Contesting policy categories using intersectionality: reflections for studying migration governance

ABSTRACT

This article presents a reflection on the analytical value of intersectionality for scholars who seek to critically interrogate migration governance in Europe – of which integration measures are an integral part. While there is a growing interest in using gender and feminist theory to investigate the policies and practices that sustain migration governance, there has been little dedicated reflection on the analytical significance of intersectionality for scholarly knowledge production. Building upon work conducted within the field of feminist policy studies, we argue that intersectionality crucially points to the broad systems of inequality and domination that are implicated in the governance of migration, which materialize in the ways in which the latter categorizes and constructs immigrant identities along intersecting axes of inequality. Analytically disentangling how such migration-related difference is created and upheld through such structures of domination and discrimination, deconstructs the apparent naturalness of the state and its hegemonic classification power.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• migration governance
• policy analysis
• feminist policy studies
• reflexivity
• categorization

Introduction

This article presents a reflection on the analytical value of intersectionality for scholars who seek to critically interrogate migration governance in Europe – of which integration measures are an integral part – with a particular focus on policy categories. There is a slow but steadily growing field of research that relies on intersectionality to investigate the policies and practices that sustain the governance of migration (e.g. Korteweg and Yurdakul 2009; Bonjour and De Hart 2013; Korteweg and Triadafilopoulos 2013; Horsti and Pellander 2015; Korteweg 2017; Elrick and Winter 2018; Bonjour and Duyvendak 2018; Bonjour and Chauvin 2018; Roggeband and van der Haar 2018) and the experiences of those subjected to them (Altay, Yurdakul, and Cortège 2021; Esposito, Matos, and Bosworth 2020; Rezzonico 2020). To date, however, there has been little dedicated reflection on the analytical significance of intersectionality for our scholarly knowledge production on migration and integration governance.

Intersectionality, in short, posits that social markers of difference in a given society at a given time, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, dis/ability, and age, cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Instead, they work together and interact to produce particular material realities and distinct social experiences, including marginalization, discrimination and exclusion. They therefore should be studied in relation to each other so as to capture the effects of their interactions (Crenshaw 1989). Davis (2014) argues that many feminist scholars are convinced that intersectionality is a useful and crucial concept for feminist analysis, but that it is not always clear what the concept might actually mean for feminist inquiry. Our aim for this article is therefore to present our reflections on the promises of integrating intersectionality as an analytical tool for critically studying migration governance in Europe. We do so from our positions as feminist political scientists working at universities in Belgium and the Netherlands, both with a common interest in feminist approaches to policy and governance. While Petra Meier has a long track-record of using feminist theory and methods to study (gender equality) policies (i.e. Lombardo and Meier 2016; Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2009, 2017), Laura Cleton’s doctoral dissertation recently explored the potential of intersectionality for critically interrogating deportation governance in Europe (i.e. Cleton 2022).

The article aims to speak to scholars who seek to analyze migration and integration policy formation and implementation: that is, the actions that states undertake to govern migration and those classified as migrants. Investigating migration and integration governance, according to Triandafyllidou (2022), directs scholars to its policies and discourses in their wider socio-political context, in a multi-dimensional and de-centred way. We argue that intersectionality crucially points these scholars to the broad systems of inequality and domination that are implicated in the governance of migration, which materialize in the ways in which the latter categorizes and constructs immigrant identities along intersecting axes of inequality. Pointing our analytical attention to the relationship between policy categorization and structures of domination is important for two, interrelated reasons.

First, scholars of migration and integration governance are well-placed to reveal how broad systems of oppression and discrimination organize society through law, policy and bureaucratic processes (Yuval-Davis 2006; Smooth 2013), and how they therefore play a key role in maintaining or challenging inequality. We understand policy as fundamentally being about classification and differentiation, “about how we do and should categorize in a world where categories are not given” (Stone 1988, 382). Intersectionality, then, helps to direct researchers’ attention to the production of these policy categories as it exposes the ways in which different modes of domination and oppression are implicated in their construction, and in the social identities that follow from them. By focusing attention to categorization instead of policy categories, intersectionality shifts our gaze from excluded and marginalized groups to the ways in which inequality is produced and maintained (Dhamoon 2011; see also Smooth 2013; Anthias 2013; Lutz, Vivar, and Supik 2016). This disrupts the apparent “naturalness” of policy categories and instead points to their contingent and constructed nature in a contextualized and historicized manner.

