|
|
|
Sort Order |
|
|
|
Items / Page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
188518
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
The movement of people across borders, and the varied governmental responses to that movement, is of crucial importance to contemporary geopolitics. Agency and mobility are two central themes in these debates. This Forum makes an intervention into such debates, by contributing to the conceptualisation of agency as a co-constitutive phenomena, and seeking a collaborative response to the question of how to rethink the paradigm of political agency. Within the diverse situations described in the Forum, the contributors trace the different ways in which migrant individuals enact and claim agency within the systems they encounter. While engaging with different case studies (migration to Germany, the UK, the EU and Japan; migration from and within West Africa) and utilising different methodologies (interviews, ethnographic research, policy analysis), the contributions are united by a determination to develop understandings of migrant and refugee agency that do justice to the complexity of the geopolitical situations in which persons find themselves: whether that is the inequalities produced by long-term factors such as colonialism and developmental interventions; or the contemporary cross-border movements driven by conflicts or regional, national and local circumstance. By recognising the various ways in which migrants, as political actors in their own right, engage with multiple forms of governance and management, we engage in a cumulative effort to make conceptual strides on the back of empirical research, in order to generate new avenues for productive research into the geopolitics of migration management.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
188521
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In this paper, we discuss the criminalisation of migrant solidarity, intended as practices of resistance to the current regulation and management of borders in Europe. We argue that the target of criminalisation is not simply humanitarian assistance: rather, we propose a differentiation between autonomous solidarity and humanitarianism, arguing that while the first is criminalised, the latter is often complicit in the harms and violence of borders. Drawing on critical humanitarian studies, we argue that autonomous migrant solidarity distinguishes itself from what we address as the ‘Humanitarian Industrial Complex’ in its active refusal to the legal obligations to control and report undocumented migrants to the authorities; its resistance to the racialised hierarchies entailed by humanitarian aid; as well as in its contestation of the commodification of migrant lives. Rather than ‘filling the gaps’ of the state or ameliorating borders and their violence, autonomous practices of migrant solidarity seek to ‘create cracks’ in the smooth operation of border regimes. It is because of their intrinsic character of opposition to both the militarisation of borders and to humanitarian technologies of government, we argue, that autonomous practices of migrant’s solidarity are accused of ‘facilitating illegal migration’ and become the target of state repression.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 3 |
ID:
188522
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
The major contribution of this research is the analysis of chronic waiting of mobile subjects whose unclassifiability can neither situate them here nor there. Their undefinable political belongingness, spatial in-betweeness, alleged racial and ethnic impurity justifies the multi-modal and multi-axial forms of direct and indirect violence through extreme regulations, exceptional policies, brutality of police, border controls and profound exclusion of ordinary citizens. Illegalised border crossers’ encounter this ordeal as they challenge the sacramental aspect of border rituals becoming sacrificial subjects of the state. The justification of criminalising the travelling anti-citizens as security threats place visible and invisible borders that snare them into agonizing moments of waiting. This research focuses on the subaltern migrants experiencing abject precarity, vulnerability and uncertainty due to chronic waiting in the bureaucratic context of immigration controls and management. We drew upon migrants’ stories, informed by participatory principles, collected in different stages through short/preliminary surveys from Madrid (Spain) and Rome (Italy) conducted between 2013 and 2015. Their stories directed the conceptualisation of waiting as a salient feature of their everyday lives. Within the contemporary capitalist world order, marked by neoliberalism and militarism, the bureaucratically imposed conditions of waiting is political and intersectional, superimposed on citizenship, geography and history. In conclusion, we suggest, commoning, with its limitations, as a possibility to cope with the violence of waiting.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 4 |
ID:
188520
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In this article I highlight the political work of Nicaraguan migrants living in the informal settlement of La Carpio in San José, Costa Rica, as they negotiate rights in the form of urban services. Nicaraguans in La Carpio have organized politically since 1993 to self-instal, demand, and negotiate services such as potable water and electricity. In the process, they successfully compel local authorities to allocate these services and grant them an implicit recognition of their right to remain and live a decent life, regardless of their status. These migrant struggles to improve urban life, the political subjectification they engender, and the mechanisms for rights-claiming that they open, show a different articulation of citizenship and political agency largely absent in the literature on migrants, refugees, and noncitizens, shaped in global North contexts: the predominance of urban informality as a means for migrants to negotiate with institutions of power the allocation of substantive rights. Moreover, in the absence of direct engagement with and challenge to the national migration regime, Nicaraguan migrants are able to weave the fabric upon which their own continuous practice of citizenship rests through their quotidian, informal interactions with state servicing authorities in La Carpio.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 5 |
