Migration and Society

As witnesses to the ongoing genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and further afield, we will not start this editorial with the horrifying, ever-increasing statistics,¹ but instead with the words of two Palestinian writers. In November 2023, Nour al-Din Hajjaj, a 27-year-old Palestinian writer from Gaza, author of two novels and one play, wrote:

In the midst of the mass displacement, dispossession and systematic killing of Palestinians in Gaza, this manifesto for “bread and roses” centralizes not only the rights of Palestinians in Gaza to life, safety, and security but also displaced people's rights to joy, beauty, and happiness. At a time when Palestinians in Gaza are being massacred and openly deprived of aid, it is, precisely, Palestinians’ commitment to joy and beauty being projected and practiced by displaced and dispossessed Palestinians in Gaza, which provides the impetus for this manifesto. Created around and centering the words and lifeworlds of Palestinians in Gaza, this piece is offered as an inevitably partial but needed archive of this more-than-massacre and as an archive that stands for the future. Starting with roses pushes us to reimagine what meaningful responses to displacement could, and should, entail.

This Special Section addresses the political effects of the increasing confluence between humanitarian, securitizing, and neoliberal logics in contemporary migration governance through the themes of temporality and expertise. Urgent temporalities and global expertise work to control migrant mobilities and amplify neoliberal values of efficiency, productivity, and universality while marginalizing alternative and local knowledges. Five interdisciplinary articles focus on the role humanitarian organizations play in migration governance at multiple scales, in different global contexts and through a range of methods. The contributors highlight the entanglement of state and non-state actors in humanitarian settings, and consider how they may perpetuate and/or challenge neoliberal bordering regimes. United by an intersectional feminist approach, a key aim is to interrogate power relations and to explore hopeful avenues for political resistance.

Drawing on Bhasan Char and Manus Island as case studies, this article makes an argument for the concept of “grey sovereignty,” which is understood as the suspension and/or manipulation of established state norms and obligations in order to contain and punish irregular migrants. The operationalization of grey sovereignty is discussed through three paradigms that can help to understand its purpose and practice: As sites of sovereign decline, violence and trauma, and erasure. I argue that the practice of grey sovereignty is enabled by the entanglement of the humanitarian apparatus and/or discourses in these practices of the state. Further, such practices use dubious means to “shrink asylum” (through temporality, precarity, power inequities) and undermine the ideals of both sovereignty and humanitarianism.

The recent and ongoing exodus of Venezuelans to the surrounding Latin American region has sparked international humanitarian intervention. Drawing on research conducted in Brazil in late 2019, this article focuses on the state-led humanitarian response to Venezuelan migration and its collaborative efforts with the military and leading organizations. Looking at two sites of institutional care, I argue that temporal structures created by military-humanitarian agencies work to govern the everyday mobilities of urban migrants living without shelter, who are often framed as criminals or threats within neoliberal securitization narratives. This article further reveals conflicting temporalities with regard to the practice of waiting, whereby the act is viewed as risky when visible in urban public spaces but favored in institutional settings where it can be closely monitored.

Despite hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees, Malaysia does not legally recognize them. Instead, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) conducts the refugee status determination process, and Malaysia expects them to take care of refugees, although community-based and nongovernmental organizations do most of this work. The Malaysian government, concerned by the increasing number of foreigners registered by the UNHCR, introduced the Tracking Refugee Information System scheme to form a national database for “security reasons.” Contracted to a private company, this yearly registration scheme with high fees provides no rights to cardholders. This article highlights the role of the Malaysian government, the UNHCR, community organizations, and a private company to make sense of the variable refugee registration regimes that increasingly use technological tools to collect refugee biodata to police refugees without increasing refugee protection.

In humanitarian organizations, neoliberal mechanisms of power exist in tension with the humanitarian desire to do good. Drawing upon digital ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how PeaceUnite, an international interfaith organization, navigates the challenges, obstacles, and contradictions posed by neoliberal entanglements. PeaceUnite navigates geopolitical and humanitarian borders through transnational peacebuilding efforts, and their responsibilization discourses emphasize local expertise while undermining local agency through their auditing and managerial frameworks of centralizing power. Despite the deeply political environment in which they work, PeaceUnite claims to be apolitical, a stance that conceals internal and external contradictions. I argue that these neoliberal discourses create an environment where state power is strengthened, and national borders reinforced, restricting PeaceUnite's organizational mission and reducing their impact.

Operation Sovereign Borders imposes protracted precarity on people seeking asylum stuck in Australia on restrictive visas. Civil society actors form a movement offering them crucial support, filling a vacuum amplified by neoliberalized welfare. Drawing on fieldwork in Naarm (Melbourne), I provide an intersectional and ethnographic exploration of power dynamics within movements by examining the creation of “civil society silos” based on diverging claims to expertise. I identify and critically analyze five forms of movement expertise—professional, lived, societal, relational, and Indigenous—alongside my own production of research expertise. These forms encompass both an encroachment of racialized neoliberal logics into movement spaces and a channel to subvert bordering regimes. The findings in this article contribute to scholarship on the political potential of civil society movements in neoliberalized migration settings, and to widening definitions of expertise to include marginalized knowledges.

