Learn more about the work of CMS affiliate Prof. Helena Zeweri.
Helena Zeweri is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UBC Vancouver. She is also co-coordinator for the Borders Research Group at the UBC Centre for Migration Studies. Helena’s recent book Between Care and Criminality: Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare (Rutgers University Press, 2024) looks at the entanglement between criminal justice and immigration systems within migrant-targeted social policy in Australia. Her current research examines how Afghan diasporic political life in Australia and the US is shaped by the enduring effects of displacement, carceral border regimes, and empire. Helena’s work has been published in various journals, including: the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Ethnos, the Journal of Refugee Studies, and the Australian Journal of Social Issues.
Can you share a bit about who or what has most shaped your scholarly interests to examine displacement and deterrence?
While my interests in displacement go far back, it was really the people I met and interviewed while doing research in Australia over the past few years that shaped my interest in deterrence. Deterrence kept coming up in my interviews with people who had arrived by boat or whose family members had. But it came up in ways I had not expected. Rather than talk about the mechanics of deterrence policies, many of the people I interviewed (most of whom came from an Afghan Hazara background, a community disproportionately affected by Australia’s Stop the Boats policies), talked about deterrence using very intimate language. Deterrence was framed as something that leveraged families against each other, that mobilized guilt and shame against prospective migrants, and that weaponized people’s cultural identities to prevent them from migrating. This was not how I typically encountered the concept of migration deterrence in the scholarly literature, which tends to think about it in terms of policies, infrastructures, and through the lens of the state. Ultimately, it was my interlocutors who pointed me in the direction of deterrence—to really examine its more implicit workings and from a more intimate perspective. What I came to realize is that while we tend to think of deterrence as happening at ‘the border’ or ending once someone has crossed the border, for some, the effects of deterrence are long-lasting and become interconnected with the experience of social displacement and disconnection.
Your research engages with the intersections of migration, imperialism, and settler colonialism. In your view, how does centring the intersection of these dynamics shift the questions, methods, or priorities of migration studies?
Centring this intersection is important because it allows us to see that the material, historical, and cultural conditions that produce and sustain these systems are interconnected. Australia is a place where all three of these structures play out in the lives of marginalized peoples. From 2001 to 2008 and then again from 2012 to 2019, migrants who arrived in Australia via ‘irregular’ means have confronted prolonged detention in offshore islands in the South Pacific. These offshore detention centres are made possible by Australia’s long history of coloniality in the South Pacific (which some have claimed constitutes a kind of regional imperial presence in its own right), but also by Australia’s own status as a settler colonial nation-state. The infrastructures and design of offshore detention are certainly continuations of carceral architectures and ideologies that were initially used to contain and criminalize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Additionally, the securitization of borders is deeply interconnected with how empires and settler colonial nation-states attempt to secure their sovereignty and reinforce their validity. Finally, in Australia there are Indigenous-led movements and conversations around embracing asylum seekers that fundamentally rethink the Westphalian notion of sovereignty itself and, by extension, the forms of conquest and control that subtend it and that anchor imperial projects among many settler colonial nation-states. In sum, viewing these systems as interconnected is key to understanding and developing more nuanced critiques of punitive border policies today.
Across your work, you move between ethnography, history, and policy analysis. How do you bring these approaches together in your research, and what do you gain from combining them?
In graduate school I remember taking a course that examined anthropology as a history of the present. It changed the way I thought about Anthropology’s explanatory power ever since! It showed me that what we as ethnographers observe and record in the present is a product of several intersecting variables (some more deliberately instated than others). The present is indeed produced by the enduring effects of the past.
While my first book was a more conventional ethnographic monograph on a social policy, it does do some social history work that I found to be illuminating. A question that guided that work is what does it mean to think about a category of violence (in the case of my book, forced marriage) as having a traceable history? What forces, ideas, people, and institutions make it knowable in the way that it is known today in Australia, was the question I asked myself. I like the genealogical approach because it is one that refuses finality—there can be multiple genealogies of one concept/category. By doing a genealogy, I was able to show that what seems like a straightforward policy designed to do good and prevent harm in people’s lives, might be anchored within structures of racialization, coloniality, and criminalization, that find their way into the most noble and caring of endeavors.
In my current research, I’m using more conventional archival methods to examine how colonial knowledge and representation of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia among Australian government institutions from 1945 to the present, laid the discursive foundations for its now expansive deterrence-based border apparatus. In that sense, I am tracing the historical roots of today’s policies around stopping boat migration. But I’m also trying to think about the archive in more expansive ways, which brings me back to ethnography. How are public exhibits on boat migration archives? How are the writings, art, and film of survivors of boat migration and offshore detention also archives, some of them political? How do they contribute to rewriting dominant policy narratives around boat migration and highlight Australia’s carceral present?
