
Costa Rican society as a whole. After almost 30 years of neoliberal policies,
the institutional conditions that have allowed better living conditions in Costa
Rica compared with neighbouring countries, have been diminished. Resistance
towards neoliberal policies has meant the politicisation of wide sectors of Costa
Rican society especially around the referendum for the (Free) Trade Agreement
between Central American countries and the Dominican Republic with the United
States. A major task is how to widen the agenda in such a way that politised
sectors recognize the importance of articulating those demands of impoverished
communities, usually ignored despite their everyday efforts and struggles to make
ends meet.
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Chapter 10
Conclusion:
Ethnicity and Ethicality in an Unequal World
Gargi Bhattacharyya
What about multiculturalism? This volume started life as an attempt to revisit the
debate about the untimely demise of multiculturalism, but from a different starting
point. Whereas critics and mourners alike have focused their attention on the
social costs or benefits of allowing alternative values systems space in public life,
the pieces in this volume have attempted, instead, to consider the place of ethical
choice in the performance of ethnicity. This has been an exercise in examining
where values fall in the conception and articulation of ethnic identity.
In part, this revisits inevitably questions about the ethical responsibilities of
race and ethnic studies. Such questions have remained as a muted thread in the
development of the subdiscipline, in as much as it can be understood in disciplinary
terms. In common with some other related areas, such as gender studies, race and
ethnic studies has been animated by a sense of the social responsibility of the
discipline. The contribution from Howard Winant situates this volume within that
debate. If we are asking questions about the place of values in the articulation of
ethnic identity, then we must, inevitably, also ask about the values that inform
the analysis of ethnicity. The internal debate of the field is conducted against the
knowledge that scholarly work may be misappropriated for other ends. Although,
of course, there are those who continue to champion the admirable goal of the
pursuit of pure knowledge, for many others the sense that their work may contribute
to a social machinery over which they have no control creates a heavy sense of
responsibility. This can be seen in the pieces by McVeigh and Sandoval-Garcia
that challenge the continuation of ideologies of racism, in Bhachu’s assertion that
we must extend the range of possible understanding or ‘just shut up’ and in pieces
by Ugba and Gabriel and Harding that seek to give voice to groups who find
themselves subject to new articulations of demeaning racism. However, although
these could all be regarded as rebuttals to critics of multiculturalism, none focus
their attentions on an explicit celebration of what multiculturalism could be.
Instead, contributors to this volume appear sympathetic to the suggestion by Paul
Gilroy that,
A widespread failure of imagination has limited the ambitions of a cosmopolitan
approach to the political lives of multicultural societies. (Gilroy, 2003: 261)

In the feverish attacks on multiculturalism that have been launched in public
debate, in most part from the political right or from those who feel that the politics
of identity has obscured more urgent political goals, it can be forgotten that
many others, including those who wish to celebrate human diversity, also have
been uneasy with the framing of multiculturalism. Paul Gilroy opens a quietly
reproachful piece with the allegation that institutionalisation of multiculturalism
has led to a limiting of aspiration for us all. This is not a call for a return to a
supposedly colour-blind meritocracy, where each of us can be all that we can be.
Instead Gilroy alludes to a far larger and expansive goal, that we should relearn
connection to each other and our mutual frailty on this small and vulnerable
planet.
The debate about the place of ethics in the performance of ethnic identity
also skirts around these larger questions. The assertion of identity in the face of
discrimination and violence can, as we have learnt, becoming exclusionary in
its turn. To limit the aspirations of any political movement to no more than the
achievement of the rights given to the privileged, or to the majority, or to those who
have wielded ethnic power and violence, stymies our collective imagination. In
many ways, the attempts by refugees, ghetto-dwellers, women activists or African
churchgoers to present a superior ethical stance in the face of dehumanising racism
is closer to the planetary humanism that Gilroy describes. This, in part, has been
the linking concern of this volume: to what extent can ethical choices made in the
name of ethnicity put forward a vision of society without racism.
