Chapter 5  Through Different Lenses Legality, Humanitarianism, and the Western Gaze

Conceptualizing Law and Globality

Globality within socio-legal studies is a relatively new but vibrant area of scholarship concerned with the ways law and legality operate beyond state-based boundaries and institutions. Eve Darian-Smith (2013) argues that much of socio-legal studies has historically been focused on Western law and norm production, often removed from global processes and movements that occur beyond and across national borders. To fill this lacuna, Darian-Smith calls for a deprovincialization of the field so that all legal research, including that which examines national processes, considers the larger geopolitical influences at work. Darian-Smith ultimately calls for a rethinking of what law means in a global world and how our basic assumptions may be destabilized when we begin to think about global impacts on legal arrangements.

In taking Darian-Smith’s observation seriously, I consider not only doctrinal law but also systems of regulation that serve to shape lives and social relationships that may constitute positivist law. The role of international institutions in reproducing legal power must be considered for its impacts on producing legal subjects and normative orderings. Susan Silbey’s (2010) discussion on legality is central here. The notion of legality expands beyond formal law to consider regulative normativity—how we come to be disciplined subjects of law without the direct action of law itself. The United Nations engages in sustained processes of cultural translation of resolutions and policies for incorporation into different legal systems and community norms. While these policies are not necessarily encoded in formal law, the international pressure that is exerted for their adoption and their potential for transformation and legislation within national contexts demonstrates the ways that organizations of power work across state-based jurisdictions to enforce understandings of normativity. Relatedly, Saskia Sassen’s (2008) work on global assemblages is concerned with cross-border networks developed for furthering specific aims and that sometimes serve to shift the loci of power from state-based governance to transnational organizing. We see here how conceptions of the centrality of formal power are changing and sometimes become diluted in our increasingly interconnected world. This does not mean, however, that these are necessarily democratic processes. Indeed, violence and environmental destruction can often be wrought by these assemblages, with hegemonic power relations being further solidified. Rather, the importance of this method of tracing cross-border connections serves to uncover emerging and existing relationships that form and are maintained across state borders and that may influence law and policy in multiple jurisdictions. Human rights campaigns, for example, are often organized between multiple countries in hopes of affecting law and policy in the country that the abuses are recognized in as well as in the activists’ home nations.

While DYSWIS is not itself a legal project, the status of refugees is discussed in multiple places within international law, as refugee camps follow systems of governance and have their own internal sets of law-like practices. Refugees are also subjects within international humanitarian law. Further, international humanitarian law is concerned with normativity—with what should be and what is considered appropriate within and between states as pertaining to armed conflict. As such, humanitarian logics are both moralistic and norm-making, influencing legislation and regulations outside of doctrine. Following this, my chapter extends conceptions of the law beyond national legislation to examine how the UNHCR has attempted to forge connections across space by making material the experiences of refugee youth. In this, refugee youth, whose status designates them as having been marked by encounters with legal systems, share stories that cross state borders to be interpreted within the locations where the images are viewed. By examining how global forces intersect with localized processes of subject production, the project underscores the interrelatedness of space, images, and legality. My process is not one that minimizes the direct impacts of law but rather demonstrates the elusiveness of law’s power: even when not formally invoked, law influences and shapes relations and subjectivities through its normative influence.

Humanitarian Projects

The UNHCR describes their core mandate as follows:

. . . to ensure the international protection of 31.7 million uprooted people worldwide. It promotes the basic human rights of refugees and that they will not be returned involuntarily to a country where they face persecution. It helps them to repatriate to their homeland when conditions permit, integrate into states of asylum or resettle in third countries. UNHCR promotes international refugee agreements, helps states establish asylum structures and acts as an international watchdog over refugee issues. (UNHCR n.d.)

This emphasis on protectionism, the intrinsic rights of humans, and the status of refugees as primarily legal resonates with how many would normatively understand the role of the UNHCR. Over the last couple of decades, however, persuasive critiques have been generated within anthropology, political science, refugee/migration studies, and sociology regarding the ways that refugees are represented and understood by the UNHCR and like-minded humanitarian agencies as voiceless, passive victims, the seminal critique questioning whether refugees must be represented by a third party at all (Malkki 1996). In recent years, new initiatives by the UNHCR appear to take notice of these criticisms by offering new opportunities for self-authorship and self-presentation to a potentially global audience.

