COST Action IS0803 Workgroups 2010
WG4: Documents, Techniques and Technologies
Morality and Legality: Borders and Bridges
Second Work Group 4 meeting
University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki
22-23 May 2010
Convenors:
Effie Voutira
voutira@uom.gr
+30-2310-891476
Sissie Theodosiou
aspasia.theodosiou@manchester.ac.uk
+30-2681-050540
Description:
One of the themes that emerged from the previous WG4 meeting on 'Passports and passing: everyday encounters with borders' concerns the realities and constraints of bureaucratic procedures and the diverse ways many people use to by-pass them.
The second meeting of the WG4 moves the discussion one step further by exploring the rationale for the legitimacy of these practices by focusing on the dual nature of the ‘border’ as a ‘boundary’ on the one hand, and as a ‘bridge’ on the other. On the theoretical level, we are broaching the thorny issue of morality and value systems used to legitimize either closed or open borders: as a barrier, borders can be cast either as positively protective or negatively exclusionary; as a bridge, borders can be positively seen as the location where differences meet and mingle, or negatively as being insufficient in keeping things, people and places separate, and being instead dangerously ‘leaky’.
Within applied philosophy, the question between Morality and Legality is normally articulated as the vexed question: does the legal define what is moral? Given the history of western philosophy that focuses on the definition of ‘morality’, mainly in the Enlightenment ideas, which have identified the moral sphere with universal norms (human rights standards), the contextualization of these norms for purposes of ‘expediency’ raises a serious challenge for the ontological defenders of those standards.
We invite proposals that explore the moral implications of both formally legal and illegal practices in relation to borders - e.g. detention, deportation and dispersal of migrants and refugees. Theseofficial practices often challenge other, transnationally and institutionally defined principles of moral conduct, as articulated, for example, in international human rights standards. Proposals are also invited on the complexities in defining what is and is not ‘legal’ in a formal sense in the range of both formally and informally state-supported practices in relation to border. In many cases, formal law, even in its ideal form, does not prove to be the exclusive embodiment of morality, but on the contrary, it is often the site of quite heated disputes about morality. Given these conditions, the meeting hopes to debate questions of how acts, whether carried out by state representatives or by others, which violate existing legal norms can be morally justified.
Participant: Anna M. Agathangelou
Global Change Institute
Cyprus
Email: agathangelou@hotmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
I examine the Cypriot enclaves and refugee camps by analyzing legal regulatory regimes of movement and discourses that constitute these spaces as moral and legal borders and/or bridges. These sites embody intense relations and irregular processes of crossing, and (un) belonging, marked with (neo) colonial logics beyond Cyprus, registering different understandings of spatiality and temporalities. Given the vital connections among the separated Cypriot populations, those who belong to Europe and those who do not, the project looks at the larger context and considers the production of borders and bridges as sites of struggle, (im) moral and (il) legal belonging which have emerged and/or re-emerged since the Republic of Cyprus entry into the EU. This paper looks at the technologies which have been developed on the part of the authorities to discipline the movement of goods and people, and on the part of refugees, migrants, and other kinds of illegal subjects to outsmart the restrictions in order to enable their crossing of borders, albeit sometimes through the constitution of bridges. In conclusion, I analyze the articulation of cosmologies that disrupt the dominant linear narratives of borders and bridges that promise the impossible through deadly missions.
Participant: Olena V. Bagno
Political Science Department
Tel-Aviv University
Israel
Email: arib27@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
I can contribute to this work group by providing the analysis of changing policies related to "passports and passing" between Ukraine and Russia on the one side, and Israel and the Schengen states on the other.
Participant: Emilio Cocco
Dept of Theories and Policies of Social Development
University of Teramo
Italy
Email: ecocco@unite.it
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The Insulation of Life at the Sea-Land divides of EU peripheries
My proposal follows the discussion among Action members we had in the WG2-Rome focused on the topic :
“liquid lands, solid sea”. I intend, with my paper, to further develop the analisys of the social construction of the maritime borders from a terrestrial state-based perspecive and the other way around (the social construction of terrestrial borders from a maritime perspective). My hypothesis, is that the double perspective on border expressed by the sea-land
relation at the peripheries of EU somehow explains the strains between an increasingly universal set of moral norms and the positive law systems, that are territorially divided by nation-states. A cosmopolitan value systems and a wider idea of humanity devolped from the “existential turn” initiated by the oceanic expansion of the XVII century. At the same time though, a concept of postive right and the idea of a state of law developed through the Enlinghtment and the national revolutions in Europe. Nowaday, even the maritime spaces are more and more subject to the sovereign state laws. Border crossers are split between the moral sphere and the systems of law. On one hand, they are persons maintaining overwhelming human rights as citizens of the same world. On the other one, they experience the parceling processes and procedures that decostrunct their bodies, minds, memories, languages. They are, like castaways, eventually trapped into space-time islands.
