I began thinking of the Rwanda policy – a plan to detain and banish people seeking protection in Britain – as more than its constituent parts after hearing former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak repeatedly describe it as a matter of ‘fairness’. How was Sunak getting away with describing a policy that targets and punishes one of the most vulnerable groups of people as fair? What was he appealing to in the national consciousness to garner support for the policy? Why did he cling to Rwanda as though it were a golden ticket to winning the next election? What was driving the compulsion to get planes off the ground? How could the unprecedented breach of the rule of law, in the form of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, be explained?
The policy’s claim to moral righteousness rests on the vilification of the ‘illegal migrant’ and the ‘people smuggler’. The former is ostensibly jumping an imaginary queue (imaginary because there are no legal routes to asylum, no orderly queues) and the latter is to blame for deaths at sea (rather than Britain and European countries whose laws and policies force people to make dangerous journeys in search of safety). The figures of the ‘illegal migrant’ and the ‘people smuggler’ are thus made to hold up a good/bad binary, wherein Britain is constructed as the benign, legitimately bordered, sovereign nation state, and the ‘illegal migrant’ is the illegitimate intruder who must be punished and banished.
The excision, or splitting, of the ‘bad’ from the rest of ‘good’ society is a basic feature of any penal narrative. It relies on a simplified and distorted version of reality and the fantasy of being able to purify society by ridding it of bad elements.1 It simultaneously enables the dominant society’s disavowal of its responsibility for violence past and present. If we understand Britain in its proper historical context, as a nation built on slavery and colonial extraction, then it cannot be said to be a legitimately bordered sovereign nation state, but a place over which those with histories of colonisation have a legitimate claim. In this light, the so-called illegal migrant becomes part of a history of anti-colonial resistance, part of a collective with a legitimate claim to access to what was stolen in the course of colonial conquest.2
At heart, the persecution intrinsic to the Rwanda policy is indicative of Britain’s denial of its brutal and violent history and present. The psychoanalytic theory of splitting can help us understand how racial state violence, such as that perpetrated by the Rwanda policy, is enabled and enacted while being justified as fair and presented as morally righteous.
Rwanda as solution
The British government waved a wand over Rwanda, turning it into a symbol, a spectacle, a Room 101. Rwanda is no longer a country, a specific place with a history, a culture, a population of individuals facing the pressures of life and the pull of ambition and dreams. Rwanda has been made into a nightmare. It has become a vision of exile, the last place in the world anyone would want to be.
In place of solutions to the very real crises suffered by its own population – housing, cost of living, health, welfare, climate – the UK government has only smoke and mirrors to offer. In this context, the empty promise of the Rwanda policy is to control Britain’s borders. Targeting vulnerable people for detention and banishment, the policy is dressed up as a solution, much like Australia’s infamous and deadly ‘Pacific solution’, which entailed the offshore imprisonment and torture of refugees,3 and where the now familiar slogan ‘stop the boats’ originates.4 The promise of these policies is to stop people travelling ‘illegally’ in search of asylum. The means is deterrence. In Rishi Sunak’s words, ‘people must know that if they come here illegally it will result in their detention and swift removal’.5
The ‘problem’ addressed by the Rwanda plan is one created by its architects. British and European countries colonised the places from which the vast majority of asylum seekers come. These places are not only scarred by colonialism, but continue to be imperially exploited within the global system of racial capitalism. Their natural resources are extracted. Their people are murdered and exploited. European countries wage neo-colonial wars on them and impose catastrophic debt and structural adjustment programmes.6 For decades, these same powers have imposed visa requirements on the countries asylum seekers are fleeing, introducing carriers’ liability sanctions, forcing people to travel irregularly via dangerous routes. The Rwanda policy is not a solution but a spectacle of cruelty that both distracts from and deepens the structural violence that undergirds our world. It casts Rwanda, a Central African country with a predominantly black population, a struggling economy, and a history of a genocide with roots in Belgian colonial rule, as being a hellish outpost, a frightful, irredeemable prospect with which to terrorise refugees. This is in keeping with the age-old colonial racial imaginary in which swathes of countries and people were deemed savages for the purpose of justifying subjugation and conquest.
