Irregular migration struggles and active subjects of trans-border politics: New research strategies for interrogating the agency of the marginalised

Abstract

The politics of migration has become increasingly prominent as a site of struggle. However, the active subjecthood of people on the move in precarious situations is often overlooked. Irregular migration struggles raise questions about how to understand the agency of people who are marginalised. What does it mean to engage people produced as ‘irregular’ as active subjects of trans-border politics? And what new research strategies can we employ to this end? The articles presented in this Special Issue of Politics each differently explore how actions by or on behalf of irregular/ised migrants involve processes of subjectivity formation that imply a form of agency. Collectively we explore how irregular migration struggles feature as a site marked by active subjects of trans-border politics. We propose a research agenda based on tracing those processes – both regulatory, activist, and everyday – that negotiate and contest how an individual is positioned as an ‘irregular migrant’. The ethos behind such research is to explore how the most marginalised individuals reclaim or reconfigure subjecthood in ambiguous terms.

Living the spectre of forced return: negotiating deportability in British immigration detention

“…This paper points to several institutional and bureaucratic elements of detention that make it a unique site from which to negotiate deportability and act in accordance with differing desires to stay or go. Having considered detainees' lived experiences of deportability and their perceptions of the possibility of leaving the UK, often against their wishes and occasionally by force, this paper has shown how IRCs can be understood as 'sites of struggle' (Strange et al 2017) in which detainees negotiate this exercise of state power in the context of extreme uncertainty, vulnerability, and unpredictability characteristic of life in British IRCs. The various strategies of action underscore the challenges of exerting agency within coercive and isolating carceral institutions.…”

Introduction

“…These in-between spaces can also be created 'through acts of solidarity between citizens and undocumented migrants as they act together to resist control of migration' (Nordling et al 2017: 3). It has also been recognised how many times undocumented migrants actively fight their current conditions to try to achieve better ones and to actively construct their subjecthood (Grønseth 2013;Strange et al 2017). All these struggles, as Nordling et al (2017) recognised, might be actual enactments of citizenship, regardless of the binary logics and classifications confining them to the restricted realms of illegality and irregularity.…”

The Nexus of Political Violence and Economic Deprivation: Pakistani Migrants Disrupt the Refugee/Migrant Dichotomy

“…Thus, agency in this specific context is understood as struggles and decisions undertaken by abject groups of people to resist structural mechanisms with the aim to improve their life chances. Strange et al (2017) assert the importance of a focus on struggles by individuals who are irregularised since it enables appreciation of the ways in which the marginalized make decisions, enact change and participate in claims-making. Thus, the very presence of unauthorized migration within a privileged and heavily policed EU can be interpreted as evidence of agency of those migrating and thus of the limitations of structural inequalities and institutionalized mechanisms of control (Squire 2017).…”