Unfortunately, the undoubted desirability of such a possibility is hampered by
the continuing violence of racism and division in the world. This work concludes
by returning to debates about the processes of racialisation, the continuation of
ethnic divisions and the emergence of new structures of inequality and social
exclusion, albeit in a manner that builds on longstanding inequalities.
Richard Sennett argues in his acclaimed work, Respect (2004), that the social
glue that bonds us together requires not only an absence of prejudice. Human
well-being also requires respect from others, including, importantly, from those
who purport to assist you. Sennett refers in particular to those who are the
recipients of charity or welfare. His point is that there is a discomfort in receiving
assistance, most of all when it is clear that this assistance is required. The transfer
of aid confirms the authority and status of the giver, or of the professional who
administers such aid on behalf of the state or other beneficent organisation. Both
the confirmation that the recipient is needy and the act of accepting such assistance
damage the self-image of those who accept aid. For this discomfort to be liveable
for both parties, there must be a demonstration of respect. Otherwise, even the
alleviation of genuine need can become a cause of resentment.
The performance of ethical worth by those who face racism or social
disrespect can be understood as another example of this need for respect. Some
of the examples of this volume refer to instances where racialised groups adopt
the language of ethics as a response to the demonisation of the dominant culture.
Following Sennett, such tactics could be seen as assertions of worth that go beyond

Conclusion: Ethnicity and Ethicality in an Unequal World 171
an appeal for rights or access to resources. Whereas the pursuit of multiculturalism
or pluralism has focused on achieving rights for all groups, including some rights
of cultural recognition, even the language of ensuring rights for the disadvantaged
can imply a disrespectful condescension. The assertion of a more developed
ethical sensitivity, as claimed by African churches in Ireland or ‘good’ refugees
in London, is a refusal of this allegation of lack. Instead of tolerance, the claim of
an alternative and superior ethical frame demands a re-evaluation of the terms of
worth and respect.
Arjun Appadurai also argues that some of the inter-ethnic tensions of our time
can be understood through ideas of respect – but in his account the perception
of being slighted fuels greater tensions. In his account of the ‘geography of
anger’, Fear of Small Numbers, Appadurai describes the excessive violence that
majorities can exercise against minorities. He argues that this is an outcome of
an anxious anger at the challenge to wholeness, purity and coherence that small
groups represent to ambitious majorities and proposes the concept of the predatory
identity to explain the particular dynamic of this defensive posture;
I define as predatory those identities whose social construction and mobilization
require the extinction of other, proximate social categories, defined as threats to
the very existence of some group, defined as a we. Predatory identities emerge,
periodically, out of pairs of identities, sometimes sets that are larger than two,
which have long histories of close contact, mixture, and some degree of mutual
stereotyping. Occasional violence may or may not be parts of these histories,
but some degree of contrastive identification is always involved. One of these
pairs or sets of identities often turns predatory by mobilizing an understanding
of itself as a threatened majority. This kind of mobilization is the key step in
turning a benign social identity into a predatory identity. (Appadurai, 2006, 51)
The world thatAppadurai describes can be recognised in a range of recent instances
of inter-ethnic violence, including the uneven but long-standing communal
divisions of India and the mobilisation of this sense of enmity in the politics of the
Hindu right and its allies, the re-emergence and electoral gains of far right anti-
immigrant parties across Europe and the teetering in and out of inter-community
violence that has characterised post-Saddam Iraq. Appadurai’s argument relies on
the reader’s familiarity with such examples in the well-known media narrative
of recent ethnic violence. This volume has steered away from attempts to issue
general theories of ethnic division and contributors here have preferred to limit
their contributions to commentaries on the playing out of ethnic identities in
particular sites. However, there is a strand that runs through chapters that suggests
a need to comprehend the actions of the self-defined ‘threatened majority’. The
shift that Appadurai is identifying is a continuation of analyses of ethnic violence
that seek to understand the psychology of the mob, or, more precisely, the process
by which ordinary people can be transformed into a violent ethnic mob (Horowitz,
2001). This is not an examination of the more tidy business of material interests

(although famous accounts remind us of the role of such interests, for example
Chua, 2003) or of the machinery of the liberal state that seeks to continue racism
while expressing allegiance to anti-racist ideals. Instead, this has tended to be a
literature that examines the implicit connections between the actions of powerful
players such as states and on the ground violence between ordinary people,
including ordinary people who have lived together peaceably in previous times.