This is not to say that Rwanda is a safe country for the purpose of returning refugees. It is to say that the assignation of a black African country with a history of European colonialism as a place synonymous with punishment and exile fuels the colonial discourse at the policy’s core. It feeds the racialised binary of civilised and barbarous that was propagated by colonial forces with catastrophic and lasting consequences. Locating the source of the policy in Britain enables us to see that Britain is an unsafe country. Not only is it the maker of a policy that targets and harms vulnerable people, it is a space in which the violent legacies of colonialism continue to reverberate, whether in the form of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, the disproportionate deaths of black men in police custody, or the neo-colonial wars it wages abroad.7
The Rwanda policy is not a solution on its own terms. It is not a catch-all policy. It applies to individuals whose asylum claims have been deemed inadmissible because they were previously in, or have a connection to, a country in which they could have claimed asylum (a so-called safe third country). Their journey to Britain must be able to be ‘described as having been dangerous’, and have taken place ‘on or after 1 January 2022’. A dangerous journey is defined as ‘one able or likely to cause harm or injury’. Examples given include those made ‘via small boat, or clandestinely in lorries’.8 Those targeted by the policy are painted as invaders, approaching British shores by sea, or hiding Trojan horse-like in vehicles. The policy’s focus on the dangerousness of the mode of travel is a cynical ploy to enable the government to spin it as having protection at its core – a ‘tough’ measure, in Sunak’s words, that helps prevent ‘vulnerable people’ from ‘perish[ing] in the Channel’.9
Attempts to control borders do not work. Deterrence will fail where the alternative to movement is death. People fleeing war, persecution, and poverty will always try to survive. They will run, they will look for shelter, they will try to protect their children. They will dream of better lives. Many will do this even if it means crossing a desert or a treacherous stretch of sea. They will risk everything they have, including their lives, in the hope of living. They will do this even if it means facing the risk of exile in Rwanda.
Rwanda and the courts
In November 2023, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that the Rwanda policy was unlawful. Refugees sent to Rwanda might be returned to countries where they would face a risk of persecution. If the UK were to remove people to Rwanda, it would be in breach of its international and domestic legal obligations not to return people to places where they face a risk of persecution, torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment.10 Many immigration and human rights lawyers were optimistic that the Supreme Court ruling meant the end of the Rwanda policy. However, in 2024, the government succeeded in legislating to nullify the effect of the Court’s judgement. The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act forces courts and tribunals to accept the government’s determination of Rwanda as a safe country for the purpose of returning refugees.
The Act is extraordinary and unprecedented in its legislating for a fact. It states, ‘this Act gives effect to the judgement of Parliament that the Republic of Rwanda is a safe country’.11 Yet no parliament can make Rwanda safe for refugees merely by saying it is so. Reality cannot be conjured into being through language, nor is it fixed. To legislate for a fact is not only irrational, but a grave and dangerous departure from the basic rule of law, which requires legislative and executive powers to make decisions based on principles such as rationality, and to respect the separation of powers, including the principle of judicial independence. What other controvertible facts might the government legislate next? Speaking in the House of Lords, former Conservative MP Kenneth Clarke described the Rwanda legislation as akin to legislating that ‘all dogs are cats’.12
The Act knowingly contravenes the UK’s human rights obligations. Home Secretary James Cleverly opened the bill with the declaration, ‘I am unable to make a statement that, in my view, the provisions of [the bill] are compatible with the [European Convention on Human Rights] but the Government nevertheless wishes the House to proceed with the Bill’.13 The Act disapplies several sections of the Human Rights Act 1998 in order to prevent the European Court of Human Rights from granting interim relief in the case of persons threatened with removal to Rwanda.14 As the House of Lords battled to introduce amendments to the bill that would have required the government to respect human rights law, its members faced sneering accusations by Conservative MPs of delaying the legislation and thus ‘not car[ing] about the people dying while trying to cross the Channel’.15 After the Lords backed down on amending the bill late on 22 April, 2024, it was passed in the Commons. Hours later, five people, including a seven year old Iraqi girl, died attempting to cross the Channel. When survivors were asked if the Rwanda scheme would dissuade them from trying again, one answered, ‘England is hope. I will try my luck’.16
Beyond signalling the government’s callous and cynical short-term strategy of winning votes by stoking anti-migrant sentiment, and deflecting attention from its role in deepening inequality and structural oppression, what does the compulsion to proceed with the Rwanda policy at all costs, whether humanitarian, legal, or financial, tell us? How might the answer to this question help us to find a way out of a politics of cruelty and punishment, and towards one based on reparation, empathy, and solidarity?
