Global Mobility and Migration Governance – MOBGLOB

Today, world-wide mobility is a part of the social texture of globalisation and international relations. It is both a cause and a consequence of globalisation, and the response of national and international political institutions is key to any analysis of governance and social transformation on a global scale. It is one of the tension points in modern politics at both a national and international level.
By looking closely at international organisations, national and regional migration policies of different countries, ways of organising the living space of migrants and refugees and the transnational social dynamics of the structure of mobility, we can observe the phenomenon of migration from several angles and on different scales.
This project aims to give a precise description of the political and social dynamics of mobility, principally by the empirical observation of the practices of those entities involved in the governance of mobility (countries, international organisations, migrants, refugees, networks). It also seeks to analyse the représentations linked to these practices, and the devices of regulation, ideology and identity politics on which they are based. The researchers involved in this project favour an empirical approach together with a systematization following the models of political science, sociology, anthropology and political economy. They have also chosen to link the subjects of their fundamental research to contemporary political and social issues, and to start from scientific reflection on public action, both national and international, its norms and its principles in relation to mobility.

The first line of this study is concerned with practice and représentations in the management of mobility in international politics. It aims to question the notion of the global governance of mobility, including economic migration and the tide of refugees. International organisations, their interaction with non-governmental players in policies on international migration and the tide of refugees are at the heart of political measures made up of speeches and practice. The overall methodology of this task is that of the sociology of international relations, and aims to analyse the “international” facts built up by different players around international mobility as social facts.

The second line of study bears on the political stakes in the regional governance of migration in two distinct areas: Europe and the Middle East. This involves determining the place of an individual country in the governance of mobility on a regional scale, in Europe in particular, between the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. “Governance” hovers between integration and “the restatement of sovereignty” in the management of international migration, notably at a time of economic and financial crisis, and we study the consequences of this “supremacist reaction” for the mobility of individuals.

The third line of study in this project is an ethnographical approach to both institutional and informal camps of refugees, migrants and/or asylum seekers, looking closely at the social transformations at work in these transnational social spaces. It bears on the modes of governance used by humanitarian players in the context of crises, and also on the agency of the population involved, and analyses this through the structure of space for relegation and /or confinement on a global scale.

The last line of study is a reflection on the future of the most visible contemporary measure for limiting mobility – walls. It explores political scenarios such as the opening of frontiers and the liberalisation of mobility, and is a theoretical continuation of the knowledge and analysis deployed within the framework of this project.