However, as in Appadurai’s formulation, it is a dynamic that equally can include
the actions of the very powerful, those who are the public embodiment of the
majority and its identity. Perhaps the suggestion of becoming predatory could
include the process through which the non-aligned come to see themselves as part
of the majority – and with an investment in its defence.
This is the unseemly alliance that is implied in Appadurai’s suggestion that
we have entered an era of ideocide, where the framework of cultural racism has
become inscribed in international politics and the desire to annihilate has been
transferred to those who allegedly harbour another set of beliefs.
Ideocide is the term that points to a widespread, indeed global, phenomenon, a
new and serious phenomenon, whereby whole peoples, countries, and ways of
life are regarded as noxious and outside the circle of humanity ... This sentiment
is too strong to be called a clash of civilizations. It can be better called a clash of
ideocides or a clash of civicides. The politics in question is more than ethnocidal
or even genocidal, since those terms have their anchors in the hatred of “internal”
minorities. Ideocide or civicide turns this sentiment outward and targets whole
ideologies, large regions, and ways of life as outside the pale of human ethical
concern. (Appadurai, 2006: 117)
What Appadurai describes is the transformation of localised racial or inter-ethnic
hatreds into transnational politics. However, instead of framing this as ‘race war’,
the terms of ideocide include an appeal to values.The hated other must be destroyed
because, by their apparent adherence to an alternative set of beliefs or code of
behaviour, they come to embody the less-than-human or even the outright evil.
This is the transformation of inter-ethnic hatred and violence (and perhaps other
forms of inter-group hostility) into a matter of competing ethical world-views.
Whereas the cry to destroy the untermensch or the cockroaches continues, even in
these supposedly post-racial times, this is a localised violence unleashed among
those who are familiar to each other, it seems. |Hatreds with global ambitions, those
that are the stuff of speeches from podiums or mountain-tops that are broadcast via
global media, declare their own moral superiority. Here the other deserves to die
not because they belong to a lesser breed but because their behaviour has proved
their irredeemable depravity. Even after the departure of Bush junior, the promise
to extend and intensify the US military presence in Afghanistan indicates that this
dynamic of competing accounts of what is good and what justifies violence will
be with us for some time. The other aspect of the concept of ideocide is that it
can be used to veil racism. The imputation of ethical lack allows a pretence of

reason – this is a serious evaluation of the worth of these people. A number of
chapters here highlight the move away from explicitly racial discourse in public
life – whether this is the racism without racism described by Lentin or McVeigh or
the collapsing of neighbourhood, ethical character and ethnic identity described by
Sandoval-Garcia. However, despite this, all contributors remark on the resilience
of the phenomenon of racism, albeit it in coded ways.
Both Sandoval-Garcia and Farrar suggest that the location influences the
manner in which a racialised account of the ethical is understood and perpetuated.
In different ways, both of these pieces indicate the translation of global forces into
local contexts. Farrar argues that the resort to violence that is advocated by some
in Islamic political groups in Britain continues a tradition of radical British politics
that considers violence to be a legitimate and perhaps inevitable response to state
repression. However, the expression of this violent resistance takes meaning
within an urban context where ‘the state’, or at least, its agents, are considered to
be identifiable and accessible. Sandoval-Garcia’s piece focuses on a stigmatised
region – but in the process produces an account that references a larger set of
transformations in the construction and narration of urban spaces. There has been
a considerable literature examining the coincidence of demonisation of place
and demonisation of particular communities (Loney and Allen, 1979; Harrison,
1983). Loic Wacquant (2008) has argued that we have entered an era of advanced
marginality, a frightening time when rapid economic restructuring has destroyed
many of the regular and respectable forms of employment available to the urban
working classes. As a result, inhabitants of the decaying neighbourhoods of
formerly industrial cities, a group that includes those who would have belonged,
formerly, to the relatively affluent workforce of industrial society, those who have
fallen through the increasingly porous ‘safety net’ of public welfare systems and
migrant populations who face barriers in both the labour market and in public
life. All suffer from what Wacquant terms ‘territorial stigmatisation’ – their social
marginalisation becomes intertwined with their place in the city, a region that itself
takes on the stigma of its inhabitants.