ID:
188524
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Sicily is one of the most important “gates of Europe” for migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The recent chronicles are full of migrants’ journeys, often ending in real tragedies, across the Mediterranean sea to reach the coast of Sicily, first Lampedusa. Sicily has become the arrival place of migrants fleeing from wars, hunger and misery, a hub of passage for those who want to continue to Northern Italy and Europe (especially France, Germany, Scandinavian countries), but also a place where migrants stay by choice, or by constriction when forced into temporary detention centres. The largest detention centre was the CARA (Reception Centre for Asylum Seekers) of Mineo (close to Catania), under media attention for corruption scandals in its management, as well as episodic riots of migrants. However, other than sudden but ephemeral riots and protests, there have not been radical and continuous struggles of migrants in Sicily, such as those in the logistics sector or in the squatting for housing in the cities of Central-Northern Italy. This contribution is the result of research on the protests of migrants in Sicily, and not for or about migrants. We analyse migrants’ protests in Sicily in the lasts 5 years from 2013 to 2018, with the aim to understand their motivations and goals, but above all why in Sicily there are few single-issue protests and such scarcity of mobilizations led by migrants, which other Italian regions are instead experiencing.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 6 |
ID:
188514
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This article introduces desecuritization as the missing supplement of the conception of securitization as a dispersed social process. It calls for the creative development of approaches that destabilise the credibility of security professionals’ claimed expert knowledge. To illustrate the potential of this approach, the article combines insights from the sociology of ignorance (agnotology) and the autonomy of migration literature to deconstruct the framing of migrants as cunning tricksters, a narrative that features prominently in processes of securitization. Within the Schengen visa regime discussed in this article, the trickster narrative emerges in the portrayal of visa applicants as deploying various modes of deception like ‘document fraud’ or ‘visa shopping’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at consulates in North Africa, this article demonstrates, in contrast, that practices like applying at a consulate known for a more liberal decision-making practice constitute coping strategies by which migrants try to mitigate the uncertainty that a culture of suspicion, the discretionary power of consular staff and the heterogeneity of opaque decision-making criteria create for them. Ultimately, the analysis shows that security practices produce not only knowledge, but also various forms of nonknowledge which provoke the instances of ‘trickery’ that ever more pervasive security practices are supposed to forestall.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 7 |
ID:
188519
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This special issue examines the upsurge of crises that confront certain migrants, identifying the contested positions of these migrants from the critical vantage point of the autonomy of migration. This line of inquiry was developed principally by scholars and activists in the late 1990s, who revolutionised the deterministic, prominent rhetoric of control and exclusion that was the self-fulfilling discourse in western cities where any influx of migrants was routinely met with regulatory mechanisms. In this milieu, autonomist approaches to migration emphasise negative dimensions of citizenship and fundamentally challenge hegemonic conceptualisations of migration by focusing on migrants’ agency, subjectivity and sense of community. In the context of migration, autonomy is an action of independence, the search for the self-management of one’s life. Conceptually, the framework of autonomous migration arises from the viewpoint that migrant mobilities confer boundless creativity of human agency and adaptability to alternative ways of living.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 8 |
ID:
188516
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Street-level bureaucrats in the field of migration control express ideas of who should have the right to stay (or not), influenced by individual stereotypes, but also by organisational structures and established legal provisions. Tasked with screening for ‘bogus’ asylum seekers and deporting irregularised migrants, they are asked to categorise and sort these people according to certain guidelines and policies. It is argued that within migration enforcement, there are two interlinked and underlying rationales which allow for and facilitate such categorisations: suspicion and notions of (un)deservingness. The article presents ethnographic data collected in migration enforcement agencies in Sweden, Switzerland, Lithuania and Latvia in order to cross-examine both concepts. It captures how suspicion becomes a default mode of migration enforcement and allows exclusionary deservingness categories to be created, which again feed back into daily practices to detect suspicious individuals. This intertwined relationship can uphold and normalise a discriminating system despite discrepancies that come up in the creation of these categories.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 9 |
ID:
188513
