'Uncertainty, Abandonment, Exhaustion - Leveraging the notion of strategic institutional ambiguity to interrogate South/North distinctions in forced migration studies

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperAcademic

Abstract

Forced migration studies still struggles to overcome implicit assumptions that the governance of displaced people is of a fundamentally different nature in the Global South and North. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that questions such lingering epistemic segregation and theoretical exceptionalism. It mobilizes the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to innovatively interrogate routinely assumed differences between migration governance in the Global North and South. It juxtaposes in-depth empirical case-studies of refugee governance in Lebanon, the country with the world’s highest per capita number of refugees, with research on European governance of forced and irregular migrants. This exploration demonstrates that the rationales and manifestations of the ‘politics of uncertainty’ that refugees are subjected to in Lebanon closely mirror those of the ‘politics of abandonment’ and ‘exhaustion’ that migrants face in Europe. Under both regimes, strategic forms of ambiguity operate to spatially and temporally marginalize refugees and render them controllable, exploitable, and deportable.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusUnpublished - 23 Jan 2020
EventInterdisciplinary Workshop on Social Marginality and Banishment - Universite de Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland
Duration: 22 Jan 202023 Jan 2020

Workshop

WorkshopInterdisciplinary Workshop on Social Marginality and Banishment
Country/TerritorySwitzerland
CityNeuchatel
Period22/01/2023/01/20

Keywords

  • Comparative Making
  • Politics
  • Governance
  • Migration
  • Asylum
  • Policy-Making

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of ''Uncertainty, Abandonment, Exhaustion - Leveraging the notion of strategic institutional ambiguity to interrogate South/North distinctions in forced migration studies'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this