Keywords

Introduction

This chapter explores the feminist scholarship on the politics of international migration produced in European institutions, both in international relations (IR) and in other social science disciplines. Until the late 1990s, international mobility has generally been overlooked by IR scholars, even though crossing borders is an inherently international affair (Pettman & Hall 2015).Footnote 1 Accelerated by the attacks of September 11, 2001, which pervasively reinforced fears on the link between migration and terrorism, IR scholars increasingly paid attention to the way states mobilize notions of security and sovereignty in how they address international movement (Adamson 2006, see also Faist 2006). By focusing on social networks, transnational communities, political discourse, and identity politics, they unpack concepts inherent to international relations, such as “national interests” (Sassen 1996) and “security” (Adamson 2006). Within this more general IR scholarship, feminist approaches to international migration are scarce.

In this chapter, we therefore discuss the work by feminist IR scholarsFootnote 2 on migration as a small and recent part of a wider, very rich tradition of feminist migration studies that has grown into a flourishing scholarly field since the 1970s, especially in North America and West and Northern Europe. Feminist approaches to international migration have been interdisciplinary since their inception, bringing together sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, socio-legal scholars, and geographers.

Our contribution to this volume’s mapping of feminist IR traditions will therefore include contributions to feminist migration studies from various disciplinary angles, with a particular focus on scholarship produced in Europe. We understand ‘Europe’ as a spatial term that sensitizes us to the fact that all knowledge is situated and therefore pushes us to ask what kind of feminist migration scholarship is produced within Europe. Knowledge generated in Europe is always co-created within wider scholarly communities that transgress university walls and geographical borders. In this chapter, we therefore include work produced by members of European institutions and their colleagues in these wider transnational networks. We ourselves are trained and employed as political scientists in Western European universities. Neither of us specializes in IR. Our academic working languages are English and Dutch and our access to scholarship in other languages is limited to work in German and French. The chapter therefore reflects our partial overview of the scholarship on the politics of international migration from feminist perspectives.

The chapter will first outline a brief history of feminist migration studies, situate it in migration studies more broadly, and point to their major contributions. Next, it highlights work on international migration by feminists IR scholars and shows that these tend to focus on two classic IR themes: security studies, and conflict and displacement. We simultaneously discuss how wider feminist scholarship on migration has broached these issues. Next, the chapter describes two bodies of feminist migration scholarship with which Europe-based feminist IR scholars can further dialogue: studies of intimacy, belonging and nationalism, and second, the study of global labor and care migration. The chapter concludes by questioning disciplinary politics and calling for further interdisciplinary and global collaboration.

Critical Feminist Interventions in Migration Studies

Well into the 1970s, scholarship on migration implicitly assumed that people who migrate are men. Feminist scholars from Europe and North America reinforced each other in changing this dominant perspective. First, by recognizing that women are migrants too and exploring why and how women migrate. Later, by applying gender as a category of analysis, asking how conceptions of femininity and masculinity shape the motivations, conditions, and consequences of international mobility. These developments within migration studies reflect the broader scholarly context: from the introduction of women’s studies in the 1970s and 1980s, to its transformation into gender studies from the 1990s onward.

The interdisciplinary field of migration studies should be understood as a ‘state science’ (Gabaccia 2014): it grew around the demands of states and the international community to track and account for the movement of people globally. This was particularly so in the period after World War II, as decolonialization led people from the “Global South” to move to the “Global North”. The increasing funding that came available to document the costs and benefits of international migration and its demographics reflects a biopolitical interest of managing mobile, racialized bodies (Mayblin & Turner 2021). Until the 1970s, this endeavor to understand why and how people move was dominated by supposedly “gender neutral” economic theories. While neo-classical theories explained mobility decisions as benefit-maximizing, a matter of balancing push and pull factors, new Marxist theories understood international migrants as a cheap labor force, resulting from unequal global distribution of economic and political power. Both models implicitly assume that men are “primary migrants” who move for work, while women as “secondary migrants” merely follow their male relatives (Kofman et al. 2000). From the late 1970s onward, feminist migration scholars strove to counter these assumptions of female dependency and passivity by documenting the predominance of women in migration flows. Known as the “add women and stir” approach, this was the first step toward the study of gender and migration.

