Organized by Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies

In cooperation with Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Institute of Political History

 

The aim of the conference is to better understand the current debates around migration in Europe, but, importantly, from a global perspective. Participants will elaborate on the meaning and understandings of global justices (among others non-domination on state levels, impartiality in individual rights, cultural recognition, more equal sharing of global burdens) in the context of the current processes of migration, migration policies, nationalism afraid of external domination, and unequal relations globally and also within Europe. We would like to focus on the perspectives of subaltern, unprivileged groups, and their sharpening competition in a turbulent capitalist environment, currently going through ambiguous transformations. The key would be to see different justice perspectives and how they can be understood.

 

Time: 09-10 November 2018
Venue: Institute of Political History
2 Alkotmány street, Budapest, 1054

 

 

PROGRAM

 

Friday

 

14:00 – Opening. Jiří Silný (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation)

14:15 – Opening. Attila Melegh (Karl Polanyi Center)
“Hegemonies and counter hegemonies. In search of theoretical perspectives”

14:30 – Keynote. Sonia Lucarelli (UNIBO)
Ontological security and the Metamorphosis of the Beast: the EU and Migration
15:00 – Márton Hunyadi (HAS and Karl Polanyi Center)
Global justices and narratives on migration in Hungarian press

15:20 – Dorottya Mendly (CUB and Karl Polanyi Center)
Shift in modern political rationality and conceptions of justice in the Hungarian case

15:40 – Silvia D’Amato (EUI)
French varieties of populism: which ‘people’ are they fighting for?

16:00 – Discussion

 

16:30 – Coffee break

 

16:45 – Céline Cantat (CEU and Karl Polanyi Center)
Migrant solidarity in Serbia

17:05 – Giorgio Grappi (UNIBO)
Migrants as justice seeking subjects and transnational regimes of labour

17:25 – Zsolt Kapelner (CEU and Institute of Political History)
Theoretical perspectives on justice and immigration

17:45 Discussion

 

18:15 Short break

 

18:30 – LIMPIADORES
Movie and discussion with Béla Soltész

19:30 Closing

 

 

Saturday

 

10:30 – Roundtable:
Overcoming contestation between forms of justice?

Margit Feischmidt (HAS, Centre for Social Sciences)
Sonia Lucarelli (University of Bologna)
Céline Cantat (Karl Polanyi Research Center, CEU)
Boldizsár Nagy (CEU)
András Kováts (HAS, Institute for Minority Studies)

Moderator: Pinar E. Donmez (CEU)

 

12:00 Lunch break

 

13:30 – DISTRICT ZERO
Movie and discussion with Olena Fedyuk

 

15:10 Closing

 

The movies are provided by the Brazilian International Labour Film Festival and are screened for the first time in Hungary.

 

 

Participants and abstracts

 

Panel presentations

 

Ontological security and the Metamorphosis of the Beast: the EU and Migration
Sonia Lucarelli (UNIBO)

EU adjectivised power (normative, civilian, soft, gentle) inspired by liberal values and contributing to a liberal world order have been put under severe strain by the EU’s migration policies, prioritizing borders control, reduction of arrivals to Europe and avoidance of secondary movements over liberal principles (human rights, asylum rights, non-domination over third states, …). The effect is a different Europe, which itself represents the biggest challenge to Europe’s liberal ontology, and to Europe’ credible and affective contribution to the maintenance of (what is left of) the liberal world order. The current European response to the phenomenon of migration seems to respond to an understanding of justice inspired by a Westphalian ethics, while it fails to meet the conditions of a just policy in both Cosmopolitan and “Subjectivesd Cosmopolitan” terms.

Sonia Lucarelli is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, Director of research at the Forum on the Problems of Peace and War in Florence, and Resident Member of the Bologna Institute for Advanced Studies. She has been Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute and participant in the International Visitors Programme of the US Department of State. Her areas of expertise include the EU foreign policy and external image, European security, NATO, European identity and Foreign Policy, Migration and Global Justice. She is Team Leader in the project GLOBUS: Reconsidering European Contributions to Global Justice (2016-2020; Horizon 2020); and has been Lead Scientist in the project PREDICT (NATO grant); in the Network of Excellence GARNET (EU VI FP) and in the Research project EU-GRASP (EU VII FP). She has also received grants for individual research projects form NATO, the Volkswagen Stiftung, the Ministry of foreign Affairs and the Institute for International Affairs in Rome.

 

Shift in modern political rationality and conceptions of justice in the Hungarian case
Dorottya Mendly (CUB and Karl Polanyi Center)

Political rationality in the Foucauldian sense and very generally is what makes things thinkable in a given historical period. The starting point of my argument is that the modern political rationality (the main pillars of which are the idea of state sovereignty on the one hand and global capitalism on the other) has been undergoing deep transformation since at least the end of WW2. Such a mutation of political reason is affected by ambiguous and often contradictory trends like de- and reterritorialization, the headway of international organizations, transnationalization and globalization. These tendencies, often perceived as challenging state control, can be traced in ways of thinking and talking about acute social phenomena, such as migration. The presentation elaborates on the relations between justice and political rationality, and connects it to the dynamics of elaborated in the Hungarian case study of the broader GLOBUS research project on migration, and especially the narratives interpreting migration in the Hungarian press from 2014 onward (Melegh et al, 2018).

