Security and Migration in the 21st Century

Elspeth Guild

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745658773
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Inteligencia y espionaje

The 21st century has brought new and challenging dimensions to our understanding of security and migration. The old Cold War framework of security as related to war and peace, international relations and foreign affairs has given way to a multiplicity of competing notions, including internal security, human security and even social security. At the same time, migration has become a hotly contested issue, characterised by an enormous difference of views and objectives.

So what do we mean by security and migration in the contemporary world? How do these two important fields intersect? And what does this collision of policy concerns and public interests mean for states and individuals alike? In this cutting-edge book, Elspeth Guild seeks to answer these pressing questions, drawing on a wide range of recent examples from the impact of asylum seekers on state border security to identity security in citizenship rules to illustrate her arguments. By approaching the topic from the perspective of the individual – citizen of one state, migrant in another – the book examines key aspects of the security-migration nexus, such as the relationship with refugees; torture; extraordinary rendition; privacy and the retention of personal data; and human rights' protection.

The first volume in Polity's new 'Dimensions of Security' series, this book is a must-read for all students of international politics, development studies and related fields.

1

Understanding security and migration in the twenty-first century

What is security? What is migration? Both these questions open hundreds of doors into many different disciplines, theories, practices and landscapes. Security as a term can be found in so many different settings and with so many different meanings that a flourishing academic discipline, security studies, has developed, within which the search for definitions is essentially contested. Anyone trying to get a mortgage will be focusing on a very different idea of security from the ones I will examine in this book. Similarly, the concept of migration can be found in multiple environments which point in completely different directions. For instance, Jacques Perrin’s 2002 film, Le peuple migrateur, translated into English as Winged Migration, achieved an Oscar award nomination in the Best Documentary category but does not include any humans. It is about birds.

Human migration has given rise to an academic discipline – migration studies. Like security studies, it comes within the wider framework of international relations. The focus is on the state as the key actor regarding migration, which is a cross-border activity carried out by individuals. The state may be the state of nationality or origin of migrants or that of their destination. The emphasis in the discipline is on the state and the acts of the state around flows of people.

Both migration studies and security studies as subcategories of political science and international relations tend to reach out towards other fields – human geography, law, history, anthropology, etc. But both remain nested in international relations. It is not surprising, then, that the work of academics in security and migration studies can be classified fairly satisfactorily using the main schools of thought of international relations and political science (Williams 2008). Like security studies, migration studies has some difficulty in determining the scope of its object. Bigo has shown that security studies depends on the enlargement of the insecurity envelope (Bigo 2006). Like blowing up a balloon, the greater the insecurity concerns presented by political actors, the bigger the security issues, and hence the remit of security studies, become. Migration studies has a similar tendency – the bigger the migration flows, the wider the scope for migration studies. As migration flows diminish in some areas (for instance, the forced migration flows to Europe in the beginning of the 2000s), the development of other fields such as security studies provides new points of reference both for political actors (concerns about refugees and terrorism) and for academics (Baldaccini & Guild 2007). In effect, what happens is that foreigners, described in various different ways (migrant, refugee, etc.), become caught in a continuum of insecurity (Bigo 2002). As the foreigner becomes compressed into state-determined categories, those categories are normatively defined, including by reference to insecurity. Political actors may focus on the ‘problem’ and ‘burden’ of asylum seekers one year, then the same or other political actors may rail against economic migrants as the source of insecurity the next. Many insecurity discourses are promoted at any given time – the capacity of one set of political actors successfully to impose their view of the most important one(s) depends on a wide variety of other factors. However, the ease with which the category of the foreigner may be added to an insecurity discourse, with the effect of heightening the perceived seriousness of the threat, remains constant.

