I wrote this review essay for an academic journal, but it got stalled: the journal had slowed its production schedule as a result of the pandemic; the essay was too long to be published without substantial cuts; the editors very sensibly wanted a review of the book by someone with lived experience of seeking refuge to accompany this review by an academic, but had trouble finding that person. The coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying restrictions on international travel, many of which have not been lifted for people seeking refuge, have probably made the book (even more) obsolete anyway. But I wanted to get the essay out into the world nonetheless, especially for the second half, on the uses of utopian fiction in refugee policymaking, so I’m publishing it here on my own blog. It is also available on my institutional e-repository [link to follow] and in a permanently archived version on Archive.org.
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Refugia: Radical Solutions to Mass Displacement. Robin Cohen and Nicholas Van Hear. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. ISBN 9781138601567 (pb); 148 pages, 2 b/w illustrations; £34.99.
The past few years have seen a flurry of proposals to reform the international refugee regime, ranging in scale and complexity from a tweet—Egyptian telecoms billionaire Naguib Sawiris’s offer to buy a Mediterranean island from Greece or Italy and put refugees there—to full-length books like Alexander Betts and Paul Collier’s Refuge,which proposed to dismantle the entire rights-based regime built around the 1951 refugee convention (White 2019). Robin Cohen and Nick Van Hear’s Refugia falls somewhere in the middle, like T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Leah Zamore’s The Arc of Protection: punchy little books of about 150 pages, designed to be read and digested quickly by policymakers, humanitarian practitioners, and activists. Like these other books, Refugia starts with the now standard claim that record numbers of people are being displaced, of whom a shrinking proportion can hope to find a ‘durable solution’ while an overstretched refugee system keeps the rest in humanitarian limbo. How can this situation be resolved? Cohen and Van Hear engage in utopian thinking to produce a ‘social science fiction’ in which a transnational global polity of refugees, wrought by the efforts of refugees themselves, emerges. This is not so much a proposal to reform or replace the current refugee regime as an effort to imagine a better world that, they hope, might be within our reach—in as little as a decade, if only refugees will grasp it for us.
The project was familiar to researchers and practitioners in the field long before the book came out: the authors presented their ideas widely, in person and in writing. An earlier version was the subject of a round table in the inaugural issue of Migration & Society: Advances in Research, where Van Hear presented the idea in outline, with critical responses from Véronique Barbelet and Christine Bennett at the Humanitarian Policy Group and Helma Lutz of Goethe University Frankfurt (Van Hear et al. 2018). Barbelet and Bennett observed that the idea ‘imagines a solution where refugees survive but do not thrive’, proposing a technical fix that does not address refugees’ structural economic, legal, and social precarity. Lutz noted that the plan ignored differences between refugees (who may include perpetrators as well as victims of persecution), said nothing about how Refugia’s people would reach agreement on how to achieve a ‘just’ society, and left unanswered the question of the economic system it would adopt. None of these issues is resolved in the book-length version of the argument. Quite the opposite: it builds the dream palace of technical fixes to even loftier heights, while the gaps in its foundations yawn ever wider. But it’s worth returning to this longer version of the argument, for two reasons. First, at some risk of flogging a dead horse, the book-length problems merit an essay-length critique, lest any of those policymakers, practitioners, or activists be tempted to lend Refugia more credence than it warrants. Second, a key point about Cohen and Van Hear’s project that those earlier critiques did notaddress is its use of fiction as a means of rethinking refugee protection—that is, its literary imagination. This deserves critical reflection, though not because it redeems Refugia (spoiler: it doesn’t). Taking Refugia seriously as fiction sharpens our understanding of the plan’s problems, bringing the authors’ preconceptions and motivations into clearer focus than a discussion limited to their academic/policy analysis. And it helps us think about how this tool for making a better future might be put to better use.