As the processes of global economic integration continue to transform urban
life across continents, these spaces of dispossession are becoming more apparent
in cities the world over. When Mike Davis (2006) predicts the rapid arrival of
a planet of slums, the residents of these expanding slums also experience the
advanced marginality that Wacquant identifies. Analysts of the banlieue, of the
shanty-town, of the projects, all discuss a version of this stigmatisation of place
– and in each location, racialisation, economic deprivation and the accusation
of moral turbulence combine to taint social identities and limit life chances
(Jargowsky, 1997; Hannerz, 2004; Venkatesh, 2000).
The United States can rightfully lay claim to being the first society of advanced
insecurity in history. Not just because it engenders – and tolerates – levels of lethal
criminality incomparably greater than those prevailing in other postindustrial
societies ...., but in the sense that it has elevated insecurity as an organizing

principle of collective life and a key mode of regulation of individual conduct
and socio-economic exchanges. (Wacquant, 2008, 119)
The uneven development of cities and other zones appears to both perpetuate
the exclusion of those stigmatised through racialisation and to create new social
divisions that confuse racial, economic and moral boundaries. As a result, there
is a return of accounts of social disadvantage that blame the disadvantaged, with
a familiar fixation on the intergenerational reproduction of questionable moral
codes (Cebulla, 2005). For the purposes of this volume, the central issue here is
the suggested connection between this stigmatisation of place and narratives of
moral inadequacy, sometimes posited against the myth of national values.
There is, of course, an older literature that describes the close coincidence
between the abandonment of decaying neighbourhoods and the social exclusion of
those who remain (Harrison, 1983). However, for some decades during which there
have been attempts to regenerate the post-industrial city, there has been a hope that
stigmatised neighbourhoods can be recreated as sites of exciting urban lifestyle
(Bianchini and Parkinson, 1994). The return to debates about the lost regions of
the city signals the failure of such initiatives for many. It is also a recognition of
the importance of urban growth in any account of recent capitalist development.
While it may be true that the still somewhat nebulous forces of globalisation have
remade the global economy in a manner that leaves few places untouched, it is
also the case that cities continue to represent both the concentration of capital and
significant nodal points in transnational capital flows. The fact that this continues to
occur in a relatively haphazard and unplanned manner only increases the tendency
to create zones of exclusion within the city itself. Recent proposals in Britain to
rework equality legislation to include a public duty to address socio-economic
disadvantage are informed by debates about this spatial distribution of economic
disadvantage (Dorling et al., 2007)
This is a body of research that argues that social disadvantage arises in highly
unequal societies from a combination of discrimination against particular groups,
lack of access to key resources, a pronounced lack of such shared resources in
stigmatised neighbourhoods and a relegitimisation of prejudice when redirected
towards failing neighbourhoods as opposed to failing groups or communities.
At the same time, the spatial concentration of racialised disadvantage can
operate to reconfirm moral condemnation of the racialised poor. A well-known
example can be seen in the condemnation by Nicholas Sarkozy, now Prime Minister
of France but then Interior Minister, of youthful residents of the Paris suburbs after
the disturbances of 2005. Such pronouncements were notable as a rare departure
from the orthodoxy of mainstream French politics that decrees that all should
be seen as citizens of the Republic above all else, and certainly above any sub-
national ethnic allegiance. In a nation that forbids the collation and monitoring
of ethnic data, unlike the highly developed systems of ethnic monitoring that
underpin equality legislation and practice in Britain and the US, such an allegation
of non-belonging broke previous norms of political acceptability. The implication

of Sarkozy’s intervention was that these social problems arise from the culture of
the banlieue – and that, therefore, the moral judgement was a comment on social
deprivation not any racial or ethnic group.