The close alignment between migration studies and governments’ policy agendas has led migration scholars to uncritically adopt state-centric concepts such as ‘country of origin,’ ‘integration,’ and ‘sovereignty’ (Schinkel 2018). Feminist migration scholars have been at the forefront of problematizing such methodological nationalism and introduced a focus on power relations in migration studies. A major contribution of the 1980s was a focus on household strategies as units of analysis. Feminists pointed out that migration decisions are taken not by isolated individuals, but by families. In households, gendered roles and relations—between husband and wife, father and daughter, aunt and nephew—shape who gets to move, when, and how (Nawyn 2010). This paved the way for more critical thinking on the impact of (gendered) power relations in migration from the 1990s onward. Scholars show how gendered power relations operate in transnational social fields (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004), including relations among family members living in different parts of the world. Since then, studies focus on how gender affects the composition and direction of migration, on the gendered experiences of migration, and on how migration transforms gender relations. Intersectional frameworks are more and more prevalent, highlighting the importance of studying gender in relation to race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and health, given a particular social context (Nawyn 2010).

In recent years, calls to ‘decolonize migration studies’ (Mayblin and Turner 2021) became louder and led feminists to critically examine the Eurocentrism that is at the heart of much scholarship on migration today. Dahinden (2018), for example, pushes us to ‘demigranticize’ migration studies—to move away from treating “the migrant population” as a separate unit of analysis that warrants particular attention. Others ‘decenter Global North knowledge’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2019, 22) about migration by centering South-South migration and engaging critically with the politics of knowledge production (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020). Drawing among others on black feminist thought and queer-of-color critique, Mayblin and Turner’s (2021) Migration Studies and Colonialism shows convincingly that migration scholars have failed to engage with past and ongoing forms of colonialism and imperialism that shape migration today.

Border (In)securities and Sovereignty

Just like the feminist migration scholars discussed in the previous section, feminist IR scholars devote themselves to making the gendered nature of key IR concepts and theory visible (Tickner 1997). Two of these concepts are “security” and “sovereignty”. The well-established field of feminist security studies has, among others, reconceptualized security as multidimensional and not necessarily associated with national security (Prügl and Tickner 2018), highlighted the mutually constitutive relationship between masculinity and statehood (Weber 2016), and showed that the sovereign state is a masculinized political institution (Stachowitsch 2013). Combining these insights with critical border studies and emotions in world politics, UK-based Ali Bilgiç (2018) analyzes European border security actors’ encounters with irregular migrants and understands these as moments of emotional performance of sovereignty that are constitutive of the EU’s neo-colonial masculinity. In these performances, the EU produces migrating bodies from the “Global South” as racialized and gendered “others” of the “Global North” through invoking colonial emotions of fear, disgust, and compassion. Such gendered and racialized othering and its importance for sustaining the notion of a superior, progressive, and white Europe have been identified by other IR scholars as well (Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019; Gray and Franck 2019). Building on this work, feminist IR scholars working in North-Western Europe recently focus on the discursive construction of refugees both as a risk and being at risk during the so-called “European refugee crisis.” They point to the necessity of an intersectional approach to refugee men and masculinity and expose how heteronormative family ideals and stereotypical assumptions about “youth” and masculinity render refugee men “vulnerable” and “dangerous” at the same time (Allsopp 2017; Pruitt et al. 2018; Hall 2020).

