Beyond here and there: (re)conceptualising migrant journeys and the ‘in-between’

Abstract

Journeys of refugees and other migrants are typically represented as linear movements between two places with the academic and policy gaze directed primarily towards the places people leave and what is assumed to be their final destination. This linear representation presupposes that people have a specific country in mind when they depart and that everything 'in-between' is simply a 'stepping stone'. This article explores the journeys of Syrians, Nigerians and Afghans drawing on empirical data gathered in Turkey, Greece and Italy during 2015. Our evidence suggests that, even for those who eventually arrived in Europe, the places to which people initially travelled were often destination rather than 'transit countries'. It was only when life became untenable and a decision was made to move that these places took on a state of 'in-betweenness', most commonly as part of a personal narrative mobilised by respondents to make sense of the broader arc of their life experiences. Failure to understand, or even ask questions about, the multiple meanings which places have for people at different points in both their phsycial and metaphorical (life) journeys, undermines conceptual and empirical analysis of migrant journeys and plays into anti-immigrant discourses prevalent across much of the Global North.

Migration trajectories and transnational support within and beyond Europe

“…Migration research often focuses exclusively on why migrants leave their home country or how they incorporate in the countries of destination. By doing so, existing research tends to neglect and undertheorize the significance of the experiences of migrants during the 'time in between' as Crawley and Jones (2020) call it. The papers in this issue all show the significance of these migration trajectories and all the places migrants went through, sometimes living, working and loving there or finding themselves in danger for shorter or longer periods of time.…”

“…A basic idea in this research as well as in the articles in this volume is that migrants are not passive victims, but active agents who, although often within constrained opportunities, develop and execute their own plans and strategies. Migration journeys are not necessarily linear and unidirectional movements from origin to destination countries, nor clearly demarcated events in time and space (Crawley and Jones 2020). Instead of being fixed and planned in advance, migrants often develop their journey step by step as they travel from one place to another in several phases (Crawley and Hagen-Zanker 2019).…”

“…Although migration research by definition studies people on the move, it nevertheless often uses a 'sedentarist' approach by focussing on 'fixed locations', be it the origin countries or communities which trigger questions on why people migrate or the receiving countries where the interest is on the incorporation of migrants after arrival (Crawley and Jones 2020;Cresswell 2006;Schapendonk and Steel 2014;Mainwaring and Brigden 2016). Transnationalism studies likewise seem unable to overcome this 'bipolar dominance of migration conceptualizations' (Schapendonk and Steel 2014, 262), since their focus is mainly on '..sending and receiving states as well as the continuing feedbacks going from point of origin to destination and back again' (Waldinger 2017, 5).…”

“…It is embodied in the bilateral agreements between the EU or individual EU countries with other countries such as Morocco, Turkey (Van Liempt et al 2017), and Libya (De Haas 2008; Kuschminder and Triandafyllidou 2020). These agreements contain both settlements with these countries to prevent migration to Europe and financial support for accommodating refugees and for economic development in general, with the explicit goal of encouraging potential migrants to 'stay put' in what the EU considers to be 'the region' (Crawley and Jones 2020).…”

“…Some earlier humanitarian reports and academic studies already described these practices, including slavery (Mixed Migration Hub 2015;Micallef 2017;). 3 Several contributions to this special issue also describe the abuse and violence migrants experience while travelling (Crawley and Jones 2020;Kuschminder 2020). Vogt (2018) documents endemic violence against migrants, not only in North Africa and the Middle East, but also in Latin America.…”