In doing this, secondly, intersectionality helps scholars of migration governance to counter the hegemony of the state itself, by showing that their rule is always co-constituted and co-constitutive through broader systems of inequality. This enables migration scholars to push back on the hegemony of the migration state, and to reveal how it reproduces inequalities through its population management. In the last three decades, critical and reflexive migration scholars have argued that migration scholarship tends to incautiously translate the policy categories, variables and logics of the nation state into its scholarly work (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002; Dahinden 2016; Anderson 2019; Amelina 2021, 2022; Moret, Andrikopoulos, and Dahinden 2021; Dahinden, Fischer, and Menet 2021). By doing so, they risk naturalizing and reproducing the “national order of things” and taking migration-related difference as a natural given. Adding to this body of work, we argue that intersectionality urges migration researchers to be attentive to the fact that (international) movement is always embedded within wider social, political and economic relations of inequality. Migration-related difference, therefore, is not only dependent on legal status or ethnicity but simultaneously produced through a set of ascribed classifications that rest on “deep-seated presuppositions” (Bacchi 1999) anchored in sexism, capitalism and neoliberalism, patriarchy, racism and ableism. Analytically disentangling how such migration-related difference is upheld through these wider structures of domination and discrimination helps migration researchers to deconstruct the apparent naturalness of the state and its regulatory power.

We want to emphasize that this article does not seek to prescribe how migration and integration researchers should use intersectionality in their work. Following Lykke (2016, 208), we approach intersectionality as “a thinking technology that encompasses a multiplicity of ways […] to analyze how power differentials, normativities and identity formations in terms of categorizations such as gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, age/generation, nationality, etc. co-produce in/exclusion, mis/recognition, dis/possession, re/distribution, etc”. Following Lykke (2016), we underscore that intersectionality as a broad, open-ended and inclusive tool for feminist inquiry can play different roles in different research projects, and can contribute in various ways to our knowledge production. Notwithstanding, we hold that feminist research on migration governance specifically might become “more methodologically appropriate and theoretically productive if the specific assumptions that the researcher makes about intersectionality were made more explicit” (Choo and Ferree 2010, 146; see also Smooth 2013). By showing what we think intersectionality can do for analyses of migration and integration governance, its policies and practices, our aim is to stimulate discussion and provide nodes for researchers to think about its potential in their own work.

The article will continue as follows. First, we will provide a brief introduction to the development of migration studies alongside the nation state and point to its continued entanglements today. We will highlight the crucial importance of policy categories within migration governance and detail the danger of said categories for migration scholarship. In the second section, we will detail how feminist scholars in other research fields study policy and policy categories. By relying upon insights produced in a body of scholarship known as “feminist policy studies” (Lombardo and Meier 2016), we point to the value of discursive and deconstructivist approaches to social markers of difference embedded in policy text. Doing so helps us to direct attention to categorizations instead of policy categories, as only the former can assess the inclusionary or exclusionary effects of policy. In the third section, then, we will build upon feminist policy scholarship to argue that an intersectional approach towards categorization allows analysts to dissect processes of differentiation while also theorizing the intersecting processes and systems of inequality in which said differentiation is rooted. This reveals the interdependency between migration governance and broad systems of inequality, which in turn counters the hegemony of the state and creates room for resistance. We will end our contribution with reflections on the future potential of working with intersectionality for knowledge production in migration studies and subsequent questions that doing so raises.

Migration studies and policy categories

The broader field of migration studies can historically be characterized as a “state science”: “shaped and birthed” by colonialism (Mayblin and Turner 2020, 204) and growing around the demands of governments and the international community to track and account for people on the move. There thus exists a clear link between migration studies as a project of universities and migration management as a project of national and international policy-making institutions (Mayblin and Turner 2020). This history has enduring consequences for scholarship today, as it shapes what constitutes “appropriate knowledge” and determines research agendas across migration studies.

Research into migration in Europe particularly took off in the period following World War II, when decolonialization spurred new movements of people who migrated from the Global South to the Global North (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020). Under empire, imperial states tied to prevent people from departing imperial territory, while they at the same time forcefully moved colonized peoples for forced labour or fight purposes. This focus on preventing exit was gradually replaced by a desire to prevent the entry of non-nationals, which was made possible by the creation of bureaucracies and registration systems (Sharma 2020). During decolonization, international organizations and European states started to more extensively fund research on international migration to track these movements (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020). Alarming accounts about “unprecedented migration” (Anderson 2019) similarly led to a “migration knowledge hype” (Stierl 2022) in 2015, when an excessive amount of research funding became readily available to study people on the move – especially those who became forcibly displaced from the Global South to the Global North.

Such developments impact how migration research is conceived and conducted. By being the primary funders for academics in North America and Europe, policy environments exert influence on the knowledge paradigms that emerge and do not emerge. Jasanoff (2005) indeed reminds us that scientific knowledge is never generated in a social vacuum, but that it instead is always co-produced between social scientists and their broader social and political environments. Several scholars of migration governance have therefore argued that this co-production warrants critical reflection, especially when policymakers are closely involved. First, this close relationship between research and policy might lead researchers to take the concepts and priorities of policymakers and practitioners as their (initial) frame of reference for identifying their areas of study and formulating research questions (Favell 2003, Bakewell 2008). An often-discussed case is that of research on immigrant integration. Favell (2003, 378; 2022) argues extensively how this body of work, according to him, is structured by “explicit or implicit links to the knowledge demands of policy agendas and political discussions in different national contexts”. Policymakers’ interest in – and funding for – instrumental knowledge that promotes the integration of immigrants gets picked up by academic researchers, who then perform “applied research” with a strong problem-solving, rather than a theoretical, orientation (Favell 2003).

