Thinking about the future of forced migration

Kaldor Centre Conference 2023

Keynote address

Aarathi Krishnan

I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and pay my respect to the Elders, both past and present. I want to also acknowledge the world that will exist beyond our lifetimes and the people, animals and nature that will thrive in it.

How do we serve all of humanity without bringing the inequities of our past into our futures?

The world feels complicated right now. It feels like we keep being taken by surprise - shocks, conflicts, new complex disasters. If you are feeling like this, it’s not necessarily wrong. 

We are, as experts argue - in the age of a global polycrisis. Which essentially means a tangled mess of crises. In the past three years alone, we have seen multiple, parallel crises manifest – climate emergencies resulting in extreme heat and out-of-control fires, economic instability, exponential increases in costs of living, political insecurities in Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, South Sudan and many other states.

If this feels improbable - let me give an example. In early 2022, Pakistan experienced an extremely challenging year. It began on the cusp of sovereign default, with rapidly depleting foreign exchange reserves and skyrocketing inflation that was due to rising global food and fuel prices amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. The volatile economic situation was worsened by 60-year-record-topping heat waves, with some parts of the country recording temperatures exceeding 50℃. Canal beds dried up, and with prohibitive fuel costs keeping people from cooling their homes or workplaces, Pakistanis were collapsing from heatstroke. This extreme event was then compounded by devastating floods that impacted the lives of 33 million Pakistanis. Subsequently, Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted in a no-confidence vote, setting in motion a chain of political crises. 

That was just in one - country. But none of us are exempt. We don’t seem to be able to improve things. People continue to be left behind. We assume our policy investments,  tinkered with at the sides, are enough to respond to anything that comes our way. But what we are facing in the next decade — is not anything we have experienced before at the scale that we will be experiencing it. We are going to be experiencing compounding, intersecting systemic and existential risks. We are going to be experiencing the types of disasters and devastation at a scale that we haven’t experienced. We are going to experience the types of wars that bypass our rigidly held principles, values and rules, that not necessarily everyone cares about abiding by. We are going to be experiencing the types of injustice, inhumanity, agony and despair not seen in decades — perpetuating historical systemic oppression that already under-girds so much of humanity today.

I put forward here a hypothesis of what levers/tipping points tip states into crisis:

• The fiscal resilience of a state to withstand shock

• The level of trust between citizens and its policymakers

• The transparency and resiliency of governance processes

Usually when one thing gets hit, it could still recover. But when two or more are hit, it's likely that a state will fall into crisis. Risks are no longer just one issue. We can’t talk about it in siloes, rather we must see that they are interconnected, interlinked and will have compounding butterfly effects across the globe. 

A Risk Report from UNDP this year point to these current risks, all heavily intertwined: 

• The backslide in women’s inclusion and participation is disrupting economic growth, preventing the actualization of cohesive societies, and regressing previously secured basic rights and freedoms. 

• Decreasing access to natural resources (most notably, fresh water) because of the climate crisis, governance issues, and rapid urbanisation. 

• Agricultural production and food shortages, which also impact on health at a time of ‘perma-pandemics’ and chronic health system capacity challenges. 

• Global economic slowdown that is leading to cascading impacts in energy dependencies, cost of living, and debt distress 

• Digital rights and digital governance, including issues of unequal digital access for women and erosion of democracies. 

• Economic anxieties, institutional imbalance, mass class divide, and the battle for truth leading to significant trust deficit without a trust safety net.

In addition, this year alone we have seen new cracks emerge:

• Fast increase in wars/conflicts

• Shifting global norms - the principles and rules we signed up to globally post WW2 are fast being thrown aside

• Aggressive pushback against geopolitical alliances - who we align to on the world stage will matter in the long term

• Increasing heat as the new un-equalizer - if you can’t afford air conditioning or fans, if you can’t afford access to clean water, you are gravely at risk

• Climate geopolitics : Tuvalu-Australia 

• The rise of climate-proof cities being promoted as refuge for potential climate migrants (Duluth, MN)

Looming larger than just the risks - is its resultant uncertainty. Because we usually consider risks in siloes, our ability to govern them is also generally narrow. But when we have the types of risks we have today, it makes it almost impossible to price it, let alone govern it. And when governance and risk design is designed in narrow streams, then now as always — the historically oppressed and excluded, continue to carry the brunt of impact.

It begs an answer to this question, how then might we live? How do we know which decisions to make?

