Refugees, migrants, neither, both: categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’
Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: The use of the categories ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ to differentiate\nbetween those on the move and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of\ntheir claims to international protection has featured strongly\nduring Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and has been used to justify\npolicies of exclusion and containment. Drawing on interviews with\n215 people who crossed the Mediterranean to Greece in 2015, our\npaper challenges this ‘categorical fetishism’, arguing that the\ndominant categories fail to capture adequately the complex\nrelationship between political, social and economic drivers of\nmigration or their shifting significance for individuals over time\nand space. As such it builds upon a substantial body of academic\nliterature demonstrating a disjuncture between conceptual and\npolicy categories and the lived experiences of those on the move.\nHowever, the paper is also critical of efforts to foreground or\nprivilege ‘refugees’ over ‘migrants’ arguing that this reinforces\nrather than challenges the dichotomy’s faulty foundations. Rather\nthose concerned about the use of categories to marginalise and\nexclude should explicitly engage with the politics of bounding,\nthat is to say, the process by which categories are constructed,\nthe purpose they serve and their consequences, in order to\ndenaturalise their use as a mechanism to distinguish, divide and\ndiscriminate.
Author: Sandoval García, Carlos
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Award: G1216507550
OpenAlex ID: W7070786281