Rwanda, shadow, and splitting
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein demonstrated that persecution and punishment are a psychic defence against depressive realisations – the recognition that a perceived aggressor is a complex and ambiguous whole, which in turn enables acceptance of one’s own ambiguity. Klein was interested in early mental and emotional human development. Her theory proposes that infants initially experience their primary caregiver not as a complex whole, but as falsely split into two figures: one good (present and responsive) and one bad (absent and frustrating). The infant’s rage at the latter distorts its sense of reality, which becomes populated by persecuting figures, and to which it responds with phantasies of attacking, destroying, and eating them. The infant’s incapacity to encounter objects as whole and complex results in the creation of a simplistic inner world wherein objects are split into either good or bad. Ideally, the infant will begin to apprehend external objects as whole as it develops, realising that the good and bad objects it perceived as separate were part of a complex whole all along, for example a caregiver who was sometimes responsive, producing feelings of satisfaction and love in the infant, and sometimes absent, eliciting feelings of frustration and hatred. Once this ‘depressive position’ is achieved, ‘splitting’ ebbs and the infant comes to a state of ambivalence toward its objects.17
Drawing on Klein, legal theorist Craig Reeves identifies ‘the basic feature of the political world’ as ‘splitting – the pervasive separation of good and bad, vulnerable and dangerous and the corresponding unleashing of simplified, one-sided emotional attitudes of love and hate, so that the political world is made over in the image of the infantile persecutory drama’. Splitting is particularly observable in the penal system, which relies on separating the bad criminal from the good, law-abiding citizen. The process is driven by ‘phantasies of purifying the good and destroying, getting rid of or controlling the bad’ elements of society.18
There is more at play in the splitting entailed in the Rwanda policy’s punitive enactment. The demonisation of the ‘illegal migrant’ not only manifests as an unleashing of a good/bad binary that allows society to absolve itself of responsibility for the social structures which elicit ‘bad’/criminal behaviour. The policy serves to excise from the collective national consciousness the role played by Britain’s colonial identity and history in producing the figure of the ‘illegal migrant’. The result is a fantasy of Britain as a legitimately bordered and homogenous nation state and of migrants as intruders, a fantasy that UK immigration law has long worked to produce and sustain.19 The 1971 Immigration Act made whiteness intrinsic to British identity through the concept of patriality; only patrials, those born in Britain or with a parent born in Britain, had a right to enter and remain in Britain.20 In 1971 such a person was 98% likely to be white. The 1981 British Nationality Act continued this process of racial exclusion by tying British citizenship to patriality. This served to cut Britain off from its colonies and to conjure Britain as a bordered, geographically limited, white nation state. The Conservative Home Secretary at the time, William Whitelaw, said of the Act that ‘it is time to dispose of the lingering notion that Britain is somehow a haven for all those whose countries we used to rule’.21 The legislation was materially and symbolically significant. It created Britain as a territorially distinct nation state and asserted that the landmass and everything within it belongs to Britons, conceived intrinsically as white. The Act was not therefore an end to colonialism, but a further seizure of the wealth and infrastructure secured through centuries of colonial conquest. The legislation served to erase from the national consciousness Britain’s colonial history and its role in creating the phenomenon of the ‘illegal migrant’.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung understood each of us as having a shadow, and considered it crucial to integrate or assimilate ‘the thing a person has no wish to be’.22 For Jung, failing to confront one’s shadow lies at the heart of breakdown in personal and social relationships, leading to the persecution of minorities and war. Jung described the shadow as ‘that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality’, consisting in part of ‘morally reprehensible tendencies’.23 The ‘collective shadow’ is that ‘which opposes our conscious, shared and collective values’.24 Splitting means that the profound wound of colonialism and slavery can be denied, and remains unrepaired. The violence has nevertheless been done and resides in disparate geographies, bodies, and psyches in the form of shadow. Splitting is an attempt to contain and repress this intolerable shadow content. It occurs on both sides of the rupture produced by colonialism.
For the victims of racism and colonialism, as Jaleel Akhtar describes, dismemberment manifests as ‘acts of amputation, phantom limbs, splitting, torture and even traumatic memories in more concrete and graphic terms’.25 This is powerfully illustrated in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, which takes its inspiration from the story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her daughter and attempted to kill her other children in a bid to prevent them from being returned to slavery.26 The pain of racism and objectification causes victims to dissociate in mind and body. In Black Skin White Masks, Franz Fanon, after suffering an experience of racism, writes, ‘[o]n that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?’27
For the coloniser, splitting allows for violent and painful history and memory to be severed and projected onto a ‘bad’ other, such as the ‘illegal migrant’ and the ‘people smuggler’. The people encapsulated by these labels become targets for criminalisation and banishment precisely because they reveal the process of splitting. Their arrival questions the idea of Britain as a legitimately bordered sovereign nation state and its assertion of exclusive entitlement to wealth and resources accumulated in the course of colonial conquest.28 ‘Illegal migrants’ are resisted because their presence might otherwise force Britain, and other European colonial powers, to confront the violent past they so vigorously deny, and to acknowledge the legitimacy of claims to access and reparation.