GOOD GOVERNANCE MEANS THAT THE LAWS AND POLICIES OF THE STATE CAN KEEP ALL PEOPLE SAFE. 

Assuming that much of what will occur in the decade(s) to come will unfold the way it has historically - is folly. But, does it really matter? Surely we should be designing for anew? But what happens when we design policies that make assumptions of people, of how they really lead their lives? 

ARE THE CHOICES WE MAKE TODAY RESILIENT ENOUGH TO MATCH WHAT IS EMERGING?

OR WE ARE LOCKING IN DECISIONS TODAY THAT DON’T ALLOW FOR ANY KIND OF SHIFT TOMORROW?

In the last two years, we saw the devastating impacts of COVID related policies designed in the West and then transferred without nuance into other countries. Social distancing policies don’t work when you are part of the urban poor and live in crowded informal settlements in India, Kenya. Lockdown policies don’t work if you are a migrant worker, living far away from your home village and have no way of getting home. Policies designed without truly considering how all people really lead their lives, are doomed to only serve a small select population. 

Merely continuing to react in the immediate after, makes assumptions that often are out of touch with the realities of the contexts we live in. Merely reacting, designing solutions in the aftermath, will fail all of us collectively. The assumptions we make about who will be most impacted, the stereotypes we fall back on in terms of who is ‘vulnerable’ is very quickly shifting. No longer can we assume that some of us are exempt from fragility - because these intersecting crisis means that all of us will be impacted. If we don’t think through our decisions through its long term implications, we will leave all of our future generations behind. 

This is the burning platform of our times because our collective actions to date have not secured a flourishing future or planet for any of us. We continue to fail in ways that keep poor people poor, we fail in ways that still does not recognize the humanity in all of us based merely on the colour of one's skin or their sexual and gender orientation, we have failed to safeguard our planet, we have failed to make the world more equal, more just, more safe. We have failed not because the challenges were impossible to solve, but because of our collective lethargy and apathy to truly reimagine a completely different status quo. If the most fragile continue to bear the brunt of unanticipated risk and increased uncertainty, our mutual ability to create norms of freedom, of thriving — fall behind. In clearer terms, if we still do not have the existing structural infrastructure and investments for existing risks and vulnerabilities, futures of compounding risk and uncertainties will most certainly impact our capacity to reduce economic and human vulnerability, and in fact, arguably could increase it.

To design anew is a hard endeavour. How can we ensure that the authority in which we make decisions today considers its impact on a future that doesn’t yet exist, and yet its impact will resonate in those futures. We cannot any longer rely on static ideas of governance but rather a much more holistic and adaptive approach that proactively identifies emerging risks, opportunities and changing tides as the only way in which we can ensure our policies are fit not just for today, but for tomorrow.

More than that, we must also look at what has gotten us here. What are the systems in which we all exist? How do they play out in all peoples experiences and why? We assume emancipation and liberation through our endeavours but without a critical understanding of power, of who is deliberately unseen or exploited. Might our work currently paradoxically expose, or expand harm on often marginalised minoritized constituents, and are the futures we are chasing merely replicating or reinforcing existing or past inequalities?. As an example, research has shown that technological experiments on refugees are often discriminatory, breach privacy and endanger lives. Refugees are often left out of conversations around technological development, and like other marginalised communities, they often become guinea pigs on which to test new surveillance tools before bringing them to the wider population. 

We now know that one of the reasons for grave inequality is due to historic colonialism and how it manifests in ongoing agony today. I argue that global systems perpetuate hierarchical, patriarchal, hegemonic views of what ‘development’ and ‘progress’ looks like, ignoring other world-views, and underlying systemic and structural pillars of inequality and bias. They were developed in imperial systems- meaning, based on our colonial legacies of the Global North and the Global South- in a way allows supremacy, and racial hierarchies to go unchallenged and also to thrive. The agonies that our world is facing today didn’t happen overnight — it is the result of this shared history of colonialism. 

What might all this mean for the futures of forced migration? 

What if - the act of displacing populations becomes increasingly a geopolitical choice - and increases pushing people out of safety in their lands to unsafe territories?

What if - the global resolutions we sign up to collectively get discarded? 

What if - even with widespread acceptance of people on the move - states are not fiscally able to support increased population sizes, let alone having the right type of social policies to keep people safe? 

What if - Australians themselves become displaced due to vast amounts of land becoming untenable to live?

