Call for papers for a panel for the 2018 APAD International Conference “Migrations, Development and Citizenship”, Roskilde, Denmark, 23-25 Mai 2018, deadline 10 January 2018
http://apad-association.org/en/2018-conference/
‘Citizens on the Move: political participation and protracted displacement in Europe’
Panel convened by Dr Tanja Müller, Associate Professor, Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester and Dr Cathy Wilcock, Research Associate and Co-ordinator at The Manchester Migration Lab, The University of Manchester
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This panel will address the issue of migrant political agency. It will ask how forms of political participation and mobilisation are made possible by citizens on the move. Specifically, we will consider the ways in which migrants encounter, and then navigate, the various policy regimes which are either designed to, or have the effect of, restricting their political agency.
Within EU policy and in the border regimes of EU member states, migration policy programmes are generally designed to defeat irregular migration and its links with terrorism. Policy making around migration - including border regimes and naturalisation or integration policies - has largely been framed by those with an interest in controlling and managing migration, and have recently been underpinned by tenuous and undertheorized links between migration and political extremism. This results in a tendency to make migration policies which dampen down the demand for non-labour-necessary migration and shut off safe routes. The effect on these citizens on the move is that their political agency is continually managed and supressed.
At the same time, asylum regimes and associated aid programmes mean that forcibly displaced people are often held for years in temporary or precarious situations. The increasing militarisation and privatisation of the aid industry, as well as the judgement processes which decide who is a deserving and who is an underserving migrant, rely on legal mechanisms which are unwieldy, slow and increasingly unaccountable and untransparent. During this time, citizens on the move are faced with situations in which they are systematically denied the rights which would allow them to exert political agency in order to protect themselves.
The migration policy environments which define the boundaries of migrant experiences ostensibly impinge on the political agency of refugees, asylum seekers and self-identifying forced migrants. However, communities all over Europe mobilise to participate politically in both their home and hostlands. Solidarity movements and citizen activism are fostered and made possible, as well as a remittance-sending industry which is, in many developing contexts, twice that of overseas aid. Recently, Europe has seen the formation of political parties by migrant communities in response to the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim parties across the continent.
In such situations of protracted displacement how is political participation made possible? How can moving citizens make themselves effective political agents in order to protect their own rights and in order to drive political changes in all of the societies where they are invested, socially, economically and culturally?
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