Alison Mountz

Where asylum-seekers wait: feminist counter-topographies of sites between states

This article examines topographies and counter-topographies of power operating transnationally across a range of sites inhabited by asylum-seekers en route between nation-states. In locations such as tunnels, detention centers and islands, journeys across time and space are truncated in myriad ways. For asylum-seekers, temporality is often conceptualized as waiting, limbo or suspension. These temporal zones map onto corresponding spatial ambiguities theorized here as liminality, exception and threshold. A feminist counter-topography of sites along time–space trajectories between states addresses both the architecture of exclusionary enforcement practices that capture bodies, and the transgressive struggles to map, locate, counter and migrate through the time–space trajectories between states. In outlining such counter-topography, the analysis enters into conversation with transnational feminist scholarship on politics of location and differentiation in order to challenge the universal dimensions of Giorgio Agambens zones of exception that leave the un-differentiated body always paradoxically outside of juridical order.

Conceptualizing detention: Mobility, containment, bordering, and exclusion

Detention is a pressing empirical, conceptual, and political issue. Detained populations, detention facilities, and industries have expanded globally. Detention is also a fundamentally geographical topic, yet largely overlooked by geographers. We argue that detention be conceptualized as a series of geographical processes. Operating through these processes are contradictory sets of temporal and spatial logics that structure the seemingly paradoxical geographies underpinning detention. These logics include containment and mobility, bordering and exclusion. We trace these logics through an emergent literature, synthesizing and analyzing important geographic themes in the field. We identify contributions by and new avenues of inquiry for geographers.

Migration management for the benefit of whom? Interrogating the work of the International Organization for Migration

This paper examines the relationship between the nation-state and migration through the activities of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM operates at the intersection of nation-states, international human rights regimes, and neo-liberal governance. We find that the IOM enforces the exclusions of asylum seekers and maintains the central role of nation-states in ordering global flows of migration. In addition, we argue that the IOM acts on behalf of nation-states by using the language of international human rights, as though working in the interests of migrants and refugees. In providing a geographic appraisal of the IOM alongside its image and presentation with an analysis of its activities on voluntary returns, we address the new spaces of ‘networked’ governance that control and order migratory flows in the interests of nation-states.

Political geography I Reconfiguring geographies of sovereignty

This first of three progress reports on the subdiscipline of political geography reviews recent scholarship on the transformation of geographies of sovereignty. The piece offers a review of major analytical themes that have emerged in recent geographical analyses of sovereignty. These themes include the design of spatial metaphors through which to conceptualize sovereignty, US exceptionalism and the influence of Agamben’s work, productive blurring of onshore and offshore operations and productions of sovereign power, and debate about the kinds of power operating through these newly constituted global topographies of power. The text also visits five kinds of sites where contemporary struggles over sovereignty manifest: prison, island, sea, body, and border. After reviewing recent trends, themes, and locations in studies of sovereign power, recommendations for future research topics are made.

Chaos and Crisis: Dissecting the Spatiotemporal Logics of Contemporary Migrations and State Practices

Discussions of chaos and crisis feature prominently in contemporary literature on the nation-state, globalization, security, and neoliberalism. In scholarship, policy, and public discourse on global migration, references to chaos and crisis abound and yet have not received sustained critical inquiry. In this article, we examine why these alarmist terms emerge so frequently, scrutinizing in particular what is relayed about the contemporary “state” of migration and its new geographical expressions. We take the recurrent discourse of chaos and crisis as our starting point, with the goal of delving more deeply into the logics driving their mobilization. We analyze when and where these discourses become prominent and trace key moments when migrants become securitized (the border crossing, the detention center, the deportation). This examination of the spatiotemporal logics of chaos and crisis advances understandings of the often contradictory efforts by nation-states to facilitate mobility and containment. We argue that states mobilize constructions of chaos and crisis to create exceptional moments in which sovereign reach and geopolitical influence are expanded. By analyzing the use of these discourses as tools, the article provides insight to the relationship between migration and state power.