The practice of anticipation, of foresight, is not neutral. It is conditioned by our positionality, cultural values, our economic systems, and our capacity for collective imagination. Are we chasing only one idea of what ‘progress’ looks like? Do we end up replicating versions of ourselves or the stories we want to tell? Anticipatory approaches and foresight can frame our choices and help us choose the pathways ahead of us; however, the more rigid our dependence, the finer the line becomes between foresight seduction and foresight coercion. We end up gently bending our choices, our perspectives and our sense of ourselves to fit these rigid frames — reducing the breadth of our humanity to those templates that are designed and understood by a privileged few.

We design through our own eyes, and so - whose futures are we building? And what kind of systems can we design that can help ensure just, equitable, safe futures for all? 

We are experiencing such a period of uncertainty, of pain, of loss of hope. We are almost floating it feels from one shock to the next.  But just looking for hope is not enough, when what we are fighting is no less than what Indy Johar calls the structural loss of hope, where the idea of the future becomes a place of worry, pain and struggle. As if the very idea of the future itself is lost. 

As Arundhati Roy said early on in the pandemic, Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next… We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

And therein lies the answer of how we create hope: We make the choice to walk through the portal with the collective readiness to imagine a new future.

Imagining a new future, designing policies that are fit for those futures, can’t be designed in isolation, in ivory towers. The visions of futures we are trying to bring closer to us, the systems and policies that we are trying to change, can only be transformed if we understand how we got here, our history, shared and individual and the narratives we tell ourselves. Being inclusive in this way means telling the truth about our past, to ensure we don’t design the inequities of those pasts into our futures. Being inclusive in this way, means reaching people where they are at - and not imposing visions of the world as seen through our own eyes down to the many. The imaginations of the few should not colonise the reimaginations of the many. What we have before us are choices about the types of pathways we want to design, to find new meaning and construct shared purpose, and to build new systems — of governance, resource flow, rights, opportunity, and expression, among others. 

Any kind of transformation for social good in the 21st century will only truly be effective if it is a systemic interrogation that does not draw on normative static frameworks and linear methodologies that are designed on out-dated assumptions. It must tackle and pull-out systemic inequality and bias, representative of all peoples and futures, and clearly linked to strategic reform. Linearity and hegemony are the crippler of our futures. If these last years have taught us anything, it is how we seek a fundamental transformation of our ways of living and being. If we truly want to break from the shackles of our past, we need new approaches to governance and policy-making:

Policy Dynamism - we need policies that are dynamic

Antifragility - we need to build antifragility into our policy design, and understand what impacts might be over multiple timelines

Systems not siloes - seeing the truth in which something exists is more important than that truth itself arguably

Understanding futures harms -  building in impact assessments that analyse not just implications but potential future harms and unintended consequences

Moving away from magical thinking - can we stop constructing solutions for problems that we don't fully understand, OR that don’t exist?

Hope is a radical act. It is what makes us cross seas, skies, take risks, and jump without safety nets when the journey and arrival might endanger safety and might diminish us. We are propelled forward by the hope for a better future for our children and our grandchildren but hope by itself is not enough. We must translate this hope into action that befits the types of resets we need in the redesign of new commons, values, and wisdoms.

This reorientation must focus not only on imagining some of our paths anew, but also more deeply examining the barriers that have impeded the translation of (out-dated) long-held values and traditions into policy decisions that dramatically shifts the status quo ensuring safety and thriving for all. Crisis, from climate emergencies to pandemics to wars, thrive in the cracks in society, exploiting and exacerbating myriad inequalities. The norms that prioritise the immediate at the expense of the future, including through processes that fail to give equity and justice to the many, serve to perpetuate the inequity and exclusion we seek to address. 

Anil Dash once wrote that “We are accountable for the communities we create”. Extending this further, we are accountable for the futures we create. We cannot absolve ourselves of the responsibilities of the intended and unintended consequences of our actions in the short and long term. If our actions enable negative outcomes down the track for the very populations we aim to serve and protect, then our very actions are a fallacy in the name of humanitarian principles. 

Radical alterity is the collective responsibility of all actors to not just expect dehumanising resilience as a coping mechanisms for impacted populations to just deal with whatever might come from the policies and systems designed on their behalf, in their futures, but rather to radically work towards mitigating, designing systems that don’t just say ‘we leave no one behind’ but rather very intentionally designing through justice, equity and resistance. 

We have an opportunity to repair the breaks in our system, and our social contract, and hold our institutions to account. We have an opportunity to collectively contour a global narrative that reimagines not just how we live and work together, but fundamentally shifts the structural pillars of how we serve those that need it the most, and each other.