Migration and Security

Migration emerged as a security issue in a context marked both by the geopolitical dislocation associated with the end of the Cold War and also by wider social and political shifts associated with ‘globalization’. As such, current debates surrounding migration and security reflect changes both in the nature of migration, as well as in the nature of thinking about migration. While it was previously considered to be a social and economic phenomenon belonging to the fields of socio-economic history, historical sociology and anthropology, migration is now pivotal in debates surrounding global politics (Castles and Davidson 2000; Castles and Miller 1993; Sassen 1996; Sayad 1999: 303-413; Soysal 1994). This is evident in its introduction into the extending field of security studies, which has found in migration a means to develop an alternative narrative in a context where the fall of the Iron Curtain and the break up of the Soviet Union had destabilised its dominant script. As a largely US and European oriented subdiscipline of IR, security studies fell into a crisis after 1989-91 (Bigo 1995), resulting in the introduction of various ‘new’ insecurities into the field of analysis. Indeed, the increasing uses of the term ‘security studies’ was itself instrumental in opening up the military-focused bipolar security