Based on content analyses of three international organizations’ policy reports and interviews with Somali refugees and refugee organizations, Dilek Karal examines the construction of ethico-political paradigm for immigration and asylum policies in Ethiopia. Departing from an assertion that ethico-political power is an intrinsic part of neo-liberal governmentality (and thus immigration and asylum policy formation), this volume unearths its mechanisms in Ethiopia’s current immigration and refugee legislation and in global policy propositions moving forward. Ultimately, the exclusionary character of the propositions for Ethiopian states’ governance of migrants is revealed through close interviews, data analysis, and applied analytics of governmentality method.
This book concentrates on the politics of allocation and dispersal, the involvement of non-state actors, the role of social workers and street level bureaucrats and the subversive nature of grassroots initiatives as far as reception policies and practices are concerned. Mass migration entails multifaceted economic, political, social, and legal challenges and brings together a diversity of actors (e.g. state institutions, international and transnational organizations, non-governmental organisations, host communities and migrants) with unequal power and divergent priorities and interests. Much of the debate on migration is centred around the notion of ‘crisis’ and around its impact on the polarization of politics in especially Western countries. In this regard, migration as an overall topic has increasingly played a significant role in shaping the present and future of our societies. The chapters address these issues in a critical and analytical way by informing the reader about a particular case and linking the case to an analytical framework about the ways in which governance of reception takes place in Europe and beyond. This book will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and academics in Politics and International Relations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies.
The act of violence of 9/11 changed the global security agenda, catapulting terrorism to the top of the agenda. Weapons of mass destruction grabbed public interest and controlling the free movement of people became a national security priority. In this volume, Jef Huysmans critically engages with theoretical developments in international relations and security studies to develop a conceptual framework for studying security. He argues that security policies and responses do not appear out of the blue, but are part of a continuous and gradual process, pre-structured by previous developments. He examines this process of securitization and explores how an issue, on the basis of the distribution and administration of fear, becomes a security policy. Huysmans then applies this theory to provide a detailed analysis of migration, asylum and refuge in the European Union. This theoretically sophisticated, yet accessible volume, makes an important contribution to the study of security, migration and European politics.
This book is concerned with the government of “illegal” immigration since the passage of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965, exploring how certain mentalities and intellectual machineries have rendered illegal immigrants as targets of government. Examines how various authorities have created knowledge about and constructed “illegal” immigration as an ethical problem. Analyzes the tactics that have been deployed to govern immigration, particularly at the US-Mexico border. Using an ethnographic approach, draws on primary source materials – including government publications, archival documents, newspapers, and popular magazines. Studies measures (e.g. Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold-the-Line) for reforming the conduct of “illegal” immigrants in order to forestall illicit border crossings. Frames the study of immigration within Foucauldian theories of governmentality. Highlights the role of numbers and statistics in constructing the “illegal” immigrant.
Across the globe, migration has been met with intensifying modes of criminalization and securitization, and claims for political asylum are increasingly met with suspicion. Asylum seekers have become the focus of global debates surrounding humanitarian obligations, on the one hand, and concerns surrounding national security and border control, on the other. In Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum, contributors provide fine-tuned analyses of political asylum systems and the adjudication of asylum claims across a range of sociocultural and geopolitical contexts. The contributors to this timely volume, drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives, offer critical insights into the processes by which tensions between humanitarianism and security are negotiated at the local level, often with negative consequences for asylum seekers. By investigating how a politics of suspicion within asylum systems is enacted in everyday practices and interactions, the authors illustrate how asylum seekers are often produced as suspicious subjects by the very systems to which they appeal for protection. Contributors: Ilil Benjamin, Carol Bohmer, Nadia El-Shaarawi, Bridget M. Haas, John Beard Haviland, Marco Jacquemet, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Rachel Lewis, Sara McKinnon, Amy Shuman, Charles Watters
This open access book provides an alternative theoretical framework of irregular migration that allows to overcome many of the contradictions and theoretical impasses displayed by the majority of approaches in current literature. The analytical framework allows moving from an interpretation biased by methodological nationalism, to a more general systemic interpretation. It explains irregular migration as a structural phenomenon or contemporary society, and why state policies are greatly ineffective in their attempt to control irregular migration. It also explains irregular migration as a diversified phenomenon that relates to the social characteristics of the context, and why states accept irregular migrants. By providing new comparative, empirical, qualitative material which allows to start filling an evident gap in the current research on irregular migration, this book is of interest to graduate students, scholars and policy makers.
This publication analyses recent development in migration movements and policies in OECD countries and some non member countries including migration of highly qualified and low qualified workers, temporary and permanent, as well as students.
Collective Movements and Emerging Political Spaces addresses the politics of new forms of collective movements, ranging from anti‐austerity protests to migrant struggles and anticolonial demonstrations. Drawing on examples from various countries, as well as struggles taking place across borders, this book traces the emergence of new practices of being political, described as ‘collective movements’. These represent something looser than a common identity – long held as necessary for a political struggle to cohere. They also suggest a different understanding of emancipation to the promise of transformation in time. By addressing various examples of ‘collective movements’, the chapters in this book examine other ways of being political together, formed through relations carved in cramped spaces or small movements that rearrange our ideas about what is possible. Drawing on the temporary and fleeting nature of many migrants’ struggles, the chapters develop concepts and approaches that acknowledge how such mobilisations trouble many standard political sociological categories – including nation, identity and citizenship. In combining an attentiveness to theories of affect, emotion and atmosphere, they also go beyond a focus on either individuals or collectives, to address the ways bodies are moved by the world and by others. Overall, the chapters propose new questions, methods and starting points for addressing collective movements in emerging political spaces, and for understanding how what counts as politics is being redrawn on the ground. This book will interest students, researchers and scholars of international political sociology, human geography, international relations, critical security studies and migration studies.
