Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Who is a Migrant? Abandoning the Nation-state Point of View in the Study of Migration

  Stephan Scheel, Martina Tazzioli

  Mig. Pol. 1, 002 (2022) · published 4 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This article develops an alternative definition of a migrant that embraces the perspective of mobility. Starting from the observation that the term ‘migrant’ has become a stigmatizing label that problematizes the mobility or the residency of people designated as such, we in-vestigate the implications of nation-state centered conceptions of migration which define migration as movement from nation-state A to nation-state B. By asking ‘Who is a migrant in Europe today?’ we show that nation-state centered understandings of migration rest on a deeply entrenched methodological nationalism and implicate three epistemological traps that continue to shape much of the research on migration: first, the naturalization of the in-ternational nation-state order that results, secondly, in the ontologisation of ‘migrants’ as ready-available objects of research, while facilitating, thirdly, the framing of migration as problem of government. To overcome these epistemological traps, we develop an alternative conception of migration that, inspired by the autonomy of migration approach, adopts the perspective of mobility while highlighting the constitutive role that nation-states’ bordering practices play in the enactment of some people as migrants. Importantly, this definition al-lows to turn the study of instances of migrantisation into an analytical lens for investigating transformations in contemporary border and citizenship regimes.

  24 citations

• Mobility control as state-making in civil war: Forcing exit, selective return and strategic laissez-faire

  Christiane Fröhlich, Lea Müller-Funk

  Mig. Pol. 2, 001 (2023) · published 27 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This paper addresses the question of how different actors attempt to control mobility during civil war, and how mobility control and processes of state-making interact in such settings. Mobility in civil wars is often considered a political act by the various actors involved: Leaving the country can be perceived as an act of opposition, as can moving between territories which are controlled by different, opposing factions. Drawing on literature on strategic displacement and migration politics and combining this with empirical insights from the ongoing wars in Libya and Syria, the paper identifies three mechanisms of mobility control in civil war settings: forcing exit, selective return as a form of expulsion, and strategic laissez-faire as the intentional absence of regulation regarding displacement and return. The analysis reveals that all three mechanisms are employed by state actor(s), rebels, and militias, and can be understood as elements of a new (post)war order that includes some citizens while excluding others depending on perceptions of political threats. We interpret the three mechanisms as ways in which actors in civil war settings attempt to manipulate a country’s demography in their own favour in a process of state-making. The paper is based on fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2021 in Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Tunisia.

  7 citations

• Laughable borders: Making the case for the humorous in migration studies

  Anja K. Franck

  Mig. Pol. 1, 004 (2022) · published 14 June 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Humor is widely recognized as a fundamental aspect of the human experience, that has also played a vital role in the way marginalized groups comment on and mock power. Yet, in migration research the methodological and analytical value of humor has been largely overlooked. Rather, migration studies has commonly centered its analysis around suffering and tragedy and, in the process, depicted migrant trajectories as endeavors largely devoid of laughter, humor, irony and play. This article suggests that such humorless representations of the migration process – and indeed of the migrant subject itself – has broader implications for the types of knowledge that we (re)produce around migrants’ experiences, subjectivities and struggles. In fact, it argues that migration studies’ failure to recognize migrants as humorous individuals risks feeding into processes of exceptionalization and de-humanization through setting “the migrant” up as an obscure figure that lacks “essentially human” qualities. In order to make the case for the humorous in migration research, the article illustrates how refugees arriving to the Greek island of Lesvos in the early summer of 2015 laughed at their own predicament as well as the technologies put in place to control their freedom of movement and how their laughter, humor and comic displays did important political work in refusing subjugation, in speaking truth to power and in capturing the absurdity of the violence that they faced.