Such a commentary returns to ideas of ethnicity as a symptom of moral
character. Although there continues to be a quite active disavowal of biological
racism in mainstream political debate across the world, the implication that some
live in squalor because that is their destiny remains strong. Urban segregation
gives a spatial embodiment to fantasies of them and us. If there is no boundary
marked by different physiology then the demarcation of urban space can naturalise
inequality and social distance through another means.
This resurrection of a widespread mythology of the bad neighbourhood as new
embodiment of racialised danger – representing both where the dangerous reside
and the site of the inter-generational reproduction of social danger – takes place
alongside the emergence of what Mike Davis terms a ‘planet of slums’. This is an
unforeseen consequence of a globalised economy, even in a time when the more
celebrated aspects of that global integration appear to be falling apart. Financial
industries may be absorbed into the state and the governments of developed
economies may argue that we are entering a new phase of global co-operation
that requires new rules of engagement, but alongside all of this, the world’s poor
continue to be crammed into increasingly sprawling unplanned urban outgrowths.
The ways of life that previously sustained much of the world’s population, most
of all subsistence agriculture, are no longer a feasible or attractive option for
many. Instead, the cities of the poor world grow exponentially, with new arrivals
constantly expanding a new world of vast urban expanses with no necessary centre,
core economic activity or even basic infrastructure (UNFPA, 2008).
Mike Davis argues that the burgeoning cities of the poor world and our
global tolerance of mass urban poverty not only come to represent a dangerous
other in highly racialised terms, these danger zones that operate alongside the
privileged nodal points of the global economy also create the conditions for
violent ethnic mobilisation. In an echo of Wacquant, Davis argues that the lack
of formal institutions opens opportunities for a variety of power struggles and
alliances of necessity. The uncertainties of the informal sector, and the absence of
more organised, unionised industries, lead to a situation where the ability to work
relies too often on patronage – and, as Davis writes, this can translate into a need
for ‘membership in some closed network, often an ethnic militia or street gang’
(Davis, 185). In the absence of formal institutions, ethnic politics can emerge as an
alternative system of everyday governance and gang-administered order.
However, equally, the claims of ethical connection can be used to remake
community in urban or formerly urban areas that have been abandoned by formal
institutions. Writing of attempts to remake New Orleans in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, BondGraham summarises a familiar series of events in the
decline of some urban neighbourhoods in developed economies,

the basic dynamics that sustain racial segregation; non-white urban migration
and concentration, spillover into accessible and marginalized neighborhoods,
reactionary white flight from many of these integrating areas, and the consequent
social-urban ecological decline that results from environmental racism and
neglect (BondGraham, 2007: 6)
However, alongside this process of demonisation and devaluation, BondGraham
identifies another response from residents – an allegiance to place that expresses
a counter-narrative to the dominant portrayal and actual material deprivation of
their neighbourhood,
Although it is poor, segregated, scorned by outsiders, criminalized, redlined,
overpoliced,and now finally flooded to Noahic proportions, New Orleans
remains an assemblage of terrains imbued with so much meaning, nesting so
much struggle and power, history and community. That residents of the 9th
Ward like Jackie are returning to rebuild, even without pledges from city leaders
that their neighborhood will be provided with sewerage, gas, and electricity is a
testament to the power of place. (BondGraham, 2007: 5)
The power of place results in a public pledge to the possibilities of affective
relations, personal and community history and the complexity of everyday lived
affinities – a pledge demonstrated in the pig-headed optimism required to begin
rebuilding, in the absence of a supporting infrastructure or any reassurance from
city leaders about the viability of the return. This tension between the attempts of
the least privileged to hang on to a sense of place and the institutional neglect that
allows their neighbourhoods to be overlooked in any plans to rebuild or provide
basic amenities could be seen as an instance of the global forces that are being
played out in many locations. Despite the scale of the global processes that work
to displace and further impoverish the poor of the world, everyday life throws up
many examples of how people struggle to both survive and retain their humanity
in the most inauspicious of circumstances. Once again, the claim of ethical worth
becomes a way to resist the forces of dehumanisation.