This is not to say that academic research on integration, whether applied or theoretical, cannot have a profound impact on improving the conditions, programmes and policies that govern the integration of immigrants (i.e. Phillimore 2011; Ager and Strang 2008). Nor does it mean that we should step away from trying to make our work having societal impact. The challenge, these scholars argue, is that this type of work might both underwrite dominant nation-building ideologies (see the paragraphs below) and possibly closes avenues for thinking about the issue at hand in a different way. Bakewell’s (2008) discussion on conducting “policy irrelevant research” is an important case in point. He explains that scholars of forced migration are disproportionately focusing on refugees in formal camps, leaving the larger number of self-settled refugees neglected. He argues that one of the reasons for this limited scope is that “much of [this research] is framed around policy categories and concerns, often in an attempt to ensure that the findings are relevant and serve to improve the very distressing circumstances associated with forced migration” (Bakewell 2008, 433). Bakewell concludes that academic researchers' reliance on policy categories, and the interests of governments more generally, obscures and renders certain population groups, relationships and research questions invisible. He thus argues for the need to conduct “policy irrelevant research” that can help build new forms of knowledge with the possibility to make a change in the lives of “those living in the shadow of bright policy lights” (Bakewell 2008, 450). Similarly, Stierl (2022) vouches for thoroughly adopting the “do no harm” principle in research on migration governance. Practically, this means considering the possible harmful consequences resulting from one’s research being made relevant to migration policymakers, as doing so might help to substantiate policies that further deter safe pathways for migration or to manage migration “more effectively” (see also Geddes 2005). Such a sensibility serves as a reminder of the political nature of our knowledge production, including the potential harmful outcomes it can generate.

Secondly, and of central importance for this article, policy’s close relationship to knowledge production on migration gave rise to a body of scholarship that risks ascribing to the paradigm of an all-encompassing governance of mobility, as opposed to critically interrogating it (Stierl 2022). Central to this line of critique is the incautious reproduction of policy categories, variables and the wider logic of the nation state into social science research. Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) were among the first to argue that migration and integration research is inherently linked to the logic of the modern nation state, which propagates the idea of “national containers” in which territorial, political, cultural and social boundaries coincide. Categories of “migrants” or “refugees”, as well as core concepts in migration studies like “integration”, “sovereignty” and “country of origin”, only follow logically from this national container model. Nation states indeed (re)produce a series of categories that justify inclusion and exclusion, which governments in turn convey through their laws, policies and practices (Crawley and Skleparis 2018; Anderson 2019). The resulting policy categories often draw boundaries between “us” and “them”, by asserting claims about people’s identity that emphasize sameness and difference (Jenkins 1994; Rosenberger and Stöckl 2018). In turn, they reinforce the boundaries of the community of value (Anderson 2013) and symbolically exclude certain people from it. Critical scholars therefore warn against the incautious reproduction of such categories, as treating them as common-sensical risks reinforcing their legitimacy (Dahinden 2016; Anderson 2019; Moret, Andrikopoulos, and Dahinden 2021).

However, having a critical stance towards policy categories deriving from the state does not mean that we need to get rid of them in our academic work. Categories matter normatively and empirically, as they have real-life effects on people involved (Crawley and Skleparis 2018; Anderson 2019; Moret, Andrikopoulos, and Dahinden 2021). Indeed, there is by now plenty of research that recognizes the problems with methodological nationalism and that proposes ways to avoid falling into this trap. Instead of taking state policy categories for granted or discarding them, such critical and reflexive migration scholars propose to centre their constructed character (Favell 2003, Bakewell 2008; Dahinden 2016; Horvath, Amelina, and Peters 2017; Korteweg 2017; Amelina 2021). Doing so reveals that migration categories are “perspectival” (Raghuram 2021): they inevitably inhibit a particular perspective, social positioning, situatedness, history and interest. Unravelling these enables researchers to illuminate the political consequences that result from the way in which policy categories are used and the work they do (Dahinden, Fischer, and Menet 2021) – giving room to actors’ “power of definition” (Rosenberger and Stöckl 2018).

