Borders Mobilities And Migrations

The book examines in changes in the social, economic and political processes behind the creation of mechanisms for the management of people's mobility and cohabitation in the Mediterranean region. The approach is historical and comparative. Issues of state control, border economies, urban coexistence, heritage and memory are studied.

The crossing of national state borders is one of the most-discussed issues of contemporary times and it poses many challenges for individual and collective identities. This concerns both short-distance mobility as well as long-distance migration. Choosing to move - or not - across international borders is a complex decision, involving both cognitive and emotional processes. This book tests the approach that three crucial thresholds need to be crossed before mobility occurs; the individual’s mindset about migrating, the choice of destination and perception of crossing borders to that location and the specific routes and spatial trajectories available to get there. Thus both borders and trajectories can act as thresholds to spatial moves. The threshold approach, with its focus on processes affecting whether, when and where to move, aims to understand the decision-making process in all its dimensions, in the hope that this will lead to a better understanding of the ways migrants conceive, perceive and undertake their transnational journeys. This book examines the three constitutive parts discerned in the cross-border mobility decision-making process: people, borders and trajectories and their interrelationships. Illustrated by a global range of case studies, it demonstrates that the relation between the three is not fixed but flexible and that decision-making contains aspects of belonging, instability, security and volatility affecting their mobility or immobility.

The Making of Migration addresses the rapid phenomenon that has become one of the most contentious issues in contemporary life: how are migrants governed as individual subjects and as part of groups? What are the modes of control, identification and partitions that migrants are subjected to? Bringing together an ethnographically grounded analysis of migration, and a critical theoretical engagement with the security and humanitarian modes of governing migrants, the book pushes us to rethink notions that are central in current political theory such as "multiplicity" and subjectivity. This is an innovative and sophisticated study; deploying migration as an analytical angle for complicating and reconceptualising the emergence of collective subjects, mechanisms of individualisation, and political invisibility/visibility. A must-read for students of Migration Studies, Political Geography, Political Theory, International Relations, and Sociology.

This volume addresses processes of human mobility in times of crisis from different scientific perspectives and at a global and trans-regional level. The first part sets out to discuss established paradigms in migration studies and politics in order to suggest new approaches to analyse mobility, migration and to challenge boundary making approaches. The second part presents empirical cases from Latin America and Spain to demonstrate how migrants challenge, negotiate and mobilize citizenship and belonging. The third part deals with the question how belonging is produced and identity is constructed at a transnational level. New information and communication technologies, human mobility but also the mobility of concepts, ideas and values foster these collectivization processes across and within physical and symbolic borders.

This book examines social, economic and political issues in West, Eastern and Southern Africa in relation to borders, human mobility and regional integration. In the process, it highlights the innovative aspects of human agency on the African continent, and presents a range of empirical case studies that shed new light on Africa’s social, economic and political realities. Further, the book explores cooperation between African nation-states, including their historical socioeconomic interconnections and governance of transboundary natural resources. Moreover, the book examines the relationship between the spatial mobility of borders and development, and the migration regimes of nation-states that share contiguous borders in different geographic territories. Further topics include the coloniality of borders, sociocultural and ethnic relations, and the impact of physical borders on human mobility and wellbeing. Given its scope, the book represents a unique resource that offers readers a wealth of new insights into today’s Africa.

This work discusses the unprecedented challenges that the movement of peoples across national borders poses for the people involved as well as for the places to which they travel and their countries of origin.

A critical assessment from the perspective of political and legal theory of how shifting borders impact on migration, mobility and the protection of displaced persons

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and experiencing the extreme challenges of urbanization. In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller makes a passionate argument for a new understanding of the contemporary crisis of movement. Sheller shows how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement. She connects the body, street, city, nation, and planet in one overarching theory of the modern, perpetually shifting world. Concepts of mobility are examined on a local level in the circulation of people, resources, and information, as well as on an urban scale, with questions of public transport and “the right to the city.” On the planetary level, she demands that we rethink the reality where tourists and other elites are able to roam freely, while migrants and those most in need are abandoned and imprisoned at the borders. Mobility Justice is a new way to understand the deep flows of inequality and uneven accessibility in a world in which the mobility commons have been enclosed. It is a call for a new understanding of the politics of movement and a demand for justice for all.

The upheavals of the Arab Spring grabbed the world’s immediate attention, and concern quickly grew over their potential aftermath, with the fear that a ‘tidal wave’ of immigrants and refugees would ‘flood’ European territory. The Arab Spring has highlighted the Mediterranean as a migration region, and new research is now required to bring to light too often neglected mobility patterns and border practices that predate and outlast the tumultuous spring of 2011. The edited volume Space, Mobility and Borders in the Western Mediterranean tackles these contemporary issues related to migration in the Mediterranean region. It brings together high-quality, original academic contributions from both empirical and theoretical points of view by scholars from diverse disciplines, who draw upon Anglophone, Francophone, Spanish and Italian research. It reexamines borders in the light of a now full-blown body of literature that seeks to capture the complexity of their contemporary features beyond their most direct visual enactments, in particular the sweeping deployment of policing devices and operations along the North/South fault line. Another distinctive binding thread in this book is that it emphasizes migrants as active subjects interacting with local events, national policies and the bordering process. Offering an examination of the intricate interplay among the events of the Arab Spring, migration’s multiple types and actors, and the evolving relationship between migration control and borders in the region, this book is an essential resource for students and scholars of migration studies, European Union Studies and Mediterranean Studies.