Dorottya Mendly is a PhD Candidate at Corvinus University of Budapest, International Relations Multidisciplinary Doctoral School. She is a member of Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and a lecturer at Corvinus and Eötvös Loránd Universities. Her doctoral research focuses on the shifting political rationalities behind global governance, understood as global governmentality.

 

Global justices and narratives on migration in Hungarian press
Márton Hunyadi (HAS – Institute for Minority Studies and Karl Polanyi Center)

The presentation is focusing on how forms of global justice (as defined by Eriksen 2016) and key narratives on migration are related to each other. These connections show how justice as non-domination is able to link all types of control narratives, which combination gives a special motivation to go against humanitarian narratives and impartiality justices. Altogether eight types of main narratives are identified in the Hungarian press between 2014 and 2017 in relation to migration and linked to justice claims and violation. A special attention is paid to how securitization and the justice of non-domination get into interaction on the one hand, and how ideas of human rights and humanitarian issues can utilize a narrow spectrum of narratives in the current public discussions in relation to the justices of impartiality which are marginalized through these narrative frames.

Márton Hunyadi is a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Minority Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and member of Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies. His main research interests include colonial/postcolonial and post-socialist migration, ethnic competition and developmental hierarchies.

 

French varieties of populism: which ‘people’ are they fighting for?
Silvia D’Amato (EUI)

Traditionally, forms of terrorist violence and migration have been interpreted and faced with very different approaches by the right wing and left-wing parties. However, in the 2017 presidential elections, the agenda on foreign policy and its implications for the discussion on terrorism and migration in the country by Marine le Pen, leader for the National Front (FN) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of France Unbowed (FI), touched some overlapping points. From a global justice perspective, this paper first analyses variances in the positioning of the party competition over four key issues, namely EU policy, foreign policy as international policy, migration and terrorism. Here, the focus is also on what kind of nexus between terrorism and migration these two parties recognise and discuss. However, by analysing what kind of ‘people’ French populist parties are focusing on, the paper also expects to shed light on some of the implications of such narratives for the differentiation between a ‘referent and legitimate people’ and a ‘unrightful rest’ within the French and the European territory.

Silvia D’Amato is currently Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and adjunct faculty at James Madison University (Florence) where she teaches Comparative European Politics and Transatlantic Relations. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Scuola Normale Superiore and a Master in International and Diplomatic Science from the University of Bologna. She is author of a book titled ‘Cultures of Counterterrorism: French and Italian responses to terrorism in the post 9/11’ that is forthcoming with Routledge. Her research interests mainly concern International Relations, European security and politics, counterterrorism strategies.

 

Migrant solidarity in Serbia
Céline Cantat (CEU and Karl Polanyi Center)

This presentation discusses the experience of migrant self-organised spaces and migration solidarity groups in Serbia (particularly Belgrade) over the last four years. It first looks at how solidarities in transit emerged in the country over 2015 and 2016, and examines their gradual marginalisation and criminalisation by the Serbian government. It then explores how the Serbian authorities established an official, heavily controlled and regulated refugee aid field from which political subversive actors and practices are excluded. The presentation argues that gaining access to the camps and to funding have become two key leverages through which pressure is exercised upon organisations willing to support migrants and refugees, with strong disciplinary effects. The presentation concludes with examples of counter-practices and with a call for the recognition of the common neoliberal violence experienced by migrants and other social groups in Serbia, which could provide the ground for the building of future solidarities.

Céline Cantat is a Research Fellow at CEU currently working on a project looking at pro-migrant and migrant-led activism along the so-called Balkan Route. She holds a PhD in Refugee Studies from the University of East London. Her PhD research was concerned with pro-migrant and anti-racist groups in France, Italy and the UK and the construction of political responses to the European Union project and its border regime. Celine’s research interests include: globalisation and migration, migration solidarity, racism and exclusion in Europe, and state formation and dynamics of mass displacement.

 

Migrants as justice seeking subjects and transnational regimes of labour
Giorgio Grappi (UNIBO)

With their unruly movements migrants question the political and economic order, thus posing a fundamental challenge for any conception of justice in global times. In my intervention I will question the distinction between refugees and economic migrants, and the intertwined narratives of refugees as extreme victims and economic migrants as impostors. I will then argue that growing racism and nationalism, far from being the result of local dynamics, form part of global transformations of power and of policies which are based on the production of politically silenced workers inside transnational regimes of labour.