One way of doing so is by separating migration research from the “migration apparatus”. Dahinden (2016) and Korteweg (2017) do so by drawing from Brubaker’s (2013) differentiation between “categories of practice” and “categories of analysis” when they analyze “migration” and “integration” respectively. Brubaker (2013) has showed the need for separating between every-day, common-sense categories anchored in this national container model and analytical categories that can help researchers to understand the former. Doing this, according to Dahinden (2016), puts “migranticized” and “ethnicized” worldviews that materialize in individual actions, institutions and politics at the centre of our investigation. In them, categories of “migration” and ethnicity are understood as core organizing principles that naturalize difference. Our task as researchers is then to dissect how these worldviews are created, how they exist, what effects they have and how they change (Dahinden 2016). Some of the tools and theoretical lenses that scholars have put forward to study such worldviews are “regime perspectives” (Horvath, Amelina, and Peters 2017), the “entangled mobilities” perspective (Wyss and Dahinden 2022) and the “doing migration” approach (Amelina 2021). A regime perspective, so Horvath and colleagues (2017) argue, urge researchers not only to reflect on their own epistemological and political positions, but also on the diffusion of norms, rationalities and discourses between political and scientific fields. The “doing migration” approach similarly focuses on rationalities and discourses, but instead centres the everyday routines, repertoires and naming strategies that transform individuals into migrants, instead of taking migration-related difference at face value (Amelina 2021). Wyss and Dahinden (2022), finally, centre the potential of a “mobility lens” for studying migration (see also Dahinden 2016). Their theoretical approach entitled “entangled mobilities” accounts for people’s movement as being dependent on, and differing in, their temporal and spatial dimensions, including their positioning within wider socio-economic hierarchies and colonial histories.

Adding to these perspectives, this article puts intersectionality forward as a complementary analytical tool through which migration and integration policy categories can be scrutinized. Our endeavour follows Amelina (2021), Wyss and Dahinden (2022) and Moret, Andrikopoulos, and Dahinden (2021, 337), who all note that “concepts from gender and feminist studies provide us with important means to approach [migration-related phenomena], whether from the perspective of the states’ representatives or the persons concerned”. As these studies unfortunately do not further elaborate on the specific role they see for these concepts, this article aims to follow-up and investigate what, according to us, the potential of intersectionality is to scrutinize policy categories as they materialize in policy documents, discourse and policy officials' narratives. To do so, we will first review the ways in which other feminist scholars investigate public policies (Lombardo and Meier 2016). We especially highlight how they assess the inclusionary or exclusionary effects of policy and argue for the value of looking at categorizations instead of categories. Consequently, we argue what such approaches, in combination with intersectionality, can do for critical analyses of migration and integration policies.

Feminist policy studies: from categories to categorization

For several decades already, feminist scholars have critically scrutinized the aims, implementation, and consequences of (public) policies (Lombardo and Meier 2016; Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2017; Hawkesworth 1994). At the heart of their endeavour is a concern with issues of power, domination and subordination, which are intrinsically intertwined with governance and policy. Lombardo and colleagues (2013, 691) note how feminist policy scholars initially focussed their efforts on criticizing the androcentric bias inherent in policies and the approach thereof, by underlining how “androcentric policy making creates gendered categories of privileged and unprivileged people in which women (and other groups) are systematically disadvantaged”. Such an inherently critical stance towards public policies, their making and state authorities in general, makes feminist policy scholars by definition attentive to how hierarchies are produced and reproduced within policy (Lombardo and Meier 2016; Lombardo and Kantola 2021). This section elaborates on how feminist scholars try to capture such hierarchies and processes by relying on deconstructive (Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2009) and discursive (Lombardo and Meier 2016) approaches to ideas, norms, values, and discourses.

Of course, feminist scholars are not the only ones pointing attention to the role of norms, tacit knowledge, and discourse in policy. They share this concern with constructivist policy scholars, as both investigate the contestation, politics and politicization behind policy discourse. They pay particular attention to the transformative potential of policy discourse, as it “provide[s] the recipes, guidelines, and maps for political action and serve[s] to justify policies and programs” (Schmidt 2008, 306; see also Schön and Rein 1994; Hajer 1995). As we will show below, feminist scholars who use deconstructive and discursive approaches similarly focus on these conceptual premises in policy and try to investigate their consequences for institutional action. Yet, Lombardo and Meier (2016) argue that even the most critical approaches within mainstream constructivist policy studies routinely neglect gender as an analytical category in their work.

Feminist scholars have therefore distinguished their analysis by paying attention to the gendered norms embedded in policy discourse, which they argue individuals have internalized in their process of socialization (Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2009; Bacchi 1999). These norms can result in stereotypes and sexist framings which materialize in policy categories – something that policy actors might not necessarily be aware of (see Bacchi 2009). By disentangling such normative assumptions embedded in policy, feminist scholars seek to investigate how they reinforce and legitimize gendered subjectivities and relations. They do so because these gendered roles, relations, and norms, in the end, might impact policy outcomes and life opportunities. By disputing claims of “neutrality” in policymaking, feminist scholars press policymakers to explicitly address (implicit) biases that infiltrate their policies. Their aim for such criticism, according to Lombardo and Meier (2016), is normative: feminist scholars strive for transformation, often by promoting gender equality. Feminist policy scholars criticize (un)intended norms, discourses, and framings in policy to transform them into vehicles that can lead to a more gender-equal society. They do so even more with policies that, at the outset, are meant to foster equal opportunities or gender equality but do not deliver in that respect given the framings they contain.

