The notion of “vulnerability” occupies a central role in academic literature, policymaking, humanitarian debates, and everyday discourses on migration and asylum. Its popularity has led some academics and practitioners to use “vulnerability” as a self-explanatory condition or phenomenon. However, a common and systematic understanding of the concept is still missing, and the moral and political meaning often ascribed to this notion may have (un)intended detrimental consequences for those migrants deemed vulnerable. Thus, this paper sets out to critically unpack and highlight the complexities hidden behind this notion in order to provide a conceptual analysis of vulnerability in the context of migration. We do so by (1) providing an overview of definitions of vulnerability across different fields of research, (2) identifying common conceptualizations or types of vulnerability and discussing their implications, and (3) highlighting possible negative societal and psychological consequences of its implementation in the context of migration. Finally, we propose (4) a new conceptual model for understanding vulnerability in the context of migration, showing how this notion can become a useful analytical tool in migration research.

Vulnerability has become a key concept in discourses and policies on international protection and reception of refugees. In this context, the notion has been described as a tool to provide special provisions to groups at higher risk or one to perpetuate political agendas within increasingly hostile reception systems. However, vulnerability as an analytical concept has received less attention, with both policymakers and scholars often employing different conceptualisations of vulnerability or treating it as a self-explanatory condition. Building on a previous conceptual elaboration, this paper sets out to apply an understanding of vulnerability as multi-layered, dynamic and embedded in a study of the lived experiences of a group of potentially ‘vulnerable’ migrants, based on ‘fixed’ contextual criteria. Drawing from in-depth interviews with young adults who obtained refugee status in Luxembourg but still live in ‘temporary’ reception centres, this paper provides a wide analytical overview of the conditions of vulnerability encountered by this specific group of migrants, in the process of building their lives in a new country. Following the participants’ subjective temporal imaginaries of past, present and future, the analysis highlights and problematises conditions of structural, situational and experiential vulnerability emerging from their accounts and experiences, and discusses their possible implications.

No abstract