Institute of Development Policy (IOB)

Este artículo pretende contribuir al debate sobre los vínculos entre la movilidad y el desarrollo, explorando el concepto de desarrollo translocal. Basado en trabajo de campo en los municipios de Matiguás y Muy Muy, éste analiza cómo la movilidad da forma a las estrategias de vida de los hogares (semi-)rurales en Nicaragua, y explora cómo los diferentes miembros de un hogar utilizan la movilidad física como una estrategia de vida. Argumenta que los habitantes de áreas (semi-)rurales consideran distintos tipos de movimientos como estrategias importantes para establecer enlaces entre personas y lugares, y para alcanzar un mejor bienestar en su comunidad natal. Al mismo tiempo muestra cómo la movilidad se forma en una arena de poder, lo que afecta su potencial. De esta manera, este artículo contribuye a un entendimiento dinámico y multidimensional de cómo los procesos de desarrollo dan forma a – y son formados por – la movilidad y la interconectividad.

Human mobility does not occur without social and spatial friction. This is particularly articulated in the context of an increasing securisation of migration whereby states and supra-states tend to frame international migration as a homeland security problem, leading to enhanced border control and the combatting of human smuggling, normalized in the everyday of host societies through television reality programmes like Border Security (Australia), UK Border Force, etc. At the same time, human right organisations and critical scholars have emphasized the human insecurity involved with migration flows and point to the countless deaths of innocent people simply looking for better futures abroad (Ferrer-Gallardo and Van Houtum 2014) as well as the exploitative acts of corrupt border guards and smugglers that are hereby produced (e.g. Triulzi and McKenzie 2012; Van Reisen, Estefanos and Rijken 2014). Moreover, when we look at the dynamics in the destination countries, we see that migrants continue to find themselves in precarious social-economic conditions and legal situations (Schuster 2005; Lucht 2012) with a substantial number of migrants facing the risk of deportation every single day (De Genova and Preutz 2010). Other forms of friction exist in the transnational space between the country of origin and destination locations. The frictions produced concern, among others, contestations over dual citizenship versus senses of loyalty, and the political engagement of diaspora communities on site and elsewhere. Moreover, migrant investments may reproduce, or even exacerbate social inequalities and divisions in countries of origin, not least if they are based on persistent social and cultural obligations.
Yet, the notion of friction is not to be understood in a negative manner only. Frictions can also have profound effects, resulting in new societal directions, or in affirmations of particular social institutions, creating incentives that may be sustainable, because of the hard questions asked on their role and impact along the way. Yet in all cases it does require critical thinking, and analyses that take on various perspectives, are steeped in insights of more holistic developments (geo-political, economic or otherwise), and which maintain an open perspective to temporal and spatial dimensions. This conference consists of the following eight different panels.

The categories that define people on the move must be understood as unstable, contingent, and provisional processes. This paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship that explores the lived complexities of migrant categorization and their social implications. Based on fieldwork in Brazil and Central America, the paper investigates the processual character of categorization by intertwining temporal and spatial dimensions, focusing on specific events to understand the occasions, circumstances, and intentions that bring about adapted or entirely new categories. An eventful notion of categorization demonstrates not only how categories come into being but also how categories remain connected to particular events that are recognized or produced in response to movement. These categories stick to the identity of a subject in transit, confirming and solidifying it; however, they can also challenge the subject's legal stability, generating new insecurities and (im-)mobilities.

People considered to be ‘in transit’ do not traverse this often-extended transit space in a void. They encounter, dwell in, and engage with particular places along the routes of their journey towards a desired destination. In the literature on borders, migration and humanitarianism, many of these places remain invisible, especially if they are not located in major cities or near a heavily monitored nation-state border. They may be constructed as ‘remote’, ‘peripheral’, or ‘marginal’ from a scholarly and policy point of view. However, we wish to emphasize and interrogate the centrality of these places as key sites in the shaping of migrant trajectories, from the surveillance and care they experience, to the re-creation of social ties and the struggles over communication, documentation, and onward travel. Moreover, the histories of these places, their (geo)political positioning, ethnic and religious diversity, socioeconomic dynamics and local actors – who may be mobile themselves – interact with passing and dwelling migrants. But how, exactly, do these interactions, these entanglements of what moves and what stays, shape these places?

In this article, we draw on the volatile complexity of African migrant trajectories in Central America to broaden the scope of transnational scholarship. These trajectories are characterised by mobilities as well as immobilities, taking shape in particular local contexts. By focusing on the interplays between displacement and emplacement that are part of these trajectories, we aim to increase our understanding of the extent to which migrants still ‘on the move’ experience both temporal embeddedness and cross-border connectedness, thereby acknowledging and unravelling transnational lives as they ‘touch the ground’ en route. To do so, we build on long-standing scholarly commitments in Central and South America and recent field research in Costa Rica. We go into selected empirical cases to discuss the dynamics of travelling, dwelling and travelling again as part of African migrant trajectories across Central America. We then explore the value of a ‘shifting’ transnational social field perspective and indicate some challenges for future trajectory research. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/psp.2421

[open access] https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/WintersUnsettling
People who are “on the move,” particularly migrants and the displaced, often inhabit places that are considered temporary, peripheral, and remote. (Un)Settling Place recentralizes these “out-of-the-way” places as key sites in the shaping of people’s mobility and identities. Ranging from the surveillance and care that migrants experience to the re-creation of social ties and the re-claiming of space, this collection volume seeks to show how a critical approach to in-between place-making can challenge the idea of place as fixed, singular, or one-directional, offering new ways of understanding migrant trajectories.