{"id":2636,"date":"2024-11-25T13:23:53","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T13:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/anthropology-of-aid\/?page_id=2636"},"modified":"2024-11-25T13:23:53","modified_gmt":"2024-11-25T13:23:53","slug":"2024-5-monopoly-for-refugees","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/anthropology-of-aid\/the-issues\/beyond-the-developing-world\/2024-5-monopoly-for-refugees\/","title":{"rendered":"(2024-5) Monopoly for Refugees"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Written by\u00a0Rezija Bessere, Meghan Edwards, Beatrice Gove, Francisco Grundy, Lewis Holliday, Montbretia Stokes-Donaldson<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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 \u201cart of governance\u201d in a wide sense which ranged from one\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

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 \u2018bare life\u2019 (Agamben, 1998) within \u2018states of exception\u2019 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\u2019 supposed threat to safety.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s self-perceptions. Cabot (2012) discusses the notion of \u2018limbo\u2019 in the refugee process where refugees are between multiple bureaucratic stages and must wait for rejection\/approval. Therefore, we added \u2018Limbo\u2019 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).<\/p>\n

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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 \u2018frozen transience\u2019 described by Rozakou (2012:570), where asylum seekers are caught in a state of perpetual waiting and depend on the decisions of others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life<\/em>. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n

Cabot, H. (2012). The Governance of Things: Documenting Limbo in the Greek Asylum Procedure.<\/em> Political and legal anthropology review, 35(1), pp.11\u201329. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dean, M. (2010). Governmentality: power and rule in modern society<\/em>. Second edition. London; SAGE.<\/p>\n

Foucault, M. and Foucault, M. (2010). The government of self and others<\/em>. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n

Foucault, M. et al. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, 1978-79<\/em>. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England]; Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n

Foucault, M. et al. (2011). The courage of the truth (the government of self and others II) lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, 1983-1984<\/em>. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK; Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n

Li, T.M. (2000). Compromising power: Development, culture, and rule in Indonesia<\/em>. Cultural anthropology, 13(3), pp.295\u2013322.<\/p>\n

Obeid, M. (2019). Novices in bureaucratic regimes: Learning to be a claimant in the United Kingdom<\/em>. Focaal, 2019(85), pp.70\u201383.<\/p>\n

Ramsay, G. (2020). Humanitarian exploits: Ordinary displacement and the political economy of the global refugee regime<\/em>. Critique of anthropology<\/em>, 40(1), pp.3\u201327.<\/p>\n

Rozakou, K. (2012). The biopolitics of hospitality in Greece: Humanitarianism and the management of refugees<\/em>. American ethnologist, 39(3), pp.562\u2013577.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thomson, M.J. (2012). Black Boxes of Bureaucracy: Transparency and Opacity in the Resettlement Process of Congolese Refugees<\/em>. Political and legal anthropology review, 35(2), pp.186\u2013205.<\/p>\n

Ticktin, M. (2006). Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France<\/em>. American ethnologist, 33(1), pp.33\u201349.<\/p>\n

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Related<\/h1>\n\n

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Written by Nobusuke Akaike, Charlotte Antilogus, Bethany Croucher, Natalie, Kaza, Tilly Neville, Samson Page, and Madeleine Raggett.<\/p>\n

Aims<\/h1>\n

By the end of the lesson, students will understand:<\/p>\n