Safe Migration And The Politics Of Brokered Safety In Southeast Asia (Routledge Series On Asian Migration)

The book investigates migration safety, which is a central policy concern the United Nations and within public discourse in light of the recent global refugee crisis. It analyses how safe migration aid interventions, which attempt to formalise labour migration pathways, produce and depend on informal, brokered practices. This book interrogates the multiple paradoxes and effects that eventuate from an ascendant policy framework - safe migration - that appears to be pro-migration", given its focus on safety for migrants, which nonetheless takes place within a broader political context of migration hostility. Based on six years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mekong region, widely considered to be a hotspot for trafficking and abusive of labour migrants, this is the first book that traces the emergence of safe migration, why certain aid actors gravitate towards the concept, as well as how safe migration policies and programmes unfold through aid agencies and government bodies. The book argues that safe migration is best understood as brokered safety. Although safe migration policy interventions attempt to formalize pre-emptive and protective measures to enhance labour migrants' well-being, the book shows through vivid ethnographic details how formal migration assistance in itself depends on - and produces - informal, mediated practices. Presenting a fresh angle within wider hostilities and ambivalences regarding migration polices worldwide, this book offers unprecedented insights into what safe migration may look like in practice. It is an innovate contribution to contemporary theorizing relating contemporary forms of governance and will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and human geographers working on Migration studies as well as Southeast Asian and Global Studies"--

• | Author: Sverre Molland
• | Publisher: Routledge
• | Publication Date: July 20, 2021
• | Number of Pages: 220 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1032015438
• | ISBN-13: 9781032015439