Performing refugeeness in the Czech Republic: gendered depoliticisation through NGO assistance

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Performing refugeeness in the Czech Republic: gendered depoliticisationthrough NGO assistanceAlice Szczepanikovaa

a Institute for the Analysis of Society and Politics, J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main,Germany

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Performing refugeeness in the Czech Republic: gendereddepoliticisation through NGO assistance

Alice Szczepanikova*

Institute for the Analysis of Society and Politics, J.W. Goethe University, Robert Mayer-Str. 5, 60045Frankfurt am Main, Germany

The article examines the gender micropolitics of non-governmental assistance torefugees in the Czech Republic – a post-socialist society which is becoming a countryof immigration. It critically examines relations of power between refugees and localnon-governmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs act as mediators betweenrefugees and the state, media, wider public and academic production of knowledge. It isargued that despite the important roles they play in securing refugees’ access to rights,their assistance is often perceived as problematic by refugees. The article analysesthese relations in a wider context of the institutions of the refugee system where thestate has increasing power in defining the conditions under which NGO assistance torefugees is provided. The study is based on qualitative research among recognisedrefugees from the former Soviet Union living in the Czech Republic and local NGOsassisting them with integration into society. I demonstrate how particular forms ofassistance and public representation depoliticise refugees in a sense of fostering ratherthan challenging unequal power relations that lock refugees in a position of clientslacking political means of influencing their place in a receiving society. This is done byconceptualising ‘a refugee’ as a performative identity that is being produced andenacted in feminised NGO spaces. The analysis highlights refugees’ critical reflectionson their position in the relations of assistance.

Keywords: NGO assistance to refugees; gender; depoliticisation; power relations;Czech Republic

Introduction

How is it that some marginalised groups of people are constructed as subordinate by those

who claim to be best equipped to provide solutions to their situation? How do recipients of

assistance reflect on their position vis-a-vis their helpers? Answers provided by this article

are based on a qualitative study of local non-governmental assistance to recognised

refugees. The focus is on nationals from the former Soviet Union settling in the

Czech Republic. I suggest that the dominant forms of non-governmental organisation

(NGO) assistance and their engagement in the representation of refugees to the public are

built on maintaining unequal relations of power between NGOs and refugees. These power

imbalances foster certain performances of ‘refugeeness’ which support the construction of

refugees as objects of assistance who themselves lack political means of influencing their

image and position in a host society. Such performances can be observed in NGO spaces

where assistance is provided, but they also characterise dominant public representations of

refugees by NGOs and therefore have a wider social impact beyond NGOs.

ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2010.485838

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*Email: [email protected]

Gender, Place and Culture

Vol. 17, No. 4, August 2010, 461–477

Downloaded By: [Szczepanikova, Alice] At: 18:27 8 July 2010

In the Czech Republic and elsewhere, NGOs act as the key mediators of individual

refugees’ relations with the state by representing them in courts and providing information

about their rights. Besides, they also mediate refugees’ relationships with the wider public.

NGOs present refugees’ stories and organise events aimed at making refugees visible in a

positive light while fundraising for the continuation of their own existence. Furthermore,

NGOs are usually the first contact points for the media; when journalists want to report on

refugee issues and look for refugee interviewees, they turn to them. Last but not least,

NGOs are important sources of information and contacts for researchers, thus, they also

influence the production of knowledge about refugees.

Most studies of NGO involvement in refugee situations stress their positive

contributions in the form of services they provide and their advocacy on behalf of

individual refugees and their rights. Existing literature focuses mostly on relations and

struggles between NGOs and large international organisations and the states (Lester 2005;

Tazreiter 2004; Wren 2007). It tends to privilege the perspective of NGOs over that of

refugees who are their raison d’etre. Nyers (2006, xiv) points out that conventional

academic and policy analyses of refugee situations provide surprisingly little or no space for

refugees to articulate their experiences and struggles. Although promotion of refugees’

narratives of persecution, flight, and asylum in publications of humanitarian organisations,

academic studies and the media has gained momentum in recent years, these testimonials do

not necessarily provide opportunities for refugees ‘to assert their (often collectively

conceived) political agency’. Moreover, argues Nyers (2006, 126), ‘it remains exceptionally

rare within the academic and policy literature on refugees to seriously consider the

possibility of including actual refugees as part of the decision-making process about

“solutions” to their plight’. Thus, the conventional disempowering representations of

refugeeness are rarely being challenged.

Refugees’ points of view and critiques of humanitarian practices have been given

some space in studies based in the so-called developing world, most commonly in Africa.

Some of the most penetrating analyses of humanitarian organisations’ involvement with

refugees emerged from these locations (Harrell-Bond 1986, 1999; Hyndman 2000, 2004;

Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005). In the context of Europe and North America,

empirically grounded critical accounts of NGO assistance to refugees are much less

common.

NGOs all over the world have become increasingly responsible for securing refugees’

access to social and economic rights. They identify niches where they do better than

bureaucratic and controlling state institutions and oppose the spread of restrictive asylum

and immigration policies. Their assistance to refugees has been influenced by wider

processes of restructuring and rolling back of welfare states and the privatisation of state-

run services (Findlay, Fyfe, and Stewart 2007; Tazreiter 2004). Moreover, new modes of

governance have been employed to implicate NGOs in controlling migration flows from the

outside and monitoring ethnic minorities within the security-conscious nation-states.

As many NGOs are effectively becoming ‘subcontractors’ of governments or the

United Nations (Lester 2005), concerns emerge about a growing divide between their

responsibilities and accountability to those whom they assist (Fisher 1997; Tazreiter 2004).

This article scrutinises local, less formalised NGOs set up to facilitate refugee

integration. It not only brings a critical insight into the micropolitics of NGO assistance to

refugees, but also highlights its gender character. It has been widely documented that

being a refugee has distinct impacts on women and men (Franz 2005; Freedman 2007;

Hajdukowski-Ahmed, Khanlou, and Moussa 2008; Indra 1999; Kay 1988; Korac 2004;

Ong 2003). However, as Harrell-Bond (1999) reminds us, we know little about the

462 A. Szczepanikova


gendered character of being dependent on assistance and of receiving help from strangers

although these are common experiences for refugees all around the world.

The next two sections of the article outline the conceptualisation of power and

performativity and clarify methodology and the positionality of the researcher and the

researched. Following these two sections, processes of refugee depoliticisation are

explored in the analysis of relations between NGOs and the state and of the feminised

character of NGO assistance. The last scrutinises daily practices of NGO assistance.

It draws on refugee women’s critical interpretations of their positions in NGO spaces and

shows how their experiences and insights illuminate unequal power relations between

refugees and NGOs more broadly.

Performance of refugeeness and relations of power

NGOs have a unique role in constructing and maintaining refugee identities. They create

spaces where certain performances of refugeeness1 are nurtured and enacted. These

performances are guided by regulatory practices of NGO humanitarianism that provide

refugees with scripts to be followed (Hyndman and de Alwis 2004, 549–50). They render

some kinds of refugee behaviour possible and make others less acceptable. Thus, NGOs

‘structure the possible field of action’ (Foucault 1982, 221) for refugees. A Foucauldian

approach to power is particularly useful in analysing practices of assistance because it

connects power’s disciplining and productive forces. Power is not an essence to be

appropriated but exists through relationships which produce particular subjectivities and

identities. Pursuing this line of analysis, the NGOs’ encounters with refugees can be seen

as constitutive of both refugee and NGO identities.

This study focuses on people who were officially recognised as refugees and granted

an appropriate legal status in a host country.2 Since they are no longer asylum seekers who

need to prove why they should be granted asylum, their position creates more space for

ambivalence towards the refugee category attached to them. At this stage, some are more

likely to define themselves or to be defined as refugees than others. In the Czech context,

it largely depends on whether they avail themselves of specialised NGO support and

whether they remain embedded in NGO social networks for a longer time. While some can

afford to disassociate themselves from the label, others make strategic use of it and/or find

themselves trapped in performing refugeeness.

Situating the researcher and locating the refugee voices

As many feminist scholars have made it clear, positionality of both the researcher and the

researched matters greatly because their knowledge is always situated and conditions and

circumstances in which this knowledge is produced influence it greatly (McDowell 1992;

Rose 1997). My aim in this section is to outline the methodology used and to situate myself

and the informants in the context in which the narratives that represent the main data for

this article were told and interpreted. In line with Dyck and McLaren (2004, 514)

I understand the process of data production as ‘embodied performances of negotiated

subjectivities, cultural scripts, and differential location within distributions of power –

both on the part of researchers and those interviewed’.

The empirical research for this study was carried out between 2005 and 2008 in Prague

and in a number of smaller towns in the Czech Republic. It is based on primary qualitative

data produced through in-depth and semi-structured interviews with 45 refugees from

Belarus, Chechnya and Armenia (26 women and 19 men).3 Here I draw mostly on the

Gender, Place and Culture 463


narratives of refugee women with whom I established closer and long-term relationships.4

Their age ranged from 20 to 45 and the majority obtained some kind of higher education.

All of them lived together with their families (husbands and children) and most did not

have a stable full-time job at the time of the research. Moreover, 13 NGO workers

(10 women and three men) representing four organisations were also interviewed.

The analysis presented here was shaped by my long-lasting engagement in refugee

issues and by different roles I have occupied in relation to both NGOs and refugees.

My personal encounter with asylum seekers, refugees and the institutions of the

Czech refugee system evolved from a position as a part-time NGO social worker in

refugee accommodation centres (2000–03) to that of a researcher (see Szczepanikova

2005) and occasional journalist returning to the Czech Republic for research trips while

studying abroad (2004–08). At the time of this research, I was no longer associated with

any of the NGOs. However, rethinking my former role as an NGO insider provided

inspiration for this article. My in-depth knowledge of the working of the refugee system

also enabled me to be more attentive to the contradictions and complexities of relations

among its different actors including the state, NGOs and the refugees.

Positions from which the refugee women reflected on their relations with NGOs

evolved during the study. Most of their more critical reflections presented here were

voiced only in repeated interviews and in the context of a longer research/friendship

relationship we established. The fact that such insights were not significantly present in

more conventional short-term research encounters reveals how difficult it can be to step

out of the position of a grateful and non-complaining recipient of aid which is usually

expected from refugees and women in particular.