DYSWIS, the project undertaken by the UNHCR, is one such initiative. It positions a relatively new figure of the refugee within humanitarian storytelling, one that departs in significant ways from the voiceless, agentless subject that has been a focus of significant critique. The project is indicative of the UNHCR’s attempt to reallocate unequal enactments of power by providing opportunities for refugee youth to present their stories to a global audience, marking an important turn in humanitarian storytelling. It is evidence of the UNHCR trying to move beyond the neocolonial paternalism that accompanied most attempts at garnering support for refugees (Razack 2007). DYSWIS provided opportunities for youth to present their own stories, with the caveat that the stories remain within the confines of what is legible in liberal, humanitarian citizenship. Ultimately, in attempting to correct previous harms, DYSWIS legitimizes the experiences of refugee youth when they fall within the mandate of its humanitarian logics and politics.

Humanitarian agencies operate based on three core tenets: humanity, impartiality, and neutrality (Nyers 2006). This presupposes the separation of humanitarianism from politics, constructing the two as mutually exclusive. Didier Fassin explains that humanitarianism serves as “both a moral discourse (based on responsibility toward the victim) and a political resource (serving specific interests) to justify action considered to be in favour of others . . . action taken in the name of a shared humanity” (2010, 239). In this way, the presented apoliticism of humanitarianism in fact masks the political engagement and priorities of humanitarian actors (Slim 2015). Malkki explains how humanitarian agencies represent refugees, speaking for groups of displaced people and silencing refugee voices through the volume of humanitarian speech (1996). Malkki writes that “humanitarian interventions tend to be constituted as the opposite of political ones” (378). This separation, she argues, is often taken for granted, and the effects of this process serve to essentialize and dehistoricize those labelled as refugees, effectively silencing them. It appears that the representation of refugees by agencies that purportedly subscribe to apolitical and moral objectives has the effect of depoliticizing and dehistoricizing the very category of “refugee.” Those who fall within this legal status are constructed as neutral and impartial through this seemingly inescapable connection with the humanitarian agencies they are represented by.3

From the perspective of the UNHCR, DYSWIS was ultimately a photography project. Designed and constructed to give refugee youth an opportunity to express their views about life in camps, the final product was an exhibition meant to share these perspectives with a broader viewing public. In DYSWIS, the humanitarian principles and logics guiding the project elicit sympathy from and forge some connection with viewers, which may compel action (McEntire et al. 2015). It is important to query why a visual, realist medium such as photography was chosen. What are the sensibilities that place precedence on visual imagery—on seeing as a source of truth? What is the value imposed on these photographs by exhibitors and viewers—what truths are they believed to express?

Photography, Politics, and the Scopic Drive

In explaining the appeal and perceived artistic merit of photography, Pierre Bourdieu writes that photography captures “an aspect of reality which is only ever the result of arbitrary selection” (1999, 164). The social uses for which it has been designed and that it is expected to fulfill are to be realistic and objective. Photography, then, can appear to be an objective recording of the world. In this understanding, however, Bourdieu argues that “society is merely confirming itself in the tautological certainty that an image of the real which is true to its representation of reality is really objective” (164). In considering DYSWIS then, it becomes apparent that the representations of the refugee camp depicted in the photographs are selections of the reality of the camp, but because the selections are captured and materialized through film (and their authority is again reasserted through inclusion in the exhibition), the reality that is portrayed is taken as a real, objective, and true representation. This would not be understood in the same way if the youth produced drawings or poetry. The choice of photography as a medium is based around the ideas that seeing is believing and a photograph is worth a thousand words: such idioms demonstrate the faith and importance placed on visual imagery in presenting human conditions. As such, DYSWIS is considered an artistic endeavour but is more legible as a documentation project presenting the lived realities of refugee youth. Here the photograph is understood as evidence. The project design makes clear that photographs were chosen to affirm the experiences and thoughts of the youth participants while also uncovering the truth of their lives.

Bourdieu (1999) further discusses the technical and aesthetic qualities of photographs, what can be photographed, and what should or must be photographed. This distinction appears to be particularly relevant in the assessment of the photographs for inclusion in the exhibitions. The aesthetic sensibilities, likely informed by humanitarian prerogatives, of those who arranged the exhibit would determine what photographs must or should be seen by the viewing public rather than what could be seen. Bourdieu states, “Because it presupposes the uniqueness and coherence of a system of norms, such an aesthetic is never better fulfilled than it is in the village community. Thus, for example, the meaning of the pose adopted for the photograph can only be understood with relation to the symbolic system in which it has its place” (1999, 166). In organizing the exhibit and selecting photographs for display then, one must consider that which the “village community” will relate to based on the system of norms that have been established for the purpose and ease of interpretation. Who is the “village community” for a project like DYSWIS? Is it those living in the camp who gain insight into the experiences and perceptions of their neighbours? Or is it humanitarian workers, politicians, and interested others viewing from a place of relative privilege and power? A political orientation informed by adherence to humanitarian principles guides who chooses to visit these exhibits, while the project write-up explains that compassion and a humanitarian orientation informed many of the choices youth made about their photographs subjects: “They saw photographing as a way of expressing this compassion and concern for those more needy among them.”

Most of the seventy-five photographs included in the final exhibit can be grouped into three categories—everyday life in the camps: a man carrying a goat, women preparing food, children’s families or houses; the deprived conditions of the camps: piles of garbage, hungry children, amputees; or aspirational settings: classrooms and maps with captions explaining children’s goals to travel and have successful careers. The most shocking photographs within the Namibia and Yemen collections did not make it into the final exhibit: a “crazy woman,” as the caption describes, laying on the ground and grasping a board and one of a boy holding what looks like a makeshift knife to the throat of a younger child in the Osire camp in Namibia and a child on an operating table overseen by doctors the Kharaze camp in Yemen.

The photographs that DYSWIS chose for the final exhibit are in some ways demonstrative of what Homi Bhabha (1983) explains as the processes of subjectification made possible and plausible by stereotypical, colonial discourse through his “scopic drive” concept. He argues that stereotypes based on colonial relationships allow people to relate to and derive pleasure from viewing the other and that this pleasure and understanding is based on a set of accessible tropes developed through colonialism (Bhabha 1983). Similar critiques have been levied by feminist researchers arguing that descriptions of spectacular, brutal sexual violence serve to resolidify power differentials, thus positioning white women as saving Black and Brown women from Black/Brown men (Spivak 2003; Sa’ar 2005; Lewis 2021). The project differs in some ways from these concerns as the youth themselves chose the subjects and the orientation of the photographs. Nevertheless, the training they received came from a particular orientation and had a humanitarian sensibility, and the project had clear goals in mind; it was not youth-designed or led. Concerningly, nowhere in the project description is the relative participation of the photos’ subjects discussed. Given the extremely vulnerable positions of many of the individuals pictured, it is uncomfortable to think they may not have freely given consent to have their photographs taken or may not know that some images are freely accessible online. For a project intending to empower the youth photographers, it is unclear why the subjects of the photographs are not also discussed as agentic individuals with the right to determine if and how their images should be shared.4

Gender inequality and the constrictive hopelessness of the camp is expressed in the exhibit, allowing Western viewers to reaffirm their stereotypes of the unfortunate circumstances of the “other” while also feeling connected to their struggles. We witness fifteen-year-old girls performing domestic chores: “I am preparing lunch for the family. The children are coming home soon” (Hodhan, fifteen years old, Kharaz refugee camp, Yemen; image caption; Redden 2008). And a young girl who enjoys football despite her gender: “Something about myself. I look like my family and I do wash the plates. And I like to play football even if I am a girl. I feel nice when I am with my mother . . . And I want to do a job of being a doctor or nurse” (Ishimewe, eleven years old, Osire refugee camp, Namibia; image caption; Redden 2008). Here, viewers may question where “the children” are that Hodhan is not. School? Out with friends? And we hope that Ishimewe can accomplish her goal of becoming a nurse or doctor, laudable in most societies. Here my critique is not of the images nor the captions, and it is certainly not with the girls who produced the images. Rather, it is to highlight the imperative within the project of positioning girls in a state of relative deprivation for viewers to consider and sympathize with. This highlights the problematic in the relationship between seeing and being seen, evident in the DYSWIS project:

