Cfp: Doing Migration in Authoritarian and Nondemocratic Settings: Biopolitics, Othering and the Black Box of Knowledge Production
Organizers: Anna Amelina, Cottbus & Karolina Barglowski, Luxembourg
Migration studies today are increasingly critical and reflexive of the ethnonationalist and exclusionary logics of migration governance institutions and related xenophobic discourses. Emphasizing the processual and constructed nature of migration and mobility (e.g. ‘doing migration/mobility’), these studies have so far focused mainly on European contexts as ‘contexts of destination’. Authoritarian contexts have been considered either as immobile or as ‘sending’ contexts of movements to ‘the West’. Although critical scholars from such nondemocratic settings have published relevant academic reflections on authoritarian migration-making, their voices often remain unnoticed in the field of European migration studies.
The proposed workshop suggests addressing this gap and paying explicit attention to migration- and integration-making in authoritarian and nondemocratic states in order to better understand complex forms of spatial relocation and membership that are related, for instance, to violent war and ‘enforced passportization’ (e.g. the Russian invasion of Ukraine), pushbacks at the EU borders (Belarus–Poland) or enforced immobilization (Belarus, China, Iran) as authoritarian biopolitics of mobility, immobility and migration governance. This focus will make it possible to study national adaptations of the global migration and mobility governance standards, as well as the uniqueness of authoritarian forms of population governance, including their political and social consequences for the targeted populations.
Deadline: 2nd december, 2022