Migration infrastructures as analytical framework

In an ever-expanding migration research field, infrastructure analysis is emerging as a promising conceptual framework. Focusing on what makes the movement of people practically possible, a migration infrastructure framework explores the intersecting dimensions of social networks, technology as well as the legal, commercial and humanitarian/NGO mediation of migration. Or, in other words, it examines how people move and are moved by others.

In a new MIASA Working Paper, Nauja Kleist, Senior Researcher at DIIS, and Jesper Bjarnesen, Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI), review and discuss migration infrastructure as a methodological and theoretical approach. Drawing on their research of (labour) mobilities in West Africa, they consider the usefulness and limitations of this approach and the derived lessons for qualitative and ethnographic methods. The notion of migration infrastructure was originally developed with reference to Asian labour migration, prompting questions of the applicability in and comparison with West African contexts. Juxtaposing Asian and West African examples, Kleist and Bjarnesen suggest that the framework holds potential for highlighting the considerable variations in the mediation of migration across different empirical contexts. Some questions are left open, however. These include the role of migrant agency; the discrepancies between intentions and uses of (migration) infrastructures; the significance of culturally embedded migrant imaginaries; and the impact of global migration governance on national or regional regulatory frameworks.

The Working Paper is one of the outputs of the Interdisciplinary Fellow Group on migration, mobility, and forced displacement, February-May 2019, that were hosted at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), University of Ghana. All MIASA Working Papers are open access.