Feminist policy scholars thus approach the study of policy from (amongst others) discursive and deconstructive angles, which enables them to make the normative content of policy categories more explicit. These approaches are of interest for our current endeavour to challenge policy categories in migration governance, as these call the dominant and thereby “normalized” usage of categories into question. In their volume on gender equality policies and practices, Lombardo and colleagues (2009, 7) for example explain that a “deconstructive approach to gender equality is invested in uncovering its different denotations by centering the intentional or unintentional engaging of policy actors in conceptual disputes that result in meanings attributed to the terms and concepts employed in specific contexts”. They underline that the concept of gender equality itself is disputed and contested, as it can be filled with a variety of different meanings that arise from specific political histories, contexts, struggles and debates (Kantola and Verloo 2018; Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2009). They then aim to identify the “institutionally supported and culturally influenced interpretative and conceptual meanings (discourses) that produce particular understandings of issues and events” (Bacchi 2009, 22).

In doing so, feminist scholars often rely on Bacchi’s (1999) “What’s the Problem Represented to Be-approach” (WPR) and Verloo’s “Critical Frame Analysis” (CFA) (Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2009). Both are meant for studying policy text and focus on how policy problems, as represented in policy documents, are constructed and represented within wider discourse. They allow for a detailed analysis of the policy diagnosis, prognosis, and call for action, and in doing so call for explicit attention to the meaning of categories used to describe actors. These actors include authors of (policy) texts and those referenced in these texts in their varying positions as problem holders, problem causers and problem solvers (Van der Haar and Verloo 2013). Scrutinizing which social markers are mentioned in policy diagnosis, prognosis, roles and call for action, and what behaviours, characteristics, norms, and values, are explicitly or implicitly attached to these categories is crucial in feminist analyses. Doing this points to the discursive mechanisms that inform the way policy categories are composed and the corresponding effects that they might generate – such as inclusionary or exclusionary treatment in and by policies.

Indeed, in paying attention to which behaviours, characteristics, norms, and values, are explicitly or implicitly attached to social markers in policy text, feminist policy studies focus attention to their portrayal and how they resonate with existing stereotypes, stigmas, positions of exclusion, marginalization, and dominance (see Van der Haar and Verloo 2013). They do so by asking what meanings are attached to these subject positions: who is rendered problematic, the norm group, causing a problem or able to bring the solution? What is highlighted and silenced in those contexts? Who and what is gendered, racialized, classed, or aged, and in what exact intersections? While these deconstructivist approaches do not (necessarily) allow for establishing to what extent these categorizations are consciously or strategically undertaken, they do highlight how policy categorization processes produce subjects. In doing so, feminist policy scholars show that we should move beyond studying social markers of difference or policy categories and instead study categorization as an active process producing (in this case) gendered subjectivities.

Bacchi (2017, 22) vouches for this move, as she urges feminist scholars to move away from categories (gender) to verbs (gendering), as the latter “are better able to draw attention to practices of subordination than fixed categories”. This is important, as categorization undertaken in policy leads not only to a normatizing of social groups, but it produces and regenerates hierarchies and inequalities by selectively connecting social markers to problems, solutions, and action. Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo (2009) for example found that within their sample of 448 texts on gender equality, diagnoses of policy problems were more often articulated in intersectional ways than proposed solutions. This, according to them, risks stigmatization, as it might derive from an understanding of certain social groups as “being” problematic. They give the example of Roma women being posed as causing problems for native Italians. Emphasizing gender and race as problematic in the dynamics of conflict between the two communities, but not as a necessary part of solutions, stigmatizes Roma women and offers no solution to the discrimination they face. Understanding that policy categories are not simply given but actively constructed, unpacking them, and critically scrutinizing the effects that categorization does for the (re)generation of hierarchies and inequalities, opens these categories under study up to new definitions and usages, which in turn helps to disrupt existing norms and hierarchies (Lombardo and Kantola 2021).

In sum, using concepts from feminist studies helps scholars to reveal the androcentric bias in public policies and to vouch for more gender + sensitive policies and inclusive societies. Feminists currently do so by (amongst others) relying on deconstructive and discursive methodologies which put the construction of policy problems and solutions, including the roles ascribed to various social groups and actors within these, centre stage. They show the need to move from a focus on categories in policy, to policy categorization as an active practice, as only the latter can reveal how inequality is maintained. In the studies reviewed above, feminist policy scholars tend to privilege gender – and by extension, the interests of women – as primary category of analysis and only consequently (if at all) include other axes of inequality in a more inductive manner. Lombardo and colleagues (2017) refer to this as “the gender + approach”. Instead of taking gender or gender + as our point of departure, we will outline in the next section what including intersectionality in our analysis can reveal about migration governance and its practices of categorization.

