The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility: Tracing State Relations Through Refugee Claims, Boats, and Discourses

Ashutosh, Ishan; Mountz, Alison

doi:10.1080/14650045.2011.567315

Cited by 37 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…Following the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, refugees deserve humanitarian protection as victims of persecution, violence and war. Such humanitarian commitment, however, runs counter to individual nation‐states’ sovereignty to selectively admit those migrants whom they deem deserving or desirable for economic or geopolitical reasons (Ashutosh & Mountz, ; Hyndman, , ). While caught up in and administered according to this dual securitised‐humanitarian logic, refugees become legible, in one way, through psychological and corporeal inscription of violence as it is produced in practices of refugee determination, screening and resettlement.…”

Section: Towards a Geopolitics Of Traumamentioning

confidence: 99%

A geopolitics of trauma: Refugee administration and protracted uncertainty in Turkey

Loyd

Ehrkamp

Secor

2018

Trans Inst British Geog

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In this paper we map out what we are calling a "geopolitics of trauma" by examining the role of trauma in transnational refugee regimes and the individualisation of geopolitical relations through mental health diagnosis and service provision.Focusing on one site of entry into the international regime of refugee administration, we present findings from fieldwork that we conducted in August, 2015 in Turkey with NGOs and IGOs involved in the protection, mental health and psychosocial service provision, and resettlement of refugees. The findings that we present demonstrate the challenges of refugee care and management on the front lines in Turkey and the significance of mental health diagnosis, treatment and documentation in the early stages of refugee administration. We suggest that practices of refugee screening and resettlement are imbued with traumatic stressors and trace how trauma intersects with the administration of refugees in different sites and at different times. We argue that the protracted situation of refugees in Turkey (many of whom will wait eight years for their Refugee Status Determination interview) and the multiple interviews and demands for documentation through which a displaced person applies for refugee status and third-country resettlement become sites of ongoing traumatisation for the refugee subject. Further, in the practices of screening and documentation, we can trace the medicalisation of the refugee subject as not only a question of care but also a practice of legibility on which the state and international organisations base their decisions about inclusion and exclusion. The geopolitics of trauma thus emerges not only in cartographies of war, displacement and resettlement, but also in the minute details and performative demands of the refugee determination and resettlement process. K E Y W O R D S mental health, Middle East, migration management, political geography, post-traumatic stress disorder, refugees 1 | INTRODUCTIONWar and peace tend to be thought of as discrete spaces and temporalities, yet the displacement and resettlement of refugees challenges this geopolitical imagination. In this paper, we examine how procedures for registering, assessing, protecting and managing refugees rework the trauma of war and violence to create new geopolitical connectivities. Rather than conceptualising trauma as an individualised experience that happened elsewhere and in the past, we argue that the screening ---

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Section: Towards a Geopolitics Of Traumamentioning

confidence: 99%

A geopolitics of trauma: Refugee administration and protracted uncertainty in Turkey

Loyd

Ehrkamp

Secor

2018

Trans Inst British Geog

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“…We join other scholars in arguing for transnational framings of domestic carceral regimes (Sudbury, 2005;Rodríguez, 2008;Loyd et al, 2012), geopolitical understandings of racialized struggles over asylum (Ashutosh and Mountz, 2012), and deeper analysis of the implications of immigration policies that blur domestic and foreign spaces and enforcement policies (Coleman, 2010). These geographical moves to geopoliticized and racialized analyses of domestic carceral regimes require sustained attention to both transnational perspectives and site-specific histories and contingencies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To develop this argument, we build on scholarship illustrating the racialized geopolitics of asylum (Ashutosh and Mountz, 2012) produced in part through bilateral negotiations between states and their influence on landscapes of detention. As Coleman (2007a, b) argues, immigration has always blurred the domestic and foreign spatial and juridical binary.…”

Section: Producing Remoteness Through Transnational Carceral Regimesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational productions of remoteness: building onshore and offshore carceral regimes across borders

Mountz

Loyd

2014

Geogr. Helv.

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Abstract. This article examines transnational framings of domestic carceral landscapes to better understand the relationship between offshore and onshore enforcement and detention regimes. US detention on mainland territory and interception and detention in the Caribbean serves as a case study. While the US domestic carceral regime is a subject of intense political debate, research, and activism, it is not often analyzed in relation to the development and expansion of an offshore "buffer zone" to intercept and detain migrants and asylum seekers. Yet the US federal government has also used offshore interception and detention as a way of controlling migration and mobility to its shores. This article traces a Cold War history of offshore US interception and detention of migrants from and in the Caribbean. We discuss how racialized crises related to Cuban and Haitian migrations by sea led to the expansion of an intertwined offshore and onshore carceral regime. Tracing these carceral geographies offers a more transnational understanding of contemporary domestic landscapes of detention of foreign nationals in the United States. It advances the argument that the conditions of remoteness ascribed frequently to US detention sites must be understood in more transnational perspective.

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“…Writing from the viewpoint of critical geography, Ashutosh and Mountz (2012) argued that, while states seek to reaffirm the primacy of place, migrants continue to operate within the space of flows, albeit at a considerable disadvantage. Writing from the viewpoint of critical geography, Ashutosh and Mountz (2012) argued that, while states seek to reaffirm the primacy of place, migrants continue to operate within the space of flows, albeit at a considerable disadvantage.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…While operating from a 'border criminology' perspective, we incorporate some insights from cognate disciplines. Writing from the viewpoint of critical geography, Ashutosh and Mountz (2012) argued that, while states seek to reaffirm the primacy of place, migrants continue to operate within the space of flows, albeit at a considerable disadvantage. 'Migrants … are not as fluid as global flows.…”

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confidence: 99%

Beyond deportation: researching the control of outward mobility using a space of flows logic

et al. 2019

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Manuel Castells (1996) famously argued that human processes are increasingly operating according to the logic of flows and it has now become commonplace to analyse movements of people, information and commodities in terms of flows. However, scholars have been slow to capture the dynamics of border enforcement practices in these terms. In this article, we argue that ‘deportation’ can best be understood, not as a discrete practice that is unidirectional, territorial and wholly controlled by individual states, but as a range of diverse practices used by states (and sometimes undermined by other parties) to try to control the circulation of people within a dynamic supra‐national space. By focusing on ‘mobility control continuums’ operating in selected countries at the peripheries of Europe, we capture the dynamics of state intervention in trans‐border flows and thereby contribute towards developing concepts and methodologies for the criminological study of border controls that are ‘sensitive to the complexities of the global’ (Aas 2007).

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The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility: Tracing State Relations Through Refugee Claims, Boats, and Discourses

Cited by 37 publications

References 0 publications

A geopolitics of trauma: Refugee administration and protracted uncertainty in Turkey

A geopolitics of trauma: Refugee administration and protracted uncertainty in Turkey

Transnational productions of remoteness: building onshore and offshore carceral regimes across borders

Beyond deportation: researching the control of outward mobility using a space of flows logic

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