  7 citations

• Ambiguous Ages, Ambivalent Youths: How Asylum Seekers in Germany Navigate Age Categorization

  Ulrike Bialas

  Mig. Pol. 2, 003 (2023) · published 5 September 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Many of the unaccompanied young migrants who have sought asylum in Germany since 2015 do not own documentation of their birth dates or even know their exact ages. Yet asylum and youth welfare laws distinguish precisely between minors and adults, down to the day, thus making it necessary for the German state to estimate the birth dates of young migrants and compelling some of the migrants to claim to be minors. In this article, drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, I examine four features of the German state’s age categorization regime that make it so powerful: the discretion of street-level bureaucrats; the weight of written records; a prioritization of precision over accuracy; and—most important—the ability of bureaucrats to switch between the previous three features at will. I analyze the strategies young migrants employ against this regime to influence the outcomes of their own age categorization as well as the challenges inherent in living as a minor or within liminal, uncertain age categories. The latter include widespread distrust and fear of being found out as well as feelings of infantilization and emasculation. I use age categorization as a context in which to reflect on the agency of migrants vis-à-vis state bureaucracies and conclude that young migrants can try to affect only the determination of their own birth dates but have little impact on the prevailing definitions of age and youth. This article thus contributes to the study of categorization processes in international migration, the possibilities for migrants’ resistance, and the politics of time.

  4 citations

• Moral lines of credit: Forging race projects, citizenship, and nation on online U.S. spousal reunification forums

  Gina Marie Longo

  Mig. Pol. 1, 005 (2022) · published 24 October 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This study investigates how U.S. citizens petitioning for “green cards” on behalf of foreign national spouses uphold the U.S. racial project as they navigate the spousal reunification process. It also explores the role of online communities as crucial “brokers” and mediators between citizen, noncitizen, and the state. This work troubles the dichotomy between immigration officers/couples while giving primacy to the citizen-spouse’s voices. Using content analysis of an online forum where petitioners exchange advice with similar others, I show the citizen’s complicity with the racialized hierarchical order of the American nation. Ultimately, family migration policies and regulations are exercises in state-building, and nation-building, and citizens partake in it while trying to secure their own family, disciplining themselves to align with the state’s ideal of what a proper future nation should look like.

  3 citations

• Strategic non-regulation as migration governance

  Katharina Natter, Kelsey Norman, Nora Stel

  Mig. Pol. 2, 004 (2023) · published 9 November 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Over the last decade, critical migration scholarship has been increasingly concerned with how state actors in both the Global South and Global North deploy forms of inaction and ambivalent action to govern migrants. Scholars have mobilized and developed concepts to capture such strategic non-regulation, ranging from notions of standoffishness, ignorance, indifference, ambiguity, adhocracy, and informality in political science, IR and sociology, to necropolitics, ignorance, opacity, obfuscation, non-recording and liminality in anthropology, socio-legal studies and political geography. Scholars thus seem to agree that the strategic use of non-regulation by state actors is a significant aspect of migration governance. Yet, conceptual and methodological advances remain fragmented and scattered across geographical regions and disciplines. This paper argues that much can be gained by putting the different conceptual and methodological innovations on strategic non-regulation into dialogue. First, consolidating insights from different bodies of scholarly work moves analyses of strategic non-regulation from the fringes of migration scholarship to its center and demonstrates that strategic non-regulation is a core feature of migration governance. Second, bringing these different works together enables us to synthesize the variety of analytical strategies that scholars have devised to empirically locate the elusive phenomenon of strategic non-regulation. Overcoming disciplinary and geographical divides in the study of strategic non-regulation will also be key to advance broader social science debates on the political functionality of policy failure and on the interplay between state capacity and political will - in migration governance but also beyond.

