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Please join the Global Migration Lab for another event in its speaker series examining contemporary issues and challenges in global migration governance.

Kelsey P. Norman: “Strategic Indifference: Understanding Responses to Migrant and Refugee Settlement in Mediterranean Host Countries”

Hiba Sha’ath: “At Cross Purposes: A Field-Based Perspective on IOM’s Framing(s) of Migration in Libya”

Comments by Craig Damian Smith

The Central Mediterranean has been the site of mass irregular migration for at least the past decade. Overloaded boats full of desperate people have come to dominate media and popular imagery. Growing attention to the often-dire conditions of migrants in Sahel and North African transit states provides an important check on European claims that “breaking” smuggling rings and criminalizing humanitarian NGOs can co-exist with the promise of development aid and protecting the rights of migrants. Indeed, it is now clear that Europe’s externalized migration controls have dire consequences for migrants, help support autocratic governments, and undermine international protection norms.

However, the focus on Europe’s policy challenges and its ability to “externalize” controls ignores the interests, choices, and domestic politics in African transit and destination states. Likewise, International Organizations are characterized as passive vehicles of European policies, obscuring their significant interests and internal politics. This panel will unpack the policies and interests of Mediterranean transit and receiving states, explore how International Organizations mediate between their own and diverse state interests, and ask how these dynamics affect irregular migration in the region.

Kelsey Norman is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science and the Institute for European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and an instructor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. She has conducted several years of field research throughout North Africa.

Hiba Sha’ath is a second year PhD student in Human Geography at York University. Prior to joining York, she worked on data analysis, research coordination and reporting with IOM Libya’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) program from 2016 to 2017, and with IOM’s regional office for West and Central Africa in spring and summer of 2018.

This speaker series is supported in part by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada in the lead up to the 2019 International Metropolis Conference.