The Problem of Migration for Security Studies

Abstract

In this chapter I establish my argument in the context of existing literature in feminist and critical security studies in international relations. I begin by exploring conceptualizations of security, moving through objectivist and universalist iterations, discursive approaches, and the feminist narrative and deconstructive approach. I draw on these influences to outline how performance is constitutive of security and decentred from the state. My rendering of the critical security literature focuses heavily on the role of migration, examining how migration represents an embodied contestation to the state as security provider. As I look at the schools of critical security studies that have broadened and deepened security I analyse how they have each prob-lematized migration while demonstrating that migration continues to represent a fundamental gap in how scholars understand, interpret and constitute the concept of security. After establishing my position in the critical security literature I detail the value of ethnography for IR more broadly and for security studies (a sub-discipline in which it has been seldom used thus far) more particularly. I draw particular attention to the need for ethnography in identity-based approaches in international security. Ultimately I argue that a performative security based on ethnographic methods offers a means to reconceptualize security that does not require excluding migrants, casting migrants as a threat, or reducing migrants to a passive subject position.