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This special section emerged out of discussions between a group of scholars researching border and migration control regimes in Europe. In our research, we had all identified suspicion as characteristic of migration governance. We saw it in the anxiety-ridden public discourses surrounding ‘unwanted’ immigration, in increasingly repressive legal frameworks, in bureaucratic classification schemes and technologies designed to identify suspected, illegalised travellers or deserving from undeserving asylum applicants, and finally, in the distrustful gaze of street-level bureaucrats enforcing migration law. We had also experienced suspicion directed against us as researchers by the state agencies we were researching. Based on these observations, this introduction develops a conceptual framework of states of suspicion, which captures how suspicion permeates migration control on the individual as well as structural level: as an affective element, as codified in law and institutionalised practice, and as manifested in material border and migration control technologies. The contributions to the special section shed light on these various elements, and taken together, enabling us to capture the constitutive nature of suspicion in contemporary migration control regimes. The special section discusses the implications of suspicion, in particular for those people who are rendered suspicious by default. Studying suspicious states, we argue, enables us to trace how migration control produces, sustains and normalises racialised global inequalities.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 10 |
ID:
188517
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In recent years, practices of control at EU border crossing points have been progressively transferred to electronic gates, or what is often called Automated Border Control (ABC). In this paper, I unpack ABC’s infrastructure and argue that e-gates enact three distinct modes of suspicion: First, they address the mistrust towards travellers’ identity claims and promise to better detect identity fraud and the misuse of other persons’ ID documents. Second, they replace the manual work of border guards, which has itself been suspected of being unreliable and error-prone. Third, however, ABC has also raised suspicion among border guards and data protection advocates alike, due to its opaque mode of operation. To examine how these three modes of suspicion unfold, I first show that automating border control relies on a heterogeneous entanglement of material devices, calculative practices and new forms of data. Drawing on document analysis and participant observation of ABC, I then trace the socio-technical controversies that its proliferation has sparked, arguing that e-gates have significantly reconfigured how suspicion at the EU borders is enacted and led to a multiplication of mistrust in the European border regime.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 11 |
ID:
188515
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In Switzerland, as in many other countries of the Global North, most asylum applicants are rejected because they are not believed. This has led many scholars to criticise the so-called ‘culture of disbelief’ in asylum administrations. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Swiss Secretariat for Migration (SEM), this article explores what this ‘culture of disbelief’ consists of, how it plays out in everyday decision-making and how, at the same time, it is constituted by these practices. Drawing on a practice-theoretical approach to administrative work, the article proposes conceptualising disbelief as practice rather than a state of mind. It brings to light several aspects which either form part of this practice itself – decision-maker’s implicit knowledge and routinised strategies for questioning applicants in asylum interviews, for example – or which shape this practice of disbelief – such as organisational socialisation and decision-makers’ role as state agents and ‘guardians of a restricted good’. The article reveals how suspicion does not unilaterally shape decision-makers’ practices, but how it is also reaffirmed through everyday decision-making. Building on this, it argues that decision-makers’ practices are both constituted by and constitutive of public political discourse and migration governance.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 12 |
ID:
188523
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In this paper, we intervene in naturalised distinctions based on problematic assumptions about agency and choice that underpin the global regime of migration management: namely, that categories of human mobility can be ontologically and juridically distinguished from one another in terms of the degrees or forms of freedom they embody, and that different rights legitimately adhere to each. Focussing on the ‘hotspots’ instituted on 5 islands in the Aegean Sea to manage ‘mixed migration flows’ during the declared ‘refugee crisis,’ we show that the ideological justification for the process of differentiation involves variable attributions of agency, choice, and freedom, or their lack thereof, all of which silence the actual subjects transformed into objects of ‘migration management.’ We argue that the figure of the refugee is divested of agency through the ascription of vulnerability, while the migrant is invested with economic rationality. However, the forms of vulnerability that internment within the camp produces are excluded by design from vulnerability assessments. By tracing the various paths out of the hotspot – including the IOM’s Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration Programme – we show that the hotspot is, in essence, a deportation mechanism. This analysis is based on an ethnographic encounter, which illustrates the psychic and physical violence through which the will is bent and shaped, leading some illegalised subjects to ‘self-deportation.’
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|