While these studies turn their feminist curiosity to the everyday practices of border management, others focus on individual experiences and feelings of (in)security to challenge the disembodied state-centric narrative dominant in IR, which has been critiqued since the 1990s (Pettman 1996). Following the pioneering question raised by Peterson (1992)—‘security for whom?’—US-based Jennifer Lobasz (2009), for example, questions what kind of threat human trafficking poses and argues that it is first and foremost a violation of human rights. Understanding trafficking as a (national) security threat neglects the voices of trafficked persons, which should be at the center of analysis (see also van Liempt 2011). Aradau (2004) argues that the schizophrenic identification of trafficked women as both victims at risk and as risky suffering bodies can be explained by the intertwinement of humanitarian and security discourses—the wish to govern bodies in pain through governmental risk technologies. Such risk technologies are also central to Wilcox’s (2015) work on airport security, which shows that mobile, trans-bodies are produced as ‘deviant,’ as they do not conform to gender expectations and the state’s desire to regulate bodies as fixed and unchanging. More recently, Bilgiç and Gkouti (2020) called for a focus on everyday practices and experiences, as doing so challenges the sovereign security logic that produces some people as meriting security at the expense of others. This links closely to sociological approaches to international migration and security. Paris-based scholar Jane Freedman (2012) has been especially influential in documenting the gendered insecurities refugee women face in attempting to cross borders. Freedman shows how refugee women’s security might be threatened due to gendered power relations and violence, while also emphasizing their survival strategies and agency. Similar points have been raised by criminologists who are largely based at Monash University in Australia and hold a long-standing partnership with Oxford University in the UK. These scholars rely on participant observation and interviews to interrogate how border enforcement differentially impacts populations, pointing to gendered violence in so-called “transit countries” (Gerard and Pickering 2014). The practice of abandoning women and children who cannot “keep up” with smugglers, for example, leads to gendered border deaths (Pickering and Cochrane 2012). They also show how gendered and racialized processes of deterrence (Gerard and Pickering 2014) and border detention (Bosworth et al. 2017) lead to immobilization of refugees.

Conflict and Displacement: Determining Inclusive Refugeehood

A second field of feminist inquiry on migration concentrates on traditional IR themes of conflict and violence, specifically international displacement and humanitarian work with refugees. The relationship between gender and violence has animated feminist IR from its beginning (Prügl and Tickner 2018), yet only few scholars have made the gendered violence experienced by refugee populations the main focus of their research. Following feminist IR scholars’ insight that sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) continues between wartime and peacetime (Freedman 2011), Germany-based Ulrike Krause (2015) shows that SGBV endures after conflict in displacement, both during flight and encampment. Feminist IR inquiry has directed much of its attention to humanitarians’ understandings of refugeehood and their activities within refugee camps. While they demonstrated that ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe 1990) have become the uncontroversial object of humanitarian concern in refugee contexts, there is a growing literature that explicitly interrogates the position of refugee men within humanitarianism. Much of this work, some of it produced in Scandinavia, discusses the perceived security risks posed by refugee men (Grabska 2011; Olivius 2016). Grabska (ibid.) and Olivius (ibid.) show that gender equality trainings in refugee camps worldwide are efforts to create “modern,” “civilized” individuals, thereby implicitly casting refugee men and masculinities as violent and troublesome. UK-based Turner (2018) argues that humanitarian actors prioritize their own goals, logics, and understandings of gender over those of Syrians refugee men themselves, making the latter uncertain objects of humanitarian care. Welfens and Bonjour (2020) show that apart from gender and sexuality, the mobilization of family norms is crucial in determining which refugees are resettled from Turkey to Germany. These studies build upon a great legacy of feminist scholarship in geopolitics—flourishing in especially Canadian universities—which challenges the idea of refugeehood as passive, feminized, and depoliticized in the context of protracted displacement in the “Global South” (Hyndman and Giles 2011, see also Johnson 2011).

There have been attempts more recently by Europe- and US-based scholars to examine the alignments between the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and responses to conflict-affected individuals on the move. While Hall (2019) argues that there is significant potential for the WPS agenda to be more closely aligned with protection frameworks for displaced women, UK-based Kirby (2020) demonstrates that the wrongs of sexual violence in Libyan detention sites are explicitly recognized by various stakeholders, yet are also re-articulated in ways that lessen the obligation of states and organizations that otherwise champion the WPS agenda. Holvikivi and Reeves (2020, 137) moreover show how solely a minority of European states currently include refugee women in their WPS policies. They conclude that this ‘refugee blind’ policy is built on a fantasy of Europe as peaceful and secure for women, which legitimizes the selective fortressing of Europe and obscures Europe’s complicity in producing insecurity at its borders. The common notion that WPS policies should be focused on foreign policy only and therefore exclude questions of asylum, they argue, reveals the colonial underpinnings of the WPS agenda, as it produces an ‘unsafe, extra-European space.’

