Defining, Combining, and Applying Postcolonial and Decolonial Approaches to the Study of Displacement Contexts

Postcolonial and decolonial theories offer essential tools for the critical study of forced migration. Centering on the historical construction of global inequalities through imperial processes of domination and exploitation launched by European states, postcolonial works have traced the relationship of knowledge to power in the representation of colonized peoples in the majority world as an uncivilized mass and essentialized “Other,” in contrast to the “modern” and “advanced” West (Bhabha 1994; Said 1978; Spivak 1999). These cultural hierarchies and dominant modes of understanding have shaped notions like universalism, humanity, and civilization, and fed into a system of refugee and migration governance that reinstates these dichotomies. Postcolonial theory also draws attention to the amnesiac severance of dominant ideas about mobility from the colonial contexts through which they evolved (Bhabha 1994; Spivak 1988). Like postcolonial approaches, decolonial scholars also reject the Eurocentrism of dominant interpretations of modernity and humanity, although decolonial approaches tend to address a much longer historical timeframe than postcolonial work (Bhambra 2007). Decoloniality has focused on how coloniality/modernity function as two sides of the same coin, leading to deep matrixes of power/knowledge subjugating and erasing alternative epistemologies (Grosfoguel 2011; Mignolo 2000; Quijano and Ennis 2000). Postcolonial and decolonial approaches therefore emphasize the continuity of colonial thinking embedded within current systems of power, and we argue that this has implications for migration studies, regarding both the longevity and impact of colonial encounters, as well as how these relations continue to shape the production of knowledge and key concepts.

These approaches have been used to critically interrogate governance processes in contexts where tensions over immigration are taking new political forms. Yet, save for some notable exceptions (see Chimni 1998), attention to the relationships between colonial histories and current and emerging systems of displacement politics has long remained neglected in the study of forced migration and in migration studies. More recently however, a widening multidisciplinary literature has engaged with a growing number of post- and decolonial themes and contexts in relation to migration (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020; Samadder 2020; Mayblin and Turner 2021; Lemberg-Pedersen et. al. 2022a; Bradley 2023). Within migration studies, a focus has evolved on the role of Northern actors in perpetuating colonial continuities of containment. For example, research has yielded important analyses of Northern migration control keeping Southern “non-insured” populations away from Northern social protection systems (Duffield 2005), and has traced how development interventions designed and funded in the North have been used to discourage internal rural–urban migrations within postcolonial countries in the Global South (Bakewell 2008a). Recent analyses further detail how humanitarian operations are imbricated in an expanding financial sector business model by strategic partnerships mediating the fintech sector's data-craving for information about the “unbanked,” displaced, populations of the world (Lemberg-Pedersen and Haioty 2020).

Even as a plurality of postcolonial and decolonial approaches have expanded across academic fields, their analytical potential, conceptual rigor, appropriateness, and political implications continue to be debated (Mabanckou and Thomas 2022). Postcolonial approaches linked to literary and cultural studies have often been understood as a general theoretical counterpoint to processes of amnesia or forgetting surrounding colonial encounters (Fanon 1965; Gandhi 1998). Ann Laura Stoler (2011) has proposed the concept of aphasia as more accurate in dealing with the ways in which the occlusion of knowledges leads to lacking and decimated vocabularies and underdeveloped understandings of the enduring relevance of colonialism. Productive critiques have also challenged the tendency of academic and policy-oriented research to focus on South–North migration and its associated control dynamics (see Crush and Chikanda 2018; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020). In turn, a strand of literature highlights the increasing roles played by states, humanitarian and other non-state actors in the restriction, extraction, and marketization of data from displaced or captured populations within the Global South (Andersson 2014; Duffield 2018; Martin and Tazzioli 2023; Mbembe 2017). At the epistemic level, knowledge about postcolonial states and societies may result in and perpetuate externally oriented epistemic systems, which originate through gazes from imperial metropoles and in turn create what Paulin Hountandji (2009) has called knowledge tourist circuits between core and periphery. The perpetuation of such circuits may be considered a generalizable risk to historicizing approaches. By extension, this risk is also faced by those seeking to apply postcolonial and decolonial approaches to situations of forced displacement. We therefore argue that there is a need for greater critical reflection on definitions of and reflexivity about research positionality (Gani and Khan 2024), as well as clearly differentiating between the specific contexts of case studies and the perspectives that can be drawn from them. Such analyses hold the potential to deepen critiques of Euro/Western- centric assumptions about displacement, while also avoiding the perpetuation of managerial and researchers’ perceived rights to access displaced persons through state or humanitarian supply lines (Cobarrubias et al. 2023; Pascucci 2017).