However, the articulation of ethical values is itself a contested issue. Shane
Brighton has argued that the assumed shared values that are necessary in order for
the diversity of multiculturalism to function and be comprehensible to all players
have been undermined,
multiculturalism requires the invocation of a value- and identity-laden ‘meta-
community’which overlays and provides a shared communal framework for all.
But this framework cannot be sustained—or no longer seems to be sustainable—
in its original terms of mutual recognition and tolerance. It is now subject to the
double duress of politically assertive minorities and political intervention from
central government. (Brighton, 2007: 12)

Brighton argues that the take-up of violence as an expression of community will
represents a response to the limitations of multiculturalism. Here, violent action that
claims ethical intent serves as a means of invoking community. Groups who have
quite tenuous internal bonds can be hailed into belonging through participating in
the myth-making that surrounds spectacular violence.
They also serve simultaneously to invoke—or, perhaps more accurately, create
a community and its values. The spectacle of sanctimonious violence connects
a dispersed and diffuse population as a community: one to be identified through
the victimhood of its past and present, the collective vulnerability of its future,
and the ethical and historical imperative to identify with and act as part of it.
From this we might conclude that the instrumental character of these attacks
was not that of a traditional act of force in pursuit of a set political end—at least
where that end is understood as some desired decision or material disadvantage
on the part of an enemy. Rather, their instrumentality was to realize an entire
community and assert the most distinctly political of its features: the relations of
enmity which must be recognized to achieve its survival. (Brighton, 2007, 15)
However, as Brighton points out, this concept of ‘intervention in the name of an
ethics of responsibility’ (Brighton, 2007, 15) is not the domain of terrorist groups
alone. This is the rhetoric that has informed the military interventions of the Blair
years and has been elevated to the status of foreign policy doctrine. From Robert
Cooper’s advocacy of postmodern empire (Cooper, 2004) to the wider debate about
the role of force in humanitarian intervention (Chandler, 2006), the depiction of
the resort to violence as an ethical responsibility has been a recurrent theme in
justifications of the actions of powerful nations.
It is in this debate about the actions necessary to safeguard the privilege and
security of affluent nations that we can see a coming together of the concepts of
ideocide and stigmatised territory. The proponents of new empire have been eager
to point to the fanatical belief systems that motivate enemies of western values
– and a version of ideocide has been proposed as a necessary response to this
threat. However, at the same time, there is a parallel commentary that recognises
the potential disruptions that can arise from continuing and increasing poverty in
a global economy that was celebrated as a route to affluence for all. As a result, as
we leave the explicit antagonisms of the war on terror, we enter an era where the
security doctrines of the affluent world are shaped by visions of danger that reside
both in alien belief systems and in the unmapped zones of urban poverty across
the world.
Mike Davis summarises a range of debates in the field of security studies to
explain the recent focus on the dangers of the expanding, desperately poor and
unknowable city. “The mega-slum … has become the weakest link in the New
World order” (Davis, 2006, 204). This is the space where new political and
ideological forces emerge and organise, where the reach of global markets or global
security machinery falters and where the majority of the world’s dispossessed and

voiceless population is destined to reside. Whether framed as a ‘war on drugs’ or
a battle against insurgents, this is the imagined terrain of the battles of the coming
century.
Pentagon doctrine is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world
war of unlimited duration against criminalised segments of the urban poor. This
is the true “clash of civilisations. (Davis, 2006, 204)
Battles about ethnic identity and values are likely to continue in the decades ahead
– the demonisation of the urban poor will carry on, now as a narrative to link the
perceived dangers of near-at-hand and far-away and the urban poor will keep on
articulating alternative visions of ethical life that give space to their humanity. If
scholarship has an ethical responsibility, perhaps it is to listen for this other story.