While feminist IR scholars center the discourses and everyday experiences pertaining to conflict and refugeehood in their analyses, socio-legal scholars in Europe have firmly critiqued the legal texts and processes leading up to the 1951 Geneva Convention. NGOs have voiced such critiques since the 1980s; academics, however, took up the question of protection frameworks for refugee women in the aftermath of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, as it became clear that the problems women face in areas affected by conflict differ significantly from those of men (Spijkerboer 2000). Scholars in the UK and the Netherlands argue that the Convention implicitly assumes that refugees are heterosexual men and thereby fail to recognize women and LGBTQI-refugees’ specific protection needs. Crawley (1999) shows that this is rooted in a persistent public–private division: gender-specific threats women might face, such as female genital mutilation, are understood as beyond the scope of the Convention because they take place in the private or familial sphere, making them not “political.” Similarly, asylum-determination procedures often fall short in recognizing women’s political activism and interpret their protest to the disappearance of relatives, for example, as “personal” rather than “political” (Spijkerboer 2000). While the UNHCR has published Gender Related Persecution Guidelines that explicate the recognition of gender-specific persecution under the Geneva Convention—often under the header of belonging to a ‘particular social group’—these guidelines still perceive female refugees, children, and LGBTQI-refugees as “deviant” and in need of “special protection” (Freedman 2015). Finally, Edwards (2010) warns against the recent shift in international refugee law and policy away from a focus on women’s rights to equality and diversity. She argues that this shift potentially undermines the goals of sexual equality and social justice by downplaying the gendered power dynamics at play.

More recently, Europe-based scholars have adopted decolonialist, intersectional approaches to study refugee migration, critiquing the strong Eurocentric bias in most policy and programmatic responses to migration and displacement. Nasser-Eddin and Abu-Assab (2020), for example, discuss how policy narratives on “economic migration” reflect an idealized understanding of the “Global North” as a destination of preferred arrival for refugees from the “Global South”, whereas empirical research shows that this is not the case. The recent ‘South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub’Footnote 3 led by UK-based Heaven Crawley aims to decenter the production of knowledge about migration and its consequences from the Global North toward those countries where most migration takes place. One example is Brankamp and Daley’s (2020) study that traces the ongoing legacies of colonial migration regimes and highlights how ‘African bodies’ have been racialized and subjected to different forms of exclusion in postcolonial states like Kenya and Tanzania.

The Politics of Intimacy and Belonging

We see potential for fruitful dialogue between Europe-based feminist IR scholars who write on migration in relation to security and sovereignty and the wider feminist literature on national identity and the politics of belonging (see Turner 2020). Feminist scholars of nation and empire show that national, racial, and cultural identities and boundaries are defined in deeply gendered ways, since gender is represented as ‘the “essence” of cultures’ (Yuval-Davis 2008 [1997], 43–45, 67). Stoler (2001, 829) has argued that these politics of belonging are not just about gender norms but also about the wider field of intimacy: ‘sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement, and child rearing.’ From colonial times to the present day, defining how “We” are different and superior to “the Other” involves reference to proper roles of men and women, proper dress, proper parenting, and proper loving (Bonjour and De Hart 2013).

Building on this work on intimacy and belonging, a new body of scholarship on family migration politics emerged in Europe from the 2000s onwards. Until then, research on the politics of migration and citizenship focused on economic and identity rationales, on humanitarian and security perspectives, but never on family (Kofman 2004). Reflecting assumptions in political science more broadly, migration scholars seemed to regard the family as an apolitical, “natural” given. Likewise, the admission of foreign family members was seen as a “self-evident” phenomenon that did not command political scientific analysis. This changed in the 2000s, spurred by the intense political salience of family migration in the 2000s in many North-Western European countries. Pioneering scholars like Sarah van Walsum, Betty de Hart, Helena Wray, and Eleonore Kofman worked in the Netherlands and the UK, where the “restrictive turn” in family migration politics was early and sharp.

