Mig. Pol. 4, 004 (2025) ·
published 12 June 2025
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This article introduces critical and actionable migration research as an approach for scholars seeking to mobilize their epistemic resources to resist migration laws and policies that violate human rights principles in the short and medium term. While academia is increasingly shaped by a neoliberal “impact agenda,” violence at physical and administrative borders, as well human rights violations continue to intensify - raising questions about the potential role of academic knowledge in resisting these dynamics. Using ideal types as simplified analytical constructs, the article suggests that the limited transformative potential of academic knowledge stems from a persistant dichotomy: applied research is often not critical and critical research is often not actionable. Overcoming this dichotomy, critical and actionable migration research advances structural transformations and reframes while simultaneously remaining actionable for state actors in the short and medium term. As such, critical and actionable migration research is not applied research, nor devoid of theoretical considerations. Using the metaphor of smuggling, this article asks how migration researchers can reclaim the meaning of “impact” so that it contains the grains of critique that resist border violence and human rights violations in the short and medium term. The article’s answer is based on autobiographical explorations of what it means for an anthropologist to produce knowledge on migration from within law faculties and as policy officer and research consultant for human and refugee rights organizations. Based on this material, the article argues that “impact” is nothing to be “done” once the research is completed. To engage in critical and actionable migration research, scholars should instead theorize transformative knowledge encounters between academics and practitioners as integral parts of the research design. After a discussion of the autobiographical data and a conceptual discussion of transformative knowledge encounters, the article highlights three specific research design principles for critical and actionable migration research: (1) building innovative knowledge alliances, (2) theorizing knowledge needs, and (3) brokering the validity of truth claims.
Mig. Pol. 3, 001 (2024) ·
published 8 April 2024
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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.
Mig. Pol. 3, 005 (2024) ·
published 30 October 2024
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This paper is about the state-driven process of ‘migrant ‘illegality’ (Genova 2002) and its impact on the life of Bengali speaking residents in the Assam state of India. While the movement of people across borders between India and present-day Bangladesh has been historical and complex, this ethnographic work explores how the state-driven process of migrant illegality and the production of ‘bare life’ have disrupted intimate relations and family life among this population in Assam. While the recent NRC (National Register of Citizens) update in Assam identified 1.9 million people as illegal migrants, there has been bureaucratic enactment of ‘migrant illegality’ by Assam Border Police for the last several years. The institutional procedures, court documents and narratives of the select cases of ‘detected’ as well as ‘detained’ migrants from ethnographic fieldwork reveal how the absence of formal papers and errors in the family records, kinship relations and property inheritance among the poor migrant families transforms actual citizens to ‘illegal migrants’ in the bureaucratic manoeuvring and reduces them to their ‘bare life’. The paper also shows how prejudice, arbitrariness, and contradictions feed into the bureaucratic process and lead to intense crises among family units, as several families have both Indians and alleged ‘Bangladeshis’ in their homes today. The paper argues that the major consequence of this state-driven ‘migrant illegality’ in the last two decades has been the creation of national borders among families, unsettling intimate relations and shared spaces.
Mig. Pol. 4, 002 (2025) ·
published 20 May 2025
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People seeking safety through migration often move through spaces of humanitarian care, including shelters, camps, and transit sites. Despite differences in resources and infrastructure, issues with overcrowding and poor thermal conditions persist globally. These concerns are directly linked to the degree in which comfort is considered in the design of humanitarian and emergency spaces. Drawing on research regarding Brazil’s military-humanitarian response to Venezuelan migration, this paper explores the often-overlooked role of comfort in humanitarian borderwork. By studying the operations and spatialities of two sites that provide care to incoming migrants and refugees, I argue that comfort can be used as a lens to examine the function of care and control in humanitarian borderwork. In doing so, this research highlights how (dis)comfort works through both care and control to (re)produce differential and restrictive mobilities. Challenging the normalisation and invisibilisation of discomfort in displacement contexts reveals the need to further consider the everyday, mundane implications of care.