References
Appadurai, Arjun (2006) Fear of Small Numbers, An Essay on the Geography of
Anger, Durham, Duke University Press.
Bianchini, Franco and Parkinson, Michael (1994) Cultural Policy and Urban
Regeneration, The West European Experience, Manchester, Manchester
University Press.
Brighton, Shane (2007) ‘British Muslims, multiculturalism and UK foreign
policy’, International Affairs 83: 1.
Cebulla, Andreas (2005) Welfare-to-work: New Labour and the US experience,
Aldershot, Ashgate.
Chandler, David (2006) From Kosovo to Kabul (and beyond): Human Rights and
International Intervention, London, Pluto.
Chua, Amy (2003) World on Fire, How exporting free market democracy breeds
ethnic hatred and global instability, London, William Heinemann.
Cooper, Robert (2004) The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-
First Century, London, Grove Press.
Davis, Mike (2006) Planet of Slums, London, Verso.
Dorling, D,, Rigby, J., Wheeler, B., Ballas, D., Thomas, B., Fahmy, E., Gordon,
D., Lupton, R. (2007) Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005,
Bristol, Policy Press.
Gilroy, Paul (2003) ‘Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night’: Homogeneous
Community and the Planetary Aspect, International Journal of Cultural
Studies vol. 6., pp. 261.
Hannerz, Ulf (2004) Soulside, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Harrison, Paul (1983) Inside the Inner City, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Horowitz, Donald L. (2001) The Deadly Ethnic Riot, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
University of California Press.

Jargowsky, Paul A. (1997) Poverty and Place, Ghettos, Barrios and the American
City, New York, Russell Sage Foundation.
Sennett, Richard (2004) Respect: The formation of character in an age of
inequality, Penguin, London.
UNFPA (2008) The State of the World Population 2007, Unleashing the Potential
of Urban Growth, http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2007/english/introduction.html.
Venkatesh, Sudhir (2000) American Project, The Rise and Fall of a Modern
Ghetto, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Wacquant, Loic (2008) Urban Outcasts, A Comparative Sociology of Advanced
Marginality, Cambridge, Polity.

Index
9/11 26, 47, 67, 103, 114, 153
abjection 30, 156
Agamben, Giorgio 65, 67, 69, 70, 80
Anthias, Floya 70
anti-social behaviour 4, 6
asylum 23, 34, 67, 70, 77, 122, 146
asylum-seeker 23, 68, 72, 78, 79, 120,
121, 147
belonging 1, 3, 4, 6–8, 11–13, 29–30, 66,
119, 123, 128, 129, 135, 149, 150,
153, 164, 174, 177
Bourdieu, Pierre 8
Britain 5, 6, 8, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
31, 33, 34, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50,
51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 60, 62, 71, 81,
103, 104, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114,
115, 116, 117, 118, 148, 157, 173,
174, 178
Brubaker, Rogers 2, 33, 120, 128, 129,
132
Christianity 122, 125, 129
citizenship 4, 7, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71,
72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 89, 92, 157,
158
class (social) 40, 47, 48, 50, 60, 62, 88,
106, 107, 110, 125, 160, 162, 164,
173
community cohesion 3, 4, 6, 27, 31, 33,
34, 153
cosmopolitan 169
cultural producers 28, 46, 47, 58, 60, 62,
63, 64
Davis, Mike 157, 173, 175, 177, 178
democracy9, 18, 37, 39, 41, 116, 178
detention 67, 81, 140, 157
diaspora 28, 37, 40, 45, 46, 52, 58, 61, 62,