In order to conceive of the colonial subject as the effect of power that is productive—disciplinary and “pleasurable”—one has to see the surveillance of colonial power as functioning in relation to the regime of the scopic drive. That is, the drive that represents the pleasure in “seeing” which has the look as its object of desire, is related both to the myths of origins, the primal scene and the problematic of fetishism and locates the surveyed object within the “imaginary” relation. (Bhabha 1992)

In relation to DYSWIS then, there is an interesting tension between seeing, the presentation of what is to be seen, and the regime of the scopic drive. While the content is related to the experiences and images by refugee youth, this is juxtaposed with the pleasure derived by the viewing public, which includes those who visited the exhibit at the UNHCR head office in Geneva or saw the excerpts of the exhibit that were available online.

According to project organizers, DYSWIS was intended to empower the refugee youth who took part in the initiative. It is reasonable to assume it was also intended to garner compassion from the viewing public. In her study of responsibility and photography, Sliwinski (2004) relays an anecdote by a man who never understood the horror of the war he lived through until he saw photographs of the atrocities in a museum. In this case, his experiences were muted and pushed aside until he encountered visual evidence of what the people of his country suffered. This was a politicizing experience that led to his personal engagement with questions of war and peace with which he may not have otherwise grappled. This mode of engagement is the hope behind many photoethnography (Wright 2018) and humanitarian photography projects (Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015). In DYSWIS, however, the photographs capture neither the refugees’ journeys to the camp nor the conditions that turned them into refugees. They are telling stories not of violence or suffering related to contextual and political realities but of everyday life in the camp. This alone does not negate the political potentials of similar projects; storytelling can be a deeply political act, including through the medium of photography, and the challenges, joys, and violence of everyday life are important topics to explore. The challenge arises in the filtering of the stories: when photographs are developed within and presented by organizations that emphasize their apoliticism and neutrality, what is the likelihood that youths’ stories are included if they insist on a different version of political citizenship?

In considering the relationship between humanitarian logics and the emphasis on photography as truth telling, it is useful to consider the ways that photography can be mobilized to reaffirm white superiority under the guise of neutrality. Razack (2007) focuses on the images of violence and pain designed to elicit outrage and action. Rather than having this effect, however, Razack states that all too often these images are simply consumed rather than acted upon. Instead of inspiring solidarity or a sense of common humanity, these images serve to reinforce the superior position of white, Western audiences over “others.” The subjects of the images are reduced to and characterized by their pain and suffering, thus their humanity is not represented or recognized. In her discussion of disembodied universality, Razack (2007) states that the people being depicted are construed as objects, while those viewing the images are moral subjects who are separate and apart from the photographic content they are viewing. This division places the viewer on a higher moral level than the object being viewed. In most cases where the objects are racialized as non-white and the viewing subjects as white, Razack proposes that a form of race pleasure emerges in which “white superiority is confirmed through images of the suffering of black bodies” (378).

Szorenyi (2006) offers a similar critique of representations that present refugees as static, desperate, and without agency. Szorenyi examines refugee coffee-table books that receive high praise for the photographers who have captured these images of struggle and suffering, but in all cases, she finds there is little contextualization of the images or engagement with the people who are being presented. Szorenyi queries the real point of these images that are marketed to Western consumers: Are they intended to inspire compassion, sympathy, and action? Are they collected for the aesthetic value of the photos themselves? Szorenyi emphasizes the importance of the presentation of suffering and, citing Butler (2004), acknowledges the importance of visibility in helping “victims of atrocity and injustice.” For Szorenyi, the issue seems to lie more with the motivations behind the production and marketing of the books, as well as with the lack of perceived agency and individuality of the subjects—or, as they are presented, objects—of the pictures.

