Crisis and Migration

Critical Perspectives

Anna Lindley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136157257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Crisis and migration have a long association, in popular and policy discourse as well as in social scientific analysis. Despite the emergence of more nuanced and even celebratory accounts of mobility in recent years, there remains a persistent emphasis on migration being either a symptom or a cause of crisis. Moreover, in the context of a recent series of headline-hitting and politically controversial situations, terms like 'migration crisis' and 'crisis migration' are acquiring increasing currency among policy-makers and academics.

Crisis and Migration provides fresh perspectives on this routine association, critically examining a series of politically controversial situations around the world. Drawing on first-hand research into the Arab uprisings, conflict and famine in the Horn of Africa, cartel violence in Latin America, the global economic crisis, and immigration 'crises' from East Asia to Southern Africa to Europe, the book's contributors situate a set of contemporary crises within longer histories of social change and human mobility, showing the importance of treating crisis and migration as contextualised processes, rather than isolated events.

By exploring how migration and crisis articulate as lived experiences and political constructs, the book brings migration from the margins to the centre of discussions of social transformation and crisis; illuminates the acute politicisation and diverse spatialisations of crisis–migration relationships; and urges a nuanced, cautious and critical approach to associations of crisis and migration.

1 Exploring crisis and migration

Concepts and issues

Anna Lindley

DOI: 10.4324/9780203078846-1

Crisis and migration have a long association, in popular and policy discourse as well as in social scientific analysis. Many crisis situations are associated with significant out-migration and displacement, and in-migration is often associated with tensions or conflict at destination. Moreover, there is a deep well of sedentarist thinking, which in some sense frames migration as crisis, and staying put as the natural and desirable human condition. Despite the relatively recent emergence of more nuanced and even celebratory accounts of mobility, the tendency to link migration with crisis in a strongly negative fashion remains deeply entrenched and vigorously persistent.

Since the mid-2000s, alongside protracted conflict situations, a series of new crises with strong migratory elements have hit the headlines, from the uprisings across the Arab world, the global economic crisis, the East African drought, to mega-disasters like the Haitian earthquake and the typhoon in the Philippines. Meanwhile, tensions around migration are mounting, sometimes culminating in severe backlashes, from Kuala Lumpur to Johannesburg to Athens, and with daily tragedies in the Mediterranean, the Sahara and other border zones. Terms like ‘crisis migration’ and ‘migration crisis’ are acquiring increasing and renewed currency among academics and policy-makers alike.

Notions of crisis and migration have some intriguing parallels. Both are often viewed as exceptional phenomena – crisis as occurring beyond the realms of ‘normal’ development and change, migration as occurring across the borders that structure politics, society and thinking about the social world. Both are often viewed as threatening, crisis as jeopardising social systems and human welfare; migration as undermining the integrity of the nation-state and bounded identities. At the same time, both are often described as characteristic of the contemporary world: scholars proclaim that we are in an ‘age of crisis’ and an ‘age of migration’ (Castles and Miller, 2009; Solimano, 2010). Together, crisis and migration have a powerful contemporary resonance.

Our aim in this book is to provide some fresh perspectives on this routine association, taking a critical look at how crisis and migration articulate, as lived experiences and as political constructs, by examining a range of situations around the world. As a first step, this opening chapter explores ways of conceptualising crisis and migration, sketching out key issues and inter-linkages; and then outlines the approach, structure, and emerging themes of the book.

Crisis?

Crisis is a concept both loud and vague. It demands our attention, communicating a sense of danger and urgency, implying the overturning of normal life, racing to the top of political agendas, demanding social scientific scrutiny. At the same time, rhetorically inflated, analytically unspecific ‘crisis-talk’ abounds (Holton, 1987). Crisis means different things to different people: the identification of a crisis often depends critically on the perceptions and pronouncements of dominant actors, which may reflect to a rather variable extent objectively measurable indicators and people’s real-life experiences (Boin, 2004). However, two particular qualities frequently recur in descriptions of crisis situations: (1) that they are not normal; and (2) that they are bad. These merit some discussion.

First, crises are typically defined in relation to a notion of normality, implying some form of marked discontinuity, a ‘breaking point in a patterned process of linearity’ (ibid.: 167). The assumption is that the discontinuity is marked, even dramatic, clearly distinguishable from both incremental processes of change, and from on-going situations of threat and embedded vulnerability. Crises are often viewed as critical turning points in history (Habermas, 1976). ¹ They may be rapid onset situations (involving a sudden rupture with the normal pattern), or slower onset (in the form of a cumulative intensification/crescendo of events, or a trend of change reaching a critical threshold or tipping point). Trajectories vary. Some crises teeter on the edge and are averted, the threatened damage not inflicted; others blossom into full-blown disasters. Some are short-lived; others become protracted over long periods of time. Generally the use of the term crisis implies the expectation or possibility in principle of an ending, where normality is re-established. This may involve the restoration of the old status quo or it may involve a wholesale transformation, or selective reform/reorganisation. Whatever their particular shape, however, crises are conventionally viewed as, by definition, an exceptional turn of events.

The second recurring quality in conventional descriptions of crisis is the idea that they are bad: that they entail a severe threat or damage to important human needs and goals. Crises are often conceptualised in relation to entire social systems: as the moment when due to external disturbances and/or inherent internal contradictions, a social system cannot continue to exist as before: its essential structures are under threat (Boin, 2004). Here, the identity and survival of ‘society as we know it’ are under threat. But crises not only affect social systems writ large, but may also be identified unfolding at various other scales and in various realms of human affairs. The threat may concern the physical, material, psychological welfare or security of a particular individual, family or population group. Or particular economic, social or political institutions may be in jeopardy: often we talk about a crisis in the markets, of the family, of government regimes, or the nation-state itself. Some crises are humanitarian emergencies, overwhelming people’s capacity to cope without external assistance. Others are more political in nature, and may or may not translate into major suffering among the population. However, the term crisis generally implies a threat of some severity and pervasive impact across various scales and dimensions of human life and may be seen as ‘ill-structured messes’ of policy problem (Mitroff et al., 2004: 175; Vigh, 2008).