It is important to note from the outset that the refugee informants whose accounts were

most valuable for this study represented a minority of those interviewed. At the beginning,

almost everyone spoke about the help received from NGOs with appreciation – like this

woman who praised their assistance:

I am very grateful to these organisations. Foreigners or refugees who come here don’t knowtheir rights, which laws apply to them and how. I don’t know who would explain it to them ifnot for these organisations. They write various applications for you, accompany you towelfare offices when you can’t speak the language properly; they always try to help and theywork really hard. (September 2007)5

Another informant particularly valued the NGOs’ friendly approach in her stressful

beginnings as an asylum seeker in a strange country:

These NGO workers were among the first people I met here and when they smiled at me in thedoorway, it already made me feel much better. (December 2006)

This asylum seeker and others were offered free legal and social counselling, opportunities

for professional retraining, Czech language courses, assistance with the search for housing

and employment or accessible leisure-time activities for children. While the first woman

maintained her unequivocally positive view of NGOs throughout a number of interviews

I conducted with her, the second speaker presented a more complex and ambivalent

character of her relations with NGOs in follow-up interviews towards the end of the

fieldwork. As I learned from the conducted interviews, I too started to formulate some of

the questions differently, no longer presupposing the unproblematic dynamic between the

helpers and those being helped. At that point, some (but not all) research participants

started speaking more openly about the ambivalence of their experiences with NGOs and

revealed their critical understanding of the unequal power relations in which they were



situated when accessing assistance. Comments like these prompted me to research the

topic in more depth:

Nowhere else have I ever felt treated so much like a second-class citizen as in these NGOs.I don’t feel the same when I clean other people’s houses, or when I go around welfare officesand ask for benefits. People in NGOs treat you either like a kid or as a fool who doesn’tunderstand a thing. I am neither of these, so why should I keep going there? True integrationstarts when you realise that and you don’t go there anymore. (September 2007)

The most reflective comments came from the women who retained close relationships

with the NGOs but were no longer dependent on their assistance because they learned the

language; they (or their husbands) found jobs and/or established alternative social

networks. They explained to me that they ‘could afford’ to look at NGOs more critically.

At the same time, they often coupled their accounts with sentences like: ‘but everybody

knows this’ or ‘all refugees are well aware of that’, which indicate that they were referring

to shared experiences which are nevertheless hidden from the public eye, inaccessible to

most researchers, and to an extent also to NGO workers. Despite their voices being in the

minority, I have been able to corroborate many of their arguments through participant

observation and interviews with NGO representatives. Refugee women’s incisive

comments redefined NGO–client relationships from ‘harmonized “us” and “thems” living

together’ (Hyndman 1998, 245) to spaces characterised by unequal power relations,

dependency and implicit reciprocity.

To situate their narratives more specifically, it is important to point out that women’s

strong presence in NGO spaces is prompted by the gender relations and inequalities they

live in. Although they constitute, on average, only 30% of asylum seekers and 40% of

recognised refugees in the Czech Republic (DAMP 2008), my observations and the reports

of NGOs corroborated that refugee women are much more likely than men to reach out for

assistance from NGOs. This situation is caused by the gender division of labour in refugee

households. Moreover, they are enhanced by NGOs’ preference for the kinds of refugee

performances which are more compatible with refugee women’s structural position as

responsible for the social reproduction of the family (Hartmann 1981).

The majority of both female and male informants considered it undignified for a

man to go and ask for assistance from strangers and thus to openly acknowledge his

situation of dependency.6 For example, this refugee woman explained how things worked

in her family:

It is always me who communicates [with NGOs] because my husband, I don’t know . . . it issimply a question of men’s pride; he will not go and plead . . . . It’s not because of his lack ofactivity; it’s because he doesn’t want to be in a position when he passively receiveshelp. (September 2007)

Another woman’s account illustrates refugee women’s self-perception as being able to

perform their neediness more efficiently than their husbands and thus gain better access to

various forms of goods and services:

A woman, when necessary, is able to lower herself, to ask for something when a man cannotdo it. He will, for example, never go somewhere and ask for help; that’s not the way we do it.He doesn’t abandon his upbringing from home only because he’s here now. That is why I canbetter explain our situation when I go somewhere. I shed a tear, if needed; these are the thingsthat women can do. (December 2006)

The gender division of labour in refugee households has origins in the dominant notion

of masculinity constructed as incompatible with pleading. This is further encouraged

by the spaces of NGOs that are largely perceived as arenas where clients have to engage



in various emotional acting roles and performances in order to show neediness and obtain

access to resources. Women’s embeddedness in, as well as critical reflection of, these

spaces resonates in the last section of this article which explores representations,

performances and depoliticisation of refugeeness in everyday practices of assistance.

The next section briefly introduces the context of refugee presence in the Czech Republic.

Refugees in the Czech Republic

The Czech Republic has a relatively short history of immigration as well as of an

institutionalised refugee system. The then Czechoslovakia became a signatory of the 1951

Geneva Convention and the related Protocol in the early 1990s, after the demise of the

communist regime. Since then, over 3000 people have been recognised as refugees out of

more than 87,000 applicants (DAMP 2008). From the late 1990s onwards, refugees from

the former Soviet Union predominated among asylum seekers and were most likely to be

granted asylum. The majority of ‘successful’ refugees came from Chechnya and Belarus

(DAMP 2008). The numbers of asylum seekers have been decreasing since 2004. In 2008,

1656 people applied for asylum and 157 were granted refugee status. Although it has long

been perceived as a transit country by asylum seekers passing through on their way to

Western Europe, since the late 1990s the Czech Republic has gradually become a

destination country for some groups of refugees.