If we are to draw on Szorenyi’s insights, DYSWIS can also be viewed as attempting to integrate the force of these critiques by shifting the focus from the refugee as a decontextualized, passive, voiceless object to a viewing, agentic subject. Brendan Bannon, the photographer who delivered the training workshop explains that “this project gave refugee children a chance to explore the totality of the refugee experience; to show the world both the differences and similarities of their lives” (Redden 2008). He goes on to describe the project as affording the young people new opportunities: “They explained themselves to each other, and became closer in the process. Together, they gave a clear idea of their lives—lives rich in experience, emotion, history, fantasy, humour and compassion” (ibid.). DYSWIS then raises an interesting tension between the lack of political engagement publicly recognized by the UNHCR in the refugee camps and the self-authorship enacted by the youths who took the photographs. Photography is an agentic activity that deploys power over what is included in the shot, how the composition of the photograph will impact the viewer’s understanding of the content, and what is excluded from the picture. Placing the camera in the hands of refugee youth, then, serves to recognize and support the decision-making capabilities of the photographers to express their personal realities and to construct their narratives for presentation. This appears as an acknowledgement of the political capabilities of the youth, and one could assume that the intended outcome of this project would be to educate and perhaps inspire action from the viewers of this exhibit. However, critical visual studies has shown that the purpose of projects such as DYSWIS is more expository than action-oriented (Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015). Photography projects such as this often seem to express the belief that seeing, in and of itself, is important and valuable, that through viewing suffering or adversity we become aware and educated, that seeing is enough to impart empathy or sympathy, and that affect alone can make a difference (Sliwinski 2004). DYSWIS does not appear to differ in this regard. Any actions, feeling, or demand for structural change that is elicited through DYSWIS is still within the humanitarian scope and thus does not challenge its mandate or principles. As such, these outcomes are also impartial and neutral.

Legality, Liminality, and the Camp

Viewers’ inspiration to demand formal, systemic change based on DYSWIS does not unsettle the context and space, either physical or relational, of the camp. The stories occupy a temporary and conditional space of usefulness to the humanitarian model, reaffirming the importance of places such as refugee camps while simultaneously demonstrating their insufficiencies and shortcomings. In this there is little space for challenging the political realities and global power relations that led to children living in refugee camps and few opportunities to create alternatives to the refugee camp model of temporary settlement.

Importantly, while refugees themselves are classified and fall under the purview of international humanitarian law in the 1951 Convention of the Refugee and 1967 Refugee Protocol, nowhere in international law are refugee camps addressed (Janmyr 2016). As such, camps operate in a legally liminal space, and their governance and management vary significantly. Janmyr emphasizes that the confinement and detention exhibited in many camps is similar to that of justice and state-run institutions often contested within international law, but refugee camps remain unconsidered. Refugee camps, then, operate in a space of liminality on two registers—both in the sense that they are simultaneously inside and outside of nation-states and that their inhabitants are considered within international law but the spaces they live in are not. The exceptional state of refugee camps has been explored at length elsewhere,5 but what is important for our consideration of DYSWIS is that experiences occurring in spaces marked by uncertainty, liminality, and temporariness are made intelligible through assertions and recessions of law. NGOs and agencies such as UNHCR provide aid, services, and legal support to refugees in camp settings and also may provide oversight and monitoring to draw attention to and prevent human rights abuses. Foucault discusses the regulative power of forces operating through the “mythicized state” (2003). In this, Foucault is not discounting the influence of the notion of sovereignty but rather drawing attention to the multiple operations of governance outside formal state power. We can see this operation within refugee camps: positioned as simultaneously inside and outside a nation-state, regulated and governed by quasi-legal actors, without formal provisions or consideration within international law. This liminality is necessarily precarious and positions refugees within camp settings as subjects to the laws that define their status within a space unseen by law. In this, we might consider law’s recession as an act of its power: without formal law to define or operate in refugee camps, law is refusing a recognition of subjecthood to refugees. Their status is determined by legal and quasi-legal actors, such as the UNHCR and other international institutions, during or after migration and through resettlement. Their liminality and precarity is re-emphasized and reinforced, though, through the refusal of law within the camps.

