1st Edition
Safe Migration and the Politics of Brokered Safety in Southeast Asia
The book investigates how the United Nations, governments, and aid agencies mobilise and instrumentalise migration policies and programmes through a discourse of safe migration.
Since the early 2000s, numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs), UN agencies, and governments have warmed to the concept of safe migration, often within a context of anti-trafficking interventions. Yet, both the policy-enthusiasm for safety, as well as how safe migration comes into being through policies and programs remain unexplored. Based on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mekong region, this is the first book that traces the emergence of safe migration, why certain aid actors gravitate towards the concept, as well as how safe migration policies and programmes unfold through aid agencies and government bodies. The book argues that safe migration is best understood as brokered safety. Although safe migration policy interventions attempt to formalize pre-emptive and protective measures to enhance labour migrants’ well-being, the book shows through vivid ethnographic details how formal migration assistance in itself depends on – and produces – informal asnd mediated practices.
The book offers unprecedented insights into what safe migration policies look like in practice. It is an innovate contribution to contemporary theorizing of contemporary forms of migration governance and will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and human geographers working within the fields of Migration studies, Development Studies, as well as Southeast Asian and Global Studies.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003185734 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
1. Introducing safe migration PART I SITUATING SAFETY IN MIGRATION 2. From traffic to safety: The allure of safe migration 3. Omnipresence and nothingness: Lao and Myanmar migrants compared PART II MODALITIES OF INTERVENTION 4. Departures: Technologies of anticipation 5. State-centric safety and biometric economies: documents and recruitment chains 6. Destinations: hotlines and safety nets PART III SAFETY MEDIATED 7. On Humanitarian spaces 8. Brokers, migrants and safety 9. informal Assistance 10. Conclusion
Biography
Sverre Molland is a senior lecturer in Anthropology at the Australian National University, Australia. His research examines the intersections between migration, development and security in a comparative perspective, with specific focus on governance regimes and intervention modalities in mainland Southeast Asia.
"Safe migration has become the new buzzword among both government and non-governmental organizations concerned with cross-border labour migration, including in Southeast Asia. Sverre Molland's monograph is the first book-length, critical academic treatment of the subject for the Southeast Asian region...The book undoubtedly provides much-needed critical insights into the emergence of safe migration as discourse, policy and practice."
--Sallie Yae, SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia Vol. 38, No. 1 (2023)
