Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Stephan Scheel
Online First: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2461355
Border regimes are pervaded by moral economies that justify practices of regulation and control. This article attends to the moral economies that animate migrants’ struggles and related practices of subversion. Based on a reading of moral economies close to E.P Thompson’s original formulation of the concept, it investigates the norms and beliefs that are carried by migrants’ practices of appropriation. By showing that these practices are, from migrants’ viewpoint, just and legitimate insofar as they defend or restore traditional rights, customs and entitlements, the analysis destabilizes dominant framings of migrants as cunning tricksters. Moreover, the analysis of the moral economies of migrants’ border struggles allows to distinguish between two different logics of appropriation. To this end, I mobilize two figures of thought from postcolonial theory. First, Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry captures the logic of practices that repurpose mechanisms of control in ways that allow migrants to obtain a visa, asylum, or a residency title (subversion through documentation). Second, Eduard Glissant’s work on opacity enables us in turn to theorize practices of appropriation that rely on the creation of ambiguity and multiplicity to counteract authorities’ attempts to assign migrants a unique stable identity by means of biometrics (subversion of documentation).
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–18
Laura Lambert
Online First: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2461342
Moral economies of asylum can be shaped by conflicts between legal norms to protect queer refugees and dominant heteronormativity. Beyond bureaucrats’ own moral subjectivities, this article suggests that organizational designs and procedures importantly shape the way they resolve such moral conflicts. In contrast to the single-agent decision-making familiar in the Global North, many states in the Global South use inter-ministerial eligibility committees composed of multiple (non-)state actors for the asylum decision-making. This article provides the first ethnographic research on such a committee in Niger. I argue that when the first queer migrants sought asylum in Niger, this organizational structure allowed for the active negotiation of procedures with UNHCR, further investigations on an applicant’s sexual orientation and gender identity by laypeople in the ‘morality check,’ and the weighing of normatively loaded evidence in the deliberation. Despite hegemonic heteronormativity, this organizational structure made protecting queer refugees to an object of negotiation and institutional emergence between these diverse actors, rather than precluding it from the outset. This suggests a relational, processual perspective on moral economies that centers procedures as a means of conflict resolution and their effects on the knowledge production of asylum seekers.
Comparative Migration Studies 13, 14
Laura Lambert
Online First: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-025-00434-2
Resettlement is a safe pathway to the Global North, but only few refugees in the Global South receive it. This article argues that beyond being a highly selective durable solution, resettlement can also operate as a temporal border intended to delay migration by making elusive promises of a better future to transiting refugees if they abandoned migration and waited for resettlement. This was the case in the major transit country Niger where resettlement was established in 2017 as a part of UNHCR’s Mixed Migration policy to contain EU-bound migration. Based on an ethnography in Niger in 2018–2019, the article identifies three modes of future-making by refugees and officials in response to these resettlement promises: risk assessment, temporal reordering, and experimentation. In acts of risk assessment, refugees weighed the risks associated with waiting for resettlement and its alternatives against each other. In the asylum procedures, state officials foregrounded refugees’ resettlement hopes over their past persecution and present protection risks. This temporal reordering could lead to rejecting their asylum applications. In acts of experimentation, refugees developed alternative futures when their resettlement eschewed. By developing resettlement promises as a temporal border, the article highlights the role of promises and future-making for migrant containment and its subversion.
Roadsides
Sindhunata Hargyono
Online First: https://doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-202401202
This article introduces the concept of dormant infrastructure as a specific infrastructural temporality pregnant with affective and political potentialities. Dormant infrastructures emerge when infrastructural forms are neither fully operational nor entirely abandoned as failed projects but instead exist in a prolonged state of potentiality. Through the case of a base transceiver station in an Indonesian border subdistrict, the article dissects how dormant infrastructures generate expectation, frustration, and political mobilization while reshaping state-citizen relations in historically marginalized regions.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Stephan Scheel
Online First: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2371207
State authorities in Europe invest immense resources in what the EU insists on calling the ‘fight against illegal migration’. Based on ethnographic research in two German cities, this paper shows that a tough approach towards illegalised migration can only be implemented through state practices that operate at the margins of, or even cross, the boundaries of what is legally permissible. This argument is developed through an analysis of informal practices that frontline staff in registry offices and migration administrations deploy to prevent, or at least disturb, illegalised migrants’ attempts to regularise their status by becoming the parent of child that is entitled to German citizenship. Drawing on the autonomy of migration approach, I use migrants’ struggles within and against Germany’s migration and citizenship regime as an epistemic device to expose three kinds of informally institutionalised counter-tactics of street-level bureaucrats that qualify as unlawfare. The analysis shows that officials, in their attempts to forestall migrants’ practices of self-legalisation, frequently resort to practices that are legally questionable or outright unlawful themselves. Ultimately, not only a tough stance on illegalised migration, but the very production of migrant illegality emerges as contagious as it implicates an illegalisation of state practices.