Giorgio Grappi is research fellow at the University of Bologna, Department of Political and Social Sciences. His main research areas include logistics, constitutionalism, the transformation of the state form and the political dimension of migration. He has been part of the collective writing of ‘New Keywords: Migration and Borders’ (2014) and is currently involved in the project GLOBUS, Reconsidering European Contributions to Global Justice. Besides several articles he is the author of the books Logistica (2016) and Il popolo inatteso: la questione antifederalista e la Costituzione degli Stati Uniti (2018).

 

Theoretical perspectives on justice and immigration
Zsolt Kapelner (CEU)

The problems of migration and social and global justice are intertwined in numerous ways. Global structural injustice distributes resources and life chances within the world’s population in a highly unequal manner which results in what many authors have called a global caste system. While few would take migration to be the sole or even primary remedy for such injustices, it is hard to deny that migrants often claim resources (including public goods produced by receiving societies, e.g. jobs, health care, cleaner water etc., as well as simply land, as in the case of climate migrants and environmental refugees whose territories became uninhabitable due to environmental devastation) to which they may be entitled as a matter of global justice. Such claims are often weighed against the competing claims of receiving societies (including national and transnational ones, such as the EU) to self-determination, the exclusive enjoyment of socially produced public goods, and so on. In this presentation I give an overview of some fundamental principles that may govern reasoning on justice in these contexts of migration. I will focus specifically on immigration from structurally disadvantaged societies to affluent ones with possible applications to the issues concerning immigration in the EU.

Zsolt Kapelner is a doctoral candidate in Political Theory at Central European University, Budapest. His research areas include democratic theory, immigration, and critical theory.

 

 

Roundtable participants

 

Margit Feischmidt is social anthropologist. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Minority Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is also associate professor at the Department of Communication and Media Studies University of Pécs, Hungary. She teaches courses related to ethnicity, nationalism, migration and social memory, as well as qualitative methods. She holds a doctoral degree in European ethnology from Humboldt University.

 

Sonia Lucarelli is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, Director of research at the Forum on the Problems of Peace and War in Florence, and Resident Member of the Bologna Institute for Advanced Studies. She has been Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute and participant in the International Visitors Programme of the US Department of State. Her areas of expertise include the EU foreign policy and external image, European security, NATO, European identity and Foreign Policy, Migration and Global Justice. She is Team Leader in the project GLOBUS: Reconsidering European Contributions to Global Justice (2016-2020; Horizon 2020); and has been Lead Scientist in the project PREDICT (NATO grant); in the Network of Excellence GARNET (EU VI FP) and in the Research project EU-GRASP (EU VII FP). She has also received grants for individual research projects form NATO, the Volkswagen Stiftung, the Ministry of foreign Affairs and the Institute for International Affairs in Rome.

 

Céline Cantat is a Research Fellow at CEU currently working on a project looking at pro-migrant and migrant-led activism along the so-called Balkan Route. She holds a PhD in Refugee Studies from the University of East London. Her PhD research was concerned with pro-migrant and anti-racist groups in France, Italy and the UK and the construction of political responses to the European Union project and its border regime. Celine’s research interests include: globalisation and migration, migration solidarity, racism and exclusion in Europe, and state formation and dynamics of mass displacement.

 

Boldizsár Nagy received his PhD at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and pursued international studies at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Center. He has been engaged both in governmental and non-governmental actions. He acted several times as expert for the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Council of Europe and UNHCR and participated at various inter-governmental negotiations. He is a co-founder and former board member of the European Society of International Law and member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Refugee Law and of the European Journal of Migration and Law. He is co-founder and editor in-chief of the on-line Rerugee Law Reader. His earlier teaching venues include Beijing, Brussels, Geneva, Moscow, New York and Tbilisi. More than two dozens books were co-authored and/or edited by him. In October 2012 he published a monograph on the development of the Hungarian refugee law and refugee movements between the end of the Cold War and Hungary’s accession to the EU.

 

András Kováts earned degrees in special education and in social policy at ELTE University, Budapest. He has been a research fellow of the Institute for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His fields of research are immigration and asylum policies, immigrant integration and welfare policy. He has authored or edited 8 books and over 40 book chapters and journal articles. Since 1998 he has been in charge of coordinating the activities of Menedék – Hungarian Association for Migrants, first as a program coordinator, later as director. He regularly teaches on international migration and immigrant integration at various higher education and other training courses.

 

Pinar E. Donmez is currently a research affiliate and works as academic coordinator of Open Learning Initiative University Preparation Program at CEU. She previously studied political science at Middle East Technical University and holds an MA and PhD in politics and international studies from the University of Warwick. She taught a number of courses and seminars in this broad field in these universities as well as at CEU. Her doctoral research focused on crisis and restructuring in Turkey with a particular focus on theories of state, management of money and depoliticisation from a Marxist political economy perspective. She has an MA and PhD in politics and international studies from the University of Warwick.