Development of the Czech refugee system has been strongly influenced by the

prospect of and subsequent membership of the European Union (since 2004). Having an

advanced refugee system was seen as instrumental in presenting the country as a prepared

candidate for the EU fulfilling its international and human rights obligations. Thus, the

system of refugee reception and integration has been institutionalised, professionalised

and significantly supported from the state budget. Since 2007, the Czech Republic has

been included in the Schengen Area. This led to the abolishment of border controls with

other Schengen states, i.e. all neighbouring countries of the Czech Republic.

Simultaneously, the ‘Schengen argument’ was used by the Czech Ministry of Interior

and members of the Czech Parliament to legitimise further restrictions on an already

limited entry of potential asylum seekers and widening of the possibilities of their

detention and removal from the territory.

What are the actual material conditions of people who were granted asylum in the

Czech Republic and why do some of them seek assistance from NGOs? Existing reports

indicate that in comparison with the Czech population as well as other groups of residing

foreigners, recognised refugees suffer from disproportionate levels of unemployment, live

in overcrowded and generally inadequate housing, have difficulties getting their

qualifications recognised, and perceive themselves as poor (MLSA 2007; Uherek et al.

2005). Refugees approach NGOs mostly for social and legal assistance, for example when

they need information about welfare benefits, help with writing various applications or

recognition of their education from countries of origin. With the inflow of EU funding that

privileges labour market integration of migrants after 2004, NGOs started to organise

various language and retraining programmes for refugees and other categories of migrants.

Besides, some NGOs also offer various recreational and therapeutic activities for refugees.

These services are usually offered free at the point of access.

Because refugee community organisations have not been established in the country,

for some refugees relations with NGO workers are an important social network and an

opportunity for social interactions outside their families. NGOs and the state provide many

of the functions which are in other contexts performed by the ethnic community. As the



following section demonstrates, the explanation of the relations between the state and the

NGO sector is important for understanding the kinds of assistance and advocacy provided

by NGOs.

NGOs and the state

The Czech refugee system consists of a complex institutional apparatus composed of a

number of state and non-governmental actors. Although NGOs and other civic

organisations are expected to be involved in the implementation of state migration policies

(Government of the Czech Republic 2003), they are not considered to be partners in

discussions about the actual content and direction of these policies. When they attempt to

have some impact on the formulation of migration and asylum policies, they are usually

seen as unwelcome intruders and trouble-makers by the Ministries and legislative bodies.

When it comes to implementing policies defined by the government, NGOs are portrayed

as better positioned than the state. As the Strategy of Collaboration of the Ministry of

Labour and Social Affairs and NGOs in the field of integration of foreigners indicates:

NGOs are able to identify concrete problems in foreigners’ coexistence with the majoritypopulation as well as barriers which prevent their integration into society . . . Their advantagelies in their flexibility, high level of motivation to solve problems, adaptability andoperativeness . . . Compared to the state administration, their asset is their informal approachto clients.7

The state’s expectation of NGOs’ role in the refugee system is that of flexible and efficient

subcontractors with limited decision-making power.

Control over financial resources is an important factor in maintaining this power

relation. In 2005, the Czech Republic became eligible to draw funds from the European

Refugee Fund (ERF) established by the European Council Decision 2000/596/EC to

improve and unify the standards of reception systems in the EU member states. Based on

the ruling of the Czech government, the Ministry of the Interior8 was made responsible for

distributing the fund. The same Ministry also formulates asylum legislation, decides about

asylum applications and runs accommodation centres for asylum seekers and recognised

refugees. Due to its wide ranging responsibilities over refugee issues, it is in a close but

often conflicting relation with NGOs providing assistance. Such centralisation of power

(indirectly strengthened by the integration of the Czech Republic into the EU) gave the

state increased control over the operation of NGOs.

With the existence of the ERF as a major source of financing activities directed

towards asylum seekers and refugees, NGOs find it difficult to access other means of

financing and thus become increasingly dependent on the state. This dependency imposes

constraints on their advocacy work. For example, in the 2006 amendment of the Czech

Asylum Act, the Ministry of Interior introduced a new rule stipulating that NGOs’ legal

counselling to asylum seekers can be provided only by those organisations that have

signed a contract with the Ministry. When the counselling takes place in accommodation

centres, where many asylum seekers await the decision on their claim, it can only be held

in places designated by the Ministry for NGO counselling and not, for example, in asylum

seekers’ rooms. This brings the interactions between NGOs and asylum seekers in

accommodation centres under even stronger control of the authorities.

The state has an interest in depoliticising its various instruments used to limit and

control the presence of asylum seekers and refugees in the country. Most notably there is a

tendency to normalise the recent increase in the use of detention of asylum seekers

together with people designated as ‘illegal immigrants’. Large numbers of potential



asylum seekers are prevented from launching their applications when intercepted at

international airports or when other EU countries can be found responsible for handling

their applications based on the Dublin II Convention.

Some NGOs have been engaged in lobbying the parliament and trying to prevent

restrictive moves in the asylum legislation. They have criticised conditions in refugee

accommodation and detention centres and actively networked with other European NGOs

in order to promote progressive policy changes at the EU level. Without their relentless

efforts, many cuts of refugee rights would pass smoothly and there would be less control of

the uses of state power over refugees. At the same time, these activities often put them in a

difficult position when accessing the EU funding channelled through the state

administration.

With regard to recognised refugees, three pillars of their integration into Czech society

have been defined by the state: obtaining basic Czech language skills, finding employment

and finding accommodation outside the system of institutions designed to assist refugees

(Government of the Czech Republic 2008). NGOs are often subcontracted to provide

various services connected with these aims.

