Repoliticizing international migration narratives? Critical reflections on the Civil Society Days of the Global Forum on Migration and Development

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on Pécoud’s international migration narratives (IMN) as an analytical framework to examine the Global Forum on Migration and Development’s Civil Society Days (GFMD-CSD). We analyse the narratives both produced and challenged at the GFMD-CSD, suggesting that while the GFMD-CSD poses a gentle challenge to existing IMN, it falls short of meaningfully (re)politicizing predominant migration paradigms. This is partly due to how the forum is a fraught space that reflects and reproduces uneven power dynamics between the Global North and South, concealing and nullifying contestations of power. Nonetheless, the GFMD-CSD, as a hybridized, experimental and fluidly defined discourse-led ‘global’ space, still functions as an important arena through which challenges to depoliticized state-led rhetoric might slowly trickle. Therefore, a closer interpretation of self-reflexive GFMD-CSD civil society strategies might challenge Pécoud’s conceptualization of what constitutes a ‘depoliticized’ approach to migration.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil society
• GFMD
• Global South
• international migration narratives

Additional information

Funding

This work has been funded by UK Aid from the UK government through the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium; however, the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies.

Notes on contributors

Kellynn Wee

Kellynn Wee works as a Research Associate at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests are in the migration industry, brokerage, social movements, and gendered labour migration in Asia.

Kudakwashe P. Vanyoro

Kudakwashe P. Vanyoro is a Research Communications Officer and Doctoral Researcher at the African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand. His research interests are migration research uptake, health systems, regulation and belonging in Southern Africa.

Zaheera Jinnah

Zaheera Jinnah is a Researcher at the African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand. Her research and teaching interests include labour and livelihoods, diasporas and gender and migration.