Critiquing structures of domination and discrimination in migration governance

Taking stock from the ways in which feminist policy scholars critically study policymaking, implementation and the categories embedded in these, this section shifts the gaze from using gender as a central category of analysis to intersectionality. In arguing for the fruitfulness of taking an intersectional perspective, we build upon the insight that deconstructive and discursive approaches to policy are particularly suitable for revealing the constructed character of policy categories. Frameworks like WPR (Bacchi 1999) and CFA (Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2009) help analysts to reveal institutionally supported and culturally influenced meanings that produce particular understandings of policy subjects and objects in policy text. Intersectionality, then, adds two further, crucial components to such analyses.

First, intersectionality exposes deep-seated presuppositions related to not only gender, but the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and other markers of social difference. It forces the analyst to be attentive to the way in which the intersection of social markers of difference generates particular forms of treatment in historically specific contexts. An individual’s status and position within society indeed depends on the ascription of meaning to social markers of difference, as well as the recognition or resonance of these meanings as valid visions of difference (Paul 2015; Raghuram 2021). Intersectionality teaches the analyst that categorization always operates contextually, acquiring its significance through resonance with existing stereotypes, images, and narratives. By opening the analysis up beyond gender relations alone, it forces us to question which power relations are of relevance to understand the work of policy categorization at hand, and the ways in which it justifies particular forms of treatment that are rendered “normalized”.

As argued in the introduction to this Special Issue (Scuzzarello and Moroşanu forthcoming) there is a limited body of scholarship that investigates migration and integration policy by exploring the weight that is being given to the intersection of particular social markers of difference in said policy. Similarly to the feminist policy scholars discussed in the previous section, they problematize conventional research on migration governance and instead redirect attention to the politics of migration (Cleton and Bonjour 2022). They conceptualize these politics as practices of power/authority that reveal the relation between global structural conditions, specific policymaking processes and the everyday decision-making of actors involved. In recent years, feminist scholars have for example shown the limits of explaining migration policy making from either economic and material rationales or identity formation, membership, and culture (Bonjour and Chauvin 2018). They destabilize the dichotomy between economic utility and identity maintenance as distinct logics that drive policy making and show that race and gender always operate through class and vice versa (e.g. in Elrick and Winter 2018; Bonjour and Duyvendak 2018). By focusing on the dialectic of power/authority, feminist scholars directed their purview to the crucial role of discourse, norms, and identity to understand the dynamics of policymaking, and argue that we should study these intersectionally if we want to account for the ways they foster inclusion or perpetuate exclusion. In the domain of integration policy, intersectional approaches have been particularly productive in exposing policy makers’ concern with identity maintenance at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and religion. Studies found that intersecting notions of gender, ethnicity and religion allow integration policymakers to problematize (Muslim) migrants as “unassimilable” and a threat to the Western, liberal society and welfare state, and in turn to propose more stringent integration measures (e.g. in Korteweg and Yurdakul 2009; Korteweg and Triadafilopoulos 2013; Kofman, Saharso, and Vacchelli 2015; Roggeband and van der Haar 2018, Kofman 2023). Beyond the attention to the way in which policies exclude migrants at the intersection of gender, religion and ethnicity, feminist researchers also investigate how class (Bonjour and Duyvendak 2018; Elrick and Winter 2018), age (Horsti and Pellander 2015; Cleton 2022) and sexuality (Yurdakul and Korteweg 2021) operate in a variety of migration control policies – including policies on labour and family migration, asylum, and return.

These studies mobilize intersectionality to deconstruct policy actors’ understandings of the subjects of policy intervention (e.g. “migrants with poor prospect” in Bonjour and Duyvendak 2018, “Moroccan Youngsters” in Roggeband and van der Haar 2018, and “Muslim masculinities” in Yurdakul and Korteweg 2021 and Huizinga 2022) or the requirements they need to fulfil for inclusion in the nation state (“dependency” in Eggebø 2010, and “admissability” in Elrick and Winter 2018). They rely on intersectionality’s core insight – the intersection of markers of social difference – to unravel how categories of gender, race and class make up immigrant subjectivities, and what “work” these consequently do within specific policy domains. They thereby emphasize how processes of differentiation that result from these categories, such as racialization, gendering and classing, result in various forms of inclusion or exclusion. Scuzzarello (2008) for example highlights how narratives of differentiation that are reproduced in integration policies affect migrant women in Sweden. By centering categories of gender and race, she finds that the integration projects under study rely on essentialist understandings of culture and diversity that exclude migrant women from the Swedish cultural and social collectivity. Centering categories of race, class, and religion in Dutch integration debates, Bonjour and Duyvendak (2018) show in a similar fashion that the racialization of “non-Western” migrants positions them as unassimilable in terms of socio-economic skills and cultural compatibility in the Netherlands.

