Description
Male deaths in the Mediterranean outnumbered female deaths by more than 2:1 in nine out of the last ten years for which data has been collected by the Missing Migrants Project. Yet, we do not need such drastic statistics to problematise the silences around the role that young men play in regimes of mobility management. Young men loom large in the imagination of mobility policy-makers and development practitioners when norms are formulated, without being intelligible as subjects to be protected.
Much literature and practice in migration management understands gender as ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe, 2014). Such constructions are critically analysed as monolithic, reductive and homogenous (Mohanty, 1988). Men are rendered equally undifferentiated as ‘subjects-who-perpetrate-violence’ (Mohanty, 1988:67). More recently ‘so-called “redundant” populations of underemployed racialized men’ (Cowan and Siciliano, 2011: 1516) were problematised.
We will contribute to thinking about these political formations, how they interact with innovations in norm-making in quasi-legal pacts. These pacts speak of vulnerabilities and protection, the question is who exactly is protectable? We seek to complicate the idea of gender when it comes to norms of protection and engage the politico-administrative and legal structures that make masculinity. We draw on fieldwork undertaken in both East and West Africa.