Despite the advantage of the ‘informal approach to clients’, NGOs receiving funding

from the Ministries are asked to provide rather bureaucratised accounts of their activities

with a strong emphasis on quantifiable results. This approach has increasingly been

adopted also in NGO annual reports and project information where numbers of new and

served clients figure prominently at the expense of more nuanced accounts of the actual

outcomes of their assistance, while refugees’ feedback on these services are missing

altogether. This bureaucratisation of NGO assistance goes hand in hand with the

depoliticisation of refugee issues. Refugees are being ‘processed’ as cases and listed as

items to legitimise money spent and a further need for funding.

In short, the NGOs’ relations with the state largely predispose their operations and

the kinds of assistance provided to refugees. However, they are not a homogeneous

group. The following section characterises similarities and differences among NGOs and

reveals some of the existing tensions with regard to their perceptions of the refugee clients.

NGOs: feminisation and internal tensions

There are around 10 organisations that work directly and exclusively with refugees and

other groups of migrants in the Czech Republic. Besides this, there are also a number of

organisations which provide a wide range of social and educational services to different

populations including refugees. Many of these are associated with Roman Catholic and

Evangelical churches. This research focused on the former group, for which refugees

represent a principal target group. The four NGOs included in the study were selected

based on their long tradition of operation in the field (i.e. from the early 1990s) or their

stronger presence in public space (i.e. representing refugees to the public through the

media and cultural events).

The gender imbalance in the group of NGO interview partners (10 women and three

men) is representative. In these four organisations, women represent on average almost

80% of employees who are dealing directly with refugee clients. Apart from the fact that

counselling tends to be a highly feminised activity (Bondi 2009), there are also other

historical and material grounds for the feminisation of NGOs in the Czech context.

A number of older members and/or initiators of the NGOs assisting refugees were

connected with a group of anti-communist dissidents active in an informal civic initiative

known as Charter 77.9 While many dissident men joined the official political scene after



the regime change in 1989, their female collaborators became more active in the NGO

sector, which quickly gained a strong representational role in the project of creating a

modern civil society in the post-socialist Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic (Marada 2008,

192). This became one of the factors that contributed to the feminisation of the civic sphere

(True 2003, 147).

The majority of younger NGO workers are recent university graduates. Here, women’s

prevalence reflects a general domination of female students in social science education as

well as the fact that in the conditions of gender segregation in the Czech labour market,

these young educated women are more willing to take less well paid jobs compensated by

work satisfaction and/or perhaps by higher incomes of their partners. Thus, the underlining

political economy of NGOs (which also includes devaluation of predominantly women’s

work) is a precondition of feminisation of NGO assistance.

NGOs differ in the broader framing of their work with refugees and the kinds of

relationships they want to forge with them. Even within one NGO there are often differing

approaches to understanding who the refugees are and what it means to help them.

Interviews with NGO workers who were associated with the dissident movement revealed

that their own self-definition as former freedom fighters often provided them with a strong

sense of moral obligation and righteousness, which sometimes prevented critical reflection

on their own actions. Some of them encouraged the idea of ‘helping refugees’ as an

unequivocally positive mission within their organisations and loaded the figure of a

refugee with a deep emotional commitment. Their vision of assistance emphasised

informal, friendship-like relations with refugees. Many younger workers tend to see

working in an NGO assisting refugees as a stepping stone for their further professional

careers. Where this group of workers prevails, the NGOs have been moving towards

greater specialisation and standardisation of their services. Their perception of a refugee

tends to be less emotionally charged; refugees are seen as yet another category of

clients alongside migrants with other kinds of residence status. However, these differing

approaches to refugees are not entirely a generational issue. Some of the younger workers

also embrace the informal, friendship-like approach while fewer of the older generation

tend to the career-oriented approach. Although NGOs in general pursue similar goals of

assisting refugees in the process of integration (often rather narrowly defined), the means

of achieving this goal varies.

The dominant approach to assistance taken by an NGO depends on power dynamics

within the organisation. In the past, some NGOs even split or transformed due to these

inner tensions. Broadly speaking, both approaches are equally present in the Czech NGO

sector and often coexist within one organisation. Moreover, there are also gendered

inequalities among NGO personnel. If men are employed, they tend to occupy positions of

directors and lawyers, both of which have higher prestige than the work of social workers

and counsellors among whom women predominate.

Whatever the approach adopted by NGOs in assisting refugees, their shared

characteristic is that they are run predominantly by Czech nationals: white, mostly

younger middle-class professionals. People with refugee experience are only a rare

exception among the employees. Their presence in NGOs is a matter of individual career

choices, social networks and persistence rather than a structural element inherent to these

organisations. At the time of the research, two NGOs employed a person with a refugee

background who had some leverage within the organisation. The third organisation

employed a few migrants and refugees on a part-time basis but only in the position of

assistants with little influence and prospect for advancement. Thus, as opposed to other

countries (especially in Western Europe and North America), which have seen



a proliferation of refugee community organisations and where many NGO advocates are

former refugees, the NGO landscape in the Czech Republic is much more homogeneous

and continues to be organised along the lines of ‘us’ helping ‘them’.10

Refugees’ and migrants’ points of view are rarely incorporated into the operation of

NGOs. They are, in general, not treated as competent actors able to identify their own needs

and means of satisfaction. The feminised character of the refugee clientele further enhances

this power relation. Refugee women tend to be perceived as easier and more manageable

objects of assistance than men (Ong 2003). I have observed that Czech NGO workers often

dealt with women even over subjects related to their husbands or sons. They found women

generally more communicative, adaptive and less willing to openly express their anger or

dissatisfaction. In other words, the performance of refugeeness expected from women was

that of a compliance with the needs and problem solutions designed by NGOs. The next

section challenges this construction through critical voices of refugee women. It brings

examples of practices of assistance which nurture depoliticised and feminised performances

of refugeeness and reinforce unequal relations of power between NGOs and refugees.