In this book I will analyse the intersection of the two fields from the perspective of international political sociology – examining the individual and his or her movement; how the state frames and categorizes him or her as an individual and a migrant, citizen or indeterminate; and how that intersects with the construction of the individual¹ as a security threat. This immediately provokes resistance; the state is not omnipotent. There is a clear correlation between the state-centric approach in migration studies and with that of mainstream security studies. Security studies tend to be dominated by a statist approach heavily influenced by realists, neo-realists and liberals (and neo-liberals). The term ‘critical security studies’ was coined to encompass a move away from these traditions and to examine again the meaning of the political in the definition of security and its study (Krause & Williams 2003). Central to critical security studies is a challenge to the doxa or belief that the academic experts know what the subject of the discipline is, that is to say what security is. Similarly, in this book I will challenge the supposition on which migration studies is based: that we know what migration is and which actors are entitled to determine the political in respect of migration. While critical migration studies has, as yet, not emerged as a separate approach, nonetheless this is the category which this book promotes. Building on critical security studies, I will examine both the subject matter of security (whose security, who is entitled to determine the politics of security) and that of migration (whose migration, who is entitled to determine the politics of migration). The insecurity continuum can be ruptured by the individual challenging his or her categorization: as a foreigner (for instance, I will examine the case of David Hicks in chapter 2), or by moving from the category of ‘terrorist’ to that of refugee (I will consider these cases in chapter 6). Similarly, it can be ruptured by a political decision no longer to treat a category of foreigners as foreign – for instance in the European Union (EU), nationals of one Member State who work and reside in another (I will consider this category in chapter 7).

In the intersection of migration and security, this book moves away from a state-centred focus in which it is the actions of the state alone which define what is political, to an approach which examines the individual and his or her concerns: how does the individual fit into a set of state structural frameworks and become categorized as a threat to security and to state control of migration? These two quite different types of security issues become conflated in much of the discussion: migrants who have escaped the control of the state are defined as security threats because the remit of the state is reconfigured. But even using the concept of migration itself is to think like a state. Individuals do not perceive themselves as migrants or otherwise except by virtue of the coercive prompting of state administrations. Even communities do not live the differentiation of some individuals from others except with a strong state push (for instance as regards the exclusion of undocumented migrants from health services in the UK, proposed in 2008: the general medical association representing doctors refused to participate, maintaining that doctors are not immigration officers).

Before developing further my own approach through international political sociology, it may be useful, briefly, to review the main schools of international relations and position the main academic work on migration and security within them. Starting then with the realist tradition, this framework is based on the idea that there is a monopoly of knowledge which is real and held by academics. According to this point of view, the state and its duty to control both security and migration are self-evident and matters of objective truth. While at its heart pessimistic, the realist approach provides explanations based on the accumulation of power by states for their own exploitation. In the migration field, Weiner represents this school most unambiguously in examining the issues around migration as essentially about state security and self-interest, in respect of which the capacity of individuals to move without state authorization represents a fundamental challenge and threat (Weiner 1997). Against this rather raw approach, liberalism is well represented in migration studies, in particular by those scholars who approach migration regimes in liberal democracies through the contradictions. While on the one hand they acknowledge the public discourse of some actors which is virulently anti-migrant, on the other they examine the generally liberal outcomes in democratic states’ migration regimes (Cornellius, Martin & Hollifield 1994). In the Marxist tradition, the focus places migration within a framework of economic struggle. The way in which states treat migration as part of their economic strategies and the struggles around the exploitation of migrant workers are central to this approach. In The Age of Migration, Castles and Miller’s central element, which informs the whole work, is the relationship of migration with capitalism and the organization of labour: ‘the consequential decline of working class parties and trade unions and the erosion of local communicative networks” resulting from migration create the conditions for virulent racism (Castles & Miller 2003). The work of Robin Cohen also comes within this general group, looking, as it does, at how the preferences, interests and actions of global capital intersect with labour migration (R. Cohen 2006).

