Classificatory Struggles Revisited: Theorizing Current Conflicts over Migration, Belonging and Membership

Abstract

Building on the reflexive turn in migration studies, the editorial proposes a conceptual heuristic for studying current conflicts over migration in Europe and beyond. The article integrates a non-essentialist understanding of migration, theories of belonging, membership and boundary-making and perspectives from cross-border studies. It calls to approach multiple social and political conflicts around migration as embedded in struggles over the migration-reladted classifications and powerful discourses of othering. Finally, it provides an overview of the contents of the special issue.

Keywords:

• Migration
• conflict
• classificatory struggles
• boundary-making
• cross-border studies

Notes

1 A major characteristic of the intersectional reading used here is that it avoids essentialist understandings of ‘axes of difference’ as ‘group traits’; instead, intersectional theory is interpreted from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, which draws attention to the performativity of social classifications such as around gender, ethnicity, race, class and other 'axes of inequality' (Amelina and Lutz, 2019).