NGOs and refugees: representations, performances and depoliticisation

Representations and performances of positive refugeeness

NGOs tend to place themselves in the position of agents for refugees. They act on behalf of

them and use the frame of their own visibility as representatives of civic society to counter

the dehumanising and alienating labels of governmental and media rhetoric about asylum

seekers and refugees. The need to balance the negative images of refugees was stressed by

many NGO workers. As this woman explained:

If there is no will to treat them [refugees] as people, because the political demand is: it would bebetter not to have them here at all, then, perhaps, my reaction to this restriction is that I alwaysfeel like showing them as decent people. As long as they [government and media] want to makeus see them as thieves, cheats and dangerous creatures . . . (April 2006, emphasis added)

This decency is most likely to be delivered through feminised and depoliticised

refugee imagery. The stories of refugee women are often presented in NGO publications

(Centre for Migration 2001; Roubalova, Gunterova, and Kostlan 2005) and images of

them and their children are displayed on their websites. As argued by Malkki (1995) the

predominance of women and children in refugees’ visual representations is not accidental

because it associates refugeeness with powerlessness and neediness. In the Czech context

as well as elsewhere, refugee women serve as easily appealing counterparts to refugee

men, who are likely to be portrayed as potential or real criminals who ‘penetrate’ borders

in an uncontrolled manner.

However, the predominance of women in refugee representations does not necessarily

improve our knowledge about their specific situation and (often gendered) problems they

face in the country of asylum. Some of my interlocutors were well aware of their role in

performing positive refugeeness:

I am myself an average representative of a woman who keeps being invited to places to makethe image of a refugee look kind of nice. I know that if they organise something, if they wantto present a refugee to the public, they will not choose a man who has been waiting for hisasylum decision for many years, is angry and exhausted. I know that if it is for a TV orsomething, they will invite me to conjure up a smile, say a few words in Czech . . . They knowI can be endearing: look, this refugee can say something; she has children, she looks happy . . .And the women who are not dumb are well aware of this. I think that this is also why you don’tsee many men participating. (September 2007)



This account reminds us of how simplified these representations can be. Seen as an

apolitical ‘womenandchildren’ group (Enloe 1993), refugee women are deprived of the

complexity of their experiences of displacement. There are few opportunities for

discussing women’s involvement in politics or their critical ideas about the workings of the

Czech refugee system, including the work of NGOs. Rather, refugees act as performers in

a play written by others, always within the bounds of the permissible. The disempowering

effects of these representations should not be overstated. However, both NGO workers and

the refugees themselves utilise them strategically. For NGOs they are important tools in

their discursive struggles around the definition of a refugee as they try to impact on flows

of resources and legitimise their own vulnerable position in the system of institutions

serving refugees vis-a-vis the state, donors and the general public (see also Phillips and

Hardy 1997). For individual refugee women, such visibility can strengthen their social

networks and bring them satisfaction from inserting their voice, however limited, into the

public sphere.

However, the wider significance of these positive images of decent and feminised

refugeeness is that they put forward ‘an ethical ideal of a politically blameless

self, untainted by compromising political allegiances or economic self-interest’

(Pupavac 2008, 276). It is this figure that then seems to be the only one worthy of

public attention and support. It makes other, more complex representations of refugee

experiences in the public space more difficult. Moreover, these positive representations

reinforce the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ because ‘they’ are prevalently

represented as someone who is ‘being shown’, being taken care of, i.e. in a passive

position that arouses pity rather than solidarity.

Implicit reciprocity and trusted clientship

Apart from promoting positive images of refugeeness in the media, some NGOs are

involved in organising public activities to promote multiculturalism and tolerance and to

raise funds for their activities with refugees. These programmes take the form of annual

multicultural festivals, national or ethnic evenings in NGO community centres, festivities

around World Refugee Day or openings of new community centres. On these occasions,

refugees are given an opportunity to present their ‘cultural contribution’ to Czech society,

most commonly by singing, dancing, exhibiting tables with samples of their traditional

cuisine for tasting or by selling handicrafts.11 Although the situation is now slowly

changing, in past years refugee women were the first to be asked to participate in these

activities and the last to be remunerated for their work.12 Often spending long hours

preparing and serving the food, they were refunded only for the costs of the products or

they could sometimes keep the profits from selling their food.

