Karen Akoka, lecturer in political science at the University of Nanterre, has just published with La Découverte editions, Asylum and exile, a history of the refugee / migrant distinction. Karen Akoka is Thomas Snégaroff’s guest for this new Look at the info.
franceinfo: This word “refugee”, what does it mean?
Karen Akoka : “Refugee” is a legal status which is backed by a definition, according to the UN “any person (…) who (…) fearing with reason of being persecuted because of his race, his religion, his nationality, his membership of a certain social group or his political opinions, is outside the country whose nationality she has and who cannot or, because of this fear, does not want to claim the protection of this country … “. In France, it isOFPRA, the French office for the protection of refugees and stateless persons which determines it.
We often hear the words “refugee” or “migrant” indiscriminately, are these concepts interchangeable?
In my opinion, a refugee is a migrant. A migrant is someone who was born abroad and who lives in a country of which he is not a national. Then, among the migrants, there are people who seek asylum, who obtain refugee status. Only, we are today in a moment of very strong dichotomy between these two groups.
My book aims in part to analyze the hierarchy that has operated between the refugee, considered legitimate, and the migrant, considered illegitimate.
Karen Akoka, author of “Asylum and Exile”–
What difference then is made today between the two categories?
So for me, a refugee is nothing other than someone who has obtained status. It does not say more about its trajectory. It is the result of a categorization process, and my whole book consists of reversing the gaze and stopping to dissect the motivations, the trajectories of individuals, to see if they are real or false, if they are migrants. or refugees, but take note that most lives are in continuums, that categories do not reflect the complexity of lives.
We must rather look on the side of those who administer the label, reverse the gaze, look at those who designate, rather than those who are designated.
Karen Akoka
You tell us in your book that there is a golden age of the refugee, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the image of the refugee is the most positive. And then there is a slip. We are in that time …
The golden age corresponds to the Trente Glorieuses where the rate of agreement to refugee status was 80%. We had the impression that everything was going well in the best of all possible worlds, that the people who appeared before the institution were “real”, and that the institution was doing its job well. The dominant public discourse today is that most asylum seekers are “fake”, since the rate of granting refugee status is 20%. This is proof that now it is individuals who pass themselves off as refugees but who are not.
I went to study that period, that golden age that permeates our representations today. What we see is that at that time, the majority of people seeking asylum, they obtain refugee status because they come from communist countries, and refugee status in this context cold war, attributing it is a way of leading the ideological confrontation. We do not then ask people if they are individually persecuted, like today. It was okay if they were economically motivated. They almost had to be Hungarians, Romanians or Czechs to obtain the status. And then, later, in the 1980s, Cambodians, Laotians, Vietnamese.
Today, we are no longer in this configuration. The requirements are much more important. Basically, this figure of the Soviet dissident, the true refugee, dominant in the Thirty Glorious Years, she built in hollow, the idea that today, they would all be fakes.
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