`This impressive collection traces salient public anxieties about migrant invasions and the elaborate technologies applied to monitor foreign bodies at borders across Europe and North America… Irregular migration is ironically becoming the norm, and the authors of this collection theorize this phenomenon in new ways that relate to ontology, govemmentality and exception Managing disparate streams of visitors – those invited and those not – requires a constantly evolving set of tools and techniques. Theoretically savvy, and politically innovative, this book brings together a stellar lineup of thinkers whose collective work on migration, borders and responses to state policies is unparalleled.’ Jennifer Hyndman, York University, Canada
`Herself a leading scholar of citizenship, Squire has assembled a provocative collection on the question of irregular migration and the governmance of borderzones. Brining together North American and European Scholarship, the authors analyse the politics of mobility across a number of different sites. These Leading scholars bring a very productive variety of theoretical perspectives and empirical cases into tension to triangulate an important field of politics, analysis and practice that will shape the field in years to come.’ Mark B Salter, University of Ottawa, Canada
Irregular migration has emerged as an issue of intensive political debate and governmental practice over recent years.
Critically intervening in debates around the governing of irregular migration, The Contested Politics of Mobility explores the politics of mobility through what is defined as an `analytic of irregularity’. It brings together authors who address issues of mobility and irregularity from a range of distinct perspectives, to focus on the politics of control as well as the politics of migration. The volume develops an account of irregularity as a produced, ambivalent and contested socio-political condition, showing how this is activated through wide-ranging `borderzones’ that pull between migration and control. Covering cases from across contemporary North America and Europe and examining a range of control mechanisms, such as biometrics, deportation and workplace raiding, the volume refuses the term `illegal’ to describe movements of people across borders. In so doing, it highlights the complexity of relations between different regions and between a politics of migration and a politics of control, and makes a timely intervention in the intersecting fields of critical citizenship, migration and security studies.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars, of politics, international relations, sociology, migration and law.