Making and Unmaking Refugees: Geopolitics of Social Ordering and Struggle within the Global Refugee Regime

Abstract

Wars and conflicts around the world take the lives of millions and leave millions more displaced both physically and emotionally. With an unprecedented number of displaced peoples worldwide, the plight of refugees, stateless, and internally-displaced people remains a crucial global issue. The current COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent growth of restrictions and barriers to mobility and resettlement have further exacerbated the challenges faced by displaced persons.Recent and emerging geographic scholarship has paid considerable attention to the interlocking themes of mobility, borders, immigration and displacement as critical to understanding the current global refugee crisis. Geopolitics, in particular, has featured several themed issues and sections that attend to the various ways borders and bordering practices shape and inform migration, mobility and displacement. In 1998, then-editor David Newman organised a special issue on Boundaries and Territories and Postmodernity. This plenary special issue focused on the 'new world order' and the extent to which borders have become increasingly permeable in the post-Westphalian geopolitical context. The special issue also called for continued engagement with the subject of changing territorial orderings (Newman 1998).Over the last two decades, Geopolitics has sustained the conversation through special issues and sections on themes related to borders, mobility

Political geography III: International migration and geopolitics

“…The special issue “Making and Unmaking Refugees: Geopolitics of Social Ordering and Struggle within the Global Refugee Regime” in the journal Geopolitics assembles a suite of articles, which examine power imbalances integrated within the state-centered global political order to highlight the protracted violence perpetuated against displaced persons (Myadar and Dempsey, 2022). State-based management regimes for migrants and refugees reveal how national politics and public discourse about immigration can have an outsized influence, which can both extensively shape national policies and programs, and significantly alter the outcomes for displaced persons.…”

“…The continued increase of human displacement highlights multiple political crises globally, from the ongoing but largely ignored crisis in Afghanistan to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Lizotte et al, 2022; Moisio, 2022; Murphy, 2022) and the massive displacements caused by climate-related and other environmental disasters (Lunstrum and Bose, 2022)—such as the recent floods in Pakistan that left nearly 1700 dead and displaced over 30 million people. There has also been extensive scholarship, particularly in the last year, attending to migration, border control, and the role of states and non-governmental institutions in the management and control of human mobility and resettlement (Lemaire et al, 2021; Myadar and Dempsey, 2022; Savio Vammen et al, 2022; Strauss, 2022; Zardo and Wolff, 2022a). The edited handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration assembles an extensive collection migration research among geographies from various perspectives (Mitchell et al, 2019).…”

The power of story: Understanding gendered dimensions of mobility among Tucson refugees

“…But we do so by recognizing the limitations the refugee categorization has under the current international refugee regime (Scherschel K., 2014). The term ‘refugee’ excludes millions of displaced individuals who had to flee other life‐threatening conditions, natural disasters (Myadar, 2020; Myadar & Dempsey, 2022). “At the heart of the process of making and unmaking refugees is therefore the politics of labeling and categorization that institutionalize the global refugee regime and social capacities the labeling dictates in return” (Myadar & Dempsey, 2022, p. 368).…”

“…This number is the highest recorded in any single year and still growing. However, as alarming as such statistics may be, when they are expressed in disembodied terms, the human dimension of widespread displacement is not adequately captured, and the uniqueness of each individual's journey is lost beyond the veil of numbers (Myadar, 2020; Myadar & Dempsey, 2022).…”

Challenging the boundaries of exclusive Europeanisation: How young refugees unsettle normative spaces of urban citizenship

“…Dealing with (refugee) migration, from this perspective, allows us to simultaneously address the intimate agency and the protagonism of people who decide to flee, and the workings of postcolonial European power (Hyndman, 2019: 5). Europe, approached as a postcolonial racial project, ‘bleed[s] into’ (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006: 450) the intimate in various ways: first, in the manner in which young refugees negotiate the ‘geopolitics of refugee categorisations’ (Myadar and Dempsey, 2021: 1) in the course of their asylum procedures. This attribution of different statuses creates violent hierarchies between people who arrive, ‘reminiscent of the orientalist and racialised practices of European colonialism and imperialism’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018: 20).…”