Mobile solidarities: The City of Sanctuary movement and the Strangers into Citizens campaign

Political and social concerns regarding the negative impact of migrants and asylum seekers on local communities have become widespread within the UK over recent years. What is often overlooked in such debates, however, is the growing significance of movements such as those associated with the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, which both grow out of and also contribute to the construction of solidaristic relations between migrants, refugees and more established local residents. This report, which summarises the findings of a project into such movements led by Dr Vicki Squire at the Open University, suggests that migrants and refugees do not necessarily encounter hostility from ‘host’ communities, nor do they necessarily form discrete groups that need to be integrated within the wider community. Rather, migrants and refugees often engage with more established residents within localised city spaces in terms that render problematic distinctions between citizens/noncitizens; between cultural, ethnic or national groups; and between different migrant categories. The mobile solidarities associated with such movements thus challenge assumptions regarding the hostility of ‘host’ communities, as well as assumptions regarding the ‘natural’ division of community groups – assumptions on which contemporary integration and cohesion policies are founded

Desert ‘trash’ : posthumanism, border struggles, and humanitarian politics

What is the political significance of humanitarian activist engagements with the discarded belongings of migrants? This article explores how bordering practices between states resonate with bordering practices between the human and non-human. It argues that attempts to transform ‘desert/ed trash’ into objects of value are nothing less than struggles over the very category of ‘the human’ itself. Focusing on humanitarian engagements with the objects that migrants leave behind across the Mexico-US Sonoran desert, it explores how the politics of human mobility involves the co-constitution of ‘people’, ‘places’ and ‘things’ in multiple ways. By contrast to a posthumanist analysis that emphasises the agency of material things based on a distinction between the human and the nonhuman, I draw on the work of Karen Barad in order to develop a ‘more-than-human’ account of the materialdiscursive un/becomings of subjects-objects-environments as more or less ‘human’. This allows for an analysis of ‘the human’ as a political stake that is produced through struggles to de/value people, places and things, and that is thus subject to contestation as well as to processes of de- and re-composition. The article assesses the various ways that humanitarian engagements contest processes of dehumanisation through the re-configuration of ‘desert/ed trash’. Rather than emphasising re-humanisation, however, I highlight the importance of analysis and practice that rejects the lure of ‘naïve humanism’ and the problematic over- and under-investments of migrant and human agency that such an approach involves. This is important, the article concludes, in order that the multiplicity of ways by which ‘the human’ is made, unmade and remade is accounted for without assuming either the supremacy or the powerlessness of people

The securitisation of migration : an absent presence?

Nearly fifteen years after 9-11, the question of whether or not migration is the subject of securitisation appears to be a question worth interrogating. Is the linkage between migration and security a stable and enduring feature of contemporary society and politics? Or is the assumption of migration’s securitisation misplaced and lacking the appropriate evidence? Some scholars have suggested that migration has, indeed, been addressed as a security issue in both the pre- and post-9/11 period (Huysmans, 2006; van Munster, 2009). Others, by contrast, question whether it is appropriate to claim that migration has been securitised in a context marked by intensified concerns over terrorism (Boswell, 2007a). Christina Boswell (2007a) suggests that it would not do to simply presume the securitisation of migration, nor would it do to automatically assume that 9/11 led to an intensification of such processes. Rather, she claims that it is important to pay attention to institutional interests and cognitive factors conditioning processes of securitisation (or non-securitisation), if we are to better understand whether or not migration has become articulated and addressed as a security problem in a post-9/11 context. I concur here with Boswell’s suggestion regarding the importance of unpacking processes of securitisation rather than assuming their presence. However, I also want to suggest that her challenge to the claim that migration has been securitized post-9/11 falls short, because it fails to take on board some of the key insights of scholars in the field of critical security studies. Rather than simply ask whether migration has or has not been securitised post-9/11, I contend that it is more appropriate to pose this as a question regarding as to how far, in what ways, and with what consequences migration been has securitized over the past fifteen years and more. I suggest that this can facilitate appreciation of the securitisation of migration is neither absent nor present in any straightforward way. By contrast, this chapter argues that raising these broader questions can help us to develop appreciation of the securitisation as an absent presence in the contemporary European context

Reshaping critical geopolitics? : the materialist challenge

How can the ‘materialist turn’ contribute to the reshaping of critical geopolitics? This article draws attention to the limits of an approach that emphasizes the representational, cultural and interpretive dimensions of geopolitics, while acknowledging the difficulties of an ontological shift to materiality for many scholars of critical geopolitics. It draws on work of Karen Barad and Annemarie Mol in order to advance three arguments for the reshaping of critical geopolitics as a field of research. First, it argues for an approach to the analysis of power that examines materialdiscursive intra-actions and that cuts across various ontological, analytical and disciplinary divides. Second, it argues for an analysis of boundary-production that focuses on the mutual enactment or co-constitution of subjects, objects and environments rather than on performance. Third, it argues for an analytical approach that engages the terrain of geopolitics in terms of a multiplicity of ‘cuts’ that trouble simplifying geopolitical imaginations along with the clear-cut boundaries that these often imply. In so doing, the article makes the case for a more-than-human approach that does not overstate the efficacy of matter, but rather that engages processes of materialisation and dematerialisation without assuming materiality to be a determinant force

