Reversing the Gaze from Refugees to Labelers: For a Socio-history of Labeling

ABSTRACT: This article is a plea for a theoretical and methodological approach in asylum and migration studies that enables distance from the institutional categories and taxonomy of refugees and migrants. It suggests reversing the gaze from "refugees" and "migrants" to the societies that label them as such and studying the historical evolutions of labeling operations with a strict definition of the refugee as the product of labeling. Applied to the study of the evolution of the refugee/migrant labeling in France from the 1950s to the 1990s, this approach shows the political dimension and constant redefinition of the migrant/refugee binary. As such it questions the division between refugee and asylum studies and invites going beyond the documentation of the experiences of exiles to include the political production of inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchies among them.