Deportation, Anxiety, Justice

New ethnographic perspectives

This book provides new ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between deportation, anxiety, and justice. As an instrument for controlling international migration, deportation policies may be justified by public authorities as measures responding to anxieties over (unregulated) migration. At the same time, they also bring out uncertainty and unrest to deportable and deported migrants as well as to their social and institutional environments, in which this act of the state may appear deeply unjust.

Providing new and complementary insights into what ‘deportation’ as a legal and policy measure actually embraces in social reality, this book argues for an understanding of deportation as a process that begins long before, and carries on long after, the removal from one country to another takes place. It provides a transnational perspective over the ‘deportation corridor’, covering different places, sites, actors, and institutions. Most importantly, it reasserts the emotional and normative elements inherent to contemporary deportation policies and practices, emphasising the interplay between deportation, perceptions of justice, and national, institutional, and personal anxieties.

Written by leading experts in the field, the contributions cover a broad spectrum of geographical sites, deportation practices, and perspectives, bring together a long overdue addition to the current scholarship on deportation studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.