Embodied Violence and Agency in Refugee Regimes

Multiple refugee regimes govern the lives of forced migrants. Through various ethnographic cases, this book reveals the embodied violence of agency within these regimes.

Multiple refugee regimes govern the lives of forced migrants simultaneously but in an often conflicting way. As a mechanism of inclusion/exclusion, they tend to engender the violence they sought to dissipate. Protection and control channel agency through mechanisms of either tutelage and victimisation or criminalisation. This book contrasts multiple groups of refugees and refugee regimes, revealing the inherent coercive violence of refugee regimes, from displacement and expulsion, to stereotypification and exclusion in host countries, and academic knowledge essentialisation. This violence is international, national, society-based, internalised, and embodied and it urgently needs due scholarly attention.

Auteur
Sabine Bauer-Amin is a social anthropologist, research associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for Social Anthropology as well as member of ROR-N. Previously, she has worked on the Middle East with a special focus on youth and issues of identity/alterity. Her current research focus lays on the situation of refugees from Iraq and Syria in Austria and beyond.Leonardo Schiocchet has a PhD in anthropology (Boston University, 2011) and a Habilitation in social and cultural anthropology (University of Vienna, 2022). He is a researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), a member of the Refugee Outreach & Research Network (ROR-n), and principal investigator of the FWF project The Austro-Arab Encounter. Since 2005, his work has focused on social belonging processes among Arab forced migrants.Maria Six-Hohenbalken (Dr.), born in 1965, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). She did her doctorate at Universität Wien. Her research fields are political and historical anthropology, diasporas and transnational communities, memory studies and art-based research. Her regional focus is on Kurdish communities in the Middle East and in Diaspora.