Refugees, migrants, neither, both: categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’
The use of the categories ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ to differentiate between those on the move and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of their claims to international protection has featured strongly during Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and has been used to justify policies of exclusion and containment....
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| Formato: | informe científico |
| Lenguaje: | English |
| Publicado: |
Taylor & Francis
2019
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| Acceso en línea: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1348224 http://repositorio.iis.ucr.ac.cr/handle/123456789/376 |
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| Sumario: | The use of the categories ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ to differentiate
between those on the move and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of
their claims to international protection has featured strongly
during Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and has been used to justify
policies of exclusion and containment. Drawing on interviews with
215 people who crossed the Mediterranean to Greece in 2015, our
paper challenges this ‘categorical fetishism’, arguing that the
dominant categories fail to capture adequately the complex
relationship between political, social and economic drivers of
migration or their shifting significance for individuals over time
and space. As such it builds upon a substantial body of academic
literature demonstrating a disjuncture between conceptual and
policy categories and the lived experiences of those on the move.
However, the paper is also critical of efforts to foreground or
privilege ‘refugees’ over ‘migrants’ arguing that this reinforces
rather than challenges the dichotomy’s faulty foundations. Rather
those concerned about the use of categories to marginalise and
exclude should explicitly engage with the politics of bounding,
that is to say, the process by which categories are constructed,
the purpose they serve and their consequences, in order to
denaturalise their use as a mechanism to distinguish, divide and
discriminate. |
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