On October 6, you will be presenting “The Enduring Effects of Deterrence Border Regimes: Afghan Hazara Narratives of Social Dislocation in Australia” at UBC. What linkages from the Australian experience do you think can inform migration debates in contexts in North America and beyond?
I think that what’s been unfolding in Australia prompts several questions that might be useful for those involved in migration debates in North America: (1) When debating border policies, what constitutes the ‘border’ that’s being referred to? Australia shows that border control is a geographically expansive regime of control. In North America, when we talk about border policies, how can we also talk about that which unfolds well beyond the territorial border itself? (2) The Australian case shows that deterrence-based border policies continue to affect migrants well after crossing the border. For those who have legal and political recognition as refugees, many continue to confront irreparable loss, but also stand no chance of reuniting with their families because of the ongoing effects of their past liminal legal statuses, which make it impossible for them to sponsor their families. Thus, in North America, when we think about challenging analogous deterrence policies, we should also think about the cumulative loss that continues to haunt people’s lives even when they are no longer within the formal grips of deterrence. (3) The paper on which this talk is based examines Afghan Hazara experiences of deterrence. These experiences cannot be disentangled from the political and humanitarian crises unfolding in Afghanistan. While many of the people whom I got to know feel they are physically and materially more secure in Australia, their lives are deeply intertwined with those of their loved ones back home who confront intersecting insecurities (physical, economic, cultural). For many, a feeling of holistic safety feels like a far-off dream. In North America, perhaps a more nuanced understanding of what some refugee communities continue to witness in their homelands from afar is important to developing a more nuanced idea of refuge.
What’s something about your research—or migration studies more generally—that you feel is critical to understanding larger discourses and debates about displacement and mobility?
One thing I try to highlight across my research is that those with the lived experience of crossing borders in the modern world make sense of their experience in deeply instructive ways. Anthropology is always trying to find a good balance between the emic (the perspective of the research subject) and the etic (the perspective of the researcher). This is a hard balance to strike, but I have found that in many cases, the people who were generous enough to share their time and narratives with me, are making sense of their experiences in ways that are deeply theoretical—they are reflecting on how borders work to deter, punish, and immobilize. I believe it’s worth considering how their testimonies may not just be testimonies of suffering, but also epistemologies in their own right. What epistemologies of border violence are they putting forth? Rather than treat their narratives as repositories of facts and information that we as social scientists then convert into a theory, are there moments where we can also treat their narratives as stand-alone conceptualizations of the operative logics of borders? Something I try to ask myself is, does this narrative need to be theorized or amplified? What is my role as an ethnographer in bringing these stories to a new audience? I don’t have a definitive answer and am still working through this, but I think it’s worth noting that those with the lived experience of displacement and crossing borders are making sense of their experiences in illuminating ways.
What current projects are you most excited about, and where do you see your research heading next?
As I mentioned, I’m currently working on a project that aims to examine how official state operations within and perceptions of local communities in Papua New Guinea (with a focus on Manus Island), Nauru, and Southeast Asia find continuity in today’s multi-pronged border security arrangements in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. By examining the historical archive (1945-1968) and contemporary policy documents (2001-the present), I hope to generate an analysis of how colonial operations within and representations of Australia’s neighbours have been key to authorizing and justifying the use of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia as frontiers for Australian border control.
I am also looking forward to starting a project on the socio-legal history of humanitarian parole, a mechanism of temporary admissibility in US immigration law. Humanitarian parole has enabled displaced people worldwide to find temporary refuge during times of crisis. Surges in humanitarian parole applications have tended to happen in the wake of US military and political remaneuvering in sites of prolonged US diplomatic or military intervention. While in theory humanitarian parole has provided temporary refuge to thousands, in practice the bureaucratic demands of parole have been extremely difficult for groups in active crisis to navigate. This was most recently illustrated by the failure of tens of thousands of applications by Afghan nationals to even be reviewed, let alone accepted in 2021. Yet humanitarian parole tends to emerge as a go-to mechanism when the US is retracting or reconfiguring its political and/or military role in sites of political interest. I am interested in understanding the relationship between legal principles around admissibility and imperial self-fashioning—how does admissibility get reinterpreted depending on how the state wants to present itself as an imperial power?
