Insecurity, deportability and authority

Abstract

Security is more than ever a central theme in the study of international migration. For the past twenty years, research on the securitization of migration has burgeoned. While these initiatives are to be applauded, we believe they may also have misdiagnosed the problem. For example, it may not be that the concept of ‘security’ needs to be ‘humanized’ in order to be more in tune with migrants’ concerns. Rather, the problem may lie in the use of the ‘migrant’ as an analytical category. The ‘migrant’ remains an inherently statist construct. The starting premise for the collection of articles in this special issue is that it is the tendency of academic research to mistake the statist category of the ‘migrant’ as an analytical category that has prevented the literature on the migration–security nexus from meaningfully reflecting the lived experience and aspirations of its human respondents, particularly as regards their encounters with forms of institutional authority, practices, resistance and resilience. We use the rubric of deportability to open up a variety of ways of thinking and talking about migration and security that do not fall back upon statist tropes. The authors in this collection take up this challenge by framing and employing concepts such as statelessness, sedentariness and expulsion to redefine our understanding of the relationship between movement and order. They take inspiration from multiple brands of social and political theorizing where conditions of violence and forced removal qualitatively differentiate the experiences and encounters of a particular group.