66, 71, 91, 148
ethics 1, 3, 4, 12, 28, 32, 45, 97, 137, 139,
153, 170, 177
ethnicity 1–5, 7, 11, 12, 13, 27, 28, 30, 42,
55, 63, 65, 66, 83–86, 95, 96, 110,
112, 136, 137, 152, 160, 169, 175
ethnicity denial 30, 84, 86, 92, 94, 95,
96, 97
family 12, 17, 20, 30, 31, 56, 62, 63, 70,
73, 78, 85, 103, 122, 126, 130,
131, 137, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146,
148, 152, 163, 164
feminism 13, 15, 16, 17, 108, 143, 152
Foucault, Michel 65, 67, 72, 80
gender 15, 25, 28, 40, 41, 65, 66, 69, 70,
71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 114,
127, 128, 137, 139, 143, 145, 160,
169
ghetto 37, 43, 170, 179
Gilroy, Paul 64, 104, 106, 107, 109, 111,
112, 117, 120, 127, 128, 132, 169,
170, 178
globalisation 5, 25, 28, 65, 99, 174
homo sacer 67, 69, 80
immigrant 6, 7, 22, 29, 30, 33, 37, 49, 51,
55, 61, 68, 70, 72, 79, 81, 82, 83,
93, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124,
127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135,
156, 171
Ireland 28, 29, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70–80,
84, 91, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100,
119–125, 127–132, 171
Islam 15, 27, 31, 32, 76, 110, 112, 113, 114

Islamist 31, 103, 108, 112, 113, 114, 115
Islamophobia 86, 112, 113
jew 39, 42, 57, 61, 62, 77, 83, 87, 88, 89,
112, 113, 126, 147
Modood, Tariq 8, 9, 10, 112, 118
multicultural/ism 6, 9, 10, 16, 27, 68, 135,
169
multiculturalism 5–11, 16, 18, 19, 26, 35,
38, 39, 73, 108, 111, 141, 153,
169, 170, 171, 176, 177
Muslim 5, 8, 9, 12, 18, 19, 34, 42, 46, 58,
86, 103, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116,
118, 120, 178
nation/alism 6–9, 11–14, 21, 25, 26, 29,
37, 40, 54, 65–69, 70–73, 94, 113,
122, 155
national identity 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 27, 73
nationality 22, 70, 71, 86, 132, 160, 161
network/ing 28–29, 43, 58, 64–67, 71,
73–81, 113, 123, 132, 148, 165,
175
police 21, 24, 73, 78, 79, 82, 88, 89, 92,
94, 104, 107, 111, 156, 157, 160,
176
policing 21, 73, 107, 117
racism without racism‘ 30, 69, 83, 84, 173
racism, 2, 3, 5, 7–9, 11, 13, 18, 20, 26,
27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35–38, 41,
42, 43, 65–69, 72, , 73, 75–77,
83–87, 89–97, 106, 107, 110, 111,
116, 135, 139, 146, 147, 157, 158,
169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176
refugee 31, 42, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 79, 91,
122, 135, 136, 137, 138, 13, 142,
143, 146, 147, 148, 151, 152, 153,
170, 171
religion 3, 5, 8, 12, 14, 85, 110, 120, 127,
128, 145, 146
secular/ism 8, 9, 12, 13, 79, 111, 112, 113,
114, 127
state racism 2, 3, 28, 29, 30, 65
stigma/tised 22, 30, 31, 73, 155, 156, 158,
159, 163, 166, 173, 174, 177
teaching 35, 37–45, 120, 125, 130, 142
transnational/ism 8, 10–11, 20–23, 28, 36,
37, 65–66, 75, 77, 86, 122, 132,
168, 172, 174
values 1–6, 8, 9–15, 18, 21, 25, 27, 29,
31, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143,
150–153, 169, 172, 174, 176, 177,
178
Wacquant, Loic 8, 33, 158, 159, 160, 162,
166, 168, 173, 174, 175, 179
war on terror‘ 12, 14, 15, 16, 21, 26, 33,
37, 177
white/ness 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 36, 37, 38,
39, 40, 42, 47, 51, 52, 56, 68, 73,
74, 77, 103, 107, 109, 110, 111,
112, 113, 115, 115, 125, 128, 156,
176
youth 6, 10, 103, 104, 107, 110, 111, 113,
123, 161, 162, 174
Yuval-Davis, Nira 70, 72

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