Short description:

Moving beyond the conventional binary logic of state and society, this book reveals how borderlands emerge as both contested and negotiated terrains shaped by historical legacies and contemporary practices co-produced by the state and people.

Long description:

This book advances a new research agenda in migration studies by rethinking the ‘migration state’ as a core feature of modern governance. Since Hollifield introduced the concept in 2004, the migration state framework has offered a powerful lens for understanding how states reconcile competing objectives of economic openness, political control, and sovereignty in an era of global mobility.

This volume widens that lens, moving beyond Western Europe and the United States to situate migration governance within longer imperial, postcolonial, and international political-economic trajectories. The book proposes new typologies including imperial migration states, developmental migration states, and immigration rentier states, demonstrating how different configurations of state institutions, political regimes, and development strategies shape migration governance across liberal democracies and autocracies.

Bringing together leading scholars working across Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and North America, the book examines countries of origin, destination, and transit through archival and ethnographic research, in-depth case studies, and comparative analyses. It will be of great interest for researchers, policymakers, and students in migration studies, political science, international relations, sociology, and development studies. The essays in this volume were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

This important collection of ethnographic essays is a sophisticated intervention in the study of the South Asian geobody. It offers a critical rethinking of borders and borderlands that takes us beyond the confinements of geographical location and narrowly defined citizenship. The essays deal with a great number of empirical cases, ranging from the troubles in Jammu and Kashmir to the conflicts in Assam, highlighting the long-term effects of Partition on mobility, family, and marriage.

It is a must-read for those interested in the politics of migration in South Asia.

Peter van der Veer, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen

This book showcases a truly outstanding collection of conceptually subtle and fine-grained ethnographic studies at the intersection of migration and refugee studies, postcolonial history, the geopolitics of borders and border zones, and the contemporary politics of citizenship in India.  Excavating the fiercely contested struggles over citizenship, the vagaries of national identity, and the lived textures and complexities of belonging in several South Asian borderlands, the contributions to this volume illuminate vital concerns and debates of global scope and significance.

Nicholas De Genova, Professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston

This is a rich collection of historical, literary, and ethnographic texts about ordinary life as it unfolds in borderlands of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Focusing on pivotal moments when borders are reconfigured through political conflict, the arrival of new infrastructure or the implementation of new governance technologies, the essays illustrate how state action frames the spectrum of possible mobilities and demonstrate how frequently these conditions change. The rich case studies are a powerful reminder that borders are not merely spatial markings; rather, they are spatio-temporal regimes that evolve dynamically in line with historical ruptures as well as the flows and disruptions that play out in everyday life.

Ursula Rao, Director of the Department 'Anthropology of Politics and Governance', Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle

This is a timely and outstanding contribution to the field of migration and borderlands in south Asia. The essays by young scholars bring fresh insights drawing on in-depth ethnographic research from diverse field sites in the region. Together, they animate borderland lives and experiences of migration, focusing on the everyday, the situated and the contingent. The collection offers a fresh new perspective on both borderland lives and migration experiences that mark a shift from state and legal discourses to more embodied and fluid negotiations around borderland lives that emerge through narratives on kinship and marriage, citizenship and bureaucracy, militarization and conflict.

Farhana Ibrahim, Professor Sociology & Social Anthropology, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Rethinking the migration state: historicising, decolonising, and disaggregating 1. Imperial migration states 2. Entangled migration states: mobility and state-building in France and Algeria 3. Labour coercion and commodification: from the British Empire to postcolonial migration states 4. The developmental migration state 5. Immigration rentier states 6. The il/liberal paradox: conceptualising immigration policy trade-offs across the democracy/autocracy divide 7. The domestic politics of selective permeability: disaggregating the Canadian migration state