This Special Section explores the continuities, ruptures, genealogies, and contingent parallels that can be traced between twenty-first-century forms of subjectification, governance, and control within the management of mobilities, and older, imperial politics on slavery and colonialism. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial approaches that emphasize the continuity of colonial thinking embedded within current systems of power, it critically examines the impact of colonial empires on migration control in the present day, as manifested by a variety of state and non-state actors across diverse temporal and geographic contexts. In doing so, it pays careful attention to the lived experiences and resistance practices of those subjected to colonial power matrixes past and present, and to strategies of countering researcher complicity in knowledge extractivism.

After the passage of the British law abolishing the slave trade in 1807, Great Britain devoted 60 years to attempting to suppress slave trading from the African continent. One major consequence of this campaign against the slave trade was the rescue of over 500,000 Africans from illegally operating slave ships. During the first two decades after 1807, Great Britain brought approximately five thousand such Africans into British Caribbean colonies. This article explores the earliest British policies related to this population, in conversation with more recent discussions of refugee management, and the impact of European colonial histories on professedly humanitarian projects.

Drawing from historical case studies from Sierra Leone and Tanzania, this article fundamentally asks, what constitutes decoloniality? Before answering, we analyze the enduring coloniality of national borders, internal boundaries and identities, and manipulation and coercive imposition of (im)mobility. These colonial logics create “tethered mobilities” moving internal and external migrants in and out of approved spaces to facilitate extraction and racialized categorizations. We explore the impact of these aspects of coloniality on rural-urban migration and law in Sierra Leone and forced migration and containment of citizens and refugees in Tanzania. Conversing with critical migration and abolition literatures, we argue that despite no explicit revolutionary intent, migrants create their own tethered mobilities through everyday life-making in prohibited spaces as “rehearsal” for decolonial futures and mobility justice.

This article examines the postcolonial politics of migration control in Mayotte, an overseas French department, and argues that these bear necropolitical consequences. It sheds light on the gendered dimension of this necropolitical power by focusing on the life and border-crossing experiences of undocumented Comorian women. Entrenched barriers to the regularization of their administrative status endanger their access to healthcare and degrade the conditions for life long-term. The constant risk of arrest and massive forced removals furthermore engender dangerous border crossings, each instance exposing the passengers to the risk of death. The article also foregrounds that these necropolitics are exacerbated as a result of the postcolonial conundrum in which Mahoran elites find themselves, with the increasing support of Black and Muslim elites for the French far-right political party.

Australia's harsh policy response to asylum seekers appears to be an extreme measure for a country that thinks of itself as a liberal democracy. Confining analyses of this regime to refugee law and policy overlooks the ways that Australia's colonial history, Indigenous dispossession, and contemporary race relations interact with one another. This article argues that these historical dynamics are essential to understanding the Australian government's response to asylum seekers in the present day, with asylum-seekers and Indigenous peoples in Australia both being utilized as tools of modern statecraft to shore up the legitimacy of the Australian state. Attention is drawn to parallels between the treatment of both Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers by the Australian government, with the increasingly harsh response to asylum seekers in Australian politics coinciding with the expansion of land rights for Indigenous Australians.

This article develops the narratological approach to well-being research through the novel use of literary theory. It is the first article to explore the role of narrative genre in how unaccompanied refugee and migrant youth expressed their life projects and experiences of confronting the challenges and opportunities of the migration and asylum regime. It argues that narrative is important to understanding their life projects and well-being needs, as well as to how they understand themselves in relation to society and how likely they are to interact (or not) with support structures. Five main narrative genres are discussed that were encountered in mixed-methods ethnographic fieldwork with over 100 individuals in England and Italy: (1) tragedy, (2) comedy, (3) epic, (4) confession, and (5) fantasy. The article interrogates the value of “truth” in these narratives and concludes that storytelling is fundamentally linked to the sense of ontological security, which is vital to the youths’ subjective well-being.

Food provisioning represents a major everyday challenge for migrant shelter administrators, workers, and volunteers, yet very little is known about the specific conditions and challenges faced by these spaces. While there is a small body of scholarly work about food in shelters from the perspective of people on the move, most of this literature is based on state-run shelters in the Global North, and there is little understanding of the challenges and conditions faced by non-state shelters in general, and by shelters in the Global South in particular. This article represents an opening for exploring these issues. Drawing on a day-long workshop conducted between a team of researchers and representatives of five migrant shelters in the Mexico City metropolitan area, the article discusses the theoretical and practical stakes of ensuring food security for migrant populations and suggests that we rescale food security to address these spaces and their struggles.