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The book begins with a scene-setting prelude, ‘Refugia 2030’, that imagines this ‘loosely connected archipelago’ (2) consolidating itself in a hostile environment of the near future. The rich world is increasingly polarized between ‘metropolitan, liberal megacities’ (1) and ‘authoritarian national governments’ rooted in small towns and the countryside; the poor world is plagued by ‘identity conflicts [sic] fuelled by ethnic, nationalist, and religious loyalties’ (1). But hope is to be found in over 300 ‘refugiums’: self-governing communities of refugees licensed or tolerated ‘by the nation-states or local authorities within whose territories they lie’ (2), which the authors call ‘Somewherelands’. Self-governed by a kind of direct democracy, this confederacy uses a blockchain-based technology known as the Sesame Pass to grant its residents, Refugians, certain entitlements and rights, like the right of movement. Refugees, in other words, have taken responsibility for themselves from the states that host them. Economically, Refugia flourishes thanks to its inhabitants’ skills ‘in cultural and creative industries, education, and digital commerce and services’ (3), and agreements on employment and tax-sharing negotiated with the Somewhereland governments. No single refugium becomes overloaded because an algorithmic ‘Capacity Rating’—devised ‘by Refugian digital specialists wary of covert control by the technology corporations’ (4)—keeps track of how many people it can support at any one time. Politically and economically open, Refugia stands as an incipient challenge to the nation-state.
From this bold vision, the book proceeds in two strands. The main strand is a more conventional academic argument, with an introduction (chapter 1), a discussion of theoretical underpinnings (ch2), a review of existing reform plans (ch3), and two chapters considering prefigurations of Refugia in today’s world (ch4) and discussing how to make it work in practice (ch5). A final chapter summarizes the argument and engages with its critics. Alongside this runs the minor strand, of fictional ‘vignettes’ that follow each chapter and imagine an episode somewhere in Refugia in the years 2027–30. I’ll discuss the academic argument before returning to its literary avatar.
The theoretical underpinnings of Refugia, according to chapter 2, lie in an effort to think beyond the nation-state, ‘an orthodoxy reinforced by everything from passports to sporting competitions’ (31). Why is this necessary? The nation-state is problematic on many grounds. No state is in reality the political expression of a single national community. In the real world, many other ‘power containers’ (16) vie with nation-states for dominance, from corporations to religions to super-wealthy individuals. Stateless nations seeking states are a destabilizing force, while the creation of a new nation-state generates new problems, as the examples of Israel and South Sudan show. ‘[T]he territorial nation-state may have reached its historical limits’ (18), and in any case, ‘fixed ascribed identities (ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, or national)’ are ‘increasingly seen as irritating, irrelevant, or even oppressive’ (20). Citing, but misspelling, Zygmunt Bauman, the authors say that modern identities are liquid, based on elective affinities as much as primordial ascriptions, and liable to agglutination and change.
If all this sounds rather vague, that’s because it is: a superficial swirl through some relevant social theory that glances off its references rather than seriously engaging with the texts or systematically reflecting on their relevance (or not) to the subject. Frustrating throughout the chapter is the authors’ stubborn refusal to recognize that in every sphere that they cite to show that the nation-state can be transcended, states play a powerful role. You don’t need to be an ‘ardent nationalist’ (19) to see this. Corporations rely on states to discipline labour, regulate markets, and (often) provide direct or indirect subsidies. Global religions operate everywhere in dialogue with states: they may be ‘power containers’ distinct from states, but they are not wholly autonomous of them. Social identities, whether ascriptive or elective, are everywhere enframed by the regulatory frameworks of states, and their repressive or ideological apparatuses. States do not determine these things, but they do shape them. The ‘archipelagic thinking’ that the authors borrow from Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau needs to be thought through in this context. Transnational entities do not transcend states but are made by them: consider the actually existing archipelagos of humanitarian containment, or of tax havens and freeports. And none of this speculation about nation-states is coherently articulated to the brief discussions of the ‘mobile commons’ and ‘homemaking on the move’ that follow.
The authors end chapter 2 by stressing the necessity of utopian thinking, but they make the very odd claim that ‘with the collapse of nearly all Socialist experiments, utopian thinking went out of fashion’ (30). But free market utopianism literally declared ‘the end of history’ when the Soviet bloc collapsed, and the decades since then have been deeply marked by other utopianisms, from the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley venture capitalists to the Islamic State. To be clear: all of the thinkers discussed in this chapter offer useful ways of thinking about our world, that could help us imagine a better future (for everyone, refugees included). Utopianism as method for scholar-activists is also not just valid but necessary, in a time when powerholders within an intellectually entrenched political economy insist that there is no alternative even as it generates insoluble political and ecological crises. But this chapter does not convincingly show how its theoretical references relate to the making of Refugia, and its refusal to engage with reality makes its utopianism idle rather than generative.
Chapter 3 discusses other proposals for reforming the refugee regime, from the relatively cautious (Aleinikoff and Zamore) to the would-be radical (Betts and Collier) to the wild-eyed and speculative (Jason Buzi’s ‘Refugee Nation’; Naguib Sawiris’s island).[1] Cohen and Van Hear attempt to extract the best ideas from this assortment, which obliges them to give a more sympathetic hearing than they merit to proposals that are merely the self-indulgent fantasies of wealthy men, or actively and intentionally harmful to refugees. But they do not discuss the most obvious failing all these schemes share: not one of them is led by refugees themselves, and most if not all have been put forward without any evidence of participation by or direct consultation with refugees. ‘Nothing about us without us’ is a key message of many refugee groups, as the authors note (62): it’s one that these reform plans, especially the more grandiose ones, have ignored. (The Bangladeshi government actually has built an artificial island to accommodate Rohingya refugees, who have done their best to avoid the nightmarish isolation and vulnerability it exposes them to [UN Bangladesh 2020; Strangio 2021].) The authors end the chapter by saying that ‘real engagement by refugees in any plan and a sense that they are in charge will be necessary to its success’ (55). This is true, but it needs more than a passing mention: the absence of any such engagement is a fundamental weakness of the ‘alternative visions’ they discuss. Cohen and Van Hear don’t exempt themselves from this criticism, but that raises the question of why they haven’t acted on it. As far as I can tell, they don’t cite a single refugee. Even Betts and Collier managed more than that, and only one of the refugees in their book was fictional.
What are the ‘prefigurations’ of Refugia in the present? Another hotchpotch. Chapter 4 ranges from migrant diasporas to UNRWA, from Rojava to urban squats. The authors are keen to show that transnational representative structures can work, and that ‘direct democracy’ is viable for communal government at scale. But they don’t dwell long enough on their examples to face any difficult questions: whether an organization like the World Jewish Congress is really representative (and is really a transnational alternative to the nation-state); whose voices are heard and whose are not in ‘direct democracies’ like Rojava or Hotel Oniro; how to articulate local and transnational experiments if not through the intermediary of the nation-state (and Rojava is surely an aspiring nation-state); or, crucially, how power is allocated in all these examples, how divergent interests are reconciled and conflicts managed. These examples all deserved a more sustained, less rose-tinted discussion, and a more coherently organized one too. They contain interesting and even inspiring possibilities for the future, but they also offer many warnings. Would a Palestinian recommend UNRWA as a ‘model of transnational governance’ (61), for example? Perhaps, if it had more Palestinians at its senior levels. But I think most would prefer a Palestinian state.
Chapter 5, ‘Making Refugia work’, is the heart of the book. The essence of Refugia, the authors say, is ‘reaching for a good society’ (81), which Refugians will achieve by ‘engagement with the known community’ (82) of other displaced people (and ‘solidarians’). Their idea of ‘known community’ takes inspiration from ‘the ancient Greek notion of the agora, the open place, the gathering place, the assembly, where people meet to shop, market, buy and sell, socialize, and exchange ideas’ (82)—though they fail to mention that classical Greece was a congeries of slave societies that placed sharp limits on participation in the polis, notably excluding women. And this vision of frictionless ‘engagement’ is not so much utopian as reductive, making refugees into an undifferentiated mass and denying them their individual and collective histories. Having misrepresented global south conflicts as ‘identity conflicts’ on the first page of the book, they now expect Refugians to slough off their prior identities—that is, their histories—and build a new collective identity rooted in the shared experience of displacement. But that is not how displacement works on the process of social identity formation. As Peter Gatrell has shown, drawing on Liisa Malkki’s anthropological work, time and again in refugee history displacement has indeed been a crucible for identity formation, but always working with, and often intensifying, what was already present (Gatrell 2013; Malkki 1996). Displacement is far more likely to stimulate nationalist political mobilizations among existing collectivities, and intensify their territorial aspirations, than produce a commitment to the kind of feelgood transnational collectivity that Cohen and Van Hear would like to see. If reading Gatrell and Malkki was too much—neither is cited—then paying attention to the experiences of almost any group of refugees would have told the authors this. There is no reason why different groups embarked on a journey of displacement, along the same route or not, should develop ‘inter-group support’, or ‘trust and confidence [and] permanent cooperation’ (85). Neither the trauma of displacement nor the ‘resilience’ learned on the journey point towards the development of a transnational identity, and nor does the third element they posit, ‘homemaking’ in exile. They develop this at some length, albeit fuzzily. In part they argue for Refugians to engage in a kind of DIY city-building, with ‘constituent assemblies in each refugium to consider’—and build—‘customized site-and-services schemes’ (84). More is needed, though, than mere bricks, mortar, and fibre-optic cables, and a ‘gendered approach to home-making’ will apparently provide this. But the authors do not articulate their second quick skim of studies on the gendered experience of displacement with their account of the ‘self-organization, democratic discussion, and representation’ that will allow Refugians to thrive.
The logical next step would be a discussion of governance within Refugia, but instead there follow sections on solidarity movements and the authors’ vision for Refugia’s technological underpinnings. Although their aspiration for Somewherelander ‘solidarians’ to sign up and become Refugians themselves is questionable, the first of these is worth discussing: solidarity work, provided it knows its place, is surely a helpful complement to any successful effort for refugee self-organization. But the second is where the book’s utopian thinking stumbles, with a vertiginous lack of critical reflection, into a dystopia that could all too easily happen, with the book’s biggest concrete idea: the Sesame Pass, or rather the Sesame Pass/App/Chip. In order to document refugees’ identities, provide work permits for Somewhereland employment, enable international travel, ensure access to entitlements such as education and housing, allocate ‘creds’ within the Capacity Rating system, and grant voting rights within each refugium and in Refugia as a whole, Cohen and Van Hear propose an ambitious tech solution. All of these functions will be encoded on a single card (Pass), then a smartphone (App), and ultimately a subcutaneous implant (Chip).
It is ironic, in a sick kind of way, that the authors think they are transcending the nation-state with this disastrously bad idea: the Sesame Chip takes all the practices modern nation-states have developed to manage their relationship with their populations down to individual level, bundles them all into a single technology more intrusive than even the most authoritarian state has yet dared, and literally implants them into the bodies of individual refugees. Cohen and Van Hear airily note that this technology will need to be kept out of the hands of the technology corporations. But they offer no explanation of how their brave transnational archipelago will procure, install, and run the mammoth infrastructure required to underpin this enormously sophisticated system, nor how individual refugiums will develop the judicial, administrative, or medical infrastructure to implant the chips in Refugian arms, or reset, renew, or replace ‘damaged, stolen, or penetrated Passes’ (93). Whose problems is the Sesame Pass solving? Not those of refugees. One motivation is the need to securely identify individual Refugians to offset the ‘fear of terrorists posing as refugees’ that figures in ‘much of the anti-refugee and anti-migrant rhetoric in Somewherelands’ (93). The authors don’t seem to realize that by insisting on a coercive control measure for refugees they are not dissipating but consolidating this racist rhetoric, and handing hostile actors (states or others) an immensely powerful tool to use against refugees. This is intellectually negligent: Cohen and Van Hear ignore the extensive critical literature on ‘surveillance capitalism’ and its exploitative relationship with refugees (Madianou 2019; Achiume 2020; Lemberg-Pedersen and Haioty 2020; Weitzberg 2020). But more than that, it is morally negligent. It is perhaps the most outstanding example of the sheer irresponsibility that characterizes the whole book.
One objection to this line of criticism might be that the book is social science fiction, and the authors can be forgiven a little starry-eyed fantasy. But even if we set aside their programmatic real-world intentions, their fiction fails. Good science fiction doesn’t simply invent currently impossible technologies (though the Sesame Chip is not far from being possible): it takes their implications seriously, including their moral and political implications, otherwise they are mere special effects. What would happen if certain individuals in a seismically unstable world had the power to still the trembling earth? They would be hated and feared as much as they were needed, as N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy shows (Jemisin 2015, 2016, 2017). A genuinely utopian fiction, or fictional utopia, might indeed be a better way of rethinking refugee protection than a policy brief. But a literary analysis of Cohen and Van Hear’s fictional vignettes is no more forgiving than a policy analysis of their proposals. Still, they deserve close attention, because this is where the authors show us Refugia as they imagine it, and show us the limits of their imagination.
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The first vignette begins with a gong sounding at the Janat Refugium, somewhere (‘Somewhereland’) in North Africa—presumably Libya, from the reference to Cyrene architecture. ‘I declare the weekly agora of Janat open’, the new presiding officer says (12), ‘As we have decided in earlier meetings the agora will finish when the gong sounds in one and half hours, with all unfinished business to go to the next meeting.’ This sounds oddly like an academic departmental meeting, but the scene is the closest the book gets to giving us an account of how governance in Refugia might work, and politics is elided from the start. How was the ‘new presiding officer’ selected? How were these procedural decisions reached? ‘The agora had adapted an old Swahili proverb’, the authors tell us, ‘to describe their vibrant democracy: ‘Fugians sit under the tree and talk until they agree’.’(12) So we have a setting whose name harks back to classical Greek democracy, and an old Swahili proverb to describe its proceedings. We’re asked to take it on trust that this just works: that the question of participation has an easy answer, and that everyone can speak English. But like ancient Greece, the Swahili coasts in more recent times were a slave-owning society. These references are not as benign as the authors think.
Discussions start with ‘routine business’: the desalination plant needs attention. Fortunately, rather like a modern British university, Janat refugium has a ‘science cluster’ which can investigate. Meanwhile volunteers are needed to clean the filters, and two love-struck young Fugians offer to help out—more for the chance to spend some time together than for the 20 creds per day that will be added to their Sesame accounts. But what are their backgrounds? Do they share a language, are they with their families? Are they a straight couple or a gay couple? It is charming that everyone simply accepts that their love will bloom, but not remotely realistic. Compare the scenes in Ben Rawlence’s book about Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya that describe Monday and Muna, a Sudanese Christian man and Somali Muslim woman who meet in the camp (working for the German development agency) and marry. The result? Immediate threats of death against Muna and her unborn child from her family and wider clan, and a life of fear. ‘A community under threat is rarely known for its tolerance’, as Rawlence says (2016: 98).
The bigger question raised in this vignette is that of political inclusion, as Janat, with a Capacity Rating of 1,400 people and only 25 spare places, decides who to take in. Pregnant women already in the camp—sorry, ‘refugium’—are quickly assigned ten places, presumably for their unborn children. But then there’s a difficult and upsetting discussion. ‘Patrice’ speaks up on behalf of his cousin, using the Sesame Pass embedded in his arm to summon up gruesome holograms showing the torture she has experienced in her (presumably Francophone African) country. Is it likely that someone would exhibit images of a female relative’s tortured body to a gathering of strangers in order to gain her access to a place of refuge? Perhaps. It’s extremely demeaning, but she is accepted, along with her family: five places. Further discussions over the remaining places provoke tears, as people remember their own suffering. But what happens to the people who don’t get spaces—do they just disappear? Languish in Somewhereland-controlled detention centres? Two pages earlier, the authors have said ‘Refugia is governed highly democratically. If you have been displaced, you can sign up. You can join freely and leave freely.’ (10) But that is not true. Janat, like a nation-state, tries to control who can enter, and gain access to the benefits of belonging. Finally, the agora discusses two ‘solidarians’ who want to join, Ebba and Lars. Ebba is a Swedish woman’s name (I had to look it up); Lars is a common Germanic male name. I mention this because this first vignette of Refugian life names three individuals and only one of them is a refugee. The other two are Nordic voluntourists, who once helped search-and-rescue missions and now offer legal and social work services in Arabic and English. ‘Their applications to join Janat as full members were greeted enthusiastically’ (13): two places of refuge going to people who don’t need them.
This is all entirely implausible. It is also deeply patronizing, even dehumanizing, in its depiction of displaced people as cheerful, mostly unnamed positive thinkers who can all speak English, all get to speak, and always come to an agreement that everyone accepts. Displaced people are real people. They have their own strongly held values, opinions, beliefs; their own languages; their own, yes, identities, that shape their assessment of how to weigh up their individual advantage, collective belonging, and the collective good. If Refugia will not grant them that, then its political institutions are not going to work.
The next vignette is more embarrassing still. At the Refugium Tindouf—this is a real place, the Algerian desert town around which Sahrawi refugee camps have existed since the 1970s—the residents are wondering what to do about ‘a group of dishevelled Brexitanians, popularly known as ‘Johnsons’ (no-one knew why)’: a sorry sight, with their ‘pink-red skins and split lips’ (33). After a discussion, the Refugians agree that however sympathetic they may feel to these unfortunate escapees from ‘bankrupt Brexitania’, it’s best not to let them linger: by ‘a clear majority (52–48 per cent)’(34), they agree to let them stay temporarily then ask them to move on. With its smug little jokes (a ‘clear majority’ of 52–48 per cent—how amusing!), this vignette is not the only place in the book where Cohen and Van Hear seem more interested in settling scores in British political debates than in working for or with refugees. Take ‘Somewhereland’, the residual category against which Refugia defines itself. ‘We are not quite sure’, a note explains, ‘but suspect that the name Somewhereland is an ironic nod’ (6) to David Goodhart’s 2017 book The Road to Somewhere. You can see why Cohen and Van Hear might want to poke fun at this prominent publicist of the British right. But by using imagined ‘refugee activists’ as their tool to do so, they place (imaginary) refugees at the service of their own politics, rather than placing their imaginations at the service of refugees. Is all of Refugia just a Remainer fantasy?
The third vignette is the first which does not feature people from the global north. Cohen and Van Hear imply early on that by 2030 Refugia will include territories in the global north, but all the refugiums they actually take the time to imagine lie in the global south. This one is in Ghana, where a Ghanaian solidarian named Lariba is driving down the highway in a ‘solar’ with the Eritrean Tekle, a Refugian who has come to do voluntary service in another refugium: this is ‘nominally voluntary, but more or less expected’ (56). Here the authors do explicitly raise the issue of how Refugians communicate. But they haven’t put much thought into ‘Fugee, the creole that was developing across Refugia’ (56): Lariba and Tekle quickly default to English. In Refugia, imagined refugees have to work for us, switching to an English that the book’s presumed anglophone audience can understand without effort. (‘Hey Fuj, turn that down a moment. I can’t hear myself think’: it isn’t even a serious attempt to reproduce any of the diverse African Englishes.) Why not make us work instead? In Riddley Walker,Russell Hoban imagined a broken, ragged English that almost drags the reader—the book never departs from it—into a post-apocalyptic future England (Hoban 1980). A Fugee creole in which Refugians might imagine their own futures: that would open up far more radical possibilities than a fiction that constrains itself to the English of the seminar paper and policy brief. But you would need to listen to many more refugees for it to be convincing.
The next vignette introduces Dr Farid Abadi, ‘Skinny Doc’. Once a doctor in Aleppo, Farid is now a grateful Refugian, putting his medical training to good use: in the Elysia Refugium, he is ‘responsible for the subcutaneous insertion of a Sesame microchip into anyone who wanted their rights, creds (the currency), and access codes inserted into their arm—the ‘skinny’ option’ (78), hence his nickname. He has done this for two young women who stroll past him, Omni and Luna, and remembers them telling him ‘Don’t mess up our beautiful skins’, and adding ‘Only oldies still carry around cards and phones’ (78). Cohen and Van Hear are not alone, among writers of science fiction, in doing clunky dialogue. But good writers of science fiction think seriously about the consequences of their speculations, even if their dialogue is a bit cringe. Perhaps younger Refugians would rush to embrace the Sesame Chip, as we have all embraced smartphones, despite the invasive surveillance they bring—but no imagined Refugian is given a moment’s opportunity to suggest that the Sesame Chip might carry dangers into the bearer’s body.[2]
Omni and Luna’s names are even more problematic than their speech. They are newly-adopted names—‘universe names’, eeek—for two young women who were once ‘bewildered, traumatized souls… dumped at the refugium by some brusque Somewherelanders’ (78): nameless refugees, in other words, without individual stories or histories. By adopting new names, ‘like so many other Refugians’, they have ‘said goodbye to the religions and ethnicities of their forbears’ (78). We have already seen why it is so implausible, not to mention patronizing, to imagine away displaced people’s individual and collective histories and heritage like this. It also makes refugees responsible for their own predicament, by blaming their displacement on their own identities. And here, most clearly, we see what is really going on. As former refugees, Omni and Luna are not a plausible fiction. But they are all too easily understandable as a fantasy of two older white academics frightened by ‘identity politics’, as it plays out not in the conflict-prone global south but on campus. If they really cared about the politics of identity in ‘West Asia’ then they might have bothered to say more about what Omni and Luna had chosen to slough off, or to do some reading about Syria before inventing a Syrian character. Back in Aleppo, they say, ‘Maronites, Chaldeans, Armenians, and Syrians all came to Dr Abadi’s door.’ But the Maronites, Chaldeans, and Armenians of Aleppo were all Syrians, and those that remain there still are. If someone wrote about ‘Catholics, Baptists, Jews, and British’ in Birmingham, would we take their vision of a post-identitarian utopia seriously?
The final vignette takes us to a ‘workshop on creds and distributed ledger technology’ (99) in 2027, where brilliant Refugians from twenty different refugiums have gathered together to do magic—or they might as well have done. ‘Jennie the Génie’ sums up the state of play: Refugia has so far ‘issued 22.4 million digital identities through its Sesame card/app/chip’; 94 per cent of refugiums have adopted the ‘cred’ as currency, its name having ‘been shown to work well in a number of languages’; 97 per cent of refugiums have agreed that newcomers should be allocated ‘10,000 non-transferable creds’ on arrival (99). This is already impressive. The near-unanimity with which Refugians have agreed on complex issues of economic, social, and political entitlements resembles no democracy I have ever heard of. And their technological prowess in power generation must be even more phenomenal than their digital wizardry. The cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin, also based on distributed ledger technology, has existed since 2008. At time of writing nearly 19m Bitcoins have been ‘mined’, out of a total possible 21m. The processing power required to keep mining more and to produce and maintain a permanent and supposedly unfalsifiable record of transactions (the blockchain) is so immense that Bitcoin consumes as much electricity annually as a mid-sized nation-state like Argentina or Sweden. Bitcoin ‘mines’ tend to be located in places that are cold, so cooling the server stacks is cheaper, and/or where energy is cheap or subsidized: Iceland has cold weather and geothermal energy, China has subsidized electricity. The blockchain required to keep track of 22.4 million identities and transactions in billions of creds would dwarf that required to keep track of Bitcoin. Refugia, evidently, has found good places to keep its servers, and within a few years of its inauguration has an energy infrastructure—somewhere—that many nation-states would envy.
And things are about to get a lot more complicated. ‘Amamefuna’ and his team have identified 6,735 occupations in existing refugiums and assessed their ‘Community Benefit Ratings’ using 40 criteria—are they hard or easy, skilled or unskilled, prosaic or creative? Gliding over the fact that value judgments like these cannot be ‘objectively calculated’ (100) but are always subjectively determined in ways that usually reflect and reproduce existing social hierarchies, these ratings too are to be hung from the already groaning blockchain that carries the digital load of the Sesame Chip. Using an ‘updated version of Kuratowski’s theorem’, the delegates come up with an algorithm that automatically assigns creds for labour service ‘while eliminating the possibility of corruption and self-importance inflation’ (!). Refugia is fortunate indeed to have so many mathematical geniuses skilled enough to devise algorithms that can simply sweep aside all knotty political and economic problems, and civic-minded enough not to go and get lucrative jobs with Google instead. ‘And, hey, I forgot to say, the Gini coefficient never gets higher than 0.1’ (100). Magic!
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Fictional utopias can be a powerful tool for critiquing reality and imagining alternatives to it. Cohen and Van Hear seem uninterested in the former: Refugia, they say, ‘is about lifting our heads above the real’ (116). The vignettes nonetheless contains an implicit critique, albeit a selective one fixated on ‘identity politics’ rather than material politics, and notably uncritical of the frictionless dreams of tech ideologists. But the book does not so much rise above the real as blithely refuse to consider it. As a result, Refugia is not ‘a promising new path through the thicket of inertia and convention’ (116) for anyone interested in less dystopian alternatives to our current system. New paths are urgently needed, but as policy analysis Refugia is simply too shallow to be a useful resource. And this is a failure of imagination. Their ‘refugee’ characters are simply puppets for the authors’ fantasies. They have put no creative effort into imagining a plausible history for their transnational polity of 2030, or into working through the consequences of their ideas. This utopia is neither realistic nor imaginative enough.
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References
Achiume, E. Tendayi. 2020. Racial and xenophobic discrimination, emerging digital technologies, and border and immigration enforcement. Thematic report of United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance to the UN General Assembly, 10 Nov 2020. https://antiracismsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/A_75_590_Advance-Unedited-Version.pdf.
Gatrell, Peter. 2013. The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hoban, Russell. 1980. Riddley Walker. London: Cape.
Jemisin, N.K. 2015. The Fifth Season. London: Orbit.
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[1] The authors also discuss ‘sanctuary cities’ here, but they are the odd one out: rather than a scheme for reforming the refugee regime, this is an actually existing global initiative of small-scale, locally grounded, practical efforts to respond to states’ failure to act on their obligations under it.
[2] The book was written before non-Refugians started burning 5G telephone masts for spreading coronavirus, or refusing the vaccine because it would place microchips in our bodies: real-world science fiction more compelling and troubling than anything these authors can invent.
Singular Things 