Second, we hold that intersectionality enables a subsequent theorizing of the relationship between policy categorization and broader systems of domination and discrimination, such as patriarchy, colonialism, heteronormativity, and capitalism. While some of the aforementioned scholars rely on intersectionality to point to the effects of interlocking practices of differentiation in policy, they at the same time pay little attention to how historically constituted systems of domination and discrimination – racism, colonialism, patriarchy, sexism, and capitalism – intersect in particular contexts to enable such differentiation to take place in the way in which it does. We think that this is a missed opportunity, as intersectionality’s core strength is to capture relations of power, both as subjects of analysis and as objects in need of transformation (see also Weldon 2006; Dhamoon 2011; Levine-Rasky 2011; Smooth 2013; Anthias 2013). Intersectionality has the unique ability to not only denaturalize deep-seated presuppositions related to intersecting categories of difference, but also to expose and theorize the intersecting power relations that sustain these presuppositions and thereby organize society. We therefore privilege simultaneously studying processes of differentiation and systems of domination, as both effectively capture the complex dynamics of power (Dhamoon 2011). Weldon (2006, 239) even notes that

it is not often recognized that structural analysis is required by the idea of intersectionality. It is the intersection of social structures, not identities, to which the concept refers. We cannot conceptualize “interstices” unless we have a concept of the structures that intersect to create these points of interaction.

Taking these structures as the foci of our analysis enables us to see that processes of categorization and systems of domination are intrinsically intertwined and acquire meaning through each other. On the one hand, the effects that policy categorization bring about – stigmatization, privilege, exclusion, or inclusion, by selectively attaching social markers of difference to problems, solutions, and outcomes – acquire their meaning because of the particular way these broader systems of domination operate. We cannot fully comprehend why certain ways of stereotyping resonate, or are rendered possible at all, without seeing them in the context of these broad, intersecting structures of domination and discrimination. Explicitly theorizing and reflecting upon these structures, on the other hand, also show that relations of inequality are reinforced by processes of policy categorization. The latter legitimize particular forms of treatment and reaffirm existing relationships of domination and privilege. The aforementioned scholarship takes such an approach only to a limited extent to date. Yurdakul and Korteweg (2021, 42), for example, set out to study how boundary regimes for refugees in Germany and Canada are “informed by postcolonial gendered racializations”. While referencing “colonially rooted processes of de-masculinization” (Yurdakul and Korteweg 2021, 46) and “colonial discourse” (48), they however do not thoroughly analyze how the gendered and racialized processes of othering are enabled by the two countries’ particular colonial histories, nor how othering sustains a neocolonial world order in which refugee politics play out today. An exception in this body of scholarship is Bassel (2021), who draws on intersectional scholarship to show the ongoing colonial legacies that underpin policy instruments for citizenship acquisition. She relies on intersectionality, and Black feminist thought more generally, to draw attention to the power relations of citizenship acquisition as intrinsically bound up with not only neoliberal “deservingness” criteria, but also as intersecting with colonial histories and its gendered and race relations.

By foregrounding structures of discrimination and domination in our analyses, we do not mean to convey that research into markers of social difference, identities or categories alone is not important, nor that we discard agency or conceptualize individuals as passive bearers of the meanings that get attached to social categories (see Prins 2006). In shifting attention from categories to processes and structures we highlight the impact of inequality upon the formation of (ascribed) identities through law and policies. Considering structures of domination and discrimination, according to Smooth (2013) inevitably merits a focus on institutions and processes, and therefore the law, policies, and governing bodies. As scholars of migration governance and policy, we are thus in a unique position to spur transformative social justice – core to intersectionality as a political concept (Smooth 2013) – since “studying the powerful, their institutions, policies and practices, instead of focusing on those whom the powerful govern, […] can identify the conceptual practices of power and how they shape daily social relations” (Harding and Norberg 2005, 2011). Pointing attention to these helps to denaturalize migration-related difference, as well as the hegemonic classification power of the state, as it reveals that migration governance always relies on (and reifies) colonial power structures, sexism, patriarchy, and capitalism. Critically scrutinizing the work that categorization does, where it originates from and how it is rendered legible, enables feminist scholars of migration and integration governance to open policy categories up to new definitions and usages. This, in turn, disrupts existing norms and hierarchies and thereby challenges the hegemony of the state.

Conclusion

In this contribution we presented a reflection on the analytical value of intersectionality for scholars who investigate policy categories at stake in the governance of migration and integration. We contend that, while there is a growing attention for intersectionality in scholarly knowledge production, its analytical potential is not fully exploited for critically studying the work that policy categories do. Relying on the example of feminist policy studies, we first showed how feminist scholars use deconstructivist and discursive approaches to scrutinize the aims, implementation, and consequences of policies, unpack policy categories as well as the categorization of policy subjects. They make the normative content of policy categories explicit by deconstructing which policy subject identities are constructed in what way. More precisely, they show how behaviours, characteristics, norms, and values are explicitly or implicitly, but mainly selectively, attached to social markers in policy text, and how this resonates with existing stereotypes, stigmas, positions of exclusion, marginalization, and dominance. In doing so, they highlight how policy categorization processes produce policy subjects.

