Home>From Migrant Populations to Sexual Minorities: States and the Making of Others
05.09.2024
From Migrant Populations to Sexual Minorities: States and the Making of Others
What if a key part of governing was labelling populations as “others” to legitimise the role and mission of the state? Jeanne Bouyat, Amandine Le Bellec, and Lucas Puygrenier, three former Sciences Po PhD students, recently edited a book published by Palgrave Macmillan in the Sciences Po series in International Relations and Political Economy. Entitled States and the Making of Others, the collective work uses a series of original case studies, rarely studied together, to examine the way in which states make Others and, ultimately, how these Others make them in return.
Find below a selection from the interview that the book's three editors gave to Miriam Périer at Sciences Po Center for International Studies (CERI).
You have recently co-edited a book that explores the role of states in the fabrication of Others and analyses how othering informs state formation and policy-making, through what you call the “state-Others nexus”. How would you define the state-Others nexus, and who are the “Others” that you focus on in your book?
Lucas Puygrenier: Arguably, the social sciences have long been concerned with the dynamics of othering in political societies, particularly in relation to issues of racism, migration, poverty, gender, and sexual identities. Our book is an attempt to bridge this diverse scholarship by bringing to the fore the role of the state.
Adapting Charles Tilly’s famous phrase “wars make states and states make war”, our main contention is that states make Others as Others make states: state actors and policies produce and reproduce Others through labelling them as such, while processes of othering contribute to the formation of the state and the expansion of its activities.
This “state-Others nexus”, as we conceptualise it, can be considered from three different perspectives, all present in the book. The first consists in investigating the practices and rationales underpinning the manufacturing or reproduction of Others by state actors and institutions. The second perspective is about reversing the terms of the equation and exploring, in turn, how the making of Others participates in state formation and policymaking. The third approach examines how processes of othering feed into the politicisation of public action, fostering conflicts and polarisation around the alleged Others.
Jeanne Bouyat: From this standpoint, there are no Others that would exist per se, prior to their encounter with the political processes we investigate. Indeed, the term “Others” refers to any group subjected to political processes of othering in a given socio-political context. Such processes assign individuals to particular, essentialised, collective groups, serving to reproduce power relationships where Others occupy subordinate positions.
In the book, we use “Others” as an umbrella concept that enables us to analyse similarities and specificities across a variety of processes of othering which may stem, among other things, from the divides between “majority” and “minority” groups, “insiders” and “outsiders”, “normal” and “deviant” people, from colonial categorisations, or from the boundaries between and within citizenships. Hence, the concept allows us to foster dialogue between various academic fields that have tended to look at “their Others” in a compartmentalised fashion – in particular those focused on racism, xenophobia, homo-transphobia, and nationalism.
Some of the book’s chapters look at more “expected” figures of Others such as international migrant populations and racialised and sexual minorities, but often through a focus on lesser examined subgroups, sometimes through using the lenses of “intersectionality”, such as LGBTQI+ international immigrants in the European Union, or French Black women migrants from the overseas territories in Paris. Other chapters of the book centre on figures of Others who have received less scholarly attention, such as surrogate mothers, vagabonds, or language translators employed in the context of asylum claims.
Can you elaborate on what the notion of othering provides theoretically and methodologically?
Amandine Le Bellec: As Lucas mentioned, there is a vast body of literature that has focused on the dynamics we study! We found othering to be a more suitable concept than, alternatively, discrimination or stigmatisation could be. Discrimination is a notion rooted in legal studies, that may suggest violation to a norm of equity and fairness. This seemed inconsistent with our emphasis on the systematic, “normal”, and expected nature of othering in political societies. Stigmatisation, on the other hand, is a concept more closely related to our theoretical framework, but it is narrower since it exclusively focuses on processes of vilification, relegation, and exclusion. It does not encompass the more subtle, complex processes of the production of Others through gatekeeping, silencing, or paradoxical state practices “disabling recognition”.
Several chapters of our book do study social groups that could be described as stigmatised, such as surrogate mothers (Perrine Chabanel), French Caribbean women in Parisian hospitals (Marine Haddad), or Ndebele-speaking minorities in Zimbabwe (Lena Reim). However, the book also pays attention to more ambivalent effects that emerge, for example, from the transformations of asylum policies in favour of specific subgroups described as “more vulnerable”, which I discuss in my own chapter. Othering is thus also a key aspect of the politics of recognition that shift the boundaries between those who are considered as part of the community, those who are tolerated, and those who are rejected. In our views, we are better equipped with the notion of othering to grasp these complexities.
So how do Others concretely contribute to the making of the state?
Lucas Puygrenier: One of our main ambitions was to illuminate the constitutive function of othering for state institutions. Two main dimensions can be cited.
First, labelling social groups as Others legitimises the expansion of bureaucratic bodies and state actors, by calling for new forms of technique and expertise. This is evident with respect to the depiction of some populations as threats to society and public order, as in the case of irregular migration or counter-terrorism strategies. It also applies when the need to understand these Others, for instance during the hearings of asylum applicants studied by Maxime Maréchal, requires the enlargement of the state apparatus by relying on auxiliaries and intermediaries, such as language translators, who are often also suspected of disloyalty.
The second role othering plays in the making of the state has to do with how state actors embrace their role and envision their mission, with the very art of governing. For instance, when Maltese authorities resort to old anti-vagrancy provisions to prosecute poor migrant men reaching Europe, as I reveal in my chapter, they also promote a certain idea of work and of how one should live their life. Similarly, Jeanne Bouyat’s chapter on institutional xenophobia in South African schools shows that the implementation of a policy of “national preference” when it comes to accessing public education and teaching jobs, relies on the interiorisation of this norm by educational officials, in collusion with the Department of Home Affairs. Othering is in short linked to a situated vision of order. It erects state institutions as both promoters and protectors of a political community that is meant to be, to an extent, to their image.
