Defining refugees is interested in the nature of the categories of refugee, migrant and asylum seeker invoked to manage migratory flows. In this interview, Michel Agier presents the work and shows how this classification opposes the absolute nature of the principle of asylum.
– Michel Agier is an anthropologist, research director at the Institute of Research for Development and director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. His research focuses on the relationships between mobility, migration and the formation of urban contexts. He has published in particular The Cosmopolitan Condition. Anthropology Faced with the Identity Trap (The Discovery, 2013), A world of camps (under his direction, with the collaboration of Clara Lecadet, La Découverte, 2014). His latest work is Migrants and Us. Understanding Babel (CNRS editions).
– Anne-Virginie Madeira is a doctor of law, temporary teaching and research associate at the University of Maine and author of a thesis on the status of national and foreigner in French public law. His work focuses in particular on the status and reception conditions of foreigners in France.
– Contributed to this work: Michel Agier, Karen Akoka, Sylvie Aprile, Delphine Diaz, Kamel Doraï, Carolina Kobelinsky, Anne-Virginie Madeira.
The crisis that Europe has been going through, with the spectacular increase in the arrival of migrants mainly from the Middle East and Africa, has highlighted the uncertainty of the institutional classifications used to describe and manage migratory flows. While the absolute, even “sacred” nature of asylum is constantly reaffirmed by French governments, its implementation gives rise to attitudes that are very different from its universalist principle. Refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, but also war refugees, economic migrants, illegal migrants, are all apparently descriptive terms that, however, engage an entire epistemology and policy of institutional, media, popular or scholarly classifications. Their analysis must be done, while none of these classifications can claim the existence of absolute definitions, everywhere and always true of the categories. It is to this relativity of the modes of classification and the categories used that this work seeks to respond, by focusing on the figure of the refugee, and on the principle which founds it, asylum.
Images and editing: Mélanie Cournil
Table of Contents
– Michel Agier and Anne-Virginie Madeira, “Presentation”
– Interview with Michel Agier, “Define, contain, welcome. Should we rethink asylum?”
– Sylvie Aprile and Delphine Diaz, “Refugees and asylum in Europe XIXe century ”
– Karen Akoka, “Refugees and Asylum Policies in XXe century ”
– Anne-Virginie Madeira, “Legal definition of the right to asylum”
– Excerpts from articles by Kamel Doraï and Carolina Kobelinsky on refugees and asylum applications »
– Annotated bibliography