Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• Smuggling critique into impact: Research design principles for critical and actionable migration research

  Maybritt Jill Alpes

  Mig. Pol. 4, 004 (2025) · published 12 June 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  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.

  2 citations

• (Inter)racialisation: the regulation of domestic and urban space in housing North-African migrants in 1960s and 1970s France

  Rébecca Suzanne Franco

  Mig. Pol. 1, 003 (2022) · published 25 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  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.

  1 citation

• Punitive Subjectivities and Emotions in Immigration Detention

  Alethia Fernández de la Reguera Ahedo

  Mig. Pol. 3, 004 (2024) · published 11 October 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  In immigration detention centres, emotions run high; tensions, conflicts, anxiety, and affection occur amid bureaucratic procedures, paperwork, files, lists of people, systematisation of cases, buses that come and go with detainees, and people who will be deported. Although immigration detention belongs to administrative law, in practice, detention centres operate closer to penal detention. Little is known about the operation of these places in Mexico, including how punishment takes place in daily practice. Even less is known about the people who work there, especially the rationale and emotions behind their daily decisions and the different ways in which they collaborate with a system that promotes punishment as a central element of immigration detention. In this article, I study how fear and disgust are emotions embedded in institutional practices that reinforce punishment in immigration detention, while empathy can challenge it. I analyse working conditions and daily interactions in detention centres, immigration control facilities and their surroundings. I argue that immigration agents can develop punitive subjectivities to channel emotions derived from anxieties and frustrations of daily work, as well as to embrace a sense of institutional belonging and the illusion of order and control. However, border officers also show empathy towards migrants to cope with emotional distress and humanise their daily work. I intend to answer the questions in this paper: Under what institutional conditions do emotions become power in immigration detention settings? What do emotions reveal about the functioning of punishment in immigration detention centres? How do emotions expressed by INM agents (such as fear, disgust and empathy) enhance or challenge punitive subjectivities?

  1 citation

• National Borders among Families: Removal and ‘Bare Life’ in India

  Salah Punathil

  Mig. Pol. 3, 005 (2024) · published 30 October 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  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.

  1 citation

• Beyond Cooperation: The Role of Origin Countries in Deportation Efforts, Evidence from Mexico (1942 to 1964)

  Guadalupe Chavez

  Mig. Pol. 4, 005 (2025) · published 28 November 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  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.

• Calibrating Comfort in the Care-Control nexus of Humanitarian Borderwork

  Bronte Alexander

  Mig. Pol. 4, 002 (2025) · published 20 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  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.

• Immigration Detention at Sea: maritime migration governance in Australia and the sanctioning of indefinite detention for the purpose of removal

  Andonea Jon Dickson

  Mig. Pol. 3, 002 (2024) · published 19 June 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  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.

• Political or environmental refugees? Re-examining the flight of the Vietnamese boat people, 1975-1995

  Saphia Fleury

  Mig. Pol. 4, 001 (2025) · published 15 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  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.

• The Curious Case of Bhasan Char: Island Relocation and the Politics of Refugee Containment in the ‘Global South’

  Tazreena Sajjad

  Mig. Pol. 4, 006 (2025) · published 24 December 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  On October 9, 2021, the Bangladesh Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to establish a common framework for humanitarian services for Rohingya refugees on Bhasanchar, an island 37 miles from the mainland in the Bay of Bengal. Bangladesh’s plan to relocate 100,000 Rohingya to Bhasanchar offers an opportunity to analyze the complex nature of refugee-hosting in the Global South, bringing into focus how a Global South host, rather than being a passive actor, can attempt a context-specific strategy to generate normative and financial support for its role in accommodating a displaced population. This research aims to make three main contributions. First, it seeks to situate the case of the Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh within the literature on migration diplomacy and refugee rentierism. Second, it seeks to modify and expand on the refugee rentier state literature by demonstrating how a host country can pursue a path of ‘normative modelling,’ rather than blackmailing or backscratching for purely economic aims. It shows that states may seek to set new norms for refugee hosting for the purpose of gaining international recognition and accolades, in addition to economic support. As such, it finds the existing models of refugee rentierism constrained by its roots in realist IR theory, and suggests a constructivist correction, in which identity and norm setting are relevant to understanding the state’s policy choices. Third, in examining the use of ‘internal offshoring’ i.e. using one’s own territory for redistribution of a population (in this case from a congested refugee camp), it problematizes how Global North practices of extraterritorial ‘offshoring’ such as Australia’s use of the Nauru and Manus islands for immigration detention have served as the framework for understanding Bangladesh’s strategy. While the research outlines the grounds for valid concerns about Bhasanchar, an examination of the political economy of land use in Bangladesh offers a nuanced understanding of the island relocation plan. Such an analysis underscores how imposing the border externalization practices framework inaccurately casts Bangladesh as a case of ‘negative norm absorption’ of migrant deterrence practices, rather than capturing how char (island) living has long been a part of riverine Bangladesh’s sociocultural and economic practices and obfuscates the country’s attempt at norm modeling for refugee accommodation.

• Petro-politics, Gender Violence and Human Trafficking in Nigeria’s Niger Delta Region

  Abosede Omowumi Babatunde

  Mig. Pol. 4, 003 (2025) · published 27 May 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  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.