James Baldwin alluded to the consequences of splitting for the oppressor. ‘You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves’.29 He expressed his terror at the ‘moral apathy, the death of the heart’ that he witnessed in white Americans in the face of ill-treatment of black Americans. ‘These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human’, he said. ‘I base this on their conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters’.30
Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film The Zone of Interest portrays an extreme example of how splitting can create a condition of both literal and psychological fortification against reality. The process of splitting in Nazi Germany enabled the turning of familiar objects – Jewish friends, neighbours, fellow citizens – into bad objects to be attacked, imprisoned, and killed. The film shows Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family living in a fortified compound at the perimeter of the concentration camp, where they enjoy their lives in an idyllic countryside setting, seemingly unperturbed by the relentless horror taking place on the other side of their garden wall. Their lives continue undisturbed as a result of splitting. All that is intolerable and bad in the self and wider society is located in the camp’s prisoners, turning them into non-human objects, and extinguishing the Höss family’s capacity for guilt, empathy, and a sense of kinship and commonality. We see a similar process of splitting in the settler colonial project of Israel, where Palestinians are dehumanised and displaced from their land; treated as second-class citizens; subjected to daily practices of humiliation, deprivation of liberty, denial of access to medication, work, and the basic means of life; subjected to mass-scale starvation, ethnic cleansing, maiming, and genocide in the form of military destruction of their lives, bodies, homes, and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the daily life of Israelis, protected by the Iron Dome air-defence system, continues under a guise of normality.
Splitting requires a high level of vigilance. The appointed ‘bad other’ must be constantly defended against, resulting in harmful behaviour that is ratcheted up to maintain the condition of collective/self-fortification. The government’s knee-jerk legislative response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Rwanda policy is unlawful is an instance of defensive behaviour designed to maintain the split between the ‘sovereign state’ and the ‘bad intruder’. Splitting leads to the adoption of positions of absolute certainty whereby external challenges are dismissed, and the possibility of ambivalence or collective/self-questioning is eliminated.
While splitting exacerbates feelings of persecution, it can also be a gratifying experience. It allows for self-absolution and a feeling of safety and security – the taking of refuge in a distorted reality that releases the individual/collective from having to take responsibility for past and present wrongdoing. Speaking about the Rwanda plan at the Stop the Boats conference in 2023, Rishi Sunak stated that banishing ‘illegal migrants’ is ‘how we will take back control of our borders’. ‘It’s devastatingly unfair’, he said, ‘on those who most need our help but can’t get it as our asylum system is being overwhelmed by those travelling illegally across the Channel . . . We’re responding with tough measures, but they are . . . fair’. Splitting entails the displacement of wrongdoing onto the ‘bad other’, who is denounced and punished, producing a sense of security and moral righteousness. In the distorted reality created by splitting, the policy is presented as part of an effort to stop the smugglers’ ‘trade in human misery’.31 In reality, the Rwanda plan is a continuation of the state’s forced transportation of racialised people with its origins in transatlantic slavery.
Integrating shadow
When frightening figures appear in dreams, therapists will often encourage patients to consider whether these might represent shadow objects, parts of ourselves we find difficult to acknowledge or understand. Rather than run from these figures, or split from this shadow content, we can turn and meet them, explore their meaning, and learn from them. These figures might hold clues to remembering past trauma, shame, or guilt. This shadow content can be integrated and worked through, rather than being continually repressed. The work is difficult and can be painful, requiring us to sit with troubling memories and feelings, but the results can be healing and deeply transformative. We can reach places of feeling that bring us closer to ourselves, and empathetically in relation with others.
For historian Catherine Hall, a society must ‘re-member’ painful memories in order to ‘come to terms with its own raced history’. If it fails to do so, this past ‘will haunt the social imagination and disrupt the present’. European societies must not jettison ‘uncomfortable memories of colonialism’, but engage with ‘’memory work’ on the legacy of Empire’.32 Re-membering is not an easy task. It requires the readmission of memories, a reckoning with colonial history and its legacies, and a re-assessment of the distorted good/bad binary produced by splitting. It is a process that might result in material change. A re-evaluation of Britain’s colonial history might lead to the disruption of racial capitalist structures that privilege some and oppress others, a realignment of power, and a redistribution of wealth and resources. It is no surprise that such an endeavour has long been resisted. Given the opportunity in 2023 to apologise for Britain’s role in the slave trade and to commit to paying reparations, Sunak refused, stating that ‘trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward’.33
What would it mean to collectively stop resisting a process of re-membering, to turn, as we might, to the haunting figures in our dreams, and meet the ‘illegal migrant’? Rather than banishing them, what if we asked, what can we learn about you, and what can you teach us about ourselves?
