Written by Rezija Bessere, Meghan Edwards, Beatrice Gove, Francisco Grundy, Lewis Holliday, Montbretia Stokes-Donaldson

For our project we have chosen to create a board game, using Monopoly as the model, that represents the refugee experience beyond the developing world. We decided to use Monopoly as our model game because we found that the experience of playing monopoly could be frustrating and tiresome, much like the refugee process and experience. Monopoly is a game that is often called endless, lasting for hours and hours when other popular board games do not take this long. This relates to themes of immigration that we observed in the literature that describe the process as never-ending. The game also encapsulates the frustration of these processes as Monopoly is a game where you are never completely safe and you can go from poor to rich and vice versa in the duration of the game, which relates to humanitarian/development themes such as the financial insecurity that those in need of aid often experience and the emotions that accompany this. Furthermore, Monopoly originated as a critique of capitalism by representing rent exploitation, so its political base provided a good framework to adapt and implement theory in the anthropology of humanitarianism and development.

Our game tries to explore how theories of governmentality can be applied to refugees and asylum seekers as they try to navigate their way through the arbitrary and frustrating bureaucratic asylum systems of neoliberal countries. Governmentality is the organised practices through which subjects are governed. Foucault defined governmentality as the “art of governance” in a wide sense which ranged from one’s control of the self to the biopolitical control of populations by the state (2008, 2010, 2011). For Foucault, the concept of governmentality developed a new understanding of power, to think beyond power as a hierarchical top-down state power and include forms of social control through disciplinary institutions such as hospitals, schools, and so on (2008). Foucault and other scholars have tended towards using governmentality to describe neoliberal governmentality. That is a form of governmentality where power is decentralised and the members of the society are active participants in their own self-governance. Neoliberal governmentality creates a certain kind of knowledge based upon the predominance of market mechanisms and of the restriction of the action of the state. The knowledge it produces allows the construction of self-regulating and correcting selves (Foucault 2008, 2010, 2011).

However, this analysis of neoliberal governmentality is lacking when it comes to the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in neoliberal states. This is because asylum seekers and refugees have not necessarily been subjected to neoliberal forms of power and therefore will not self-regulate and correct themselves. Instead, the state subjects them to biopolitical control and surveillance through systems such as documentation. Refugees and asylum seekers are reduced to ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998) within ‘states of exception’ where refugees are reduced to merely biological existence and stripped of all political and social agency. Rozakou (2012) shows how the reduction of asylum seekers in Greece to bare life is justified through state narratives of national security and the asylum seekers’ supposed threat to safety.

Our modified version of Monopoly aims to shed light on the refugee experience by repositioning players as refugees navigating complex bureaucratic systems. The objective of the game is to collect the necessary documents to gain asylum or resettlement. This reframing of Monopoly’s goal highlights how legal documentation becomes a form of currency, essential for survival and access to basic rights and services as shown by Thomson (2012), Cabot (2012) and Ramsay (2020). Cabot (2012) particularly shows the centrality of documents in the refugee experience, how they define access to aid, mobility and even affect the claimant’s self-perceptions. Cabot (2012) discusses the notion of ‘limbo’ in the refugee process where refugees are between multiple bureaucratic stages and must wait for rejection/approval. Therefore, we added ‘Limbo’ stages on the board to reflect this. By replacing the traditional Monopoly properties with documents, the game emphasises both the power dynamics inherent between the state and the refugee but also shows how the state attempts to manage its refugee population through documents used as tools of governmentality and biopolitical control. In the game these documents also act as gatekeepers to essential resources as they do in the lives of real refugees (Thomson, 2012). The game board becomes a representation of the bureaucratic maze refugees must learn to navigate (Obeid, 2019) and the luck of dice rolls represents the arbitrary nature of these processes (Cabot, 2012).

Anthropologists have described the social and economic precarity that refugees and asylum seekers face, encountering hostility, indifference and exploitation (Ramsey, 2019). This precarity is represented in the game through the limited financial resources players are provided, mirroring the constraints refugees face when trying to access funds. For example in the UK, refugees and asylum seekers are not allowed to work while their claims are being processed. The limited choices available to players and repetition within the game reflect the constrained agency of refugees. This resonates with the concept of ‘frozen transience’ described by Rozakou (2012:570), where asylum seekers are caught in a state of perpetual waiting and depend on the decisions of others. 