Mig. Pol. 4, 003 (2025) ·
published 27 May 2025
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In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, oil politics by global oil corporation, national government and local leaders perpetuate gender inequalities in the distribution of oil benefits to women in oil communities. Women also bear the greater cost of oil-induced environmental harms which adversely affect their traditional livelihood of farming and fishing. Scholarship on human trafficking in Nigeria focused scant attention on the structural conditions that influenced women experience of human trafficking in extractive contexts. This article examines how oil politics perpetuate gender violence and expose women to human trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labour in the Niger Delta region. Based on feminist political ecology perspectives and field studies in selected oil communities, the study seeks to explain how oil politics perpetuate women’s socio-economic deprivation, in ways that expose them to human trafficking as victims and accomplice. Women exposure to human trafficking amplify their experience of gender violence and violate their rights and aspiration for emancipation and justice in Nigeria’s oil extractive region. International organizations and policy makers need to consider the global and local dynamics that magnified women’s experience of human trafficking in extractive communities and the wider implications for the global and local efforts to combat human trafficking.
Mig. Pol. 4, 005 (2025) ·
published 28 November 2025
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For deportations to be carried out, host countries must secure inter-state cooperation with origin countries where they seek to deport noncitizens. However, origin countries may decide to cooperate or resist cooperation. This paper pushes the scholarship by exploring why some origin countries not only decide to cooperate but also become proactive actors in deportation efforts by encouraging and promoting the deportation of their citizens despite the economic and political costs. This paper unpacks this puzzle by analyzing why the Mexican government became a proactive actor in facilitating the deportation of its citizens from the 1940s to the 1960s. Drawing on state archival research in the U.S. and Mexico, I argue that the Mexican government became a proactive actor as a strategy to address its domestic challenges and to cultivate its diplomatic relations with the U.S. government and the benefits that came with such relation including the continuation of the Bracero Program, the largest guest worker program. This study makes two contributions. Empirically, this article provides an in-depth analysis on how Mexico, the country with the highest deportation flows in the Western Hemisphere, managed deportations during one of the largest U.S. removal operations. Second, by introducing the concept of proactiveness, it expands the field of migration diplomacy by unpacking the conditions that motivate origin countries to become proactive actors in deportation proceedings.
Mig. Pol. 1, 003 (2022) ·
published 25 May 2022
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Literature on immigrant housing and assimilation has shown how housing policies perpetuate, create and contest racial boundaries. This paper argues for the necessity to look at the regulation of domestic space together with the regulation of the urban space. By reading “along” and “against” the archival grain, this paper looks at housing policies that targeted the North-African migrant population in the 1960s and 1970s in France as colonial continuities. French authorities ostensibly encouraged gendered assimilation through spatial politics and interventions in the domestic space. Literature on the French context has shown how this perpetuated racialisation in the housing process. Building upon feminist scholarship on gender, intimacy, and colonialism, this paper shows how these policies did not acknowledge interracialised households and prevented interracialised intimacies. This helps understand how housing policies can reinforce racialised exclusion by regulating racial boundaries in the urban space and the domestic space together.
Mig. Pol. 4, 001 (2025) ·
published 15 May 2025
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This paper examines ecocide in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1954 to 1975) and the extent to which it drove the ‘boat people’ mass migration from Vietnam from 1975 to the mid-1990s. The exodus has become an archetype of a ‘political’ refugee flow, based on a Western Cold War narrative of people fleeing en masse from the persecution of an autocratic Communist regime. This paper challenges this assumption, showing how the interplay of environmental factors with political and military decisions contributed to the post-war exodus. These findings are reached through the analysis of historical primary sources as well as 229 oral history interviews, some 40 per cent of which were conducted with former child refugees. The implications have contemporary relevance because modern migration flows are frequently mixed, and climate change is further complicating the reasons that people leave their homes and their ability to access asylum. The conclusion argues that ecocide can, in some contexts, be considered a form of persecution for the purpose of refugee determination.
Mig. Pol. 3, 002 (2024) ·
published 19 June 2024
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Over the past four decades, maritime geographies have become prominent sites of migration governance. While there is important scholarly work on these spaces, charting changing techniques of control and containment, what continues to demand attention is the governance that works through systematically keeping people seeking asylum mobile at sea. This article focuses on Australia, examining the coerced mobilities that follow interdictions at sea and their carceral nature. I interrogate the High Court case, CPCF v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, which addresses the extended maritime detention of 157 people seeking asylum in June 2014. Through analysing the language used in this case, such as the conclusion by the majority that “to detain” a person at sea mandates a concomitant duty “to take” that person somewhere, I highlight how coerced mobility has become central to Australia’s strategy of maritime migration governance and how this has come to legitimate detention at sea without any clear time limitation. This will reveal the extent to which carcerality informs migration governance in Australia’s maritime geographies.
