Crisis: A Global Inquiry Into the Contemporary Moment

Anthropologue et médecin, Didier Fassin est professeur au Collège de France, titulaire de la chaire Questions morales et enjeux politiques dans les sociétés contemporaines, et directeur d’études à l’EHESS. Anne-Claire Defossez est sociologue, chercheure à l’Institute for Advanced Study de Princeton.

Fuyant les violences politiques, les persécutions religieuses ou la pauvreté, des hommes, des femmes, des enfants d’Afghanistan, d’Iran, du Maghreb et d’Afrique subsaharienne, se mettent en route pour des voyages de plusieurs années au cours desquels ils affrontent les rackets des bandes armées, les brutalités des polices, les camps d’enfermement, les murs de barbelés, les rigueurs du désert, les périls de la mer. Beaucoup y perdent la vie.
Cinq années durant, été comme hiver, Didier Fassin et Anne-Claire Defossez ont mené une recherche à la frontière entre l’Italie et la France, dans les Alpes, auprès de nombre de ces exilés, pour reconstituer leur périple en l’inscrivant dans le contexte géopolitique des bouleversements du monde. Ils ont pris part aux activités menées pour leur porter assistance. Ils ont rencontré les multiples acteurs de ce territoire de migrations millénaires.
Leur enquête donne ainsi à comprendre l’expérience des exilés, l’engagement des volontaires et même le désarroi des forces de l’ordre, conscientes de la vanité de leur mission. Elle dévoile l’inefficacité d’une militarisation de la frontière qui rend plus dangereuse la traversée de la montagne et d’une politique qui nie les droits de personnes en quête de protection.

The 21st century has seen displacement of migrants and refugees unprecedented since World War 2. As of the end of 2022, of the 108 million people who had to leave their homes because of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations, 62·5 million were internally displaced, 35·3 million were refugees, and 5·4 million were officially asylum seekers.

However, the number of people still in transit in search of protection or a better life is unknown. Whether they are Venezuelans trying to reach the USA, Senegalese trying to reach the Canary Islands, or Ethiopians trying to reach Saudi Arabia, or whether they are Guineans crossing the Sahara, Afghans crossing the Evros River, or Rohingyas crossing the Andaman Sea, the only figures that we have about these people are the conservative statistics produced by the International Organization for Migration of the number of deaths worldwide: 58 280 in 10 years.

But what about those who survived? In Europe, an indirect source is the number of asylum seekers, since most people arriving after forcible displacement apply for refugee status. In 2022, not counting Ukrainians who were granted temporary protection, there were 881 000 people seeking asylum, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Türkiye.

This means at least an equivalent number of people travelled from their home country to their host country in the previous months or years. Yet, we know little of the journey of this approximately 1 million displaced people.

In the tradition of Koselleck, crisis has often been approached as an idea or as a narrative, but less research has been conducted on how people produce, respond to, and live through crises. Most of the articles of the present issue explore this perspective, with its dual dimension of experience and politics. In line with it, the present article proposes an analysis of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic through the questions of the rupture in time, the state of exception and the uncovering of inequalities.