Human Security and the Governmentality of Neo-Liberal Mobility

Transnational migration and its implications for human security as a policy field constitute one of the most complex issues of our time. Current experiences of displacement and security spans between a cyber world characterized by hyper mobility of finance, technology, information and the ‘cosmopolitan’ values of a ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong, 1999) to the world of human trafficking and smuggling of migrants and refugees as a mode of mobility adopted by people who cross borders on foot, by boat, trucks and planes who are often abandoned to die when arrangements break down (Eschbach/Hagan/Rodriguez, 2001; El-Cherkeh/Hella, 2004). The extant legal vacuum reflects unresolved conflicts of interest at different levels and poses a great challenge to the right to mobility as an expression of the liberal ideal of individual liberty

Human trafficking and organised crime

The Institute of Social Studies is Europe's longest-established centre of higher education and research in development studies. Post-graduate teaching programmes range from six-week diploma courses to the PhD programme. Research at ISS is fundamental in the sense of laying a scientific basis for the formulation of appropriate development policies. The academic work of ISS is disseminated in the form of books, journal articles, teaching texts, monographs and working papers. The Working Paper series provides a forum for work in progress which seeks to elicit comments and generate discussion. The series includes the research of staff, PhD participants and visiting fellows, and outstanding research papers by graduate students. For further information contact

Development ethics through the lenses of caring, gender, and human security.

Thinking about ethics of development and human development must both treat development in a global perspective and yet reflect on the content of human. This paper explores some faces of globalization by using a gender perspective, in order to consider reproduction (psychological and emotional as well as biological) and the activities and attitudes of care that give moral resources for response to systemic tragedy, not only for identifying and understanding it. There now exist globally interconnected systems of vulnerability and capability, for which matching systems of human security, care and responsibility are needed in order to protect human dignity. The discourse of human security helps here by better grounding an agenda of basic human needs, in an ethnography of ordinary lives rather than only an abstracted accounting of deficiencies or an elevated language of opportunities. It must be emotionally and existentially grounded too. The authors examine the potential contributions the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism; the work of philosopher-anthropologist Ananta Giri; and feminist care ethics

Gender, poverty and social justice

Views on poverty are deeply rooted in cultural frameworks about the human condition shaped by histories. In the debate on modernity, perspec

Introductory Remarks

Driven by diverse forces – economic pressures and opportunities, climate change, war, conquest, and transformation of political regimes – human migration has been central to circulation of knowledge and values, goods and labour. Yet, it has been subject to mainly disciplinary inquiries and the existing body of studies has lacked a comprehensive perspective. This volume essays precisely such a more comprehensive historical and experiential perspective, and as a result leads us to reconsider the meanings of ‘human’, ‘movement’, and ‘borders’

Movements of the ‘we’

We consider cross-border migration through the lens of the capabilities approach, with special reference to transnational migration and to implications for the approach itself. Cross-border migration has profound and diverse effects, not least because it accelerates change in the nature of political community. A capabilities approach can be helpful through its insistence on multi-dimensional, inter-personally disaggregated, reflective evaluation. At the same time, the realities of migration exercise pressure on capabilities thinking, to deepen its underlying social and political theory and nuance its efforts to counter communitarian tendencies. By extending its attention to migrants and the locality-spanning social and political spaces in which they live, the capabilities approach will be able to better concretize and situate the picture of the ‘we’ who ‘have (or seek) reason to value’ purported goods and rights

Trans-Local Livelihoods and Connections -- Embedding a Gender Perspective into Migration Studies

The Social Field of Migration: Conflict and Contention This volume examines intersections between gender, state policy, socio-cultural environment, with a focus on micro-interactions that shape the experience of migration in particular ways. It breaks from the convention that treats different social worlds of international migration as mutually exclusive legal categories. Dominant conceptions of migration produce forms of knowledge that fragment the processes of migration into internal, regional and transnational domains, while maintaining a strict analytical distinction between categories of legal and illegal migration. This fragmentation can obliterate dynamics that lie at the interface between the local, regional, and global domains and between the interlocking systems of migration and the embodied practices of control. Migration networks and practices respond to policy shifts as well as to the strategies of recruiters, employers, and migrants themselves. Knowledge about these dynamics is central to an understanding of contemporary transformations, from which more adequate responses to a range of denial of entitlements and rights and social experiences of security may be derived. Critically revisiting theories, concepts, and methodologies used, and their motivating values, can help to identify flaws and expose unjust aspects of dominant knowledge frameworks

Feminist knowledge and human security

The essay proposes to re-orient feminist debates on epistemology towards the care-security nexus as a pathway that can plausibly provide an integral understanding of a human-centred and eco-minded security. Seeing "gender" in binary terms tends to produce an understanding of "care" as "female" and "security" as "male". Care, when free from the constraints of gender as a binary construct, can play an important role in revealing the depth of ethical-political concerns and help expand the understanding of security. By revisiting the concept of care present in the two feminist innovations -- situated knowledge and knowledge production as quilting -- the essay shows that there are gains to be made in bridging existing rifts between feminist knowledge networks and beyond. The concept of situated knowledge gives significance to care as self-reflexivity -- an ongoing process and a multifaceted nature of experience in the relation between the knower and the known. Knowledge production as quilting displaces the image of the solitary knowledge agent and provides a flexible approach to epistemology less constrained by teleological assumptions, appealing instead to interdisciplinary and inter-cultural cooperation. Both aspects of feminist epistemology are conducive to address the care-security nexus as an open and dynamic phenomenon, for which a successful inclusion of distinctive insights from different disciplines and cultural frameworks of knowledge would be a gain

Human trafficking, globalisation and transnational feminist responses

This paper presents a historical overview of feminist frameworks for analysis and advocacy on human trafficking. It traces the major differences and similarities in the forms of knowledge produced since the Anti-White Slavery campaigns nearly two centuries ago. It highlights how institutional and moral considerations – especially concerning the treatment of the female body as an instrument – have played a role in shaping the conceptual possibilities and directions of politics for change. By tracing the epistemological and ethical tensions in the body of knowledge about human trafficking and the power relations involved in interpreting the question of human dignity and agency, the paper hopes to open new lines for debate and cooperation to address the varying interpretations of the use of force as well as the nature of human agency, decision-making and choice in the business of human trafficking. Attention is given to how, under the forces of globalisation, the unprecedented re-writing the human body, and sexuality (as a source of labour, sex