The authors, in their 2021 book, The Global Shelter Imaginary, IKEA Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief, examine how humanitarianism has recently started missing the point of their task to end the refuge crises (and now the goal is to manage them) and how market consumerism has normalized the new direction. This new direction toward improvement of management has hidden the problems and evade the solutions.
A “Social Imaginary,” a term coined by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, refers to “what goes without saying,” the collected common ideas and sentiments that people believe and feel about their social existence. If you have never been a refugee, or lived in a refugee shelter, or worked with refugees in a camp then everything you think you know is imaginary. Your mind naturally tries to fill in the gaps of all the pieces of information (most being out of context) that your mind encounters. This is the first step to learning but since we cannot learn everything somethings stay in the imaginary. Furthermore, anytime you talk or listen to people who have imaginary impressions, you further reinforce the prevailing imaginary. The authors study and try to explain recent changes in the global shelter imaginary by studying what has been said and promoted in the media and in legislation as well as the reporting on the “results”.
The authors’ thesis is that there is a “political process whereby the protection of refugees and the displaced has been abandoned in favor of a generalized preoccupation with relief logistics….The ‘deployment of moral sentiments’ constitutes an new species of ‘humanitarian government’: ‘inequality is replaced by exclusion (through category fetishism: are they really refugees who deserver protection or are they migrants who can be incarcerated and detained), domination is transformed into misfortune, injustice is articulated by suffering, violence is expressed in terms of trauma.’”
Three recent international agreements are the legitimizing standardization of the shift that began much earlier: the New York Declaration for refugees (2016), the Global Compact on Refugees (2018), and the first Global refugee Forum in 2019. Essentially these agreements move the conversation away from justice and the causes of displacement to notions of care. These agreements speak about a “global migration crisis” instead of calling out the reason for the migration; the result is that countries need to “burden share” and “ease pressures on host countries” refugee rights are assumed as inalienable and therefore not talked about. The authors refer to this new concern with care over justice as “sentimental humanitarianism”. This new ethic of care and compassion privatizes public policy models by imposing market-driven models of success. Consider that justice is not market driven; it is either/or: you have a process to an end point of justice or you don’t. Care on the other hand is consumer or market based. Measurables are on a scale; one can improve care because care is on a spectrum. Any marginal improvement in care can be an amazing marketable victory. But improvements of care do not solve the problem – they hide the problem. No one wants to talk about managing inequality, domination, injustice or violence but we can boast of improving care for the unfortunate, the suffering, and those experiencing trauma. “[T]he global shelter imaginary is the way that the current humanitarian order treats architecture/shelter as a plenipotentiary for the political protections it is actually abandoning, and then frames the abandonment of the dispossessed as if it constituted a moral triumph—an act of rescue. The global shelter imaginary attains its social function by repeatedly transposing irreducible political quandaries into technocratic challenges.” In other words there is a deadlocked political problem that no one wants to deal with so the problem is reframed in a way that can appear to bring good news: manage the problem and expect ever better management of the problem.
The authors look at four examples of this shift away from rights to care. In chapter 1 “Better Shelter/Better Refugee”, they look at the relationship between The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and IKEA’s development of a universal emergency shelter. After World War II, through the International Refugee Organization (1944), the UN High Commission on Refugees (1950) and the Refugee Convention (1951), “states have advanced an international refugee protection regime premised on the universal right to seek asylum….At the same time, Western states, in particular, have sought to preempt and delimit the exercise of that right in practice. The refugee has thus been suspended between the aspirations of international human rights norms on the one hand and the vicissitudes of domestic immigration policies on the other. States have repeatedly pitted the demands of sovereignty against those of human rights in ways that have increasingly ‘denaturalized/disqualified’ populations otherwise worthy of protection.” Just as the protections are increased in theory they are simultaneously narrowed in practice through their criminalization via, for example border police and detention centers. Over time the refugee problem becomes easier to manage than solve and management can follow a non-government logic of the consumer market. Enter in the capitalist humanitarian initiatives.
The IKEA Foundation UNHCR partnership involves providing a Better Shelter for refugees around the world. The Better Shelter is one that is more durable than a tent, is easy to transport and build by hand and can last up to three years. It allegedly fits the need for something better than a tent but is not a permanent house. “But as it claims to make incremental gains along the axis of durability, the Better Shelter also replicates the same illogic of humanitarian governance it is intended to redress. In the first instance.…incrementalist assumptions about how to offer dwellings with a slightly longer lifespan must be understood as palliatives for an order that is actually characterized by category fetishism and inaction….[T]he Better Shelter cannot compete with or situate itself within a continuum spanning between tents and houses because the proceeding are not indices of duration but rather moments in a juridico-political paradox that defines protracted refugee crises”. Namely: states do not tolerate permanent settlement “states typically tolerate camps only so long as they are provisional structures, no matter how many decades they remain in place” so the dispossessed cannot have houses or move on – they can only move back to their home country which is likely not safe. The Better Shelter does not actually help the displaced become un-displaced but take the attention away from the real problem. “The gap between what the Better Shelter can actually do and the privileged position it occupies in the attention economy becomes explicable with reference to the ‘iconography of predicament’ that the Better Shelter advances. As it implicates design in the amelioration of forced migration, the Better Shelter corroborates the humanitarian order’s technocratic framing of refugees and their ‘crisis’”. For example, the Museum of Modern Art, in 2016 made the Better Shelter its curatorial “centerpiece”, “It effectively bandwagoned with IKEA…in a complex process of reputation management…simultaneously engaged in ‘virtue signaling’ in the social sphere—a species of legitimacy swapping that attends efforts to relate design to humanitarian crisis.” In this way, with many diverse and agents speaking the same message (in the case of the global shelter imaginary, that shelter design is a great leap forward in addressing forced migration) imaginary is reenforced and legitimated. It becomes harder to question when many diverse institutions (not just the media) have bandwagoned on the message.
The political process does not end there. Now that the developed world has bought into the preferred solution to the refugee crises results must be shown. Since the political will to naturalize refugees is still off the table, progress must come in the creation of a better refugee. Since rights cannot be protected the refugee’s body is protected and they “are expected to conform to the norms and qualifications assigned to them. Now a physical and mental evaluation is part of refugee status determinations and in which “‘medical authority progressively substitutes itself for the asylum seeker’s word,’ in an act of ‘objectification’ that erases the ‘experience of the victims as political subjects.’” This is what Foucault called biopower, where the sovereign power using branches of knowledge as justification for the exercise of power over groups of people. “in media…the dispossessed appear to be those ‘whose lives have been changed’ because they have been provided with ‘a safer more dignified home away from home.’ … Refugees become ‘better’ as they fulfill this function”
The philosophy of care behind the Better Shelter concept is alive and well in the homelessness problem of cities where the trend seems to be to find the best shelter for the homeless. Should a shelter ever be considered a home? This trend “blurs the difference between the rightless condition of the refugee and the socioeconomic displacement of the homeless”. In both cases, “the biopolitical regulation of life presumes itself to advance and ideal beyond politics by appealing to the dignity of unqualified existence. And this is how the global shelter imaginary confuses bare life with cosmopolitan right and the state of exception with the common good. This, finally, is how a life horrifically suspended between the ‘fact and law’… is postured into a regulative ideal.”