Transit: Encounters, Negotiation, and Resistance in Forced Migration

About this Research Topic

Background

‘Transit’ as a concept in migration is garnering increasing attention, but it remains largely conflated with temporariness as it pertains to forced migrants’ journeys. Existing research considers transit migration as part of broader mobility strategies, looking at how these movements are embedded in overall migration trajectories. Focusing overwhelmingly on irregular migration from the Global South to the Global North, current literature largely engages with questions such as: Where do transits take place? Where do transit journeys lead to? As such, it has begun capturing questions of distance and time as experienced by refugees and asylum-seekers in terms of the transit experience, and the forced interruptions its various stages present. Despite this, many aspects of the migratory experience as well as transit in South-to-South contexts remain under-theorized, while strategies for survival, negotiation, mobilization, and resistance remain under-examined.

Furthermore, there is an intensification of border fortification practices emanating from the Global North, which is finding increasing salience in several Global South contexts, heightening levels of vulnerability of forced migrants. Expanding border regimes are also producing violent situations of immobility along the global colonial/colonized divide. These developments open up new venues of critical research about informal and hyper-temporary spaces, hostile and violent interactions with state forces; and grassroots and transnational infrastructures of solidarity and migrant resistance.

Forced migration scholars, therefore, need to continually grapple with the multi-layered experience of transit – not just as a geospatial reality – but also as social, cultural, economic, psychological, and relational spaces, within which refugees and asylum-seekers navigate and negotiate forced encampments, border regimes, crude and/or advanced technologies of migrant deterrence, human traffickers and smugglers, and state authorities who are often militarized. Such negotiations take place within complex social, economic, and political contexts while producing their own dynamics. Moreover, the transit experience may also involve refugees and asylum-seekers engaging with non-state actors including international NGOs, local host populations, creating possibilities for dynamic kinship and solidarity networks to emerge.

This Research Topic aims to bridge the fields of refugee studies, critical security studies, development studies, human rights, health, psychology, and gender studies to capture the complex experiences of refugees and asylum-seekers and draw from methodological orientations to enhance the understanding of ‘transit.’ Through centering the complex and far-reaching dimensions and implications of transit life, it aims to build on, and expand the critical and interdisciplinary conversation of how the refugee and the asylum-seeker perceive and engage the ‘transit space’ whether they come in the form of shipping containers, irregular routes, countries that become destinations, ‘temporary’ settlements, or in the form of time, space, and opportunities for building communities and strategies for survival and resistance.

Suggested themes:

• Transit as ‘home’: How do refugees and asylum- seekers engage in ‘homemaking’ in temporary, and oftentimes hostile settings?

• Detention, deportation, and apprehension: What does it mean to experience transit in violent institutions of migrant deterrence on land and at sea?

• ‘Temporality’ of urban spaces of departure and arrival and life along the border: How can we conceptualize urban spaces and border encampment marked by interactions with violent state and local powers, and changing policies of entry and restrictions?

• The economic realm: How do refugees and asylum-seekers approach, negotiate and innovate around issues of economic survival?

• The environment: What types of complex relationships arise between refugees and asylum-seekers and the natural environment within which they need to negotiate their everyday struggles and resistance?

• Grass-roots networks and solidarity movements: What roles do refugees and asylum-seekers play in creating networks for security, advocacy and kinship? What is the role for solidarity movements in the ‘transit’ space?

• Intersectionality and power: How do different genders, ages, disabilities of refugees and asylum-seekers shape their interactions with institutions (INGOs, local NGOs, aid workers, volunteers) that hold prejudicial assumptions about race, ethnicity, gender, geography, sex, class, and caste?

• Physical and mental health and the impact of the pandemic on ‘transit’ life

• Resistance, survival, and innovation: How do refugees and asylum-seekers organize and resist institutions, mechanisms, actors and bureaucracies of transit?

• Interacting with complex non-state actors: How do we begin to think about the complex interactions between refugees and asylum-seekers and human traffickers and smugglers in light of the conflation of the former’s migration with criminality, and the increasing reliance on human smuggling in the face of restrictive border practices?

This Research Topic particularly invites contributions from the Global South as well as refugees and asylum-seeking scholars to deepen the understanding of transit in our contemporary world.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Registered Report
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: transit, forced migration, refugee journey, border regimes, migrant resistance, human trafficking, grass-roots networks, solidarity movements

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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