Tag Archives: Germany

Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Allison Stuewe: Humanitarian Erasure: Marriage Practices of Iraqi Yezidi Refugees and Germany’s Integration Courses

Image: Refugee welcome centre in Hamburg, Germany, photo by Rasande Tyskar

The German governing coalition explicitly considers refugee integration to be a humanitarian project based on an obligation to care for others because of their shared humanity. Notably, however, the country’s strategies for integrating refugees are based on the notion that refugees coming to Germany lack not only the practical skills (like linguistic skills) to help them succeed in Germany but also the “right” values. The idea that refugees and their cultural differences, not German society, are the barrier to refugee success in Germany guides German integration programming. Survey data suggests, however, that refugees identify with most “German values” to an equal or stronger extent than the rest of the German population (Fuchs, Fan, and von Scheve 2021).

To compensate for this perceived (if false) deficiency, Germany’s humanitarian approach to refugee management relies on policies and programming, including federally designed integration courses, that prioritize refugee personal development to transform refugees into desirable German subjects who value the rule of law, freedom, tolerance, and equal rights. Germany’s integration strategies provide one example of how colonial taxonomies of social difference—in this case, orientalist notions of the inferior values of people from the Middle East—can produce humanitarian practice itself. While German integration courses are imagined by the state to facilitate refugee life through cultural integration, the courses do nothing to address refugee racialization or institutionalized racism in Germany. I raise the question then, based on the experiences of my Iraqi Yezidi refugee interviewees, about the degree to which integration courses re-package orientalist hierarchies into other forms of taken-for-granted, institutionalized social difference. To what extent do integration courses imply a suppression of meaningful cultural practices, like marriage practices, while leaving German racial hierarchies untouched?

The very idea of the individual refugee subject who can be taught the right values through integration policy is deeply inflected by ideas about love, sex, and marriage. Elizabeth Povinelli (2006) has called this self-making subject the “autological subject” and has argued that it, along with its false binary pair, “genealogical society,” or social constraint, are Enlightenment products tied to ideas about intimacy. Scholars have argued in multiple contexts that through the marriage of a heterosexual couple—and the state’s efforts to regulate it—political and economic subjects are made and the state is reproduced (D’Aoust 2014; de Hart 2015; Federici 2004; Foucault 1978; Stoler 2001). Notably, in my research with Iraqi Yezidis—Kurdish-speaking practitioners of an ancient monotheistic religion who are strictly endogamous—marriage is similarly critical for the reproduction of the community.

The content of the integration courses, which are administered through course providers approved by the Federal Office of Migration and Refugees, offers a concrete example of how ideas about marriage and love are bound up in the individual political subject that Germany’s refugee integration strategies aim to create. These courses, which are often a requirement for receiving social benefits or obtaining more secure legal status, are intended to improve language skills and provide information about German law and society. As outlined by the national standard curriculum for official integration courses (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge 2017), Module III teaches values like freedom and tolerance through content about family and gender roles among other topics. The curriculum names different family forms, “free choice of partner,” and the possible clash of family expectations about romantic choices as topics that should be covered.

For Yezidi refugees who have through history struggled against campaigns of forced assimilation and displacement at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, British colonizers, the Iraqi and Kurdish governments, and terrorist organizations, these integration courses are not neutral. This is particularly so as some of the dynamics of refugee management in Germany, including constraints on where refugees can live, the pressure to learn German, and acts of violence and discrimination against refugees perceived to be inadequately assimilated, seem to echo campaigns against Yezidis in Iraq. Many of my interviewees find the messages in these integration courses (that free choice of partner is valuable, for example) challenging because they seem to critique what most of my interviewees see as essential for the future of the Yezidi minority: the obligation to marry another Yezidi. The stakes for Yezidis are high; many of my informants have said to me that if too many Yezidis choose to marry outside the community, Yezidism will no longer exist in 50 or 100 years.

Marriage has emerged as an institution through which making choices informed by the appropriate values is critical for the reproduction of both Yezidism and Germany itself. The marriage choices young Yezidis make are not just acts of diplomacy balancing between the competing expectations of their families and the German state but small “intimate events” (Povinelli 2006) in the struggle for a Yezidi future. German integration programming impinges upon Yezidi practices like strict prohibitions against out-marriage that might create ‘parallel societies’, but many of my interviewees see the state’s attention to integration and indifference to threats to Yezidi cultural integrity as harbingers of possible Yezidi ethnocide by assimilation. Beyond the focus of Germany’s integration programming on values, the promise of integration raises questions for some of my interviewees. Even if integration courses do result in changes in Yezidi marriage choices or other culturally salient practices, will Yezidis be able to easily, as one of my interviewees put it, “live like Germans?” For some of my interviewees, there is the sense that even if they might be able to do so, they would not be accepted as such; perhaps the Yezidi would be gone, but the racialized refugee would remain.