Geopolitics
Stephan Scheel
Online First: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2024.2368620
Since the 2015 ‘migration crisis’, various measures have been introduced in Europe to enforce deportations. They include detention in prison-like facilities, unannounced executions of deportations at night-time and the scraping of legal safeguards like medical reasons prohibiting deportations. These evidently violent measures are justified with alarmist reports which suggest, supported by statistical knowledge, an ever-widening ‘deportation gap’. The term refers to the divergence between the number of migrants issued with a return order and the much smaller number of deportations. Illustrated through the case of Germany, this article combines insights from ignorance studies with a sociology of translation to show that the claim of a widening deportation gap is a statistical chimera that is based on various kinds and sources of nonknowledge. Contrary to actor-based approaches in ignorance studies, it is argued that this nonknowledge is not reducible to the production of ‘strategic ignorance’ (McGoey 2019) by policy actors seeking to advance their agenda. Rather, the production and circulation of nonknowledge appears to be dispersed and messy as it is facilitated by complex and fragile sociotechnical networks. In this way, a sociology of translation allows scholars to avoid the impression of entertaining a conspirational logic in the study of strategic ignorance and other forms of nonknowledge.
Politics
Stephan Scheel, Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Nicholas de Genova
Online First: https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957241229377
The introduction to the special issue (SI) lays out the agenda and key concepts of the SI ‘COVID Capitalism: The Contested Logistics of Migrant Labour Supply Chains in the Double Crisis’. The contributions to the SI focus on the reconfiguration of the means and methods of the exploitation of migrant labour during the COVID-19 pandemic and the related reorganisation of contemporary border and migration regimes. They all focus, more or less explicitly, on the adaptation and reorganisation of migrant labour supply chains which were disrupted through the ‘double crisis’ of public health and existing border and mobility regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, the SI seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of COVID-capitalism, understood as a form of disaster capitalism, in which fractions of capital try to turn the multiple crises implicated by the pandemic into a source of profit. If and how they succeed with these endeavours is, however, not guaranteed from the outset but an empirical question. The study of migrant labour supply chains does thus not only help to develop a more nuanced understanding of disaster capitalism but also contributes to debates on the logistification of migration management.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 50(9), pp. 2289-2308
Stephan Scheel
Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2307782
In a growing number of destination countries state authorities have started to use various digital devices such as analysis of data captured from mobile phones to verify asylum seekers’ claimed country of origin. This move has prompted some critics to claim that asylum decision-making is increasingly delegated to machines. Based on fieldwork at a reception centre in Germany, this paper mobilises insights from science and technology studies (STS) to develop a framework that allows for more nuanced analyses and modes of critiques of the digitisation of asylum procedures. Rather than thinking human and non-human forms of agency as external to one another in order to juxtapose them in a zero-sum game, I comprehend the introduction of digital technologies as a reconfiguration of existing human-machine configurations. This conception highlights how the use digital technologies enables caseworkers to retain their position as an epistemic authority in asylum decision-making by assembling clues about asylum seekers’ country of origin generated by digital technologies into hard juridical evidence. Subsequently, I develop an alternative critique that focuses on epistemic implications of the digitisation of asylum procedures. I identify a particular version of data colonialism that enables epistemic domination by means of data extraction.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 50(9), pp. 2163-2187
Nina Amelung, Stephan Scheel, Rogier van Reekum
Online First: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2307766
This special issue (SI) calls for reinventing the politics of knowledge production in migration studies. Academic migration research should make knowledge production an essential part of its research agenda if it wants to remain relevant in the transnational field of migration research. A risk of marginalisation stems from three interrelated tendencies: First, non-academic actors producing authoritative knowledge about migration have proliferated in recent years. Secondly, academic knowledge production is challenged both by counter-knowledge produced by social movements as well as new digital methods and information structures owned by policy-oriented and private actors. Thirdly, academics no longer hold a hegemonic position in the transnational field of migration research. The contributions to this SI interrogate the politics of knowledge production on migration along three lines of inquiry: (1) the enactment of migration as an intelligible object of government through practices of quantification, categorisation and visualisation; (2) the production of control knowledge in border encounters about subjects targeted as migrants and (3) the modes of thought seeking to unknow and re-know migration beyond dominant nation-state centric understandings. This introduction elaborates how the nine articles of the SI intervene in the politics of knowledge production in migration studies along these lines of inquiry.