Annual Roger Hood Lecture - Punishing the Innocent The Politics of Violence in Border Policing

As the number of forcibly displaced persons has considerably increased in recent years and as the control of borders has become a major issue in national and international policies, people fleeing their country because of war, persecution or poverty have increasingly been subjected to direct violence of police forces and indirect violence through repression leading them to take dangerous routes and putting them at the mercy of smugglers. Actually, many more people die every year from the latter than from the former.

Based on a five-year ethnography at the border between Italy and France in the Alps, the lecture will mobilize participant observation at a refuge hosting migrants in Briançon and observant participation as volunteer in rescue operations at the Montgenèvre pass, conversations with exiles about their experience along their journey from sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East, interviews with law enforcement officers and commanders, and reports produced by human rights activists and organizations. It will discuss the various forms of violence in the Sahara, Maghreb, particularly Libya, and across the Mediterranean, for some, or in Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and along the Balkan route, for others, with sometimes overlap between police and militias. These practices have been exacerbated in the past decade by, on the one hand, the externalization by European countries of border control on the African continent and the Middle Eastern region, and on the other hand, the support to countries regarded by the European Union as its ramparts against immigration, notably Greece, Croatia and Poland.

The tolerance of this violence, the impunity of its perpetrators, its encouragement by political leaders, the major financial and technological resources deployed to facilitate it, and ultimately, its justification in the name of national sovereignty which exiles are presumably breaching – with no consideration for their rights under international law, particularly the Geneva Convention related to Refugees – indicate that, for many police officers and policy makers, the use of force is a legitimate punishment of so-called “illegal aliens” that can go as far as either killing them or letting them die. Like in urban policing, such practices are racially differentiated and grounded in the view that not all lives are equal. For the more than 73,000 persons who have disappeared during their journey in the past decade, this politics of violence is an invisible form of what Professor Roger Hood spent part of his life studying: death penalty. 

Biography:

Professor at the Collège de France, Chair Moral Questions and Social Issues and James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study 

Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and a sociologist. Initially trained as a physician at Paris University Pierre et Marie Curie, he practiced internal medicine and taught public health at the Hospital of La Pitié Salpétrière, before turning to the social sciences. Having completed a Master’s degree at La Sorbonne and a PhD at EHESS, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, he became Professor at the University of Paris North and later Director of Studies at EHESS, a position he still holds. At CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he was the founding director of IRIS, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences. In 2009, he was appointed at the Institute for Advanced Study as the James D. Wolfensohn Professor. In 2019, he was elected to the Annual Chair in Public Health at the Collège de France, where his inaugural Lecture was titled “The Inequality of Lives.” In 2022, he was elected at the Collège de France on the permanent chair Moral Questions and Social Issues. His new inaugural lecture was titled “The Social Sciences in a Time of Crisis.”

Credit: Patrick Imbert, Collège de France

At the crossroads of two disciplines, he initially conducted studies in medical anthropology, focusing on issues of power and inequalities, successively in Senegal, Ecuador and France. His research on the politics and experiences of AIDS in South Africa led him to develop the conceptual framework of the embodiment of history to account for the reproduction of social disparities and the production of heterodox interpretations of the epidemic. In parallel, he launched a scientific program on humanitarianism in various international contexts of conflicts and disasters, analyzing the implications of speaking of injustice as suffering, violence as trauma, and resistance as resilience. He also investigated immigration and asylum policies as part of a collective project on borders and boundaries supported by the French National Agency for Research.

Laureate of the program Ideas of the European Research Council, he developed an approach to political and moral anthropology which he put to work through a ten-year ethnography of the French state, conducting fieldwork on police, justice and prison. He later engaged a critical discussion of philosophical approaches to punishment, which was the matter of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley, and to life, which was the topic of his Adorno Lectures, at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. He also gave the inaugural Lemkin Lecture at Rutgers University on resentment and ressentiment, the Tumin Lecture at Princeton University on the life of things, the Eric Wolf Lecture at the University of Vienna on conspiracy theories, and the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia on crisis. Frequently intervening in the media, in institutions, in schools and in front of general audiences, he developed a theoretical reflection on the public presence of the social sciences, which he presented in his recipient lecture for the Gold Medal in anthropology at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Foundation Nomis and the Huxley Memorial Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. He is a member of the Academia Europea and of the American Philosophical Society. 

He authored twenty books, which were translated in twelve languages and several of which were granted awards, and edited twenty-seven collective volumes. He occasionally writes for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Guardian, Le Monde, Liberation, and is a regular contributor to Alternatives Économiques. A former vice-president of Médecins sans frontières, he is currently the president of Comede, the Medical Committee for Exiles.