Between crisis and critique: migration and refugee protection in a global perspective

Abstract

The paper argues that the narrative around a contemporary global crisis of refugees and migrants is supported by a specific articulation between the 'problem of displacement' and particular forms of conceptualizing, spatially and temporally, modes of belonging. This articulation is analyzed through four moves: i) the politics of numbers, ii) the politics of movement, iii) the politics of time and iv) a politics of governance. The conjunction of these four axes advances a model of apprehending and managing mobility that has acquired a central place in debates over the limits of globalization processes. This hegemonic approach, though contested by resistance movements from migrants and refugees and by the persistence of human mobility as a global phenomenon, operates to reduce spaces of protection, to shut down safe routes and to convert movement into a priority object of violent intervention. It allows for filtering, modulating and authorizing desirable forms of circulation while, simultaneously and violently, containing and excluding the undesirables. The paper argues that the discourse of crisis enables a global governmentality of migration that articulates the right to move as a central facet of the production of inequalities in the contemporary capitalist global order.