The Postcolonial Migration State in the Global South

• In Event: Migration and Restriction in the Global South

Abstract

The evolution of migration policymaking across the Global South is of growing interest to international relations. Yet, the impact of colonial and imperial legacies on states’ migration management regimes outside Europe and North America continues to be under-theorized. How does postcolonial state formation shape policies of cross-border mobility management in the Global South? To address this, we bring James F. Hollifield’s framework of the contemporary ‘migration state’ in conversation with critical social sciences scholarship on postcolonialism in order to identify two sets of tensions across newly-independent states of the Global South: firstly, the need to construct a modern sovereign nation-state with a well-defined national identity tended to contrast with the weak institutional capacity to do so; secondly, the territorial realities of sovereignty conflicted with the imperatives of nation-building that sought to establish exclusive citizenship norms towards national populations residing both inside and outside the boundaries of the postcolonial state. We argue that, by increasingly relying on cross-border mobility control policies to reconcile past tensions, the ‘postcolonial state’ transforms into a ‘postcolonial migration state’ showing distinct continuities (and departures) from colonial-era patterns. In particular, postcolonial migration states become actively engaged in the surveillance and control of segmented migration streams that redistribute labour for the global economy. We demonstrate this empirically via a comparative study of post-independence migration management in India and Egypt, while also aiming to merge a problematic regional divide between Global South scholarship on the Middle East and South Asia.

Authors

• Gerasimos Tsourapas, University of Glasgow

• Kamal Sadiq, University of California, Irvine