Scholars from other countries in Northern, Western, and Southern Europe soon followed their example in seeking to understand how the heightened political focus on family migration was related to the resurgence of assimilationism and ethno-racial nationalism in European politics, and critiqued the exclusionary effects of increasingly restrictive family migration policies (Grillo 2008; van Walsum 2008). Scholars show how national identities in Europe today are construed in opposition to the perceived culture and identity of migrants, epitomized by the “migrant”—especially “Muslim”—family. Whereas the “Western” family is imagined as modern, emancipated, and egalitarian, the migrant family is associated with tradition, patriarchy, oppression, and even violence (Grillo 2008). This political representation of the “migrant family” as problematic is highly gendered and racialized. Migrant women are represented as victims of patriarchal oppression and violence (Bonjour and de Hart 2013), whereas migrant men are represented as violent oppressors of their wives and children (Charsley and Wray 2015). Such representations have served to justify restrictive reform of family reunification policies: if migrant men are so violent, so the reasoning goes, then migrant women are better off remaining separate from them (Van Walsum 2008). Inspired by feminist insight that “the personal is political,” scholars of family migration politics have resisted the conception of family as apolitical, emphasizing that what counts as family and who gets to have family are crucially contested questions at the very heart of migration politics (Bonjour and Cleton 2021).

In sum, we hold that feminist work in migration studies on intimacy and belonging is important for a feminist IR focus on migration. Feminist IR scholars working on sovereignty and security, for example, can benefit from insights into the importance of nation and empire for the management of migration to theorize how states and the international order get reproduced along the intersections of gender, race, class, and migratory status (e.g. Turner 2020).

Global Relations of Labor and Care

While there is a long-standing feminist IR interest in labor relations, issues pertaining to the specificities of migrant labor and care work can be further explored by Europe-based scholars (Prügl and Tickner 2018, see Robinson 2006; Elias 2010; Kunz 2011 for notable exceptions). In the context of today’s globalized economy that is characterized by sharp inequalities, it is vital to investigate how not only gender, race, and class intersect to regulate transnational value chains, but also how it specifically disciplines precarious migrant laborers in systems of multilevel governance. Feminist IR scholars can thereby build upon a long-standing tradition of feminist migration studies produced in Europe and North America. One of the classic works on gender and migrant labor was published in 1984 by Paris-based sociologist Mirjana Morokvásic. Referring to Michael Piore’s 1979 book on migrant labor entitled Birds of Passage, Morokvásic entitled her seminal 1984 article “Birds of Passage are also Women.” She argued that migrant women’s labor market position tends to be doubly precarious, as a result of their status as migrants and their status as women. Migrant women tend to be restricted to low-paid work in insecure conditions, for instance in textile industries or in the care sector. Often this work is done within the home—either within a family business, or in employers’ homes in the case of domestic work—and thus rendered invisible to the state and the public eye.

More recently, scholars have argued that women’s unpaid care work within the family may also contribute to families’ economic productivity, for instance when grandmothers’ care for children allows mothers to engage in paid work (Bonizzoni 2018). Furthermore, scholars have explored how gendered labor market structures affect the experiences and opportunities of labor migrants (Brettel 2016). Some labor market niches are strongly gendered, for instance, which results in women forming the majority of migrants engaged in domestic work and the sex industry, whereas male labor migrants dominate in construction (Charsley and Wray 2015). Feminized labor market niches are more likely to be characterized by informality and lack of state regulation and oversight, partly because state institutions fail to recognize “women’s work,” such as domestic work, as “real work,” and partly because state institutions are reticent to intervene in the domestic sphere, where feminized work is often done. Migrant men might also experience downward social mobility that challenges their status as men and breadwinners, for example if they find themselves doing “women’s work” in feminized labor market niches such as cleaning (Sinatti 2014).

