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 language | English |
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Publication status | Unpublished - 23 Jan 2020 |
Event | Interdisciplinary Workshop on Social Marginality and Banishment - Universite de Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland Duration: 22 Jan 2020 → 23 Jan 2020 |
Workshop
Workshop | Interdisciplinary Workshop on Social Marginality and Banishment |
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Country/Territory | Switzerland |
City | Neuchatel |
Period | 22/01/20 → 23/01/20 |
Keywords
- Comparative Making
- Politics
- Governance
- Migration
- Asylum
- Policy-Making