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With an unprecedented increase in global refugee numbers, there has been a collective failure on part of the most advanced liberal democracies to guarantee ‘human’ conditions for these refugees. Focusing on the conditions of Rohingya Muslims in migrant camps in India, this article conjoins the binary between bio and necro forms of power arguing that these ethical perspectives contribute to a connected understanding regarding questions of state responsibility and hospitality. The veil of ignorance exhibited by the state, allows for it to constitute itself as ‘normatively good’ in providing shelter to the refugees while being innocent of its violent complicities. The article proceeds in three parts. Section one charts the turn to ethics in IR, focusing on, critical humanism based on bodily vulnerability and the notion of stranger fetishism. The second section provides a detailed description of the experiences of the residents of the Rohingya refugee camps. The last section summarizes how the refugee camps can be identified as central to the contemporary necrpolitical landscape.

Ethics and Precarious Life: The Object of Disgust and Stranger Fetishism

 There has been a recent turn towards inquiring into the ‘human subject’ within IR as a discipline, long obsessed with systemic explanations and formulations (Butler 2004; 2007; 2009, Hutchings 2010; Campbell 1992; Frost 1986; 2000; and Linklater 2007; 2011; 2016). This has been also in response to the securitizing discourses shaped by the global war on terror where the national body is under threat. In the contemporary world, one needs to therefore question ‘what work does suffering do’ for the fate of refugees. There is an ethic of hospitality (Butler 2009; Danewid 2017) that is evoked as a form of response to the suffering of others, to show solidarity with those beyond the borders in the sub-continent, underlining shared history and India’s special status in the region. By focusing on the generosity and hospitality which manifests itself in a patronizing fantasy of protecting endangered others, one bolsters the claim for India as a bastion of democracy, rights and liberal values. This article makes two interventions. First, it contributes in dismantling the ‘charitable’, ‘good neighbor’, ‘humanist’ discourses around India that build on ‘fetishisation of the stranger’ and the narrative of treating guests as equivalents of god. Second and relatedly, by linking bio and necropolitics of power one unveils the erasures of the ongoing tragic conditions refugees are subject to due to state ‘inaction’. The construction of India as ‘ethical’, good and responsible precisely obliterates the mundane violence and state complicity experienced by the refugees.

Sara Ahmed’s work on stranger fetishism provides some insights into ‘objectification of the stranger’ as a figure of danger, as a constant reminder of difference but also relationality (Ahmed 2000). There is a self-serving motivation that underpins the welcoming of the alien stranger, as Ahmed explains

the alien is a source of fascination and desire: making friends with aliens, eating with aliens, or even eating one (up), might enable us to transcend the very limits and frailties of an all-too human form. Or, by allowing some aliens to co-exist ‘with us’, we might expand our community: we might prove our advancement into or beyond the human; we might demonstrate our willingness to accept difference and to make it our own. Being hospitable to aliens might, in this way, allow us to become human ( Ahmed 2000, 53).

the alien is a source of fascination and desire: making friends with aliens, eating with aliens, or even eating one (up), might enable us to transcend the very limits and frailties of an all-too human form. Or, by allowing some aliens to co-exist ‘with us’, we might expand our community: we might prove our advancement into or beyond the human; we might demonstrate our willingness to accept difference and to make it our own. Being hospitable to aliens might, in this way, allow us to become human ( Ahmed 2000, 53).

How does one recognise a stranger? The question of stranger/ness is often framed through the lens of recognition and misrecognition, identifying the stranger as one who is not the object of our knowledge (Ahmed 2010, 24).  Knowledge is thus constitutive of not only what is familiar/knowable to us but also what is strange and who is defined as a stranger. Thus stranger isn’t someone we don’t recognise rather it is someone we recognise as a stranger, he/she is produced as an object of knowledge than through absence of knowledge. There are hence far reaching implications of the inter-connections between knowledge and strangers. Strangers are not distant rather those who have entered the proximities of what the majority calls as ‘home’(ibid, 25).

The stranger is often attributed as the source of danger, making hysteria around their presence and anticipated source of threat they might be to the larger population. However, in liberal discourses strangers are celebrated as origins of difference, the testament to toleration and multicultural values of a progressive nation. Both these perspectives only further the idea of ‘stranger fetishism’, which is often observed in foreign policy as well as national security considerations of a nation-state (Ahmed 2010, 6).

Why do states need a figure for projecting disgust that translates into a climate of fear mongering and spectre of violence against the other? The idea of chaos and crisis emblematic in the refugee presence allows states to deflect attention by blaming the foreigner, the other and justify continuation of securitised policies to promote national sovereignty. They are often referred to as vermin, pariah or bogus: always less than human.

There are various processes of incorporation and eviction through which bodies are produced as assimilable and naturalised within a national context. The bodies of strangers or ‘strange bodies’ are removed/dismissed from the national space by reading them through histories of determination in which these bodies are associated with dirt and danger (Ahmed 2010, 14). There are various parameters in place that mark a body strange from a familiar one. The stranger rather being utterly unknown is always already predicated on recognisable attributes (not necessarily visual, like the beard for Muslims, sometimes these could be olfactory as well). Thus the stranger is kept at a distance through the fact of its proximity, the ability of the majority to discern strangeness.

In India, the subject (Hindu upper caste man, mostly) is presented as endangered by the proximity of ‘imagined others’ which threatens to take away something from the subject  (jobs, wealth, land) as well as take the place of the subject. The presence........

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