Description
This panel examines the intersections of colonialism, citizenship and the migration-security nexus. Contemporary migration scholarship explores the migration-security nexus through its instruments, practices, and impact on populations in a hypersecuritised context. Less discussed is the role of colonial practices, discourses and lived experiences that affect this relationship. With this objective, this panel interrogates how a postcolonial lens provides a critical framework through which the migration-security nexus can be understood and challenged. First, colonial rationalities govern practices of control, surveillance and policing with an increasing trend toward the blending of criminal and immigration institutions. Second, hierarchies of migrant and citizen populations continue to be ordered according to colonial notions of race, gender and class, drawing attention to those who are positioned as dangerous, disposable and deportable. Third, colonial renderings of the migration-security nexus trouble binaries of what is traditionally conceived as local/global, citizen/non-citizen and us/them, as well as challenging concepts of sovereignty and citizenship.
