Blurry Polarization—Muslim Mobilities Reconfigured

Abstract

This concluding chapter discusses how paradoxes and contested assumptions about mobility and religion shape both the discourse and practices of migration management and ideas about belonging in the Middle East and in the larger Muslim world. Contemporary migration management approaches in Dar al-Islam are characterized by a discursive and practical “blurry polarization” (Isotalo, 2011), an oxymoron that we use to make sense of the contrast between increasingly nebulous policy terms for people on the move, and debates and practices for population management that divide along a security-development axis. Mobility, from the viewpoint of the actors formally responsible for border control, migration management, and enforcement of policy and legal obligations in the region—national governments, IOM, the UNHCR, and other humanitarian agencies—is either a security or a development issue. At the same time, even while this discursive and practical polarization has occurred, migration management depends on increasingly blurry concepts to describe mobility (e.g., “forced migration,” “asylum migration,” “mixed migratory flows,” “internal asylum”) and the various categories of movers (e.g., labor migrants, guest workers, refugees, asylum seekers, pilgrims, tourists, students) in ways that allow for a fluctuating, contingent, and politicized treatment of movers. Conceptual blurring has, moreover, become a matter-of-fact part of public parlance: Finnish television news, for example, used the terms “migrant,” “asylum seeker,” and “refugee” interchangeably within the same report about a group of Syrians and Eritreans rescued from the Mediterranean by the Italian coast guard (MTV News, June 8, 2014).

This chapter was developed from an earlier paper presented by Riina Isotalo at the Annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 16–20, 2011, Montreal, Canada entitled, “Blurry Polarization and Mobility Management: Refugees in the Middle East.”