Lost boys,invisible girls: stories of Sudanese marriages across borders

Forced migration challenges and changes gender relations. The transnational activities of refugees resettled in the West create gender asymmetries among those who stay behind. This article explores the transnational marriages of young southern Sudanese women (‘invisible girls’), who either stayed in Sudan or remained in refugee camps in Kenya, to Sudanese men who were resettled to America, Canada or Australia (‘lost boys’). Incorporating gender as a relational category into the analysis of transnational practices that migrants and refugees engage in is important. The article argues that there is a need to put feminist analysis at the centre of transnational processes resulting from (forced) migration. It looks at the connections between different geographical locations, the impacts of the migration of young refugee men on bridewealth and marriage negotiations and the gender consequences for young women, men and their families. It is argued that transnational activities, such as marriage, contest, reconfigure and reinforce the culturally inscribed gender norms and practices in and across places. Transnational marriage results in ambiguous benefits for women (and men) in accessing greater freedoms. Anthropological analyses of marriage need a geographical focus on the transnational fields in which they occur. The article seeks to deepen understanding of the nuanced gendered consequences of transnationalism. It shows how gender analysis of actions taken across different locations can contribute to the theorisation of transnational studies of refugees and migrants.     

Transnational family networks in the Somali diaspora in Egypt: women's roles and differentiated experiences

Diasporic Somalis are increasingly leading a transnational life in which family members are sustained through networks of relations, obligations and resources that are located in different nation-states. These networks and relations enable diasporic Somalis to seek safety for themselves and their relatives, minimize risks and maximize family resources. In this article, I examine three key dimensions of such a way of life, namely: migration; remittances; and transnational family care. I focus on the roles that women play in this family-based support system. For instance, women move and facilitate the movement of other family members; they remit to family members; and they provide care for children and sick relatives. But these transnational households are not free from tensions. Family members are placed in hierarchical relations shaped by age; parental authority; possession of western citizenship; financial resources; and bonds of familial reciprocity and gratitude. Women gain appreciation from relatives and a sense of self-respect for their new roles. Some of the women also make use of the family network to arrange for the care of their children and sick relatives, while they engage in transnational trading activities. However, young and single female relatives often sacrifice or delay their individual dreams because of their familial obligations. I conclude that transnationalism – as a way of organizing and sustaining livelihood, resources and relations of Somali families – is not always emancipating or marginalizing for Somali women. Rather the benefits and challenges of such a way of life for women are different, mixed and uneven.     

Bordering through othering: On strategic ambiguity in the making of the EU-Turkey refugee deal

This article scrutinises the identity-constitutive role of bordering practices by taking EU-Turkey cooperation on border control and refugee governance as a case. Using Foucault's notion of dispositif, this empirically oriented contribution critically reflects on the link between bordering, othering, and the reification of identities. More specifically, it undertakes a Critical Discourse Analysis of the EU border dispositif to elucidate how material structures and socio-spatial practices and discourses are mobilised in the processes of bordering. Throughout this article, special attention is paid to the strategic uses of ambiguity in refugee governance. Examining strategic ambiguity operative at the level of discourse, in institutional and legal structures, and routine daily practices, the multifaceted approach adopted in this study extends the analysis beyond the impact of strategic ambiguity on refugee's living experiences. The analysis demonstrates that strategic ambiguity relates to multiple domains of refugee governance and becomes a practical ideological tool, a normalising procedure for norm-breaking practices. Providing multiple layers of distinct but mutually reinforcing critical exploration, this study demonstrates how accumulated layers of knowledge, imageries, and historical narratives support institutional, legal and administrative practices in the ambiguous time/space of the EU-Turkey refugee deal. The analysis also exposes how the EU border dispositif translates difference into otherness, and contributes to the construction of European identity through the othering of refugees.     

A Crisis of Opportunity: Market-Making,Big Data,and the Consolidation of Migration as Risk

Crisis narratives surrounding Europe’s 2015 migration influx fuelled demands for new ways of tracking, mapping and predicting human mobility. We explore how market opportunities for technology firms and data analytics start-ups created by the EU’s Global Approach to Migration led to solutionistic approaches to compiling and analysing migration statistics. We show that initiatives such as the rebranding of existing platforms and services as migration prediction systems are consolidating policy conceptualisations of migration as risk. Despite the promise of greater granularity, this “big data approach” cannot offer greater certainty about who is on the move and why. Instead such approaches are ill-suited to understanding the complex dynamics of migration and to offering protection to vulnerable people. The marketisation of migration statistics through big data offers a key case for advancing progressive approaches to both migration statistics and global data justice.     