Building on this work of feminist policy scholars, we introduced intersectionality to demonstrate how we can investigate categorization as an active process that produces subjectivities in migration and integration studies. Intersectionality, we argued, crucially points scholars of migration governance to the broad systems of inequality and domination that are implicated in the governance of migration, which materialize in the ways in which the latter categorizes and constructs immigrant identities along intersecting axes of inequality. It first forces analysts to be attentive to the ways in which the intersections of social markers of difference generates particular forms of treatment in historically specific contexts. It thereby centres both context, as well as the active role that policy actors play in perpetuating or countering inequality. Secondly, we argued that intersectionality enables a subsequent theorizing of the relationship between policy categorization and broader systems of domination and discrimination. Doing so enables researchers to denaturalize migration-related difference and the hegemonic classification power of the state, as it helps to reveal how migration governance always relies on and reifies colonial power structures, sexism, patriarchy, and capitalism.

Having argued what we believe intersectionality can do for critical analyses of migration and integration governance, we will end this contribution with reiterating its core principles and strengths and hope that these will spur further reflection in future empirical and theoretical research in migration studies. First, intersectionality allows to sharpen the analytical distance between researchers and the policy categories found in migration and integration policy texts. This is of utmost importance in the light of our discussion on the close logics between some of the research on migration governance and governance processes itself. Unpacking how policy subjects are constituted, and how processes of differentiation enable this, allows researchers not to take categories for granted nor subscribing to the dominant policy paradigm and reproducing policy categories contained in it. It makes it possible to understand that while social markers are presented as proxies for social groups or policy subjects – and consequently presented as static identities – they are not naturally given but politically constructed.

A second point of interest is that intersectionality is by definition context sensitive. Indeed, not limiting the analysis to one social marker of difference (such as gender) but opening it up to the question of which ones are at stake, how they interact, and what consequences this has, allows for considering the social markers of difference relevant in a given policy context. It is plausible to assume that certain social markers of difference, such as race and class, may invariably be of relevance in contemporary integration and migration governance (see Anthias 2020 on “ethnos”). However, while some social markers of difference and their intersections may be relevant in one policy context, they may be less relevant in others, or other intersections may be at play, or the consequences of said intersections may play out differently. A crucial feature of an intersectional approach, according to us, is that it always approaches categorizations from different angles without necessarily a priori creating an analytical hierarchy between social markers of difference. Context matters in migration and integration governance and intersectionality brings it automatically into the analysis.

A third point of interest comprises the fact that intersectionality disputes the presumed rationality and neutrality of public policies. By disentangling the naturalized dimension of policy categories and the political dimension of categorization, intersectionality points at the fact that migration and integration governance and policies may be less rational and neutral than they pretend or are believed to be. Disputing claims of neutrality and rationality unpacks not only biases but also the inherently unequal foundations and functioning of migration and integration governance. This unmasking of a presumption of rationality and neutrality can be found at a meta-level, the official policy discourse, but also at a meso- or micro-level, when studying the discourses and practices of particular administrations, services, and individual policymakers or street level bureaucrats.

A final point of interest is that intersectionality at its core allows for unpacking power relations: what they are constituted of and how they are (re)produced in governance and policy. An intersectional approach shows that categorizations rely on broader systems of inequality, discrimination, and domination, and thereby at the same time reinforce these hegemonic power relations. We have argued that state power is intrinsically bound up with these broader systems, and that exposing how they reinforce each other can spur transformative social justice. Critical (case) studies of migration and integration governance can further develop this. This goes for the way in which categorization undertaken in policy text reifies and regenerates power hierarchies, processes, and inequalities, not the least through the way they set boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. It also implies investigating the construction of privilege (Levine-Rasky 2011): who is exempted from integration measures or allowed to move freely across the globe. But also more closely centering who is entitled to define inclusion and exclusion and thus disposes of the agency to regenerate and reproduce existing hegemonies. One way of doing this is by centering the intentions of actors who exploit or counteract the significance of categorizations in policy (Van der Haar and Verloo 2013). Finally, broadening the concept of power beyond domination would also allow to investigate agency in broader terms, including the power to change, disrupt and displace existing norms and hierarchies.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sarah Scuzzarello and Laura Moroşanu for including us in this special issue on intersectionality and integration, for pushing our thinking and critically engaging with the arguments presented in this manuscript. We are grateful to Eline Westra, as well as the participants in the roundtable Working on/with intersectionality in migration research and future research agendas at 19th IMISCOE Annual Conference “Migration and Time: Temporalities of Mobility, Governance and Resistance”, for their comments on and engagement with the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO) [grant number G072317N].