Allison Stuewe is a PhD candidate in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include migration policy, intimate relationships and kinship, and historical political economy. Her current research project explores the marriage decisions of Iraqi Yezidi refugees living in Germany.

References

Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (2017), ‘Curriculum Für Einen Bundesweiten Orientierungskurs: Überarbeitete Neuauflage Für 100 UE – April 2017’, Nürnberg.

D’Aoust, A. (2014), ‘Love as Project of (Im)Mobility: Love, Sovereignty and Governmentality in Marriage Migration Management Practices’, Global Society, 28:3, 317–35.

de Hart, B. (2015), ‘Regulating Mixed Marriages through Acquisition and Loss of Citizenship’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 662:1, 170–87.

Federici, S. (2004), Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn: Autonomedia).

Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Random House).

Fuchs, L. M., Y. Fan, and C. von Scheve (2021), ‘Value Differences between Refugees and German Citizens: Insights from a Representative Survey’, International Migration, 59:5, 59–81.

Povinelli, E. A. (2006), The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham: Duke University Press).

Stoler, A. L. (2001), ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History, 88:3, 829–65.

Cite as: Stuewe, Allison 2024. “Humanitarian Erasure: Marriage Practices of Iraqi Yezidi Refugees and Germany’s Integration Courses” Focaalblog 8 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/08/allison-stuewe-humanitarian-erasure-marriage-practices-of-iraqi-yezidi-refugees-and-germanys-integration-courses/

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Felix Lussem: Alienating “facts” and uneven futures of energy transition

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past and present projects of large-scale resource extraction and subsequent “recultivation” measures to convert the land back to agricultural production or natural conservation. Lignite (or brown coal) is exploited in vast open-pit mines here – the Hambach mine not far from the city of Cologne is dubbed “Europe’s biggest hole” – “swallowing” everything from forests to villages in their way.

Coal mining – in contrast to the more authoritarian and centralized organization of oil extraction – has been historically associated with the development of the welfare state and the consolidation of workers’ rights in western democracies. However, as Thomas H. Eriksen notes, “contemporary coal mining has been restructured and reconfigured to resemble oil drilling formally”, becoming “less labour-intensive and more capital-intensive than in the past” (2016: 38). This neoliberal restructuring resulted not only in the transformation of institutions of “Carbon Democracy” (Mitchell 2009), as the conditions for workers to organize and wield influence over the means of production were eroded, but also in declining economic dependency on the coal industry in the Rhineland region.

Despite this decrease of economic significance in the region, RWE, the energy company currently operating the mines, has still been considerably involved in local politics over the past decades – not least because of its mandate to secure the provision of cheap electricity for German industry and consumers. To this day the state-approved “general public interest” serves as the legal basis for the suspension of fundamental rights, making possible the expropriation of land titles, the demolition of protected landmarks, or the circumvention of guidelines for environmental protection for the extraction of fossil fuels in Germany’s lignite mining regions.

Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine
Image 1: A new energy horizon after the end of the world? Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine (Picture taken by the author)

Environmental destruction and relocation of tens of thousands of people due to numerous mine expansions in the Rhineland were thus firmly connected to narratives of national progress and regional prosperity. Mourning over losses of personal possessions and feelings of belonging were relegated to the private realm, and little room was left for critical voices in the public domain.

Recently however, this hegemonic state-industry nexus has been successfully challenged by a coalition of environmentalists, citizen initiatives, radical activists and other civil society actors (despite the continued economic profitability of the coal industry, ensured by “environmental load displacement” (Hornborg 2009) and other indirect subsidies). Their demands to save the remaining forest in front of the Hambach mine effectively stopped the encroaching extractivist operation. They were supported by a government commission installed to negotiate the conditions of Germany’s energy transition, following the decision to phase out the coal industry as a national contribution toward climate change mitigation.

The prospect of a global climate crisis has therefore led to the current reevaluation of lignite mining from guarantor of wealth and stability to driver of multi-scalar uncertainties. This enabled previously marginalized actors to voice their concerns by articulating their demands in terms of these globalized discourses. Yet, the (inter-)nationally reported success of the protests around the Hambach forest was only one instance of ongoing negotiations about the pace and scale of energy transition, from the perspective of the critical civil society actors with whom I conduct research in the Rhineland.

Since this seeming breakthrough for civic participation in shaping the region’s future, numerous setbacks and scandals have occurred. These are testament to the inability of carbon-democratic institutions to deal with a crisis that challenges its basic principles of growth as progress and wage labor as key to well-being. Controversies range from the passing of a coal exit law that many critical voices interpret as a “coal extension law”, to the federal government holding back an official report that questions the energetic necessity of the energy company’s plans for mine expansion.

Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I regularly participated in meetings of a local group of critical civil society actors who played a decisive role in saving the forest and turning it into a national symbol of climate activism. Their political engagement served as an opportunity to take a closer look at the uneven futures of energy transition in the Rhineland. As we sit in a circle in the Protestant church hall of a village close to the Hambach mine, many of the participants share impressions of feeling alienated from their home region by the energy company’s mining activities. Despite being part of the majority that does not depend on the coal industry for income, some of the locals feel their concerns were generally ignored by communal politics, making them rather skeptical of established political institutions’ capability to develop a sustainable and equitable future for the mining region.

Nonetheless, they see the impending process of energy transition as a window of opportunity to reconnect with their home region by actively participating in the development of alternative future visions, beyond institutions of representative democracy. This desire for autonomous participation is directly linked to the affective alienation associated by some of my interlocutors with the large-scale landscape transformation of the mining activities, coupled with the close connection between local politics and the energy company.

This carbon-democratic entanglement of political institutions and energy industry experienced in everyday life in the Rhineland’s lignite mining region probably finds its most drastic manifestation in the practice of “creating facts” (“Fakten schaffen”), of which my interlocutors often accuse the mining company. This expression usually refers to the practice of producing accomplished facts which alter conditions in a way to favor certain outcomes. Often their undeniable materiality forces other actors to acknowledge these facts, in turn leading to the retrospective legitimization of the outcomes of Fakten schaffen. Thus, actors with the power and institutional support to “create facts” narrow down an otherwise ambiguous situation potentially open to negotiation by different actors to a specific path of options in their interest.

In this way the energy company continues the controversial destruction of almost completely relocated villages. Under Germany’s new energy policy, the company is sticking to its operating plan and regular rhythm of extraction and redevelopment, despite radically changing socioecological and energy-political parameters. While numerous critical actors unsuccessfully appeal to democratic institutions to inhibit this pursuit of enforcing prior arrangements through material destruction, the following, more ambiguous example will serve to illustrate this modus operandi of Fakten schaffen and its relation to the feeling of alienation.

Photo of solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest
Image 2: “Path dependency” – literal and figurative: Solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest (Picture taken by the author)

Thomas, an outspoken and very knowledgeable member of a local citizen initiative against coal mining, and part of the larger group of civil society actors mentioned above, gives me a ride to the train station after we participated in one of the regular protest-walks through the forest at the Hambach mine. As we pass the bridge over the railway connecting the mines with the nearby power plants, I decide to ask him about the solar panels aligning the tracks beneath us. Their sheer size hardly makes them unnoticeable, but I never paid much attention to them, except for contemplating the irony that the fossil fuel infrastructure gives room to more “sustainable” forms of energy generation here. After all, the solar panels seemed somewhat out of place next to passing trains packed with lignite. The panels simultaneously signal the out-of-time-ness of the coal industry and point to a new energy future on the horizon.  But Thomas’ reaction to my question made me aware of another aspect regarding their significance for the issue of affective alienation in relation to the practice of Fakten schaffen.

Knowing that most of my interlocutors are in favor of direct solar energy generation and having the impressive photovoltaic structure right before our eyes, I am prepared to finally hear a success story about civic participation in local development. Yet, Thomas is not sympathetic to the photovoltaic project at all. He tells me it was a typical outcome of cooperation between energy company and politics in the region.

This sentiment echoes many civil society actors who criticize that, being the biggest landowner there, RWE conducts itself “like the lord of a manor” (“Gutsherrenart”), demonstrating the “feudal” excesses of carbon democracy in the Rhineland, which regularly undermine popular desires of stronger democratic involvement in matters of future-making. Thomas goes on to inform me that a citizen initiative proposed a similar project a few years ago in which the solar panels ought to be lining the highway that was relocated closer to the village because of the encroaching mine. They had imagined the photovoltaic structure as serving multiple other functions, such as protecting villagers from noise and air pollution emitted by the mine and highway. While the project gained some attention in the local press, it was not supported by the communal administration and ultimately had to be relinquished.

Around the same time, the energy company came to an agreement with the administration to make property available for the hitherto largest photovoltaic project in the region, co-financed by a local bank. The uncanny speed with which this project was realized confirmed not only the close ties between politics and coal industry to critical actors like Thomas, but also showed clearly how easily something can be achieved in the region when the energy company is directly involved.