Participant: Jane Cowan
Social Anthropology
University of Sussex
United Kingdom
Email: j.cowan@sussex.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Ambiguous citizens caught between competing justice projects: Rereading interwar petitions from the Greek/Bulgarian/Yugoslav borders
My research in the League of Nations Archives has been exploring a conjuncture between an ongoing insurgency, inspired by a popular ideal of national self-determination and demanding an Autonomous Macedonia, and a transformational moment of “institutionalizing the international” in the form of the League of Nations, charged to stabilize and consolidate the post-Versailles “New Europe”. This conjuncture is characterized by a clash of justice projects: one seeking international recognition of a nation and its rightful political autonomy, the other seeking peaceful consolidation of a post-war political order where that particular nation had no place. Intriguingly, there is also a clash of languages and different orientations to time: advocates of an Autonomous Macedonia adopt the moralizing and passionate language of the Rights of Nations and seek the future vindication of a “just” revision of borders; bureaucrats and architects of the new order treat the
struggle for nations as now decided, drawing on a language of legality: of treaties, convenants and other legal texts. In the early 1920s in a Macedonian region of new, not-yet-decided and still contested national borders, individuals and families whose “racial nationality” was disputed or ambiguous often found themselves appropriated by and caught between these two justice projects. Similarly, as beleaguered inhabitants or as distressed exiles and refugees, they adopted sometimes a moral rhetoric and sometimes appeals to legality and legal rights. In this paper, I will reflect on what might be illuminated when we “read” the multiplicity of petitions arriving to the Minority Section through the problematic of morality vs. legality.
Participant: Dimitrios Dalakoglou
Department of Anthropology
University of Sussex
United Kingdom
Email: purityanddanger@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Building European Security on the Bottom of Aegean Sea and on the Minefield of Evros River: Legal and
Legitimated Killings on the EU Borders
Anarchists in Greece chant a slogan which loosely can be translated as such: 'The security of each European in being built on the bottom of Aegean Sea and on the minefield of Evros River'. Evros is the river which divides EU (Greece) and Turkey while Aegean is the water border between the two countries. In monthly basis Greek authorities discover migrants without documents trying to enter EU. However, frequently some of these migrants are getting killed in their effort to come to the EU. Their deaths usually are recorded as 'accidents'. Besides these 'accidental' deaths since 1999 it is confirmed that more than 20 migrants were killed by border guards, police or army officers on the Greek borders or deportation centres. This paper examines the links between deaths of migrants on the EU borders and the EU and Greek legal systems the last 20 years.
Participant: Jeanette Edwards
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: jeanette.edwards@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Bodies Bridging Borders
What is legal may not necessarily be considered moral (and vice versa). I would like to pick up the theme of borders as both bridges and boundaries by looking at the movement of 'body bits' across them. I propose a paper which begins a review of the literature on the trajectories of biological bodies and bodily substances in biomedical procedures. I am interested in how boundaries between countries facilitate access to advanced biotechnologies, such IVF using donated gametes or embryos, organ transplantation or cosmetic surgery. What is disallowed (not permitted) in one country may not only be allowed but actively encouraged (in the form of 'medical tourism') in another. In this sense, borders act as bridges across which people requiring various biomedical interventions travel. I draw initially on the ethnographic example of Lebanon (on one eastern border of Europe) where a lack of national legislation allows many women, who would otherwise find IVF prohibited through religious injunctions, access to a range of fertility services
Participant: Gergana Georgieva
Balkan Studies, the 15th - 19th Centuries
Institute of Balkan Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Bulgaria
Email: gergana_ig@yahoo.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
MORALITY VS. LEGALITY IN OTTOMAN CONTEXT: The Local Migrations of Ottoman Peasants in the Balkans
It is considered that peasant life in the Ottoman Empire was centered around the village community and borders of its locality. The tax regulations always emphasize that peasants were not allowed to leave their villages without the permission of their timar-holder. Thus, they were “attached” to the land and the margins of their vicinity became boundaries of their lives. The Ottoman documents, however, give examples of groups of peasants who decided to abandon their homes and contravene the borders of their settled worlds. The expressed reason for those migrations was the fiscal
pressure. The recurrence of these cases attracted my attention. They were like a repeating motive which traversed several centuries. It appears that those cases of peasant mobility were part of established social practice used in the interactions between peasants and Ottoman authorities. Thus, I claim that “the small migrations” and crossing of the local borders, were used to initiate negotiations with the authorities. They appeared to be a practice of social control over the fiscal politics of the state and opportunity for social pressure from the bottom up. In this case, it is not clear which position is legal and illegal; moral and immoral. The peasants' moral argument can be put under discussion, because it appeared that the flight didn’t always mean over-taxation or abuse.