In the context of unequal power relations between refugee women and NGOs, many

are reluctant not to participate even if they do not have time and energy and perhaps do not

find these events particularly meaningful and fulfilling. They are aware that their presence

strengthens their social networks with NGOs and their sympathisers. These networks can

be capitalised on in the form of a widened structure of opportunities for accessing

retraining and language courses organised or funded by NGOs, material help, part-time

jobs or free recreational activities for them and their children. In other words, their

participation in ‘voluntary’ work turns them into a ‘trusted client’ and gives them a better

position to claim various forms of funding as they emerge. One of the informants observed

how NGO assistance is being allocated based on clients’ previous performance as

trustworthy rather than according to interpretation of their needs. While she herself



benefited greatly from close ties with NGOs and obtained a number of retraining courses,

she acknowledged that other people, who were often in a greater need of such support, did

not get it simply because they were not proved and tested clients in the eyes of NGO

workers. She concluded by saying:

It’s more comfortable for these organisations to do it this way. If they don’t knowthese people, they simply don’t trust them enough to provide them with financialhelp. (September 2007)

Apparent voluntariness of the activities which turn refugees into ‘trusted client’ masks

mechanisms of reciprocity which disproportionately affect refugee women. Many

informants expressed ambivalent feelings about the roles they played in NGOs:

There were a few things I didn’t like so much. For example, when someone was doing someresearch or it was for a radio programme, they would call us [refugee women] . . . or whensome food had to be prepared for a presentation. Well, they sort of . . . exploited us, you know,but it is hard to say it in this way. I know how I felt about it and I know how other women felt.They simply didn’t ask what we have had inside, how we saw it. I know they needed theseprogrammes and interviews, but it was not always pleasant for us. Of course, they would giveyou something, a used computer, for example, but then you would be asked to do this and thatagain. We are quite sensitive to these things. (March 2007)

Others spoke more openly about the mutual dependency between NGOs and their clients.

They were frustrated that NGOs usually did not acknowledge this aspect of the relationship:

We need them as well as they need us, but they will not admit it and that’s what I don’t like.They think they can treat us like a flock of sheep, run us somewhere, take pictures of us andthen they don’t really care about your individual situation. (August 2007)

In an environment where refugees’ opinions about NGO projects do not count for

much, these critiques remain largely unspoken. If they were voiced in the past, they were

usually dismissed by NGO workers as expressions of misunderstanding of the role of the

non-governmental sector.

The feminised character of NGO assistance can provide refugee women with new

skills and opportunities and can strengthen their bargaining position vis-a-vis their

husbands (see also Kibria 1993; Ong 2003). However, as women’s critical voices indicate,

similarly to men, they do not feel comfortable in the position of dependency and when they

are not being treated as competent actors in NGO spaces. There is nothing essential about

them being better performing ‘trusted clients’ than men or bearers of a palatable image of

refugeeness to be entertained by the public. Given the unequal gender relations in their

households, they do nevertheless feel more compelled to swallow their discontent and

perform their role as far as it provides them and their families with essential support.

Although their embeddedness in NGO networks can enhance their capacity for

self-determination, the meaning attached to autonomy in these spaces remains ambiguous

and therefore women’s potential often remains unrealised.

Conclusion

This article reveals depoliticising effects of informal non-governmental assistance to

refugees by analysing NGO–refugee relations as gendered relations of power and

inequality. These relations need to be seen in the context of NGOs’ growing dependence

on the state that prompts the NGO sector to play a more prominent role in facilitating

refugee integration, rather than to engage in more political forms of advocacy for refugees’

and asylum seekers’ rights and freedoms. This development takes place in the context

of increasing restrictiveness of asylum policies and determination of state bodies



to depoliticise some of the highly problematic policy tools such as detention and expulsion

of asylum seekers. The analysed relations of power are mutually constitutive with

feminisation of NGO personnel and refugee clientele.

There is no doubt that NGOs provide refugees with essential support and have

important roles in public and political representation of refugees’ rights. NGOs are not

homogeneous and vary in their approaches to refugee assistance. My aim is to point out

some of the gendered micropolitics through which NGOs foster construction of refugees

as apolitical clients incapable of interpreting their own needs and lacking access to

distributional apparatus set up to satisfy these needs.

Perhaps surprisingly, this critique applies best to organisations that promote informal

and friendship-like relations to refugees. Friendly relationships fostered by NGO workers

can act as the most effective silencing mechanisms if they are not accompanied by a

tackling of the roots of refugees’ lack of voice in NGOs. They are particularly hard to

challenge because such challenge would involve subverting the role of a grateful recipient

of aid assigned to refugees. This is especially hard when NGOs play a dominant role in

drawing the spaces of articulation of refugees’ needs in the public sphere and determine

which aspects of refugee men’s and women’s identities are to be recognised as worthy of

public attention and support. The resulting silence can be greatly disempowering as it

leaves refugees without spaces where they could develop political means to influence their

position in society and assert themselves as objects of political solidarity rather than only

help and pity.

As Zetter (1991) points out, although the ‘refugee label’ has in the first place a

bureaucratic meaning, it can nevertheless assume a distinctive, politicised character.

NGOs should actively oppose rather than benefit from the refugee label being a synonym

for dependency on the help of others. It is not only stigmatising but also easily convertible

into refugeeness being perceived as potentially threatening ‘otherness’ and uncomfortable

neediness. Such construction produces much ambivalence towards refugees in today’s

Europe and is constantly being mobilised by governments when they are pushing through

restrictive policies.

Acknowledgements

This article greatly benefited from comments from and/or discussions with: Caroline Wright, AnniePhizacklea, Jennifer Hyndman, Katarzyna Grabska, Gail Hopkins, Robyn Longhurst, KarelNovotny, Marek Canek, Olena Fedyuk, Julia Jiwon Shin, Jan Drahokoupil, three anonymousreviewers and the participants in the conference ‘Migrations: Theorising and Researching’ in Telc,Czech Republic, where it was presented in May 2008.

