Forced Migration Management and Social Control: Shifting Mobility Regimes for Refugees and IDPs in Ukraine

• In Event: 4266 - Noncitizen Political Activism

Abstract

Traditional as well as new countries of immigration have developed a wide range of methods to attempt to prevent the arrival of potential refugees on their territory from afar. But, how does the control of asylum migration operate internationally and internally, and how are these modes of control organizationally related? Migration scholars have paid attention to extraterritorial control by Global North states from afar, while refugee studies have investigated the ways in international humanitarian policies reproduce similar dynamics inside countries of the Global South. Though studies of “remote control” and refugees converge, global humanitarian affairs are rarely studied in the context of policy in transit and buffer countries between South and North. Using an institutional ethnography of international refugee and state IDP policy in Ukraine, this paper explores the diffusion of forced migration policy from the international to national scales, and between different populations—from refugees to the internally displaced. Interviews with refugees and refugee and IDP-serving agencies identify the ways in which even humanitarian policies aimed at the local integration may instead reinforce social exclusion by way of promoting territorial control of displaced people in unsafe spaces—countries and regions within them. The paper concludes with suggestions for studying the link between migration and refugee policy at the international and state levels, the diffusion and migration policy regimes from North to South, and local integration solutions from the international to the state level.

Author

• Raphi Rechitsky, National University