Migration as a threat to social cohesion and the right of communities to determine their membership is central to a Communitarian approach to the field. Attention is focused on the sub-state level of community and the relationship of community with the state – how do the state’s activities in allowing migration flows affect community coherence (Kymlicka 1995; Etzioni 2004)? One of the difficulties with this approach as applied to migration is that it leads towards a crystallization of the idea of community which excludes change. Constructivist theorists have taken a substantial interest in the migration–security nexus, in particular through the works of Buzan, Waever and Kelstrup. The identities and interests of international actors become central in international relations. They examine the ways in which social construction of interests transforms individuals into foreigners who are perceived as a threat, as opposed to citizens (Waever, Buzan, Kelstrup & Lemaitre 1993). Sassen represents one of the most interesting voices in the constructivist/normative framing of migration. Focusing on the relationship of structure and agent and how the mechanisms work by which institutions are produced by certain sets of practices, conceptualization beyond the state becomes easier. There is, however, a strong normative setting directed at how practices are regulated or produced by norms. Her point of departure is globalization – of which the movement of immigrants is one manifestation – placed not so much in the state setting as in that of the city (Sassen 2006). Because of the strong focus on the construction and impact of norms there is a tendency towards the aspirational in this trend. Here the work of Rubio-Marin fits, examining migration from the perspective of civic membership and exclusion (Rubio-Marin 2000). While this approach is richer than the strictly state-centric ones, its focus on the impacts of globalization generates criticism that it is partial. Critical theory, in particular through the work of Habermas on citizenship, provides another prism of analysis in the field of migration. Its focus on a critique of domination bringing together social and cultural analytical tools, has proven attractive as a way to engage belonging and movement in a normative societal setting (Habermas 1992). This has opened a new debate on belonging and exclusion, primarily developed at the intersection of theory and philosophy (Follesdal 2001; Mertens 2008). However, it is through feminist theory that the focus of migration studies shifts substantially towards the individual, primarily women and their position as migrants in patriarchal statist structures (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2002), though the public policy debate is still very much present (Vargas 2003).

More recently, international political sociology has focused on the relationship of the individual with power and authority, in particular through the constitution of power and authority: how do individuals become categorized as migrants or not. Here it is the role of individuals and their resistance to state political actors which is the subject of investigation: what are the challenges to the state’s categorization of the individual? Bigo and Huysmans, coming from critical security studies, develop the analysis of migration and security through the sociology of power and its constitution (Bigo 2002; Huysmans 2006). I have chosen this framework in which to examine the nexus of security and migration. In particular, I avoid analysing the constitution of authority and power as an exclusively state attribute which is then applied to flows of people. Instead I look at the individuals and their struggles to achieve authority and voice against the overarching framework promoted by political actors, in particular in liberal democracies. By refusing to accept the disappearance of the individual into an undifferentiated flow of people which is then directed (or not, as the case may be) by state actors or processes, I seek to reveal the construction and deconstruction of assumptions about migration, identity and security. My contention is that the assumptions about groups of persons – in the case of migration, flows or stocks of migrants – are easily manipulated by political actors. When the flow is disaggregated into the individuals with their individual struggles and objectives in aspiring to constitute authority, a very different analysis is possible, though this is often one which is disturbing to statist approaches and presuppositions. As Stanley Cohen has so seminally shown in criminology, it is through the deconstruction of the mechanisms of authority in state-centric and media discourses that we can understand how society operates (S. Cohen 2003). His choice of asylum seekers and refugees as one of the groups through which to update his thesis in the introduction to the third edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics is symptomatic. The vitriolic discussion about forced migrants and migration promoted by a variety of political and media actors can have real social consequences; Cohen points to the stabbing of an asylum seeker in Glasgow following attacks on ‘bogus’ asylum seekers in the media. The acts and aspirations of individuals count when analysing migration – both within the state and within the migration flow.

Critical security?