Participant: Sarah Green
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Email: sarah.green@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Convenor WG4 2009
Participant: Basia Nikiforova
Culture, Philosophy and Arts Research Institute
Lithuania
Email: bnikiforova@gmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
The Time of Exception (Lithuanian case).
Laws themselves must be examined continually against a higher framework than the immediate arena of their practical application. New security threats by global terrorist networks have challenged the existing criteria for legitimate military intervention. It identifies two types of positions – legal and moral. Morality and legality exist in a normative realm of virtues. Giorgio Agamben in the book “State of Exception” investigates the increase of power structures governments in times of crisis. We will analyze the case about the CIA built secret prison in a residential section of Vilnius from September 2004 through November 2005 (From the report of ABC News CIA used the prison to detain and interrogate top level al Qaeda prisoners captured around the world after 9/11). As a result of the ABC News.com story about Lithuania, the Council of Europe reopened its investigation into Lithuanian involvement in the CIA program, according to a Council of Europe official. Today both Lithuania and the United States try provide answers to this question. For us, this case is possibility to discuss such questions as sovereignty of state border, contradictions between moral values and legislation, the frontier between “rule” and “exception”. This case is possibility to revalue such definition of boundary studies as
“territorialization” and “de-territorialization”.
Participant: Irina Novikova
Center for Gender Studies; Dept of Culture and Literature
The University of Latvia (Riga)
Latvia
Email: iranovi@lanet.lv
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
“Aliens” - Passport and citizenship regime in Latvia
In this paper I will focus on the relationship between the discourses of state, nation building and citizenship in Latvia, in the context of the country’s integration into the political, economic, and social dimensions of the European Union. I will discuss the realities and constraints of “alien” passport and citizenship regime for a substantial group of former Soviet residents in Latvia. I will explore
- the ways in which these practices were made legitimate in the course of the 1990s,
- formation of political, ideological and discursive grounds upon which the process of political alienation was taking place
- the citizenship legislation ad public responses of Latvian-speaking and Russian-speaking communities to it..
I will discuss the morality and value system discourses in media and political sphere used in creating national
citizenship legislation based on the category of “aliens”. I will also address the construction of borders in terms of negative exclusionary effects of the citizenship legislation in the issues of demography, ethnicity, family, sexuality, national security, Europeanization, migration, belonging and the question about the project of a political nation in Latvia today. I will then move to discussing about general theoretical and conceptual implications of this passport and citizenship regime which
is considered to be unique for the European context. However, I would like to question this view.
Participant: Irena Saleniece
Department of History, Faculty of Humanities
Daugavpils University
Latvia
Email: irena.saleniece@apollo.lv; irena.saleniece@du.lv
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Between Legality, Morality, and Justice
After national independence of Latvia had been restored, Russian troops were withdrawn from the country (1994). According to international agreements, along with the Soviet Army servicemen, member of their families had to leave Latvia. In the USSR, the borders between the Union Republics were administrative; as pro forma established borders. However, due to historical and political causes, living conditions in Latvia (as well as in the other Baltic Republics) were more attractive than those in the other Soviet Republics. Therefore, leaving Latvia, the families of servicemen changed their living conditions for the worst. They wished to stay there despite international agreements and legislation of the Republic of Latvia; in some occasions, it caused conflicts with the authorities of the Republic of Latvia. In this respect, the case of Slivenko family became widely known. The European Court of Human Rights discharged Slivenko family’s claim lodged against the Latvian authorities due to violation of human rights in the course of deportation from Latvia. This decision caused conflicting attitudes in Latvia. The analysis of sociological data, historical records, and press reveals
differences in perception of legality, morality, and justice in present-day Latvia.
