Description
The security-migration nexus is ubiquitous throughout Europe and beyond. An avalanche of scholarship has explored the construction of migration as a security threat in general and, in the case of the UK, the creation of the ‘hostile environment’ in particular – the problematic nature of each being well documented. Yet, far less attention has been paid to activities that contest this process. Utilising Balzacq’s four modalities of contestation – desecuritisation, resistance, emancipation and resilience – this article addresses the imbalance, exploring how asylum and refugee-advocacy NGOs, as vital, under-explored actors in the security drama, engage in and contest security-migration politics. Using Scotland (2018-19) as an illustrative case and adopting an inductive, practice-centred approach to contestation, findings demonstrate that NGOs are successfully contesting the security-migration nexus in Scotland, supporting the ‘surviving’ and ‘thriving’ of asylum seeker and refugee communities, problematising previous conceptualisations of ‘UK’ asylum and refugee politics, with implications extending far beyond UK shores. The article helps refine the theorisation of contestation by demonstrating the value of attending to both atypical security actors and contestation practices, as well as showing the applicability of ‘modalities’ of contestation to be dependent on the practice in question, elucidating the blindness of single-modality studies to critical insights.
