Understanding State Responses to Forced Migration

Abstract

Forced Migration and Global Politics. By Betts Alexander. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 216 pp., $28.96 paperback (ISBN 978-1-4051-8031-3). Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum in Africa. By Milner James. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. 235 pp., $95.00 hardcover (ISBN 978-0-230-21504-7). Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. By Mountz Alison. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 208 pp., $25.00 paperback (ISBN 978-0-8166-6538-9). These three books look at different aspects of the global forced migration crisis, and all ultimately aim to increase understanding of the complex processes within and between states in attempts to manage the forced movement of people across borders. Forced migration is a central problem of international relations (IR) in a globalized world, increasingly exacerbated by the growing disparities between the Global South and the Global North. Forced migration and asylum-seeking simultaneously challenge and reinforce the very idea of state sovereignty: the forced migrant symbolizes both the difficulties modern states face in controlling the flows of people across their borders and the continuing ability of states to make decisions about who they exclude and include. The discourses and the realities of forced migration are often situated geographically at the borders between states and conceptually around the blurry edges of sovereign control. They involve new forms of state-making and border-policing, and subsequently new geographies of power. At its core, forced migration is about the complex relationships between states, international systems, and individuals in attempts to address a global problem. Each text reviewed here addresses this complex relationship in depth and with insight. Each author, however, places the emphasis on different aspects of the relationship and uses different analytic tools. Forced Migration and Global Politics by Alexander Betts is a comprehensive and clearly structured analysis of forced migration in terms of IR theory. Betts systematically addresses key classical and contemporary IR theories and applies each to the problem of forced migration. Betts has two aims here that are mutually reinforcing: to deepen understandings of forced migration by situating it within a variety of IR approaches and to expand debates around IR theory itself by applying its frameworks to a new empirical field. These aims are successfully achieved across the book and done …