The case of Ibrahima Bah
The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 introduced the offence of ‘illegal arrival’34 and increased the maximum penalty to four years’ imprisonment. It also expanded the scope of the offence of ‘facilitating arrival’,35 and increased its penalty to life imprisonment. The offences effectively criminalise the act of claiming asylum in Britain. There are no accessible legal routes and a person must first arrive in the UK in order to lodge an asylum claim. The offences risk breach of the UK’s obligations under the UN Refugee Convention, which protects refugees from being penalised for the manner in which they enter a country to seek protection.36 Like the Rwanda plan, the government’s stated objective in introducing these measures is to deter people from crossing the Channel in small boats. However, there is no evidence to suggest that these changes have deterred crossings.37 Instead, hundreds of vulnerable people have been prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned under the legislation. One such person is Ibrahima Bah.
Bah arrived in the UK in December 2022 as a young asylum seeker from Senegal and was labelled both an ‘illegal migrant’ and a ‘people smuggler’. His journey to Europe, during which he was subjected to forced labour, was treacherous and traumatic – the Immigration Enforcement Competent Authority considered him to have been a victim of modern slavery. On arriving in Calais, Bah found himself unable to afford the £2,000 cost of a place on a dinghy to the UK. In exchange for agreeing to steer the boat, he would be granted free passage, but on seeing how unsuitable and overcrowded the boat was, he refused to carry out his role. After being beaten and threatened by smugglers armed with guns and knives, he boarded the dinghy. A teenager at the time of crossing, Bah was forced to steer the inflatable carrying asylum seekers across the Channel from France.
The night it set sail, the boat quickly began to take on water. Ultimately it collapsed and at least four people drowned. Witnesses at Bah’s trial described how he saved lives by steering the ailing vessel towards a fishing trawler so that terrified people onboard could be rescued.38 ‘He was trying his best’, one witness said. Another described him as an ‘angel’ for putting the lives of others before his. Bah, as the trial judge acknowledged, was one of the last to be rescued, continuing to help others after exiting the dinghy, including his friend, Ba, who, as the judge said, ‘tragically died before your eyes’. Though the judge described Bah’s journey to the UK as ‘suffering on top of suffering’, and the disaster as ‘also a tragedy’ for Bah, he was convicted of four counts of gross negligence manslaughter and one of facilitating a breach of immigration law, and was sentenced to nine years and six months in prison.
Speaking of her little brother, Bah’s sister says, ‘He is gentle, kind, and respectful, and loves his family very much. He always wanted to take care of all of us.’39 Meanwhile, the Home Office, following his conviction, posted Bah’s mugshot on social media with the words ‘JAILED: SMALL BOAT PILOT’ above his image.40 In this picture, Bah looks like the vulnerable, traumatised teenager he is, sitting at odds with the Home Office’s crude vilification of him. Bah’s criminalisation and the Home Office’s obscene celebration are manifestations of splitting. In being labelled both an ‘illegal migrant’ and a ‘people smuggler’, Bah is reduced to a one-dimensional dangerous figure, deserving only of being maligned and punished. Lost in the process of his vilification is Ibrahima Bah the whole person, the grieving person, the victim of trauma and injustice, the young person full of selflessness, compassion, strength, and a desire and capacity to help others. Lost is the opportunity for us to meet Bah, to welcome him in, to realise his vulnerability and suffering, and our place in its making. Like the vast majority of those who seek asylum in Britain, Bah comes from a country scarred by colonialism. Lost is the opportunity to stop the violence that is required to maintain a distorted reality in which Britain absolves itself of responsibility for past and ongoing harm.
Like the criminalisation and imprisonment of asylum seekers, the policy of banishment to Rwanda is another instance of the catastrophic implications of the armoured defence entailed in splitting. The more distance placed between an ‘us’ and a ‘bad other’, the more unfamiliar and frightening they become, and the more a society is able to engage in cruel and dehumanising practices while claiming that it is acting morally. Proximity to and intimacy with the ‘illegal migrant’ and the ‘people smuggler’, people like Bah, prevents them from being projections of fear and hatred alone. Their humanity is clear, their complexity apparent, as is the cruelty and oppression in the legislation that targets them. The distorted reality produced by splitting collapses, allowing us to encounter migrants as people we admire and respect, as both victims of structural violence and agentic people resisting their oppression, people with whom we can connect, empathise, and organise in solidarity.