▪ Abstract This article strives to meet two challenges. As a review, it provides a critical discussion of the scholarship concerning undocumented migration, with a special emphasis on ethnographically informed works that foreground significant aspects of the everyday life of undocumented migrants. But another key concern here is to formulate more precisely the theoretical status of migrant “illegality” and deportability in order that further research related to undocumented migration may be conceptualized more rigorously. This review considers the study of migrant “illegality” as an epistemological, methodological, and political problem, in order to then formulate it as a theoretical problem. The article argues that it is insufficient to examine the “illegality” of undocumented migration only in terms of its consequences and that it is necessary also to produce historically informed accounts of the sociopolitical processes of “illegalization” themselves, which can be characterized as the legal production ...

/pdf/migrant-illegality-and-deportability-in-everyday-life-5yqno3o04s.pdf

Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life

A sociolinguistics of globalization

This is a study in industrial sociology; it a partial report, to be followed by another, of an investigation of singel factory seen in the light of Max Weber's theory of bureacracy.

Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy.

International Relations scholars have vigorous theories to explain why international organizations (IOs) are created, but they have paid little attention to IO behavior and whether IOs actually do what their creators intend. This blind spot flows logically from the economic theories of organization that have dominated the study of international institutions and regimes. To recover the agency and autonomy of IOs, we offer a constructivist approach. Building on Max Weber's well-known analysis of bureaucracy, we argue that IOs are much more powerful than even neoliberals have argued, and that the same characteristics of bureaucracy that make IOs powerful can also make them prone to dysfunctional behavior. IOs are powerful because, like all bureaucracies, they make rules, and, in so doing, they create social knowledge. IOs deploy this knowledge in ways that define shared international tasks, create new categories of actors, form new interests for actors, and transfer new models of political organization around the world. However, the same normative valuation on impersonal rules that defines bureaucracies and makes them powerful in modern life can also make them unresponsive to their environments, obsessed with their own rules at the expense of primary missions, and ultimately produce inefficient and self-defeating behavior. Sociological and constructivist approaches thus allow us to expand the research agenda beyond IO creation and to ask important questions about the consequences of global bureaucratization and the effects of IOs in world politics.

/pdf/the-politics-power-and-pathologies-of-international-2pwcle5zda.pdf

The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations

This review offers a critical mappingo f the construction-in-progress of refugees and displacement as an anthropological domain of knowledge. It situates the emergence of “the refugee” and of “refugee studies” in two ways: first, historically, by looking at the management of displacement in Europe in the wake of World War II; and second, by tracing an array of different discursive and institutional domains within which “the refugee” and/or “being in exile” have been constituted. These domains include international law, international studies, documentary production by the United Nations and other international refugee agencies, development studies, and literary studies. The last part of the review briefly discusses recent work on displacement, diaspora, and deterritorialization in the context of studies of cultural identity, nationalism, transnational cultural forms—work that helps to conceptualize the anthropological study of displacement in new ways.

Refugees and Exile: From "Refugee Studies" to the National Order of Things

In this new theoretical crossroads, examining the
place of refugees in the national order of things
becomes a clarifying exercise. On the one hand, trying to understand the circumstances of particular
groups of refugees illuminates the complexity of 
the ways in which people construct, remember, and
lay claim to particular places as “homelands” or
“nations.” On the other, examining how refugees
become an object of knowledge and management
suggests that the displacement of refugees is constituted differently from other kinds of deterritorialization by those states, organizations, and
scholars who are concerned with refugees. Here,
the contemporary category of refugees is a particularly informative one in the study of the
sociopolitical construction of space and place.

/pdf/national-geographic-the-rooting-of-peoples-and-the-52c81jch4u.pdf

National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees

This study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, driven into exile in Tanzania after their 1972 insurrection against the dominant Tutsi was brutally quashed, shows how experiences of dispossession and violence are remembered and turned into narratives, and how this process helps to construct identities such as "Hutu" and "Tutsi." Through extensive fieldwork in two refugee communities, the author finds that the refugees' current circumstances significantly influence these constructions. Those living in organized camps created an elaborate "mythico-history" of the Hutu people, which gave significance to exile, and envisioned a collective return to the homeland of Burundi. Other refugees, who had assimilated in a more urban setting, crafted identities in response to the practical circumstances of their day-to-day lives. Malkki reveals how such things as national identity, historical consciousness and the social imagination of "enemies" get constructed in the process of everyday life. The book closes with an epilogue looking at the recent violence between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi, showing how the movement of large refugee populations across national borders has shaped patterns of violence in the region.

Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania

Massive displacements of people due to political violence and oppression and
the sight-on television and in newspapers-of refugees as a miserable “sea
of humanity” have come to seem more and more common. If these
displacements, and media representations of them, appear familiar, so too
does the range of humanitarian interventions that is routinely activated by the
movement of people. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the forms
typically taken by humanitarian interventions that focus on refugees as their
object of knowledge, assistance, and management, and to trace the effects of
these forms of intervention at several different levels.

Liisa H. Malkki

Papers

National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees

Refugees and Exile: From "Refugee Studies" to the National Order of Things

Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania

Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization

Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania.