This special issue presents scholarly research which, in distinctive ways, explores the intersection of political theory, comparative politics, international relations and the study of forced migration. The outcome of an international workshop hosted by the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford in May 2007, this volume features individual research trajectories focused on a range of important issues, including asylum and deportation, migration control and regional cooperation, internal displacement and sovereignty, in productive encounters with theory and method. Read together, the scholarly articles collected here also span the traditional divide between ‘North’ and ‘South’, including case studies from Australia, Canada, and Europe, as well as from South Africa, Guatemala, and Malaysia.

Deportation has traditionally been seen as a secondary instrument of migration control, one used by liberal democratic states relatively infrequently and with some trepidation. This secondary status has been assured by the fact that deportation is both a complicated and a controversial power. It is complicated because tracking individuals down and returning them home are time-consuming and resource-intense activities; it is controversial because deportation is a cruel power, one that sometimes seems incompatible with respect for human rights. In the light of these constraints, how can one explain the fact that since 2000 the United Kingdom has radically increased the number of failed asylum seekers deported from its territory? I argue in the article that this increase has been achieved through a conscious and careful process of policy innovation that has enabled state officials to engage in large-scale expulsions without directly violating liberal norms.

Despite the recent proliferation of policy initiatives designed to curb illegal immigration, advanced industrialized states have made little headway towards the goal of effective migration control. Examining the case of deportation in Germany and the European Union, this article contends that one of the most fundamental reasons underlying this failure is a unilateral policy bias that fails to take into account two related conditions. First, policies of migration control directly and substantially impinge upon the interests of foreign governments. Secondly, the cooperation of foreign officials is an essential condition for policy implementation. To the extent that they disregard these basic conditions, then, migration control policies are bound to fail. By examining the implementation of deportation policy, the article illustrates the limited efficacy of control measures that are dominated by the interests of advanced industrialized states to the exclusion of the concerns of foreign governments.

This article first looks at developments in the external dimension of EU migration and refugee policy, as highlighted by a succession of Commission Communications and Council or European Council conclusions that have emphasized the need to integrate migration and asylum more firmly into the Union's external policies. It then looks at one particular recent experiment with externalizing refugee policy, namely the invention of ‘Regional Protection Programmes’. Finally it asks what this concept of regional protection has meant in normative terms, before suggesting ways in which the space afforded protection has been altered.

In focusing on the relationships between asylum recognition rates and the different institutional arrangements through which European states share or preserve their sovereignty, this article seeks to show how sovereignty-sharing affects the right to political asylum in practice. After a qualitative overview of variations in sovereignty-sharing forms, the article presents the results from a multiple regression analysis of the relationship between legal and institutional frames of asylum decision-making in 17 West European countries (EU-15, Norway and Switzerland) and the asylum recognition rates in these countries. The article ends with a brief assessment of the significance of the results for a potential policy change in the European Union.

Despite their stated commitment to the 1951 Refugee Convention, liberal democratic states routinely interdict refugees, such as through the use of visa requirements, effectively blocking them from reaching their borders. How do liberal democratic states navigate this contradictory terrain? To answer this question, this article explores situations where normally routine and often invisible interdiction practices break down. Canada's approach to Roma arriving from the Czech Republic and Hungary between 1997 and 2001 is an illuminating example of such breakdown and repair, providing a rare glimpse into how one liberal democratic state manages its own interdiction contradictions.

Insecurity and fear in the global North produce political space to advance security measures, including the externalization of asylum. States in the global North make it increasingly difficult for asylum seekers to reach sovereign territory where they might make a refugee claim. While legal protection remains intact under the Refugee Convention, extra-legal measures employ geography to restrict access to asylum and keep claimants at bay through a variety of tactics. This article probes the ways in which fear of uninvited asylum seekers is securitized and looks at the tactics utilized to keep them at bay, far from the borders of states that are signatories to the UN Refugee Convention. Drawing on research in Europe and Australia, we demonstrate how states are promoting ‘protection in regions of origin’ through practices of de facto neo-refoulement. Neo-refoulement refers to a geographically based strategy of preventing asylum by restricting access to territories that, in principle, provide protection to refugees.

Most studies of how refugees are represented focus on negative media representations. Less attention has been paid to sympathetic counter-representations. This article explores the representations preferred by refugee advocacy organizations and how they tend to exclude the mass of ordinary refugees and the difficult arguments required to defend refugee rights. The article outlines the rise of the health paradigm for understanding the conditions of refugees. The contemporary representation of refugees as traumatized victims is inspired by compassion. However, the trauma framework implies impaired capacity and the need for individuals to surrender their welfare to expert authorities. The article argues that casting refugees in the sick role risks compromising their rights. The article is informed by the writing of the sociologist Talcott Parsons on the sick role and the philosopher Hannah Arendt on refugees.

This article examines the ideological function of ‘models’ of citizenship in shaping the contours of public debate and the ability of refugee women to make claims in the public sphere. Key elements of Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation are explored: ideology works by interpellating (‘hailing’) individuals, providing them with a social and juridical identity that constitutes them as subjects. The article argues that ‘models’ of citizenship serve as vehicles for processes of interpellation that restrict claim-making, through the imposition of a dominant hierarchy of identities and needs. These processes become visible through analysis of Somali refugee women's experiences in republican France.

Academic writing often portrays migrants as either passive victims of violence and aid recipients or as courageous heroes facing horrific indifference and hazards. This article recodes them and their activities as potent forces for reshaping practices of state power. In this depiction, displacement also becomes a lens for re-evaluating the nature of sovereignty in urban Africa. Through its focus on Johannesburg this article explores how migrant communities intentionally and inadvertently evade, erode and exploit state policies, practices and shortcomings. Rather than being bound by their ambiguous status, they exploit their exclusion to exercise forms of autonomy and freedom in their engagement with the state and its street-level manifestations. Through these interactions, displacement and the continued mobility of urban residents is generating new forms of non-state-centric urban sovereignties and new patterns of transnational governance shaped, but not controlled, by state institutions. To recognize these evolving configurations we must look beyond Manichaean perspectives to see the full nature and degree of territorial control.

Land is a key issue in the aftermath of wars. The return or resettlement of displaced populations accentuates land-related problems, and international support seeks to strengthen the state's administration of land. This article explores ethnographically a land conflict in Guatemala between returning refugees and former members of a civil defence patrol, including the intervention of state and international institutions. In dialogue with Carl Schmitt's idea that land appropriation, first measurements and division are constitutive of the order and orientation of political community, the analysis suggests that bodily presence at the land, potential use of violence and negotiated measurement, continue to be features of post-colonial states despite attempts to solve land problems once and for all.

This article directs attention to dynamics of refuge and governmentality in a region of the ‘global South’, South-East Asia, and brings into focus the major recipients of (forced) migrants, Malaysia and Thailand, neither of which is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, or the 1967 Protocol. Against the backdrop of the illuminating contrast offered by the Thai case, this article argues that, in the case of Malaysia, the mobilization of ‘volunteers of the nation’ in campaigns against ‘illegal migrants’ serves as a performative (re)enactment of ethnic identity and national citizenship in the making of Malays and Malaysians in this postcolonial ‘plural society’. The article explores the wider consequences of the (re)production of (il)legality and identity as a social reality experienced not merely by (forced) migrants, and not only at the border, but also by government officials and national citizens actively mobilized in high-profile campaigns to flush out ‘illegal migrants’ from markets, construction and plantation sites, as well as dwellings in kampong neighbourhoods, city blocks and jungle sites across Malaysia.