Résultat de la recherche
Il/liberal Integrationism. A Contradiction in Terms: Respecting the Values of the Constitution as an Integration Requirement in Switzerland
What work does integration do, as an idea and as bureaucratic practice, through the mobilization of “shared values”? This thesis takes Switzerland as a case study and sets out to answer this question at the intersection of social science and political philosophy. As integration regimes in Europe increasingly require migranticized subjects to have shared values, the thesis puts the integration requirement to respect the values of the constitution at the core of its investigation. Based on a grounded theory analysis of state discourse and practice in Swiss naturalization and immigration street-level bureaucracies, the thesis examines what the value requirement is, how it is applied and how it is justified. This inquiry reveals an il/liberal integrationism that manifests itself in different ways. First, it produces a culturalized social imaginary of society as a community of value(s), which in turn legitimizes aggressive integrationism. Second, the knowledge production on the value requirement by street-level bureaucrats is characterized by a tight grip on subjects’ intimacy and an imperative urge to know and feel their integration. This integration governance can be understood as a totalizing institution in that it seeks to access inner convictions and to govern all spheres of life. Third, il/liberal integrationism operates, discursively, through boundary making in the name of liberal values while, normatively, it is at odds with fundamental principles of liberal democracy. A grounded normative theory approach illustrates how integrationism violates the very liberal democratic values the requirement purports to foster. The thesis concludes that the value requirement and the ideology of shared values are incompatible with liberal democracy. Against an essentially migranticized understanding of integration and il/liberal integrationism that seeks to monitor, discipline and exclude migranticized subjects in the name of shared values, the thesis pleads for a conception of liberal democracy as fundamentally constituted by value pluralism and democratic contestation. Agonistic democracy and radical liberalism offer alternative imaginaries to think of the state, society and democracy beyond the integration nation.
Die problematische Verschränkung von Staatsbürgerschaft und nationaler Identität
Exploring the social organization of difference at the interface of mobility and peripherality: Ethnographic study in a Swiss valley
This thesis sheds ethnographic light on the small Swiss valley of Val-de-Travers, a region of 12,000 inhabitants located in the canton of Neuchâtel, on the border with France. Inspired by critical and reflexive studies on migration, it proposes an in-depth analysis of the discourses and daily practices that participate in the construction of a local order in constant negotiation, at the interface of different forms of mobility and lived and situated experiences of peripherality. Based on a qualitative field study conducted between 2019 and 2021, this thesis apprehends the Val-de- Travers through two of its main and interwoven characteristics. On the one hand, the diversity of past and present mobilities that intersect. Indeed, for decades, countless foreign workers, cross-border workers, tourists, refugees, and residents of other Swiss regions have been crossing the region to work or live there. At the same time, young people, job seekers, families and retirees have left the valley in search of professional, educational, or economic opportunities. On the other hand, the Valley is characterized by its peripherality: a complex set of experiences and imaginaries that refer both to its asymmetrical political and economic relationship with a neighboring city (Neuchâtel); to a romantic celebration of the valley’s authenticity as a rural periphery sheltered from globalization and modernization; a supposedly superior value of seemingly unconditional solidarity; a region characterized by scattered settlement and low population density in public spaces; a region adjacent to a national border; or a tourist region with natural sites and industrial heritage. By adopting a posture at the interface, this thesis explores how the different forms of mobility that traverse and shape the valley articulate, resonate, or come into tension with the lived and imagined experiences of peripherality; and vice versa. Indeed, the position and evolution of the valley in the global, national, and cantonal political economy contribute significantly to the daily dynamics of selfidentification and social categorization. This thesis thus seeks to understand how people who visit, live, or work in this place make sense of their daily environment and negotiate the social organization of difference, namely the way in which differences between individuals and collectives, and the social categories associated with them, are produced, represented, appropriated, and organized. It shows how the lived and situated experiences of these different dynamics generate discourses and practices that participate in the emergence of an (imagined) community characterized by the coherent assemblage of its heterogeneity. By focusing on the everyday experiences of ordinary people, it also highlights how the categories, boundaries and regulations of the nation-state permeate everyday life and articulate with other social and symbolic differentiations beyond ethno-national categories and governmental logics. In the form of a collection of scientific articles, the analysis is composed of three parts, each illuminating not only specific dynamics of the articulation between mobilities and peripherality, but also proposing specific and original conceptualizations to approach this articulation. The first paper explores the emergence of what I call an imagined community of fate, which can be understood as the result of dynamic and nested forms of boundary-work in which the most important categories and markers are socioeconomic rather than nation and ethnicity based. The second article documents the discourses and everyday practices that participate in the emergence of a regime of (im)moral mobilities. Exploring in particular border mobilities (whether to work or to buy goods and services), I demonstrate how ordinary inhabitants categorize these mobilities in terms of good or bad and put in place informal strategies of regulation. The third article explores how the presence of people assigned to stigmatized categories of difference – in this case, refugees, cross-border workers and “cas sociaux” – generates varied and interrelated representations of experiences of peripherality. Depending on the situation, these categories of difference are presented as familiar strangers, as space invaders, or as peripheral figures.
Pre-Print!! Migranticization
Migranticization can be understood as those sets of performative practices that ascribe a migratory status to certain people and bodies – labelling them (im)migrants, second-generation migrants, people with migration background, minorities, etc. – and thus (re-)establish their a priori non-belonging, regardless of whether the people designated as ‘migrants’ are citizens of the nation-state they reside in or not, and regardless of whether they have crossed a national border or not. Migranticization can be considered as a technology of power and governance; it places people in a distinct hierarchy which goes along with an unequal distribution of societal symbolic and material resources while it affirms a national ‘we’ within a system of global inequalities. The suggestion is to use migranticization as an analytical lens which makes it possible to investigate the uses of migration-related categories and their consequences in terms of power and ex/inclusion from/in a global system of inequalities and nation-states.
Se rencontrer au carrefour des mobilités. L'engagement bénévole dans le mouvement de solidarité aux personnes exilées à Athènes en 2022-2023
Ce travail porte sur l'engagement bénévole dans le cadre du mouvement de soutien aux personnes exilées à Athènes en 2023. Les données ont été récoltées au travers d'un terrain de six mois dans une association s'inscrivant dans ce mouvement, ainsi que par des entretiens formels avec des bénévoles de cette association. Le questionnement principal de cette recherche est de comprendre comment ces personnes font sens de leur engagement bénévole dans le contexte athénien en 2023. Les deux parties analytiques questionnent l'origine de l'engagement des bénévoles de cette association, ainsi que les tensions auxquelles iels sont confrontéexs au cours de leur expérience de bénévolat. Après avoir présenté le contexte d'émergence de l'association, les histoires véhiculées sur son origine, au sein de l'association et au-delà, sont dégagées. À l'aide d'un cadre analytique précis, il est avancé que ces histoires font office de mythes et contribuent à générer et maintenir l'engagement bénévole au sein de cette association. Dans la deuxième partie analytique, quelques décalages observés entre ces mythes et la réalité vécue en 2023 par les bénévoles sont présentés. Il est suggéré que c'est notamment par la prise de responsabilités au sein de l'association que certains bénévoles créent du sens autour de leur engagement. Finalement, il est constaté que des dynamiques de boundary making sont à l'œuvre dans l'association et qu'elles contribuent également à créer du sens autour de l'implication des individus en constituant des groupes d'appartenance auxquels s'identifier pour les bénévoles.
(Doing) belonging as technology of power: how the principle of ‘gender equality’ governs membership in Swiss society
This paper analyses how the principle of gender equality informs politics of belonging in Switzerland. We propose to conceptualize ‘doing belonging’ as a technology of power and we examine how actors in (non-)institutional settings employ it as part of professional and personal action. The paper draws on two case studies: an ethnography of institutions in charge of Swiss naturalization procedures and a series of qualitative interviews with migrant descendants. It unpacks how individuals negotiate belonging in different social contexts that are marked by specific power relations. First, we reveal how ideas of gender equality shape the implementation of state policies in naturalization procedures by selectively assessing the candidates according to their national and assumed cultural background. Second, we show how naturalized individuals are doing belonging when confronting external ascriptions as being ‘gender unequal’. The analysis contributes to a better understanding of the role the principle of gender equality plays in politics of belonging enacted at a micro-sociological and individual level, thus illuminating the gendered underpinnings of migration politics.
Hospitalité transitoire. La part bénévole du régime migratoire. Logiques du soutien bénévole aux personnes en mobilité à travers l’Europe, perspectives ethnographiques d’un Refuge à la frontière franco-italienne
Cette thèse s’intéresse aux pratiques de soutien aux personnes en mobilité à la frontière franco-italienne à travers l’approche ethnographique d’un Refuge. En utilisant une perspective de régime migratoire, je développe un cadre théorique qui permet d’étudier les micropratiques qui produisent l’hospitalité transitoire tout en tenant compte des limites contextuelles et matériels qui influent sur les engagements collectifs. Le Refuge est un espace où travaillent exclusivement des bénévoles – non-formé-e-s dans le domaine de la migration. Le soutien qui y prend forme fait office de première nécessité – repos, hygiène, repas chauds, soins et programmation de la suite du parcours de mobilité – ceci dans un laps de temps voulu court. Pour comprendre les enjeux qui se jouent dans ce lieu spécifique, je propose de mettre en lumière les processus de production du soutien à travers trois logiques centrales : l’humanitaire, l’urgence et la solidarité. D’abord, je mets en avant l’ambivalence du soutien humanitaire en montrant que les intentionnalités qui motivent les pratiques reproduisent parfois les effets du contrôle qu’elles visent à contourner. Ensuite, j’articule la logique des urgences en contribuant à élaborer les concepts d’urgence fonctionnelle et d’urgence stratégique. Tous deux sont construits dans les pratiques et traduisent le fonctionnement général du Refuge dans une dynamique d’hospitalité transitoire. Enfin, je présente la logique de la solidarité qui constitue une dimension centrale dans les mouvements contemporains de soutien humanitaire en Europe. J’analyse la fabrique de récits de solidarité comme un instrument habilitant et stratégique dans la permanence des actions menées, notamment dans le maintien de relations avec les pouvoirs publics locaux et les autorités. L’analyse éclaire les pratiques bénévoles à travers un prisme mettant en valeur les récits et les descriptions ethnographiques, et montre la manière dont les actions sont mues par des logiques centrales qui invitent à penser les pratiques bénévoles comme des processus d’actions au sein desquels s’entremêlent le contournement du contrôle autant que sa reproduction. L’argumentaire développé propose de dépasser l’écueil d’une réflexion binaire en réfléchissant aux pratiques de soutien comme des processus enchevêtrés et complémentaires dont l’élaboration et la mise en oeuvre traduit la participation d’acteurices non-étatiques à la gestion migratoire au sein du régime.
What Is the Nexus between Migration and Mobility? A Framework to Understand the Interplay between Different Ideal Types of Human Movement
Categorising certain forms of human movement as ‘migration’ and others as ‘mobility’ has far-reaching consequences. We introduce the migration–mobility nexus as a framework for other researchers to interrogate the relationship between these two categories of human movement and explain how they shape different social representations. Our framework articulates four ideal-typical interplays between categories of migration and categories of mobility: continuum (fluid mobilities transform into more stable forms of migration and vice versa), enablement (migration requires mobility, and mobility can trigger migration), hierarchy (migration and mobility are political categories that legitimise hierarchies of movement) and opposition (migration and mobility are pitted against each other). These interplays reveal the normative underpinnings of different categories, which we argue are too often implicit and unacknowledged.