  3 citations

• Engaging with the State. Illegalized migrants, welfare institutions and the law in French-Speaking Belgium

  Sophie Andreetta

  Mig. Pol. 1, 001 (2022) · published 21 March 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  By highlighting informal strategies and solidarities on the one hand, and protests on the other, current studies of citizenship and illegalized migration describe two main forms of political subjectivities among illegalized migrants: ‘without’ the state or ‘against’ it. In contrast, this article unpacks how migrants make use of state laws and institutions, voice expectations, and pursue their claims using official venues – in short, how they act ‘with’ the state. It builds on ethnographic fieldwork on illegalized migrants’ welfare requests in French-speaking Belgium and the various sets of actors involved in assessing or furthering their cases. Migrants’ discourses and expectations of the welfare office provide insights into their understandings of the state, highlight the crucial role of immigration lawyers in brokering cases, and ultimately allow for a more nuanced reading of the idea that welfare dependency leads to deportability. On a theoretical level, this article contributes to ongoing debates both in the study of statehood and in migration studies, showing how procedural fairness can be a central aspect of – in this case – migrants’ relationship to and expectations of the state, and how migrants’ strategies and practices of inclusion can also be formal ones, based on existing state laws and institutions.

  2 citations

• Alibis of Exclusion: The role of ethnic economies in the differentiated inclusion of refugees in Berlin

  Jagat Sohail

  Mig. Pol. 2, 002 (2023) · published 11 July 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Neoliberal transformations in the field of asylum in Germany have, since 2016, placed an emphasis on labour market participation as the primary way through which refugees can establish long-term residence claims. Yet, while new arrivals are increasingly expected to rapidly integrate into this market, they are often armed with differential and precarious legal statuses which overwhelmingly determine the spheres of economic activity refugees can enter. This is especially true for the ever increasing number of rejected asylum seekers who are temporarily “tolerated”, for whom the only path to residence requires that they display their value as economic subjects to the German state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Berlin between 2017 and 2020, I argue that, armed with little other than their cultural identities and networks, many refugees heavily relied on co-ethnic relationships to facilitate their participation in the labour market. The result is a displacement of the management of new diversity to ethnic economies, a move that disavows the marginalising consequences of the neoliberal transformations refugees are subject to. By masking a relationship between recently arrived migrants and the German economy and society as a relationship between migrants themselves, I argue that these practices work as alibis of exclusion.

  1 citation

• "The Greatest and Most Important Human Right": Citizenship and Bureaucratic Indifference in Refugee-UNHCR Correspondence

  Lamis Abdelaaty

  Mig. Pol. 3, 001 (2024) · published 8 April 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  This article examines how refugees advocate for themselves with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and what responses their communications engender. It analyzes letters sent by refugees in Kenya to UNHCR headquarters in Geneva between 1983 and 1994. The findings underline a disjuncture between refugees’ efforts to constitute themselves as political agents, and UNHCR’s insistence on viewing them as depoliticized subjects. The refugees perform citizenship vis-à-vis UNHCR, using their shared identity as a basis for collective claims-making and trying to renegotiate their unequal relationship with the international organization. To empower themselves, they adopt the international organization’s own refugee rights vocabulary and play off different organizations and layers of UNHCR against each other. UNHCR’s responses (or lack thereof) demonstrate the consequences of its insulation and bureaucratization. These insights are especially noteworthy in light of recent progress on meaningful refugee participation in the refugee regime.

• “Reborn in Guate”: Making Resource Frontiers in Asylum in Guatemala’s Northern Petén

  Julia Morris

  Mig. Pol. 3, 003 (2024) · published 12 August 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The last decade and a half have seen a dramatic increase in the outsourcing and offshoring of asylum processing and resettlement to countries in the Global South. This article advances a new theoretical framework to examine the surge in new asylum regimes worldwide. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in several externalised asylum sites and specifically in Guatemala, it looks at these recent developments through the lens of ‘resource frontiers.’ Merging critical political ecological approaches on resource frontiers with research on border externalisation, I argue that ‘asylum frontiers’ are the social spaces connected to the exploration and development of a resource sector that extracts value from people on the move. I centre my analysis on the US-driven development of an asylum regime in Guatemala’s northern Petén region. I consider the specificities of Guatemala’s emerging asylum frontier, detailing how this arrangement sits with the country’s own histories of asylum and enforced return. In doing so, I show how different political actors – migrants, Indigenous Mayan refugees, and deported Guatemalans – ‘live with’ these frontier economies.