The power dynamics that foreground essentialist representations of migration dynamics have long been a key concern within postcolonial feminist analysis (Mohanty 1988; Spivak 1999). Work has, inter alia, interrogated hierarchical representations of migrants and refugees in relation to gender, race, and ethnicity (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2014), challenged dominant narratives on multiculturalism (Yuval-Davis 2006), and countered the neglect of gender and sexuality (see Cappiali and Pacciardi 2024; Nasser-Edin and Abu-Assab 2020; Parashar 2016). Through the case of the French department of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, Nina Sahraoui (this issue) furthers such critiques by examining the necropolitical migration control exercised over the undocumented lives of women, involving perilous journeys in kwassa-kwassa fishing boats and the transformation of spaces around Mayotte's maternity ward into a node of extraterritorial citizenship control. This connects to research on the mobilization of powerful discourses that link gender equality and female emancipation with the Global North. These can be used to legitimize both humanitarian and development interventions as well as restrictive migration regimes, while obscuring the causes of protracted displacement and the deleterious effects of interventions on displaced women (Abu-Lughod 2013; Akram et al. 2014). Yet, drawing on Achille Mbembe's work (2017), Sahraoui reveals the gendered necropolitics of the liberal state in its implementation of exceptional mobility controls and birthright laws that stigmatize, harm, and ultimately abandon undocumented pregnant Mahoran women to their death.

In turn, Susan Reardon-Smith (this issue) interrogates the multiple ways that displaced persons have also been used as tools of statecraft and of excluding others in the context of Australian asylum and immigration policy. This work aligns with research building on Edward Said's (1978) critical, postcolonial analyses of Orientalist assumptions in Western discourses on migration, and which has argued further for a decolonial approach to understand how colonial legacies continue to shape migrant experiences (Agnew 2009). For instance, Harsha Walia (2013) asserts formative links between colonial imperialism and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous and first nations people. These are also evident in the parallels that Reardon-Smith draws between the treatment of both Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers by the Australian state, in the context of increasingly harsh responses to asylum seekers in Australian politics that coincide with the expansion of land rights for Indigenous Australians. This work offers insights into the way that public debate in Australia is directed away from important contextual and historical factors, reflecting Aurora Vergara-Figueroa's (2018: xxi) insight that the dehistoricized application of concepts, such as “forced migration,” in local contexts of displacement and dispossession risks depoliticizing these processes, and epistemologically erasing marginalized cultures and people.

This STS also pays careful attention to the ways human relationships and the rules of colonial structures have endured beyond the formal control of colonial powers (Brankamp and Daley 2020; Mamdani 1996). What may be described as colonial impulses to contain, manipulate, and induce the movement of certain populations have further morphed into postcolonial South-South dynamics through imbalances in the exercise of sovereign power privileging elites and/or creating economic dependencies. In this STS, Laura Adderley's contribution details one such enduring dimension, examining how British imperial anti-slavery humanitarian interventions transformed emancipated people and people rescued from slave ships into settler colonists in old or new imperial spaces. This policy resettled people emancipated from enslavement from western and central African regions and then rescued from slaving vessels, into societies like Antigua, the Bahamas, Tortola, Liberia and Sierra Leone. In this manner, relations between Southern states were shaped by settler colonial humanitarian population transfers with an enduring influence on the social fabric and multifaceted relationships within and across regions such as the Caribbean. In this way, South-South dynamics are entangled across power differentials in ways that may contingently parallel, but also depart from, the impulses of their colonial predecessors (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2018; Mignolo 2013). While these systems are often legislated in societies by elites “from above” they can also be conceptualized as endured, shaped, and hybridized by autonomous acts of quasi-members “from below”, such as minorities, migrants, and refugees “from below” (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; Engin 2008). Yet, even where new forms of subjectification, governance and control have emerged in postcolonial states of the Global South, the connections between these newer practices and those undertaken in colonial contexts of displacement require further exploration. In their contribution, Clayton Boeyink and Simeon Koroma (this issue) analyze how barrays (local dispute settlements in Western Area Sierra Leone presided over by community-appointed chiefs) first emerged as informal alternatives to colonial-era administrative systems, and have since then been adapted to become the prime vehicle for urban migrants whose justice claims are otherwise dismissed in and by colonial and postcolonial legal systems. Boeyink and Koroma´s engagement with the continuities shaping the hybridized law structures in Sierra Leone is one example of the value added by postcolonial perspectives: insisting on viewing migration dynamics as situated within wider sociohistorical, geographical, and economic trajectories.

Resistance to, and the re-politicization of, colonial processes are central concerns of postcolonial approaches, for instance in Nicolas De Genova's (2010) conceptualization of migrant “illegality” and deportability and how he deals with migrants’ own contestation of, and resistance against, state control. Although the containment and control of migrant and refugee bodies needs to be central in research on the coloniality of power, the contributors also pay crucial attention to the seemingly small and benign acts and processes of anticolonial and decolonial resistance enacted through everyday mobilities and through the subversion and hybridization of prevailing colonial structures. Thus, Boeyink and Koroma examine postcolonial Tanzanian and Sierra Leonean regimes of migration control, mapping displaced citizens’ and migrants’ everyday decolonial resistance to hegemonic postcolonial structures, as they navigate their lives through “tethered mobilities,” residing in spaces across the city- and refugee camps, which imperial and postcolonial states have otherwise deemed unworthy for living. Providing another example, Reardon-Smith (this issue) details how in Australia, Aboriginal leaders have resisted political attempts to undermine solidarity between Aboriginal peoples and asylum seekers, by framing themselves as the original custodians of the land, and bidding asylum seekers welcome, for instance, by offering visas from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. However, as Sahraoui's description of Mahoran anti-immigration politics illustrates, the very possibility of resistance varies greatly from context to context. Indeed, even when fierce anti-immigration policies appear the only publicly acceptable stance, decolonial awareness can still find surprising manifestations, such as a pragmatic support for Le Pen as a way to reveal society-wide racism. These findings relate to Sara Ahmed's (2014) notion of the politics of refusal, and the power inherent in marginalized people's own ways of divesting from colonial power relations. Related to the STS's focus on research positionality (to which we now turn), diverse modes of refusal and resistance must also be seen as foundational questions and processes for researchers.