Domestic and care work, ranging from cleaning and cooking to raising children and caring for sick and elderly people, has emerged as one of the most important legal avenues for migrant women today, occurring in almost all regions of the world. Cynthia Enloe was among the first feminist IR scholars to put the politics of domestic work central stage in her analysis. In her seminal work Bananas, Beaches & Bases (1990), Enloe interrogates women’s labor in agriculture, textiles, and domestic service and asks how our understanding of international politics would change if we center their experiences. She shows that the international economy is dependent on women’s work, but that women are often treated as less than ‘serious workers’ by men in trade unions and by the regulatory frameworks of home and host governments. From the 1990s onward, migration scholars in North America and in Europe have applied feminist political economy approaches to the study of migrant domestic work. They mobilized the concept of “reproductive labor” to emphasize that care—be it paid or unpaid—is work. In her influential book Doing the Dirty Work (2000), UK-based sociologist Bridget Anderson theorizes the increase in migrant domestic labor as a solution for white middle-class women in the Global North, enabling them to enter the labor market without having to negotiate with their husbands to share the unpaid work at home more equally. Anderson’s argument echoes the analysis of North American scholar Rhacel Parreñas (2000), who conceptualized migrant domestic labor as an “international division of reproductive labor” which reflects geopolitical, economic, and gendered power relations. Arlie Hochschild famously coined the concept of “global care chains” (2000), where women migrate to do care work, leaving their own children in the care of an elder sibling or grandparent. These scholars have critiqued the poor working conditions and risk of exploitation and abuse to which migrant domestic workers are exposed, as well as the emotional and material difficulties that domestic workers and their families may experience if migrant parents must leave their own children behind to care for the children of others.

Conclusion

This chapter suggests that there is a substantial literature on the gendered nature of international migration and migration politics, but that it has rarely been profiled as being core to the discipline of international relations. Europe-based, feminist IR scholars who work on migration often do so in relation to two classic IR themes: security and conflict and displacement. They thereby shift the traditional macro-level IR frame from the global to the local and foreground the discourses on and embodied experience of individuals on the move. In taking stock of the literature discussed in this chapter, as well as related work that has not been explicitly mentioned here, we are struck by two core insights on the state of research on migration in feminist IR.

First, it strikes us that almost all of the scholars cited in this chapter are working in institutions in North-Western Europe, notably the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Scandinavian countries, as well as North America and Australia. Surely, this is at least in part the result of our own location in Dutch and English language academic environments in the Netherlands and Flanders. However, perhaps it also reflects the strong embeddedness of feminist approaches in the social sciences in those parts of the world. As more and more migration scholars strive to overcome the Eurocentrism that characterizes their field, new partnerships are being created, such as the “South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub,” to address inequalities in knowledge production on migration. These discussions also extend to the funding relations between migration researchers and policy-making institutions. While we are witnessing the EU’s border regime becoming increasingly repressive and violent, a collective of over 360 critical migration scholars across Europe voiced their discontent with the EU’s extensive funding of projects on migration governance, while at the same time disregarding its outcomes that have the potential to improve safe border crossing and to better the treatment of people on the move.Footnote 4

Second, we hold that there is ample room for feminist IR scholars in Europe to further address migration governance in relation to the politics of intimacy and belonging and global relations of labor and care. While we have given our thoughts on possible ways of doing this in the chapter itself, we want to conclude here by emphasizing the striking commonality in epistemological and ontological approaches of feminist IR scholars and scholars in other disciplines, which should facilitate such cross-fertilization. Feminists, as critical scholars, draw on a variety of philosophical traditions, social and political theory, and literature outside their core discipline to help them understand the issues with which they are concerned (Tickner 1997). At the same time, feminist migration scholars across the social sciences do not always find the opportunity to meet in shared spaces to exchange ideas. The fact that migration is not profiled as ‘core’ to the IR discipline (Pettman and Hall 2015) makes feminist IR scholars predominantly work on the topic as part of a broader IR-research agenda. We reckon that this leads them to participate in IR conferences—like those hosted by the International Studies Association (ISA)—rather than interdisciplinary migration conferences (IMISCOE) where other feminist migration scholars meet.Footnote 5 Considering the similarities in feminist work in IR and other disciplines discussed in this chapter, we do see ample room for further interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration on migration and its politics between feminist scholars across the world.