As the editors state in the introduction of this volume, law is not only violence; it is also a polyvalent force working to construct, regulate, and produce subjectivity in mutually constitutive and historically specific ways. Law can be violence, but it can also contribute to creative and productive projects, ones that may shape subjectivities and subjects through their relation to law. Law’s slow violence can be felt, however, through a turning away of legal protections and governance, a feeling made palpable within some of the stark photographs depicting the violence of children going hungry and disabled people sitting alone and apart from others. In the case of DYSWIS, refugee youth are defined as refugees through their legal positioning as having been forcibly displaced from their homes, and their subjectivities in relation to this category were mined for the project. DYSWIS does not grapple with the intricacies of international law pertaining to refugees, and yet we can read through the images the simultaneous presence and absence of law alongside the ambiguity and liminality within the photographs.

The DYSWIS camps are presented as facts, and their legitimacy is not challenged by the project presenting these spaces as uncontested reality. From the photos and the captions, we are struck by the quasi-carceral life in the camp. While several photographs highlight the relative deprivation and feelings of being trapped in the camp, the depoliticization and decontextualization of humanitarian logics driving the project limit opportunities to challenge the governance of these spaces. For example, in one image we see a pair of small hands grasping a chain-link fence. It may be difficult to interpret were it not for the caption, “Prison. I dreamt I was in prison” (image caption; Redden 2008). It is largely through the pairing of the words with the imagery that feelings of empathy, confinement, and sympathy are developed. Indeed, after viewing the photographs, one is left with a feeling of sadness that youth live in these conditions, but there is limited space available to question how they came to be there, where they are going, or how the camp system could be reimagined. Instead, we are left with a sense of suspension, the feeling that there is a moral imperative to engage, but how to do so and with what political objective in mind is as undefined by the project as the space itself is within law. By visually capturing only the present moment in the camps and providing no historical context, understanding of and relating to the youth becomes limited to only that which is immediately visible.

Shane McGrath (2005) argues that refugees are subject to a “politics of compassion,” which can have positive effects for those who may benefit from these outcomes but may also serve to prioritize a Western subjectivity and subjectification upon those who come under the scope of the compassionate viewer. In this project, the youth, and the subjects in their photographs, were presented in a way that caused reception to their stories to be shaped by humanitarian sensibilities and the politics of compassion and sentimentality. This effectively limited the self-authorship potential of DYSWIS. Further, Szorenyi (2006) shows that the separation between those who feel compassion and those who are the recipients of that compassion serves to reinforce inequalities, once again solidifying the disparate relationship between refugees and those who consume and react to their stories.

Conclusions and Future Directions

Projects such as DYSWIS offer applied insight into the implementation of humanitarian prerogatives in ambiguous spaces, providing the opportunity for established conceptions to be re-evaluated and reimagined in a way that may allow for new relationships to develop between refugees and the agencies representing them. DYSWIS arose out of humanitarian traditions and responses to critiques of the mandate and effects of humanitarianism. Its organization around refugee subjects in refugee camps positioned the project in spaces marked by liminality, both with regard to the territory of the camp and their legal position. The final output was a photography exhibition in which the objective reality and truth of the refugee youth experience was purportedly presented, and yet there remains outstanding issues with the prioritization of visual representations of “truth” and the limits of political engagement and potential both in the photographs themselves and for those viewing them. Questions and considerations of politicization, contextualization, subjectification, and seeing/being are all relevant to my consideration of DYSWIS. In advancing legal subjectivity in diffuse ways, non-state forces are advancing notions of liberal normativity through processes that are deeply implicated in how youth experience and engage with international institutions. In analyzing a project such as DYSWIS, it is important to look at the sensibilities and knowledges that lead to its development and implementation, the spatial and political location of the project, and the continuing influences of its existence. It is not easy to criticize a project intended to empower refugee youth and support them in telling their stories; nowhere herein do I intend to take away from the positive elements and intentions behind the project. However, it is imperative to engage with projects and initiatives aiming to do good; this is how we better understand entrenched power relations and open space to consider how even noble intentions are often limited in their outcomes, to uncover where these limitations originate from and to what effect, and to find out how these reinforce rather than effectively challenge Global North–South hierarchies.

