INFOSHEET: Surplus and Displacement, Refugees and Migrants

por Nadia Bou Ali

In this essay, researcher Nadia Bou Ali explores the concept of “surplus-humanity” as articulated by various theorists, which delineates the marginalized masses facing inequality, dispossession, and displacement, devoid of social and human rights. Bou Ali intertwines this notion with the critical discourse on “surplus populations” from political economy, elucidating how economic systems both exclude and potentially absorb those they marginalize. She contends that understanding this economic underpinning is vital for comprehending the unique challenges faced by refugees, particularly in contexts like the aftermath of the Türkiye/Syria earthquake, where social insecurity and unemployment serve as gateways to economic integration for displaced populations.

The essay reveals the connection between surplus-population to economic dynamics and labour exploitation, which contribute to rising unemployment rates within national economies. It explores how this surplus labour force, often excluded from formal rights and employment, paradoxically facilitates the lowering of wages, perpetuating a cycle of economic exclusion.

This analysis highlights that social and economic exclusion are not synonymous and sheds light on the role of aid in contexts like Lebanon, where NGOs play a significant role in supporting refugees’ subsistence needs.

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Read the full article, originally published at Global Dialogue.

Nadia Bou Ali

Nadia Bou Ali is a psychoanalyst with a private practice in Beirut. She is also an Associate Professor and Director of the Critical Humanities Program at the American University of Beirut. She has a DPhil from the University of Oxford. Her research is focused on modern Arab thought and literature, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Hall of Mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). She has co-edited Lacan contra Foucault: subjectivity, sex, and politics (Bloomsbury, 2019 ) and more recently Extimacy: encounters between psychoanalysis and philosophy (forthcoming with Northwestern University Press). She is editing and introducing the first English translation of Mahdi Amel’s theoretical works for Historical Materialism, Brill. Nadia is currently writing a book entitled Structure and Form: the afterlives of Marx and Freud in Arabic (under contract with Verso).