Paper/Proposal Title
Transformations of Free Movement: Syrian Refugee Rights within Neoliberal Signal Territories
Start Date
11-10-2017 8:30 AM
Keywords
forced migration, refugee, human rights, smartphone, neoliberalism
Abstract
Alongside representations of the fractious civil conflict in Syria, our media frequently depict victims of forced displacement using their smartphones. In October 2015, Time published images of refugees taking selfies after making the journey from the Turkish coast to Lesbos, Greece. These images show refugees using mobile devices to enjoy human rights like the freedoms of expression and movement. Absent is the state sanction implied by UN compacts such as the 1951 Refugee Convention.
This paper situates these representations, recent scholarship, and my own fieldwork with Syrian refugees sheltering in the Kurdish Region of Iraq within an analysis of human rights and neoliberal signal territories.
Media scholar Lisa Parks describes signal territories as regions defined not by sovereign jurisdiction but the broadcast capacity enabled by telephonic infrastructure. The massive investment that created this infrastructure was incited largely by neoliberal deregulation of national communication regimes. Even holdouts like Syria’s state-controlled cell provider, Syria-Telecom, an enduring source of income for the Assad regime, can at times be accessed by refugees lingering across the border in Jordan. How might neoliberal signal territories impact forced migration, especially in recent and ongoing cases of Syrian refugees traversing state bounds?
As feminist theorist Brooke Ackerly has noted, human rights may be transformed in practice. Inspired by her work, I argue that refugees’ use of mobile technology within signal territories suggests a way of rethinking features of the UN framework from the ground, and infrastructure, up. We are facing not the neoliberal foreclosure of rights, but shifts in embodied social practices enabled by technology. How might refugees’ use of mobile devices suggest the transformation of their, and therefore our, human right to freedom of movement?
Included in
Transformations of Free Movement: Syrian Refugee Rights within Neoliberal Signal Territories
Alongside representations of the fractious civil conflict in Syria, our media frequently depict victims of forced displacement using their smartphones. In October 2015, Time published images of refugees taking selfies after making the journey from the Turkish coast to Lesbos, Greece. These images show refugees using mobile devices to enjoy human rights like the freedoms of expression and movement. Absent is the state sanction implied by UN compacts such as the 1951 Refugee Convention.
This paper situates these representations, recent scholarship, and my own fieldwork with Syrian refugees sheltering in the Kurdish Region of Iraq within an analysis of human rights and neoliberal signal territories.
Media scholar Lisa Parks describes signal territories as regions defined not by sovereign jurisdiction but the broadcast capacity enabled by telephonic infrastructure. The massive investment that created this infrastructure was incited largely by neoliberal deregulation of national communication regimes. Even holdouts like Syria’s state-controlled cell provider, Syria-Telecom, an enduring source of income for the Assad regime, can at times be accessed by refugees lingering across the border in Jordan. How might neoliberal signal territories impact forced migration, especially in recent and ongoing cases of Syrian refugees traversing state bounds?
As feminist theorist Brooke Ackerly has noted, human rights may be transformed in practice. Inspired by her work, I argue that refugees’ use of mobile technology within signal territories suggests a way of rethinking features of the UN framework from the ground, and infrastructure, up. We are facing not the neoliberal foreclosure of rights, but shifts in embodied social practices enabled by technology. How might refugees’ use of mobile devices suggest the transformation of their, and therefore our, human right to freedom of movement?