If we consider the value of photographs to be relational rather than objective, then we can begin to break down the binary of seeing/being seen and at a minimum remain cognizant of the discrepant power relations that accompany it. The issue remains, however, that the engagement in DYSWIS moves away from the authors of the images and texts and instead becomes refocused on the UNHCR, which is in current ownership of the exhibition. It seems plausible that the connections made are not with the youth in camp spaces but rather with the agency that implemented the project. This is where DYSWIS differs from other photoethnography projects. The exhibition is more strongly associated with the UNHCR than with the youth, or with either camp. By claiming ownership over the photographs and authoring the exhibition that is accessible to the public, the UNHCR minimizes the political voice from the photographers and reroutes the potential for relationality and connections that could have been established from the youth to the organization.

Similar to what I have attempted to do in this chapter, socio-legal studies creates space to bring together different bodies of research and literature in order to examine how law and normative ordering impacts social relations and sense of place. In this, we are able to look at the intersections, creative opportunities, and political potential of challenging dominant configurations of power through nuanced studies of the ways they operate and circulate in varied sites around the world and come to be reproduced even within projects designed to challenge them. In the case of DYSWIS, we may be left with a sense that colonial power relations are hegemonic and near impossible to rupture. Indeed, the nature of hegemony is that it seems inescapable in its dominance and as a mode of truth that cannot easily be undone (Gramsci 1971). By working with the methods put forward by socio-legal studies, we can gain an in-depth understanding of how these relations are codified, both in doctrinal law and in numerous other scripted ways, and how these texts influence understandings of and relationships to people both near and far. By offering ways to understand not just local contexts but the ways that international organizations and institutions operate across state borders, space is opened for exploring how the most influential bodies, such as the UN, are complicit in processes that legitimize imposed depoliticization and fetishization of the human experience. Through this we can start to pull the threads that may ultimately serve to unravel the configurations of domination that continue to exist through insidious racialization and othering.

Since my initial analysis of this project, DYSWIS has been implemented in refugee camps in Syria and Jordan, with photographs and brief testimonials available on a designated site for the project (UNHCR 2015). While a full consideration of the more recent iterations of the project has not been completed at this time, preliminary investigation shows that the updated site offers more opportunity for context and has videos as well as still photographs. The site itself does not provide details about specific political realities that create conflict and displacement, nor does it host detailed stories from project participants. From the website, however, it does appear that photo exhibitions are held in project refugee camps as well as online. This is a positive development, as opportunities for shared experiences are positioned in locales where they arise instead of in decontextualized spaces.

Photography projects such as DYSWIS offer important opportunities for marginalized young people to present their experiences and point the camera at what is interesting or important in their lives. Self-authorship mitigates some critiques of disempowering narratives that present refugees only as victims. The medium of photography is not neutral however, nor is the training, the curation behind putting together an exhibit, or how the photographs are viewed by differently positioned audiences or humanitarian projects writ large. Through these processes, law’s presence and absence can be felt simultaneously: the violence and deprivation depicted in some photographs can be interpreted as demonstrating lawlessness, a lack of protection. And yet the subjectification of refugees within international law makes their presence within the liminal spaces of the camps necessarily legal. This emerges in tension with the concreteness of the moments captured on film, raising more questions than answers about how youth’s lives are governed, where and when the turning away or refusal of law acts as violence, and how humanitarianism, as purportedly apolitical and impartial, is positioned to grapple with these challenges.

Notes

Acknowledgements: This chapter is an adaptation of my master’s research, which benefited immensely from Dr. Anna Pratt’s supervision and her commitment to critical scholarship. Thank you to the editors of this collection—Mariful Alam, Pat Dwyer, and Katrin Roots—for their support, keen edits, and thoughtful suggestions.

References