Guest Editorial: Interventions in Migration and Activism

Abstract

Migration is an increasingly contested field. As global inequalities widen, and potential global mobilities develop, states are pouring more money into border control than ever before. This has led to the proliferation of new technologies of enforcement that are reconfiguring the border itself: from smart borders that risk-manage flows of people, goods and information (Amoore, 2006), to graduated sovereignty that renders citizenship flexible and selective (Ong, 2000; Salter, 2008), to disparate controls that extend state sovereignty well beyond its territory (Clayton, 2010; Mountz, 2010). Discussion about migration and its control, migration enforcement regimes and border politics has highlighted profound contradictions between liberal democratic espousals of freedom and equality and the reality of exclusionary immigration policies (Bauder, 2003a; Conlon and Gill, 2013). The hypocritical formations of race, patriarchy, and colonialism that underpin immigration law and citizenship regimes and that increasingly associate acts of immigration with criminality have been roundly critiqued (Tyler, 2010; Coleman, 2012; Mains, Gilmartin, Cullen, Mohammad, Tolia-Kelly, Raghuram and Winders 2013; Moran, Gill and Conlon, 2013; Loyd, Mitchelson and Burridge, 2012). Crucial to this discussion, as Bauder points out, is that we continue to fundamentally “question the existing regime of regulating the international movement of people” (2003b: 218).