Notes

1. I refer to ‘refugeeness’ as a social construction of what is considered to be typical for peoplelabelled as refugees. This construction changes over time and varies in relation to differentbeholders and performers. Refugeeness is by no means a set of given psychological or socialfeatures. It is constantly being re-created and performed in social interactions.

2. The act of recognition and granting of refugee status is a crucial precondition for the debateabout refugeeness as a form of performance. Asylum as a category of protection bestowsdisplaced people with access to a range of crucial rights without which they can be put intodetention, expelled or deported back to their countries of origin. Performance of refugeenessdiscussed here relates to the situation when these basic conditions are secured and refugees arelegally permitted to try to establish themselves in a receiving society.

3. I would like to acknowledge that I have partly relied on NGO help and mediation when lookingfor refugee interlocutors. Around 30% were contacted directly via NGOs or were met at public



events organised by NGOs. The interviews were conducted by me in Czech or in Russiandepending on the choice of the informants.

4. In this research, refugee research participants were divided into two groups: 1) 11‘core informants’ whom I met a number of times and maintained contact with over the periodof one to three years, and 2) 34 ‘standard informants’ who were interviewed only once or twice.The rationale for this division was to generate both depth and diversity of narratives. Contactswith the core informants provided a longitudinal perspective on how people cope with beingasylum seekers and refugees, how their position in society changes and how their views ofinstitutions evolve over time.

5. For the sake of maintaining their anonymity, all markers of informants’ identities are omitted inthe text as well as the names of NGOs and their representatives, some of whom also wanted toremain anonymous.

6. Due to the predominance of women among refugee clientele the voices of refugee men aremissing from this analysis. They either did not have a lot of experiences with NGO assistance orthey were not particularly keen on discussing their position as NGO clients.

7. Strategy of cooperation between the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of the Czech Republicand NGOs in the sphere of integration of foreigners, http://www.cizinci.cz/clanek.php?lg¼ 1andid ¼ 392 (accessed 15 March 2008).

8. More specifically, it was its Department of Asylum and Migration Policy (DAMP).9. The Charter 77 initiative was active in Czechoslovakia from 1977 to 1992 and is considered to

be the most prominent action against the communist regime between the late 1970s and the 1989‘Velvet Revolution’.

10. The NGOs have also been influenced by an ongoing process of professionalisation andstandardisation of social services coordinated by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Forexample, if they want to have their social services accredited by the Ministry, any futureemployee must have a formal university degree in social work or other relevant field. Such acondition effectively disqualifies the vast majority of recently arrived adult refugees, who couldbe interested in and capable of taking up such a job.

11. In these events, refugees’ cultures are being predominantly constructed as elements of ‘folklore’which contributes to the effacement of the plurality of positions and problems that characteriserefugee populations in today’s Europe.

12. One of the NGOs started a programme in support of professionalisation of refugee women intopaid cooks and caterers in 2006. As a result of this commodification of refugee women’s labour,it has become more difficult for other organisations to use their unpaid work for self-promotion.

Notes on contributor

Alice Szczepanikova is an Alexander von Humboldt Post-Doctoral Research Fellow based at theInstitute for the Analysis of Society and Politics, J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Shecompleted her PhD in the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. She investigatedhistorically and politically contingent constructions of ‘a refugee’ in the context of the refugeesystem in the Czech Republic. The research combined a study of ‘a refugee’ as an idealised conceptthat underlies asylum policymaking, as an object of governance that shapes institutional practicesand as a lived and performed gendered experience that forms and transforms identities. Her currentproject focuses on transformations of gender relations in Chechnya and among Chechen refugeesliving in Europe.

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ABSTRACT TRANSLATION

Representacion de la refugiedad en la Republica Checa: despolitizacion generizada a

traves de la asistencia de las ONG

El artıculo estudia las micropolıticas de genero de la asistencia no gubernamental a los

refugiados en la Republica Checa – una sociedad post socialista que se esta convirtiendo

en un paıs de inmigracion. Examina crıticamente las relaciones de poder entre los

refugiados y las organizaciones no gubernamentales locales (ONG). Estas ONG actuan

como mediadoras entre los refugiados y el estado, los medios, el publico en general y la

produccion academica de conocimiento. Se argumenta que a pesar de los importantes roles

que juegan en asegurar el acceso de los refugiados a sus derechos, su asistencia es a

menudo percibida como problematica por los refugiados. El artıculo analiza estas

relaciones en un contexto mas amplio de las instituciones del sistema de refugiados, donde

el estado tiene un poder creciente en definir las condiciones bajo las cuales la asistencia de

las ONG a los refugiados es provista. El estudio esta basado en investigacion cualitativa

con refugiados reconocidos de la ex Union Sovietica que viven en la Republica Checa y

las ONG locales que los asisten en su integracion en la sociedad. Demuestro como las

formas particulares de asistencia y representacion publica despolitizan a los refugiados en

un sentido de fomentar, mas que desafiar, las relaciones desiguales de poder que

encierran a los refugiados en una situacion de clientes, que carecen de medios polıticos

para influenciar su lugar en una sociedad receptora. Esto se hace por medio de la



conceptualizacion de ‘un refugiado’ como una identidad de representacion que esta siendo

producida y representada en espacios de ONG feminizados. El analisis destaca las

reflexiones crıticas de los refugiados sobre su posicion en las relaciones de asistencia.

Palabras clave: asistencia de ONG a refugiados; genero; despolitizacion; relaciones de

poder; Republica Checa



Performing refugeeness in the Czech Republic: gendered depoliticisation through NGO assistance

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