Clearly, these key elements are subject to nuance and debate. Empirical facts ‘require an interpretative framework for actors to make sense of them, and for specific events to be recognised as representing a “crisis”’ (Broome et al., 2012: 11). Different branches of social theory take rather different views of crisis.

Crises are a central and recurring feature of the painful progression of capitalism in Marxist analysis, part of its characteristic dialectic of creation and destruction (Marx, 1995; Harvey, 2011). Processes of primitive accumulation dispossess producers and force them to work as wage labourers, forming a cheap and flexible ‘reserve army of labour’ that facilitates industrial expansion, and the management of recurrent crises of accumulation. Debate continues about how cumulative crises can generate class struggle and alternatives to capitalism (Saad Filho, 2011).

By contrast, functionalist understandings of modern social order stretching back to Durkheim have interpreted the increasingly complex division of labour in industrial societies as leading to a new style of social integration, sometimes generating anomie and conflict as a temporary result of the rapid pace of change, but generally producing social systems that tend to be self-regulating and harmonious, underpinned by shared values and interdependent elements and practices (Giddens, 1971; Preston, 1996).

When post-Second World War optimism that the rest of the world could emulate Western-style modernisation began to run aground, neoclassical economics provided a modified, but still basically functionalist vision of development, emphasising the free movement of capital, goods and labour as ultimately leading to equilibrium and convergence (Friedman, 2002). Facing early resistance to their policy prescriptions of privatisation, deregulation and state reduction, neoliberal policy advocates concluded that: ‘Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change’ (ibid.: xiv). Time and again, economic ‘shock therapy’ has been administered in contexts of crisis, transition, states of emergency, authoritarian rule and fragile post-conflict situations (Cramer, 2006; Klein, 2008; Van Hear, 2006). While providing lucrative opportunities for some, such reforms were experienced as a crisis by many people around the world. Nevertheless, crisis is often conceptualised within this framework as a disruption best managed by deepening neoliberal reform, rather than fundamentally challenging to the overall development vision (Williamson, 1994).

Thus, contrasting theories of social change and development critically shape understandings of crisis. The same system modification may be viewed as either triggering dissolution and system collapse, or as a learning process and system modification, depending on the degree of importance the observer attaches to the maintenance of a static system identity (Habermas, 1976). Moreover, whereas the broadly ‘developmentalist’ approaches described above tend to conceptualise crisis in relation to progressive, on-going processes of change, others think about crisis rather as punctuating extended periods of statis viewed as characteristic of complex social systems (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993).

Approaches to studying crisis vary, but there are several broad lines of enquiry, albeit somewhat overlapping. They variously focus on triggers and exceptionality; wider structural processes; lived experiences; and political constructions of crisis. Conventional approaches tend to view crisis as an exceptional event disrupting normal liberal development pathways. This tends to go with a focus on specific triggers and consequences of crisis, as a necessary foundation for some form of pre-emptive or remedial policy response (Broome et al., 2012). Efforts focus on the objective measurement of particular variables deemed to reflect discontinuity and threat, often at quite high levels of geographic aggregation. Use is made of some form of crisis threshold on continuous scales of measurement, deemed to approximate significant social shifts. ² A basic challenge here is uncertainty: in severe crisis situations, data systems are often disrupted and there is a limited statistical evidence base (Boin, 2004).

While there is a strong association of crisis with more acute, rapid onset situations, these often have longer build-up periods and deeper structural causes that are not always fully acknowledged. Revisionist work challenges the notion of crises as exceptional events, and urges us to put crisis into context, taking a more process-oriented approach (Rosenthal, 2003). This requires tracking back from the triggering event(s), to understand underlying structural factors, processes of disintegration, and exploring the internal dynamics of crisis (Roux-Dufort, 2007). It shifts the focus from coping with consequences and victims to addressing causes and culprits (ibid.).

This kind of difference – between emphasising triggers and exceptionality, or structural processes – is reflected in contrasting analyses of violent conflict. For example, Collier et al. conceptualise civil war as ‘development in reverse’ (2003: i), an aberration of development with damaging consequences at home and abroad; they focus on identifying risk factors for conflict through analysis of large-scale datasets. More process-oriented political economy analysis suggests that violence may not be an aberration, but rather ‘actually existing development’, arising from the structural difficulties of late transitions to capitalism in a particular kind of global economic and political setting (Cramer, 2006; Duffield, 2007: 183).

A second approach focuses on the lived experiences and practices of people on the ground and on their perceptions and narratives of crisis, through ‘bottom-up’ research. This has contributed to a much more nuanced understanding of threats and their...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Exploring crisis and migration: concepts and issues
• 2 Migration and ‘crisis’ in the Middle East and North Africa region
• 3 Histories and contemporary challenges of crisis and mobility in Somalia
• 4 Criminal violence and displacement in Mexico: evidence, perceptions and politics
• 5 The global economic crisis and East Asian labour migration: a crisis of migration or struggles of labour?
• 6 Crisis, enforcement and control at the EU borders
• 7 The social construction of (non-)crises and its effects: government discourse on xenophobia, immigration and social cohesion in South Africa
• 8 Imagined threats, manufactured crises and ‘real’ emergencies: the politics of border closure in the face of mass refugee influx
• 9 Crisis? Which crisis? Families and forced migration
• Index