Description
The migration-security nexus is a well-known and controversial feature of the liberal peacebuilding model, wherein peacebuilders frame and manage migration as a security issue in order to contain conflicts and displaced people. Many critics of the liberal peace have previously called for the desecuritisation of migration as the most normatively desirable outcome for local people in conflict settings and as a necessary prerequisite to build sustaining peace. More recently, theorists have found that desecuritisation is a complex and dynamic process that rarely manifests as the undoing of securitisation. This paper theoretically builds on this literature to consider how the securitisation of migration can be undone in the post-liberal peacebuilding agenda. Focusing on the European Union’s interventions in Mali, the paper employs post-structuralist discourse analysis to identify and critically examine three main logics behind the migration-security nexus: humanitarianism, societal security, and risk management. The analysis shows that effective desecuritisation must go beyond problem-solving approaches to continuously challenge and delegitimise the very epistemological foundations that sustain each of these logics. The paper also finds that non-state actors on the peripheries of peacebuilding circles are particularly well-placed as desecuritising agents due to their liminal position as both institutional insiders and outsiders.