So instead of being perceived as a successful step towards sustainable energy transition in the Rhineland’s lignite mining area, the solar panels symbolize a failure of civic participation. They appear to Thomas as a material (arte-)fact resulting from the dubiously close cooperation between local politics and the energy company. Judged from a distance, this instance of Fakten schaffen produced a material outcome in line with my interlocutors’ desires for sustainable energy generation. However, the concrete infrastructure stands as a monument that exemplifies how flows of innovation are caught up in existing power relations and ultimately contribute to consolidating the local incarnation of the state-industry nexus, even in the face of impending coal exit.

While the lignite industry will disappear in the foreseeable future, the longstanding history of capitalist extractivism – the main reason for the affective alienation of a large group of people in the area – will likely continue, no matter the source of energy. The deliberate promotion of technoscientific development interventions carried out by experts in the context of energy transition policies thus works to forestall the socioecological transformation from below that Thomas and others envision as a necessary step for politics in the Anthropocene.

Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the economic ministry’s newly adopted rhetoric of establishing a special economic zone in the area to speed up planning processes and pursue the double-bind of “green growth” (Eriksen 2016). Meanwhile, they were simultaneously hosting forums for civic participation that seem disconnected from this pursuit, because they operate at a different pace. This contradictory course of action leads many local actors to evaluate the efforts to integrate civil society into official planning processes as a mere façade, intensifying their skepticism towards institutions of carbon democracy in the region.

This brief insight into my fieldwork shows how inhabitants that felt alienated by collusions between energy industry and political institutions, sensed the diverging interest of politics and industry in the context of energy transition as an opportunity to regain some autonomy over the shaping of their region’s future. However, instances of Fakten schaffen enacted by the state-industry nexus function to curtail this grassroots engagement, and to (re-)connect extractive infrastructures of late industrialism (Fortun 2014) to narratives of modernization and progress under the aegis of “green growth”.

A coalition of local actors more attuned to the socioecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene criticizes this carbon-democratic variant of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and pushes for a joint transformation of resource use and political culture in search of a redefined “good life” for all. Rather than a utopian vision of future prosperity, this practical engagement might be characterized as “patchy hope” (Tsing et al. 2019) which, despite being situated and emplaced, operates between the particular and the universal, the local and the global; aware of its own limitations within ambiguous entanglements of politics and energy in the Rhineland.

Felix Lussem is a research assistant and lecturer in the field of environmental anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His doctoral research deals with shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” with a regional focus on the Rhineland’s lignite mining area. Contact: flussem2@uni-koeln.de

Bibliography

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Eriksen, Thomas H. 2016. Overheating. An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. London: Pluto Press.

Fortun, Kim. 2014. From Latour to late industrialism. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 309-329.

Hornborg, Alf. 2009. Zero-Sum World: Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50 (3-4): 237-262.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. Carbon democracy. Economy and Society 38 (3): 399-432.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews & Nils Bubandt. 2019. Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology. Current Anthropology 60 (Supplement 20): S000.

Cite as: Lussem, Felix. 2021. “Alienating ‘facts’ and uneven futures of energy transition.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/felix-lussem-alienating-facts-and-uneven-futures-of-energy-transition/

Blog

Petra Rethmann: The German question: Solidarity, Lexit, nation

On 14 May 2017, in North Rhine-Westphalia’s (NRW) state (Bundesland) election, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won in emphatic fashion. Emphatic, here, does not express itself in numbers—33 percent for the CDU—but in the fact that the party won at all. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), which from 1966 to 2005, and then from 2010 to 2017, had governed North Rhine-Westphalia, crashed with roughly 31 percent. Party leader Hannelore Kraft resigned within 30 minutes of the polls closing. After a lengthy hiatus, the anti-statist and centre-right right Free Democratic Party (FDP) reached more than 12 percent, and the xenophobic Alternative for Germany (AfD) eased with more than 7 percent into NRW’s parliament. More left-leaning parties that ran on platforms arguing for greater social and economically distributive justice, including the Pirates and The Left, failed to clear the 5 percent threshold required by Germany’s electoral system. The one Land that in Germany had always been regarded as the center of Social Democracy went conservative.

Continue reading →

Blog

Chris Hann: On Saxony-Anhalt bashing

Regional elections in Germany have seldom if ever attracted as much attention as they did on Sunday, 13 March 2016. This was the first opportunity for the electorate to express its opinion about the “refugee policy” pursued by Chancellor Angela Merkel since early September 2015. Not only her own Christian Democratic Union but also the Social Democrats, her coalition partner in Berlin, lost votes to a new protest party, the Alternative for Germany. These “Rechtspopulisten” did especially well in Saxony-Anhalt, where I live. Rather than simply join the chorus of condemnation of this vile movement and celebrate the humanitarian altruism shown by the mainstream parties toward deserving foreigners, it behooves social scientists to analyze the deeper causes and consequences of both the voting and the migration patterns.
Continue reading →