Borders, Asylum and Global Non-Citizenship: The Other Side of the Fence by Heather L. Johnson (review)

Heather Johnson’s informative and theoretically-laden study seeks to reconfigure general understandings of migrants’ irregularity; provide a local perspective on the global regime for international migration, and account for irregular migrants’ everyday political agency “in shaping the politics of asylum and migration.”¹ The author grounds her analysis in field research, and her sites include refugee camps in the “global South” (Tanzania), detention centers in the “global North” (Australia), and border zones between the two (Morocco and Spain).² These are “sites of intervention” where global power relations and discourses, as well as the lived experiences of migrants, become particularly conspicuous.³

Johnson writes from the disciplinary perspective of international relations, with particular attention to migration and asylum politics and their intersections with development. The book is structured into nine chapters (including a helpful introduction and a conclusion), complemented by a methodological appendix featuring a list of interviewees. These include migrants, non-governmental workers, activists, and government officials.

Geographically and epistemologically, Borders, Asylum and Global Non-Citizenship offers several vantage points on migration, citizenship, and their regulation in an otherwise mobile world. For example, it provides an account of what protracted, structural situations of “donors’ fatigue” look like on the ground, as UNHCR and World Food Programme officials are faced with surging numbers of displaced persons. In a Tanzanian refugee camp, Johnson documents the case of parents “who are reducing their food intake in order to boost that of their children so that they are able to take the [anti-HIV] drugs.”⁴ Johnson’s reflections, immediately following such an unsettling finding, capture the book’s overarching approach. Decisions such as these are not easy, says Johnson. Nevertheless, they are made “not by the authorities, but by individuals and families, often in defiance of the regulations and policies that govern camp life. . . . They are, in this sense, defiant contestations of the dominant structures of the camp.”⁵ Such expressions of political agency and “choice” are present and brought to light throughout the various “sites of intervention” the book illuminates. There is then an important question that is likely to be relevant to most readers: can (and should) analysts speak of agency and choice when people who are already vulnerable decide to deprive themselves of food? Can one speak of irregular migrants as actors “who shape and interact with the policies and practices that shape their lives,”⁶ when deportation is the most likely outcome of their actions? Or when the migratory project includes a high probability of being exploited by smugglers, when not of dying at one of the hyper-regulated passageways toward Europe, Australia, and the United States?

While answers to this query are likely to be diverse, it is helpful to note that Johnson is arguing two interrelated points here, whose implications are not so obvious. Migrants, crucially including those who are categorized as irregular ones, are real persons; scholars and others would do well to take that person-hood seriously. In other words, migrants come with their own individual voices, migration projects, acts of resistance, and subversion. Scholars (together with activists, human rights workers, and policy makers) should not be dismissive of this, for they otherwise risk dismissing a substantial portion of their object of study and engagement. Building upon the methodological and ethical contributions of post-colonial, anthropological, and feminist critique, Johnson seeks to challenge the quantitative and realist habit arguably informing, when not disciplining, the scholarly tradition of international relations. This is relevant in her analysis because individual and everyday acts are too often deprived of their political meanings and implications. Responding to such a context, Johnson is particularly keen on accounting for what is seemingly transitory and precarious and for migrants and refugees’ political agency. She clarifies that their political agency is different “from that we expect of citizens” who remain within a state framework⁷ and the book is careful in...