Description
This paper provides a set of analytical tools for studying refugees in the context of border crossing. To this end, this paper employs middle-range theory, situating North Korean border crossers represented as refugees, migrants, and defectors in various “space” including borders, camps, and courts. The term “border crosser” is used for stressing the uncertainty of legal status and thereby precarious rights protection during the cross-border journey. Firstly, this paper analyses legal status of North Korean border crossers in five states (South Korea, China, Russia, the UK, and the US) vis-à-vis North Koreans’ predicaments as refugees sur place. Here, international legal instruments and UNHCR play an important yet limited role in refugeeisation of border crossers in two phases of border crossing (i.e., physical event of crossing borders and subsequent legal or administrative processes). The legal status is then compared to this paper’s survey on self-identification of border crossers. Through this triangulation of factor analysis, this paper describes endogenous and exogenous variables of (de)refugeeisation. Notably, this paper focuses on the “agency” of (non)border crossers drawn on Foucauldian resistance and Bakhtinian answerability. In this view, border crossing is rephrased as self-emancipation practice in response to the body management of the states. This is further articulated upon this paper’s theoretical foundation, Ethics of Coexistence (EoC). To be specific, EoC addresses the power to restore the politics of migration against scapegoating mechanisms; the fitness of deviance for constructive social changes; and the resilience of human agents to risks in border crossing. This paper then develops Mobility-Identity-Security Analysis (MISA) and Biopolitical Risk Analysis (BRA) by reiterating the empirical case of North Koreans. In the former, (de)securitisation dilemmas, micro paradigm shifts, and locus of control exemplify each dimension of MIS, and the intersections and reverses of MIS are displayed. In the latter, an ecological understanding of risk, a risk transformation strategy in peace and agency nexus, and a matrix of urgency are illustrated. At the intersection of MISA and BRA is “Neosecuritisation”, a critique of traditional securitisation discourses in migration and refugee studies. Neosecuritisation reconfigures contentious arenas for asylum claims (economic, health, environmental) and definitions of “refugee” prescribed in the 1951 Refugee Convention, the 1969 OAU Convention, and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration. This paper concludes with methodological, legal, and policy-relevant reflections on primarily but not limited to North Korean refugees sur place.
