Working from an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on the social sciences, legal studies, and the humanities, this book investigates the causes and effects of the extremities experienced by migrants. Firstly, the volume analyses the development and political-cultural conditions of current practices and discourses of “bordering,” “illegality,” and “irregularization.” Secondly, it focuses on the varieties of irregularization and on the diversity of the fields, techniques and effects involved in this variegation. Thirdly, the book examines examples of resistance that migrants and migratory cultures have developed in order to deal with the predicaments they face. The book uses the European Union as its case study, exploring practices and discourses of bordering, border control, and migration regulation. But the significance of this field extends well beyond the European context as the monitoring of Europe’s borders increasingly takes place on a global scale and reflects an internationally increasing trend.

Deportation has again taken a prominent place within the immigration policies of nation-states. Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation addresses the social responses to deportation, in particular the growing movements against deportation and detention, and for freedom of movement and the regularization of status. The book brings deportation and anti-deportation together with the aim of understanding the political subjects that emerge in this contested field of governance and control, freedom and struggle. However, rather than focusing on the typical subjects of removal – refugees, the undocumented, and irregular migrants – Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation looks at the ways that citizens get caught up in the deportation apparatus and must struggle to remain in or return to their country of citizenship. The transformation of ‘regular’ citizens into deportable ‘irregular’ citizens involves the removal of the rights, duties, and obligations of citizenship. This includes unmaking citizenship through official revocation or denationalization, as well as through informal, extra-legal, and unofficial means. The book features stories about struggles over removal and return, deportation and repatriation, rescue and abandonment. The book features eleven ‘acts of citizenship’ that occur in the context of deportation and anti-deportation, arguing that these struggles for rights, recognition, and return are fundamentally struggles over political subjectivity – of citizenship. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of citizenship, migration and security studies.

Migration and especially irregular migration are politically sensitive and highly debated issues in the developed world, particularly in Europe. This book analyses irregular protection-seeking migration in Europe, with close attention to sub-Saharan migration into the EU, from the perspective of emancipatory security theory. Some individuals leave their countries because political, social, and economic structures largely fail to provide protection. This book examines how communities respond to migrants who seek protection and security, where migration is perceived as a source of insecurity by many in that community. The central aim of this critical analysis is to explore ideas and practices which can contribute to replacing the political structures of insecurity with emancipatory structures, where individuals (both irregular migrants and members of the receiving communities) enjoy security together, not opposed to each other. Drawing on the security dilemma, critical approaches to security, forced migration and trust, the book demonstrates how common life between two groups of individuals can be politically constructed, in tandem with limitations, risks, and possible handicaps of initiating such a construction in world politics. Rethinking Security in the Age of Migration will be of interest to students and scholars of migration studies, security studies, international relations, European politics and sociology.

The Making of Migration addresses the rapid phenomenon that has become one of the most contentious issues in contemporary life: how are migrants governed as individual subjects and as part of groups? What are the modes of control, identification and partitions that migrants are subjected to? Bringing together an ethnographically grounded analysis of migration, and a critical theoretical engagement with the security and humanitarian modes of governing migrants, the book pushes us to rethink notions that are central in current political theory such as "multiplicity" and subjectivity. This is an innovative and sophisticated study; deploying migration as an analytical angle for complicating and reconceptualising the emergence of collective subjects, mechanisms of individualisation, and political invisibility/visibility. A must-read for students of Migration Studies, Political Geography, Political Theory, International Relations, and Sociology.

Focusing on the dynamics of irregular immigration in Southern EU Member States, this book analyses how the phenomenon is managed at national and local levels in different legal and political systems. In doing so, it answers vital policy questions regarding the continued existence of irregular migration, pathways to legality, and relations between unauthorized migrants and receiving societies. The author argues that while the economic crisis and migrant flows coming from the South and East of the Mediterranean Sea have called this regime into question, it is the needs of labour markets in Southern Europe and compliance with European Union rules that has had a more dominant effect. The particular manner in which labour markets, political actors, social institutions, and migrants’ networks intersect are shown to be distinctive features of the migration regime in this region. Describing bordering and debordering practices, from the island of Lampedusa to local communities in distant regions, this book brings fresh insights to urgent areas of debate within the field. It analyses why many irregular immigrants are socially accepted, such as women who perform domestic and care activities, whereas others are rejected and marginalized, as is often the case for asylum seekers, despite having permission to reside. Drawing together twenty years of research and addressing the current crisis, it will appeal to policy-makers, students and scholars of migration.

How do immigration and refugee laws work 'in action' in Russia? This book offers a complex, empirical and nuanced understanding.

In this groundbreaking ethnography, Ruben Andersson, a gifted anthropologist and journalist, travels along the clandestine migration trail from Senegal and Mali to the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Through the voices of his informants, Andersson explores, viscerally and emphatically, how Europe’s increasingly powerful border regime meets and interacts with its target–the clandestine migrant. This vivid, rich work examines the subterranean migration flow from Africa to Europe, and shifts the focus from the "illegal immigrants" themselves to the vast industry built around their movements. This fascinating and accessible book is a must-read for anyone interested in the politics of international migration and the changing texture of global culture.

Much work has been done on the causes and characteristics of the Arab Spring, but relatively little research has examined the political and spatial consequences that have developed following the uprisings. This book engages with the ways in which spaces in Southern Europe and Northern Africa have been negotiated and transformed by migrants in the wake of the uprisings, showing that their struggles are a continuation of their political movement. Drawing on an innovative countermapping approach, based on radical cartography, Martina Tazzioli illustrates the spatial upheavals caused by migration in the Mediterranean and the transformations created by migration controls applied by European nations. With critical insight on the application of Foucault’s concept of governmentality to migration studies, exploration of a reconfigured theory of autonomy of migration and discussion of the politics of invisibility that underpins migration, this book sheds new light on the enduring struggles that follow the Arab Spring.

This volume traces the African ramifications of Europe’s southern border. While the Mediterranean Sea has become the main stage for the current play and tragedy between European borders and African migrants, Europe’s southern border has also been “offshored” to Africa, mainly through cooperation agreements with countries of transit and origin. By bringing into conversation case studies from different countries and disciplines, this volume seeks to open a window on the backstage of this externalization of borders. It casts light on the sites – from consulates to open seas and deserts – in which Europe’s southern border is made and unmade as an African reality, yielding what the editors call "EurAfrican borders." It further describes the multiple actors – state agents, migrants, smugglers, activists, etc. – that variously imagine, construct, cross or contest these borders, and situates their encounters within the history of uneven exchanges between Africa and Europe.

Through the concepts of the ‘coloniality of asylum’ and ‘solidarity as method’, this book links the question of the state to the one of civil society; in so doing, it questions the idea of ‘autonomous politics’, showing how both refugee mobility and solidarity are intimately marked by the coloniality of asylum, in its multiple ramifications of objectification, racialisation and victimisation. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, The Coloniality of Asylum bridges border studies with decolonial theory and the anthropology of the state, and accounts for the mutual production of ‘refugees’ and ‘Europe’. It shows how Europe politically, legally and socially produces refugees while, in turn, through their border struggles and autonomous movements, refugees produce the space of Europe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hamburg in the wake of the 2015 ‘long summer of migration’, the book offers a polyphonic account, moving between the standpoints of different subjects and wrestling with questions of protection, freedom, autonomy, solidarity and subjectivity.