To conclude, we have produced a board game focussing on issues of humanitarianism and development in anthropology and adapted the literature we found when researching game mechanics. We have done this by constructing a frustrating experience where you attempt to collect various documents to gain refugee status or asylum. When playing the game, players will realise how difficult this is due to many factors such as chance cards causing you to lose documents you may have just gained and the very delicate process of managing your money which we have lowered significantly from the base Monopoly amounts. By doing this, we hope to have accurately conveyed the frustration and hardships of bureaucratic processes that many refugees endure all over the world by replicating these processes through a seemingly never-ending and frustrating board game.

Bibliography

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.

Cabot, H. (2012). The Governance of Things: Documenting Limbo in the Greek Asylum Procedure. Political and legal anthropology review, 35(1), pp.11–29.                        

Dean, M. (2010). Governmentality: power and rule in modern society. Second edition. London; SAGE.

Foucault, M. and Foucault, M. (2010). The government of self and others. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, M. et al. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England]; Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, M. et al. (2011). The courage of the truth (the government of self and others II) lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK; Palgrave Macmillan.

Li, T.M. (2000). Compromising power: Development, culture, and rule in Indonesia. Cultural anthropology, 13(3), pp.295–322.

Obeid, M. (2019). Novices in bureaucratic regimes: Learning to be a claimant in the United Kingdom. Focaal, 2019(85), pp.70–83.

Ramsay, G. (2020). Humanitarian exploits: Ordinary displacement and the political economy of the global refugee regime. Critique of anthropology, 40(1), pp.3–27.

Rozakou, K. (2012). The biopolitics of hospitality in Greece: Humanitarianism and the management of refugees. American ethnologist, 39(3), pp.562–577.         

Thomson, M.J. (2012). Black Boxes of Bureaucracy: Transparency and Opacity in the Resettlement Process of Congolese Refugees. Political and legal anthropology review, 35(2), pp.186–205.

Ticktin, M. (2006). Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France. American ethnologist, 33(1), pp.33–49.

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Written by Nobusuke Akaike, Charlotte Antilogus, Bethany Croucher, Natalie, Kaza, Tilly Neville, Samson Page, and Madeleine Raggett.

Aims

By the end of the lesson, students will understand:

• That who people choose to help is based on their political assumptions of who they see as ‘in need’
• That we all have these biases and they have a considerable impact on our understanding of important ideas such as compassion
• That these biases and the choices based upon them are informed by global unequal power relations
• That this unequal power relation does not simply span between nations, but also within each nation, and can come in many forms
• That anthropology’s look at compassion is important in exposing these kinds of power relations and denaturalising the way we look at humanitarian action as a top-down viewpoint

Resources

• Example Google Docs Presentation – compassion SOAN beyond dev
• Computer, Projector and Screen
• Access to PowerPoint
• Mobile phone and access to wifi
• Mentimeter website (menti) – this is a website that allows students to input their answers anonymously to pre-designed questions. Answers can be made into mind maps or graphs which enables easy discussion about the question and encourages collaborative work.
• YouTube

Background (for teachers)

Scholars in anthropology and beyond complicate our understanding of compassion by relating it to the concepts of ‘pity’ and ‘inequality’, for example.

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt argues that compassion exists in a face-to-face situation and that pity arises in a more public, distant situation (Boltanski 1999). In other words, Arendt suggests that distance creates pity and not compassion.

Social anthropologist Didier Fassin (2012) argues that humanitarianism is always a mix of assistance and domination, of solidarity and inequality. In other words, Fassin shows that the compassion central to humanitarian action inherently consists of domination, inequality, and power.

Political and legal anthropologist Heath Cabot (2012) analyses how the process of becoming an asylum seeker in Greece is filled with uncertainty, with some being favoured unfairly over others. This humanitarian aid takes place in Greece which is seen as a ‘developed country’ and this reading therefore complicates the assumption humanitarianism only happens in developing countries.

Social anthropologist Miriam Ticktin (2006) ethnographically shows that medical aid reproduces inequalities, as migrants purposefully infect themselves with HIV to qualify as ‘good’ victims who deserve humanitarian compassion. Like Cabot’s work, this aid takes place in France, a developed country.