Security cannot be reduced to one element. Rather it can only be understood in relation to power – either more power provides more security (the Cold War scenario in which more military technology was considered essential to security) or security is based on relationships among actors and thus not a commodity at all (Williams 2008). Critical security studies began the investigation into the object of security studies – the meaning of security itself. It is within this rich discipline that the questions I pose about security are best situated (Krause & Williams 2003). One thing which is generally accepted about security is that there is a tension between collective security and security of the individual. While, in the name of collective security, measures are taken which have direct and immediate impacts on the security of the individual, the safeguarding of security for an individual may constitute a challenge to the dominant framing of the requirements of collective security. This is particularly so when the individual concerned is a foreigner (Huysmans 2006). In liberal democracies, measures taken in the name of security are taken for the good of the collectivity, that is the individuals who are entitled to voice within the community. That these measures may reduce the security of any one individual is inevitable. For example, decisions about the allocation of police resources will result in some individuals having better access than others. Changes to social benefits rules will result in great social security for one individual but not necessarily for another.

A tension also exists regarding the composition of the collectivity which is entitled to security. Depending on the way in which we are using the term ‘security’ and in respect of which set of relationships, some individuals will be fully included but others less so (Fierke 2007). For instance, the state sanction of social relationships through marriage is intended, among other things, to provide financial security for the economically weaker partner on the realization of specific events (such as death, divorce, etc.). The struggle of same-sex partners to enjoy this state sanction and the security which goes with it has taken up substantial amounts of parliamentary time in many liberal democracies. The question of inclusion or exclusion from the relationships of security varies depending on how one is using the term ‘security’ and for what purpose. Security is, then, most frequently about inclusion, exclusion and choices about sacrifice (Walker 2009). Decisions of this kind are the result of struggles around the constitution of legitimate authority.

Similarly, there is a tension between internal security and external security. The political debates on what types of security individuals should enjoy within the state, whether these be in the form of social security benefits or the length of detention before charge (which was a very hot issue in the UK parliament in 2008), take place within highly structured constitutions which constrain the variations possible. The institutions engaged in security within the state are multiple – for instance social affairs and health ministries concern themselves with limiting the risk of pandemics killing many people, the police and criminal justice departments occupy themselves with the question of crime: what it is, who commits it and how they should be punished. The more widely the concept of security is defined, the more state activities fall within its remit. External security, on the other hand, is more limited. In its classic form it is concerned with the physical integrity of the state – ensuring that the state is not overrun by some other state. The institutions most engaged with this form of security are the military and the foreign ministries. However, the boundaries between these two types of security are by no means as clear as first appears (Bigo 2001). Separatist and nationalist movements within parts of states may challenge the physical integrity of the state more fundamentally than any foreign country. Interior ministries may play an increasingly important role in foreign affairs – making extradition agreements with other countries so that the reach of national criminal law can extend into other states and catch individuals, or readmission agreements whereby states will accept back into their territory foreigners who have passed through it on their way somewhere else.

In this book I will be most concerned with the relationship of security, in many of its different forms, with the individual who is not defined as intrinsically belonging to the collectivity: the foreigner. Among the fields of security which will be central in this book are:

•	sovereign, state or national security – the state’s right to determine its borders, who crosses them and what the consequences of crossing a border are;
•	security, policing and crime – what a crime is and how it relates to the foreigner;
•	security categorization and identity – the state’s power to define the identity of its citizens and thereby exclude others who are not accepted as such;
•	welfare and social security – the allocation of resources to protect the individual.

Undoubtedly, for many readers, security is associated with war, strategic studies and international relations. However, my understanding is wider than this conventional one. By bringing into the security equation history, sociology, law and other disciplines which themselves have long and quite independent definitions of ‘security’, it is possible to attempt a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of the relationships involved (Fierke 2007). The definitional problems are part of the changing field of security studies which, until the great failings of the field at the end of t...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Understanding security and migration in the twenty-first century
• 2. Migration, citizenship and the state
• 3. Migration, expulsion and the state
• 4. Armed conflict, flight and refugees
• 5. Migration, torture and the complicit state
• 6. Migration and data: documenting the non-national
• 7. Economy and migration
• 8. Foreigners, trafficking and globalization
• 9. Sovereignty, security and borders
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index