Participant: Paul Scheibelhofer
Gender Studies Department
Central European University
Hungary
Email: scheibelhofer_paul@phd.ceu.hu
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Re-visiting the “camp”
All over Europe and beyond, camps for asylum seeking migrants have become part of migration regimes. While defended by policy makers as a needed aspect of a functioning asylum system, these camps have come under fierce attacks by human rights groups and theoreticians alike, e.g. by philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2002) who famously analysed such camps as institutionalised and localised “state of exception” in which disenfranchised inmates are faced with the absolute power of rulers. While such fundamental critique raises important questions, I want to argue in the paper, that the absolute tone in which these are formulated tend to blind out important aspects of migration realities and, in the end, work against differentiated critical analyses of camps and questions regarding their legitimacy. In order to go beyond the mythologizing critique of the camp, I will develop a more nuanced theoretical understanding of camps as – structurally – part of political economies and, as – locally – sites of migrants’ (however bounded) agency. This, I hope, will offer new approaches to a differentiated discussion of the legitimacy and morality camps as parts of European migration regimes.
Participant: Aspasia Theodosiou
Department of Popular Music
Epirus Institute of Technology
Greece
Email: aspasia.theodosiou@manchester.ac.uk
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Convenor WG4 2010
Participant: Prof Larissa Titarenko
Department of Sociology
Belarus State University
Republic of Belarus
Email: larisa166@hotmail.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Belarus as an EU Border: symbolic significance and materiality
Republic of Belarus, one of the former Soviet republics, currently borders three EU member-states: Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. From this aspect, it is an important eastern border of the EU that has a material substance. This border is absolutely real and has all the attributes of a frontier between the two worlds (to some extend, similar to the previous Soviet-Western border). In Berlin a real Wall physically divided two worlds; citizens of Belarus feel the current EU border as a symbolic wall additionally to its physical, material manifestation: they have to pay for a visa, the application process is difficult and time consuming, border checking is not pleasant, border crossing takes time, etc. Belarusian citizens consider this border as a "closed gate" to a better life. However, while in the Soviet time the population might believe in the official propaganda about the West and considered the border as a “protection”, now the meanings of border have changed: most people view borders as obstacles, a limit for their free will to travel, cooperate, and communicate. The purpose of this paper proposal (based on observations and interviews) is to examine the changes in the meanings of the state border the under current conditions in Belarus.
Participant: Jelena Tosic
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
University of Vienna
Austria
Email: jelentos@yahoo.com
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Diversity and Morality in a Balkan Border Zone - Some Conceptual-Empirical Explorations
Following my research on 'tolerance', human rights and morality in the postsocialist context, I would like to explore local patterns of defining 'diversity' with reference to moral values in the context of contemporary Balkans. The paper represents a conceptual-empirical (pre-fieldwork) exploration of the Montenegrin-Albanian Border. It will consider different ways to theoretically and empirically grasp the moral/legitimizing aspects of border construction and connotation in the local everyday context of a region considered to be marked by 'diversity' and 'hybridity'. One highly relevant conceptual-empirical context I will use in my exploration is the anthropology of the state. In this sense the border can be seen as the space, where citizens 'encounter' the state, which on the other hand constructs itself precisely through the administrative and repetitive 'border-keeping-process'. In this context narrations of war, isolation and forced migration (which marked the regions' recent history) will give insights into the often ambivalent and 'ironic' process of border construction and legitimacy through time. Namely, formerly 'strict' state border which as such ignored local diversity (transcending state borders) now become - due to economic interests and the process of fostering 'regional' identities - 'fluid' and easy to cross.
Participant: Eftychia Voutira
University of Macedonia
Greece
Email: voutira@uom.gr
Proposal for the meeting or other role at the meeting:
Imposing law through EU borders - The limits of morality
Classical moral philosophy distinguishes between two key concepts: 'the right' and 'the good'. Morality deals with the first and ethics with the latter. Contemporary political theory reaffirms this distinction particularly in the work of John Rawls which has served as a paradigm for further research in the development of normative moral theory. The challenge raised today is that of bridging the gap between "rightful state action" and conventionally wrong practices used by states in the name of expediency or pragmatic concerns. This paper considers the context of asylum determination procedures and state practices vis a vis asylum seekers and illegal migrants. Focusing on both the normative and the administrative character of the EU directives in relation to the harmonisation of asylum law state practices, this paper uses examples from Greece in order to corroborate the wider hypothesis that the notion of "minimum standards" introduced in the EU asylum law context as a normative guideline to member states, de facto lowers the quality and level of international refugee protection in favour of deterrence.