These two ethnographic examples illustrate the theoretical claims made by Fassin and Arendt. They show how compassion is political – it is enmeshed in global power relations and produced by cultural and political assumptions of who is ‘in need’ (and who is not).

Student Brief

Anthropology is the cross-cultural study of human society and culture. Its main aim is to question assumptions we may have of the world in order to understand ourselves and others better. Within this lesson we will look at compassion in relation to humanitarian aid anthropologically. Humanitarian aid is the material and logistical assistance offered to those in need of help and is often assumed to be given to developing countries from developed countries. The concept of ‘developing countries’ refers to countries with a low quality of life, less developed economy and diminished technological infrastructure relative to other more industrialized countries. Meanwhile ‘developed countries’ are considered to have a high quality of life, a developed economy and developed technological infrastructure. Using anthropological work on compassion we plan to complicate the assumption humanitarian aid only takes place in developing countries.

To prepare for this lesson, start thinking about how you understand ‘compassion’ and what other things you associate it with.

Sections 1 – 4

Section 1 – Outlining objectives

• Revisit Aims section.
• Briefly go over and clarify ‘developing’ vs ‘developed’ countries (BBC bitesize definition).

Section 2 – Exploring compassion

• Exploring how the class understands and defines compassion using the menti task below:
  • Menti Task 1: Each student comes up with three words for what they understand ‘compassion’ as (see below mind map with potential answers). You might expect answers such as love, sympathy, giving, kindness, etc.
  • Menti Task 2: group discussion – where does compassion come from? You might expect answers such as ‘from a feeling’, ‘from the heart’, etc.

• Then show that compassion is more that a ‘natural’ impulse or feeling:
  • Menti Task 3: group discussion, how would we choose to show our compassion? The students will debate how they would distribute £100? You might expect answers such as Oliver Twist and Annie receiving more of the £100 and Tony Stark and Homer Simpson receiving less. Teachers can change the characters to accommodate the specific interests of their students.
• Teachers will root these activities and the complication of compassion as natural in Arendt’s and Fassin’s understandings of the concept. Through this, students should reach the understanding that the decisions they have just made were based on preconceived ideas of what compassion is, and that this idea is more complicated than that.

Section 3 – Compassion beyond the developing world

• Now that the students have been introduced to how compassion is entangled within problems of inequality, use Ticktin and Cabot’s ethnographic examples to expand their understanding, by situating compassion within the developed world.
• To further illustrate Arendt and Fassin’s ideas in an age-friendly way, use the examples from the “barbiesavior” Instagram (below). This should engage them in how top-down patterns of aid may be problematic, or deemed patronising, as compassion is given to those considered in the poorest conditions. It also introduces them to colonialism, a key topic addressed in anthropology, as aid is often seen to be given to ‘third-world’ countries, despite being needed even within the UK.

 

    

Source: Instagram 2019

• Teachers should encourage the students to research and apply this to real-word topics, such as with the European migrant crisis. Note, this may contain distressing material so should be approached sensitively.

Section 4 – Summary

• Revisit the key points and learning objectives: repeat Menti task 1 to show how class understandings of compassion might have changed from their initial thoughts on the subject.
• Get into small groups to discuss how their understandings have changed, with each group then sharing with the class what they have learnt and taken away from the lesson. 

Bibliography

BarbieSavior (2021). Instagram. [online] www.instagram.com. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/barbiesavior/.

BBC Bitesize (2021). ‘Differences in levels of development between developing countries’. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zt666sg/revision/1

Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant Suffering. [online] assets.cambridge.org. [online] Available at: https://assets.cambridge.org/97805216/59536/excerpt/9780521659536_excerpt.pdf.

Cabot, H. (2012) ‘The Governance of Things: Documenting Limbo in the Greek Asylum Procedure’, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), 35(1), pp. 11–29.

Child Poverty Action Group (2020). ‘Child poverty facts and figures’. [online] CPAG. Available at: https://cpag.org.uk/child-poverty/child-poverty-facts-and-figures

Fassin, D. (2012) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Paul, R. and Elder, L. (2001) Critical Thinking: Tools for taking charge of your learning and your life. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Ticktin, M. (2006) ‘Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France’, American Ethnologist, 33(1), pp. 33–49.

UnicefUK (2012). ‘Pupils speak out about UK child poverty’. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBVYA-3ASt0

 

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