Considering the increased institutionalization of scholar-activist research across many university contexts, this reflection critically engages the assumed harmony between scholarship and activism in migration research. Collaboratively authored by eight academics at various disciplinary, geographic, gendered/racialized, and career-level junctures, the article examines the commitments, aspirations, anxieties, and contradictions of activist scholarship. The reflection elaborates on concepts such as accompaniment, reciprocity, foreclosure, disclosure, and impact, putting a finer point on what responsible, ethical, and political research means in the neoliberal university today. The discussion develops insights from a 2023 workshop, convened by Noor Amr and Katharyne Mitchell, at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany.

This conversation between Jonathan Darling and Sarah M. Hughes focuses on Darling's recently published book Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum (2022). Based on research conducted over the course of six years, Systems of Suffering examines the emergence, development, and implications of the dispersal system in the UK. This market-based system of asylum governance is a process that distributes asylum seekers to predominantly urban areas and, Darling argues, represents a form of “distributed violence that is cumulative and incapacitating, and governs through the exhaustion of its critics and subjects” (p. 3). As the conversation unfolds, Darling talks about the implications of the rapidly shifting legal and policy landscape in the UK for the asylum dispersal and the challenges but, he suggests, political urgency of continuing to research it.

It is through writing that times and spaces are made, ones that stand tall in the face of this world's incessant catastrophes. In this issue's Creative Encounters section, “The Radiator” by Ngoi Hui Chien tenderly questions both difference around us and us as difference, and how subjectivities that are arguably concerned with the homely can also be entry points to strangerhood in new settings. In the following collaborative work, Hanno Brankamp and Kodi Arnu Ngutulu view poetry from the optics of knowledge production whereby writing transcends writing-as-an- expression-of-suffering, instead offering the reader varied poetic voices from Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, including Joh Magok Kuerang (“Unrelenting Pursuit”), Chol Reech (“Planted Thorns”), Atem D. Alaak (“Away from Home”), Mary Aluel (“Empty Pockets”), and Mamer Amou (“Escaping My Identity”). Articulating a diversity of human conditions, spanning containment, fleeing, belonging, and strandedness, the poems’ intricate imaginings not only express such conditions but also reinscribe them as individual journeys that are worthy of narration.

As a Chinese born and raised in tropical Malaysia, I had never seen a radiator before studying in the United Kingdom. Therefore, when I first arrived in the UK in the autumn, I embarrassingly mistook the panel radiator in my room for the place to hang my towel. To capture the experience, I wrote my poem in the shape of a panel radiator, a rectangle with two stands on the sides. Written vertically from right to left, the poem's form resembles the ancient Chinese texts. I chose this form because the UK's autumn reminded me of literary works from China about autumn. Both locales are “the North” for me: while the UK is in the Global North, China is in the North for Malaysians.

Poetry On the Run is an ongoing collaborative project that seeks to traverse the confines of research on displacement through poetic encounters, renderings, imaginations, and experimentation. This contribution is based on a creative writing workshop with young poets in Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya. The workshop explored how the concept of “fugitivity” may resonate with more contemporary experiences of forced migration, while also furthering the use of poetry as a literary research method and source of theoretical knowledge in the study of refugeehood today. This lyrical (re)searching is framed as part of what we refer to as the “geopoetics of migration.”

We have recently taken over as Book Reviews editors for Migration and Society and wanted to use this opportunity to introduce ourselves, as well as the rich selection of books reviewed in this current issue. As the co-editors of this section, we will prioritize book reviews that are critical in their approach and aligned with the ethos of the journal. We seek to represent diversity in our field and encourage readers, publishers, and authors to share with us books that straddle multiple disciplines, epistemologies, and methodological approaches that can provide our readers with a range of critical perspectives to understand migration and the societies we live in.

Domicide: Architecture, War and Destruction of Home in Syria. Ammar Azzouz. 2023. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. 176 pages. ISBN 9781350248106 (hardback); ISBN 9781350248113 (ebook).

Tahriib – Journeys into the Unknown. An Ethnography of Uncertainty in Migration. Anja Simonsen. 2023. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 228 pages. ISSN 2662-2602

Border Nation: A Story of Migration. Leah Cowan, 2021. London: Pluto Press. 167 pages. ISBN 9780745341071 paperback, ISBN 9781786807038 (ebook)

The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach. Rawan Arar and David Scott FitzGerald. 2023. Cambridge: Polity Press. 316 pages. ISBN 9781509542796

Continental Encampment: Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East and Europe. Are John Knudsen and Kjersti G. Berg, eds.2023. Berghahn Books. 332 pages. ISBN 9781800738454 (ebook)

We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America. Blair Sackett and Annette Lareau. 2023. Berkeley: University of California Press. 291 pages. ISBN 9780520976504