Researching precarious migrations : qualitative strategies toward a positive transformation of the politics of migration

How can research contribute to a positive transformation of the politics of migration? This article addresses the question with reference to a recent research project, Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by Boat, which maps and documents the journeys and experiences of people on the move across the Mediterranean. It explores how qualitative research engaging research participants as people with the authority to speak can affect change by exposing claims and demands that compel ‘receiving communities’ to bear witness to the contemporary violence of policies and practices. Exploring the dissemination strategy of sharing stories through interactive maps and research-art collaboration, the article emphasises the importance of strategies that foster constructive connections between diverse constituencies. This, the article argues, involves a process of translation that goes beyond a form of passive empathy, and that works toward positive transformation of a slower duration, albeit in terms that remain discomforting

Irregular migration struggles and active subjects of trans-border politics : new research strategies for interrogating the agency of the marginalised

The politics of migration has become increasingly prominent as a site of struggle. However, the active subjecthood of people on the move in precarious situations is often overlooked. Irregular migration struggles raise questions about how to understand the agency of people who are marginalised. What does it mean to engage people produced as ‘irregular’ as active subjects of trans-border politics? And what new research strategies can we employ to this end? The articles presented in this Special Issue of Politics each differently explore how actions by or on behalf of irregular/ised migrants involve processes of subjectivity formation that imply a form of agency. Collectively we explore how irregular migration struggles feature as a site marked by active subjects of trans-border politics. We propose a research agenda based on tracing those processes – both regulatory, activist, and everyday – that negotiate and contest how an individual is positioned as an ‘irregular migrant’. The ethos behind such research is to explore how the most marginalised individuals reclaim or reconfigure subjecthood in ambiguous terms

Divided seas, parallel lives

This photo essay examines the sea as a divided space and as marked by the existence of parallel lives. Images taken during fieldwork on the small Mediterranean island of Lampedusa in 2015 are used to examine the ways in which these divisions are experienced, questioned and problematized by inhabitants of and visitors to the island. Lampedusa emerges here as a site of contested memorials and hospitalities, where lost lives are at best imperfectly recovered. The essay shows how a series of familiar gendered dynamics play into this division of places and lives, yet in multiple, fragmented and contested ways

Hidden geographies of the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’

This article explores the hidden geographies of what has been widely referred to as the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ of 2015 and 2016. Specifically, it draws on a large-scale analysis of migratory testimonies from across the central and eastern Mediterranean routes, in order to explore the claims or demands posed to European policy-makers by people on the move. Reflecting on the idea that migration forms a subversive political act that disrupts spatialised inequalities and longer histories of power and violence, the article sets out the argument advanced by scholars of the autonomy of migration approach that migration forms a ‘social movement’ involving subjective acts of escape. It makes the case for a move beyond an abstract account of migration as a social movement, to emphasise the importance of an analysis that unpacks the concrete ways in which multiple ‘nonmovements’ expose the hidden geographies of the so-called ‘crisis’. In so doing, it draws attention to two specific ways in which migration forms a political act that exposes otherwise hidden dynamics of the so-called ‘crisis’. First, the article highlights anti-colonial acts that contest the spatialised inequalities of global migration along with longer-standing historical dynamics of exploitation and dispossession that these implicate. Second, it highlights anti-war acts that reject securitised responses to cross-border migration along with longer-standing spatial and historical dynamics of masculinist violence. While imperceptibility remains a critical dimension of many migratory acts, the article concludes that paying attention to the perceptible claims to justice that subversive political acts of migration involve is crucial in understanding the distinct transformations put into motion by people on the move

Migration and the politics of ‘the human’ : confronting the privileged subjects of IR

In what ways has migration as a field of scholarship contributed to the discipline of IR? How can migration as a lived experience shed light on international politics as a field of interconnections? And how might migration as a political and analytical force compel IR to confront its privileged subjects? This article addresses these questions by focusing specifically on precarious migration from the Global South to the Global North. It shows how critical scholars refuse the suggestion that such migrations pose a ‘global challenge’ or problem to be resolved, considering instead how contemporary practices of governing migration effectively produce precarity for many people on the move. It also shows how critical works point to longer standing racialised dynamics of colonial violence within which such governing practices are embedded, to emphasise both the limitations of liberal humanitarianism as well as the problematic politics of ‘the human’ that this involves. By building on the insights of anti-racist, indigenous and postcolonial scholarship, critical scholars of migration are well placed to draw attention to the privileging of some subjects over others in the study and practice of international politics. The article argues that engaging IR while rejecting the orthodoxies on which the discipline is built remains critical for such works, in order to advance understanding of the silences and violences of contemporary international politics