Queer Global Displacement: Social Reproduction,Refugee Survival,and Organised Abandonment in Nairobi,Cape Town,and Paris

Queer refugees are misfits in the global political economy of migration. While international human rights law has provided some room for queer acceptance, queer refugees face organised abandonment—marginality, erasure, and invisibility—as they attempt to survive in the face of ongoing displacement. This paper explores queer refugee survival in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Paris, and examines the netted practices of the state, non-state actors, and civil society embedded in a landscape of heteronormativity and anti-migrant sentiment. In so doing, this paper emphasises queerness as a form of precarity inseparable from the overarching violence of race, class, and capital. With this critique in mind, queer refugee survival is constrained by the lack of access to shelter, community, and work-related social reproduction. In short, queer refugees face deeper marginality than their cis-gendered and heterosexual counterparts as they attempt to survive in the city.     

“Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti-Trafficking in Nepal

In this paper, I explore how the diverse labour migration practices of people who challenge their state’s restrictive policies produce a form of stigma that extends from people to the places where they reside. Drawing on the findings of Participatory Action Research (PAR) conducted in Nepal, I demonstrate how people residing in one such place attempt to undo stigma by adopting diverse practices amidst restrictive anti-trafficking and migration policies. I reveal a novel practice of prospective labour migrants negotiating and receiving money from their choicest mobility facilitators to assist their unauthorised labour migration. This exchange of money potentially criminalises prospective labour migrants, their family members, unlicensed and licensed recruitment agents, community leaders, anti-traffickers, government officials, hotel owners, transport service providers, and airport immigration officials as traffickers. Underscoring the collateral damage of anti-trafficking in Nepal, I assert that the exchange of money to facilitate unauthorised migration expands the remit of criminalisation of citizens as “traffickers”.