Specters at the Port of Entry:Understanding State Mobilities through an Ontology of Exclusion

Abstract This paper suggests that recent literature on the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ largely overlooks the role of state mobilities. It argues for the inclusion of state mobilities, and addresses a range of sites of study to build this case. These landscapes offer material expressions where state mobility can be examined. The paper then offers a sustained examination of the port of entry as a seemingly static and yet increasingly mobile expression of state infrastructure and power. The ports of entry under examination are all found in close proximity to the US-Canada border. The provisional nature of their appearance and disappearance highlights the dialectical spatial relations between mobilities and moorings, working simultaneously to conceal exclusion and shrink spaces of asylum. This concealment requires, in turn, an ontology of exclusion.

For institutional ethnography: Geographical approaches to institutions and the everyday

In this paper we unpack how geographers have studied institutions, focusing specifically on institutional ethnography, often called ‘IE’. Sociologist Dorothy Smith is widely credited with developing institutional ethnography as an ‘embodied’ feminist approach. Smith studies the experiences of women in daily life, and the complex social relations in which these are embedded. Institutional ethnography offers the possibility to study up to understand the differential effects of institutions within and beyond institutional spaces and associated productions of subjectivities and material inequalities. We suggest that geographical scholarship on institutions can be enhanced and, in turn, has much to contribute to the broader interdisciplinary field on institutional ethnography, such as understandings of institutions that account for spatial differentiation. We argue that IE holds potential to enrich geographical research not only about a multitude of kinds of institutions, but about the many structures, effects, and identities working through institutions as territorial forces. In spite of recent interest by geographers, the broader literature on institutional ethnography remains under-engaged and under-cited by human geographers. Critical of this lack of engagement, we suggest that it has left a gap in geographical research on institutions. Our aim is to analyze and advance existing scholarship and offer this article as a tool for geographers thinking about employing IE. We develop a typology, categorized by methodological approach, to highlight ethnographic approaches to institutions undertaken by geographers.

Political geography II Islands and archipelagos

This second of two progress reports on the subdiscipline of political geography explores islands and archipelagos as material sites and political concepts with which to understand spatial ontologies of power. The piece reviews thematic interests in the interdisciplinary field of island studies as well as those taken up by political geographers. Areas for future research are also identified.

The Geopolitics of Migrant Mobility: Tracing State Relations Through Refugee Claims, Boats, and Discourses

This paper highlights how states attempt to control migrant mobilities through refugee claims. We examine the representations and practices of refugees in the refugee claimant process over time and in very different cases with distinct geopolitical influences and inflections in Canada. Our paper is based on case studies of Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in Toronto and refugee claimants from Fujian province, China, that landed in British Columbia in 1999. We analyse the ways that geopolitics influence every phase of the refugee claimant process, from the representations of claimants, to the decisions made about refugee claims, and the tenor of mundane encounters with state authorities. Our findings indicate that the geopolitics of migrant mobilities are produced through everyday state practices as well as by migrant strategies to move and resettle.

In/visibility and the Securitization of Migration: Shaping Publics through Border Enforcement on Islands

The border, once conceived of as a line on a map, is changing spatially into a form more akin to an archipelago: it is transnational, fragmented, biometric, intimate, and contracted out with proliferating spaces of confinement. The border is reconstituted and sovereign power reconfigured through the blurring of on- and offshore sites and migrations. Amid security “crises,” states use geography creatively to undermine access to legal representation, human rights, and avenues to asylum. Enforcement operations reach offshore, moving the border to the locations of asylum seekers and carrying out detention in places between states. These geographic shifts of border enforcement are tied to the securitization of migration and require a degree of complicity with violence in peripheral zones. The shifting of resources offshore serves, in part, to call public attention away from other sites and social relations, rendering hypervisible enforcement practices and homogenizing discourse while “invisibilizing” the violence incurred by offshore enforcement. With intensified enforcement and detention on islands through securitization and militarization, public attention is diverted from quieter daily practices of exclusion. This essay explores paradoxical framings endemic to contemporary governance of migration: to make visible and invisible, to show some things while hiding others.