Between containment,confinement and dispersal: the evolution of the Italian reception system before and after the ‘refugee crisis’

In this article, I will analyse how the Italian reception system has been transformed after the ‘refugee crisis’, showing how the change cannot be reduced to a mere expansion of the reception capacity. I will do this by tracing a genealogy of the Italian reception system and highlighting its main features before and after the ‘refugee crisis’. My hypothesis is that the ‘refugee crisis’ and the sense of emergency it created has stimulated the emergence of distinct segments within the Italian reception system functioning according to radically different philosophies and objectives. This, in addition to increasing the overall lack of consistency of the system, is having a profound impact on the rights of asylum seekers, greatly increasing the risk of their spatial and social segregation within Italian society.     

The Game: Or, ‘the making of migration’ along the Balkan Route

‘The Game’ is how many refugees describe their attempts to informally travel to Western Europe via the so-called Balkan Route. This article conceptualises The Game as a spatial tactic implemented by refugees as a response to the impossibility of legally entering the EU and as a gray area in the governance of informal migrant mobilities. It does so by engaging with the recent literature on the Balkan Route to analyse how The Game has been performed and ‘managed’ in Serbia, a key ‘buffer state’ along this corridor. Drawing from Tazzioli's work on ‘The Making of Migration’, and in particular on her understanding of refugee forced mobility as a form of ‘migrant management’ on the part of the authorities, this article shows how the ambivalent connotations of The Game reveal the troubling configurations of EU border politics and of its formal and informal geopolitical arrangements. At the same time, it argues that the practices related to The Game ultimately reflect the extraordinary determination of the refugees in creating new itineraries, spatial interstices, invisible networks and ‘holes in the border walls’ that allow them, despite all the difficulties, to challenge such border politics. We conclude by proposing to understand The Game as part of the biopolitics of migration and by suggesting that it represents a powerful manifestation of the condition (and the field of possibility) of thousands of refugees along the Balkan Route today.     

Bodies That Walk,Bodies That Talk,Bodies That Love: Palestinian Women Refugees,Affectivity, and the Politics of the Ordinary

In this article I interrogate what is lost in war and displacement through the affective memories of Palestinian refugee women who remember through their body and what their body has endured. I reflect on how bodies and spaces connect and disconnect at violent junctures, and on the vital forces vulnerability and precariousness ignite in displacement. Throughout the geography of separations and shifting shelters, refugee women engaged in place‐making, transforming the transience enforced by their continuous evictions into the permanence of home, not as a static identity‐place‐nation, but as a site of dynamic affective, social relations and connections. Read through Michael Hardt's metaphor of “social muscles”, as bodily and emotional drives that blur the boundaries of intimate and social spaces, affective memories can serve as a political horizon that redesigns, in Arendtian terms, the love for the nation as love for concrete relations and for existing in the world.     

Subcontracting Academia: Alienation,Exploitation and Disillusionment in the UK Overseas Syrian Refugee Research Industry

As the political economy of social science research has shifted, subcontracted research assistants have taken over an ever growing part of the research process. In this article, we report on a case study of the experiences of local research assistants employed on UK‐directed research projects on Syrian refugees in Lebanon. While refugee research is framed in the UK as a noble project of helping the world's most vulnerable, these assistants speak critically of their sense of alienation, exploitation and disillusionment with the research they work on. Such problems arise, we argue, not just from subcontracted labour relations in the workplace itself, but also the broader political economy of how overseas social science research is currently produced. Addressing these problems requires giving better recognition to the work, interests and concerns of research assistants, but also rethinking and restructuring the global production of social science research more generally.     

The Discursive Violence of Postcolonial Asylum in the Irish Republic

ABSTRACT

This paper situates postcolonial asylum as a dominant global encounter between the West and the Rest. Rather than a humanitarian gift, the paper argues that discursive violence of asylum regimes forces the materialization of identities, spaces and structural conditions that encamp and re-colonise asylum-seeking bodies. It first examines the global instrumentalization of images and bodies of Third World women in refugee representations to act as a humanitarian alibi that re-signifies the white saviour discourse. Moving to the Irish context where childbearing bodies of African women were targeted in a political campaign that ended birthright Citizenship for children of non-EU parents in 2004, it examines the performativity and affective entanglements of visual representations of ‘Third World Women’ and illustrates how NGO policies and projects force performances of black female bodies that exploit their representational and affective labour. Meanwhile, the material labour—of waiting— is appropriated from bodies detained in Direct Provision (a form of open asylum detention) by the asylum industry. The paper argues that postcolonial asylum is non-performative of the promise it makes, but a colonial continuity that serves a number of uses for white Western states and preserves a humanitarian face while detracting critical attention from the root causes of forced displacement from the South—necropolitics in the South.     

‘It can be good there too’: home and continuity in refugee children's narratives of settlement

Drawing on refugee children's narratives about their experiences of settlement after prolonged stays in asylum centres, this article explores how the process of home-making is experienced in the everyday lives of children (7–12 year olds) settling with their parents in Norway. This article examines the importance of home as a material and relational space where children's expectations of an ideal home and existing standards together influence the process of home-making. Settlement is found to be a turning point in the lives of refugee families; it is a way of making oneself at home, sustaining continuity in children's world of movement, as well as linking space and time in their lives.