Refugees, migrants, neither, both: categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’

Abstract

The use of the categories 'refugee' and 'migrant' to differentiate between those on the move and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of their claims to international protection has featured strongly during Europe's 'migration crisis' and has been used to justify policies of exclusion and containment. Drawing on interviews with 215 people who crossed the Mediterranean to Greece in 2015, our paper challenges this 'categorical fetishism', arguing that the dominant categories fail to capture adequately the complex relationship between political, social and economic drivers of migration or their shifting significance for individuals over time and space. As such it builds upon a substantial body of academic literature demonstrating a disjuncture between conceptual and policy categories and the lived experiences of those on the move. However, the paper is also critical of efforts to foreground or privilege 'refugees' over 'migrants' arguing that this reinforces rather than challenges the dichotomy's faulty foundations. Rather those concerned about the use of categories to marginalise and exclude should explicitly engage with the politics of bounding, that is to say, the process by which categories are constructed, the purpose they serve and their consequences, in order to denaturalise their use as a mechanism to distinguish, divide and discriminate.

Moving forward: why responding to migration, mobility and HIV in South(ern) Africa is a public health priority

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Forced to leave? The discursive and analytical significance of describing migration as forced and voluntary

“…Fieldwork observations convince us of the impossibility of describing someone's decision to migrate as entirely voluntary or entirely forced. Making a clear-cut distinction between forced and voluntary migration is not acceptable from an empirical, and consequently, analytical, point of view, even if labelling for the sake of migration management upholds the notion (see also Carling 2017;Crawley and Skleparis 2017).…”

The Political Influence of Return: From Diaspora to Libyan Transit Returnees

“…We seek to address the dearth of literature on political influence of return and specifically engage with different types of return. Whilst we agree with the dangers of “categorical fetishism”, highly pertinent in research on forced migration (see Crawley and Skleparis, ), we will distinguish returnees according to perceived skills level in the following. We see this as a way to show how such categories translate into certain expectations and actions at a policy level.…”