Vulnerability’s Legal Life: An Ambivalent Force of Migration Governance

Abstract

The role of vulnerability in migration governance This Special Issue takes stock of current debates across different disciplines and problematises the concept of vulnerability in the field of migration and its relationship to law, building on discussions held during the MAPS Project Conference of December 2020. 1 The Conference considered the treatment that migrants are facing in Europe and elsewhere, focusing on the difficulties they encounter in accessing their rights and interrogating the law's ambiguous position in their regard: exacerbating vulnerability, while, at the same time, also providing a possible source of protection that can unravel restrictive policies of deterrence and control (Moreno-Lax, 2017;Moreno-Lax and Giuffré, 2019). This dual role of the law vis-à-vis migration, as simultaneously a generator of vulnerability and its potential antidote, is what contributions to this Special Issue grapple with and aim to elucidate.Vulnerability is gaining traction as an explanatory paradigm in (human rights) law (e.g.