migration, migrants and human security bp.pdf (original) (raw)

Migration, migrants and human security. Over the last few years, headline news and social media around the world has featured men, women and children who were fleeing large-scale violence, disasters and loss of prospects of livelihood. Their search for safer havens has been interrupted by expanding terrains of state security imperatives on land and seas to prevent migrants from stopping in their territories, incarceration in detention camps within nation-states, and the growth of human smuggling rings that fail to deliver on promises to move people safely. According to the estimates by the United Nations, 63.5 million to be updated before final copyediting; people have fled, or have been forced off their homelands by the end of 2015 1 , and deserts and seas are littered with the bodies of those who perished trying to reach safe havens in recent years (New York Times 2015). Yet the dominant sociological conversations on migration, in the one-third world, continue to focus on migrants' integration within nation states. Bringing an awareness of the disjunctured intersections of political-economic processes that shape migration and migrants' lives, the insights from the scholarship on forced migration, as well as the critical literatures on intersectionality and human rights, this special issue proposes a framework that combines the concepts of human security and glocal, i.e. global-national-local, terrains of migration to frame migrants' experiences. It is time to move beyond the dominant focus on nation-states to understand which entities and structures reach beyond nation-states territorial limits to shape migrants lives prior to, during, and after migration. It is also important to go beyond the focus on human rights, with its assumption about the role and ability of nation-states to guarantee the conditions under which people can build lives of human dignity. The objective of this article is to provide the lens for understanding the entities and structures that affect access to substantive human rights, without losing sight of the migrants' agency to build secure lives. Many diverging circles of conversations now mark studies of migrations and migrants in the one third and two third worlds; these conversations overlap with studies of ethnicities (and the factors that kept migrant groups distinct from mainstreams), diasporas studies (on issues of multiple migrations and the persistence of ties to symbolic homes), and explorations of citizenships (specifically the discussions about the nature of rights granted to migrants in exchange of for their labor). Other 1