Post- and Decolonial Resistance to Research-Policy Nexuses in Forced Migration

As shown above, the contributors and guest editors of this STS reflect various ways of engaging with and applying the theories and concepts of postcolonial and decolonial approaches to contexts of forced migration. Yet they also share the understanding that rather than pitting these important approaches against each other, more critical potential can be harnessed from a comprehensive approach that combines their shared ambition to insist on the relevance and urgency of engaging with the still unfolding effects of colonialism across different geographic contexts.

While more work remains to be done to further develop and realize the distinct potential of postcolonial and decolonial approaches to conceptualize and research forced migration, recent literature nonetheless offers important insights. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2014) have formulated similar, yet distinct, challenges to researchers who risk embodying and enacting extractivist positionalities vis-à-vis displaced populations or Indigenous communities. Their critiques carry with them the daunting prospect that matrixes of power, Western scientific approaches and ways of understanding how we think about knowledge have been fundamentally imbricated in the socioeconomic orders that emerged from the era of colonial imperialism. This also poses a formidable challenge to forced migration studies, requiring theoretical tools to engage with the boundaries of recognition and legitimation, past and present, a challenge around which seminal works on Orientalism, the postcolony, and necropolitics have revolved (Said 1978; Mbembe 2001, 2008).

The research brought together here represents a move toward decentering dominant and influential currents in today's partnerships between research and policy on forced migration, through which massive databases on current displacement dynamics are crafted by “boundary organizations” (van Nispen and Scholten 2017) such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA), (see Bakewell 2008b; Zetter 1991), financial actors such as the World Bank Group, the World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center, and for-profit consultancies such as Accenture or McKinsey (see Duffield 2018; Stavinoha 2024). Yet, as the resulting knowledge is tied to donor imperatives to frame displacements through a presentist and actionable focus, the knowledge and political contexts stored in colonial archives tend to be left at the wayside despite the fact that they represent a vast repository telling in-depth histories of not only similar, but often also connected economies, actors, and dynamics rolled out towards displaced Indigenous, colonial or enslaved peoples. The first step pursued by our STS contributions toward re-historicizing and re-politicizing current displacement politics follows the basic realization that scholars may resist the positionalities that result from partnering-for-access with actors in the political economies of humanitarian supply chains or in political architectures collecting and disaggregating ever more data about displaced populations (Tuck and Yang 2014).

In this sense, forced migration studies is currently facing a crossroads when it comes to its own positionality vis-à-vis its logics of categorization, knowledge, intervention, and self-understanding about displacement politics. The research agenda underpinning and arising through this STS foregrounds the possibility that critical researchers may, rather than partnering with political- economic architectures of displacement and data extraction, instead use postcolonial and decolonial approaches to resist complicity in such processes. Through critical and multidisciplinary comparisons between multiple colonial histories, eras and contexts, researchers may examine how architectures of complicity enact and instantiate oppression, but also leave documentary traces of use for research. These problematic and ambiguous spaces constitute an under-explored area in postcolonial displacement studies. In her contribution, Sahraoui conducted fieldwork among healthcare professionals in Mayotte who explained that when they prescribed perinatal medical examinations to undocumented pregnant women, the border police timed raids and arrests with when the women left the health centers. By comparison, Laura Rosanne Adderley references early nineteenth-century British practices such as slave owners keeping records about enslaved people's scarification and injuries, or customs officers recording the African names of slave trade refugees. She highlights that although these practices were undertaken for the purpose of abolitionist policies, the collection of such data dehumanized their subjects, while also documenting this oppression for research in posteriority. This is comparable to present-day experimentation with the use of biometric dataveillance technologies to capture data in the current management of human mobility: this simultaneously generates vast data-sets traded between states and organizations, serves to dehumanize marginalized populations, and generates new entry-points for control and domination.

Addressing the Endurance of Coloniality

How to conceptualize and then invoke the relationship between past and present is, at a conceptual level, one key dimension of post- and decolonial approaches that has received less attention in the field of refugee studies. When applied to forced migration dynamics, post- and de-colonial approaches assume the continuing relevance of colonial encounters at a fundamental level, and examine how this relevance plays out for both colonizing and colonized societies (see Mayblin and Turner 2021). The notions of “continuity,” “critical junctures,” “tipping points,” or “trajectories” offer useful conceptual tools to researchers (Amenta 2009; Mayblin 2017). Together, they all underscore a crucial question: what constitutes the necessary and sufficient conditions of such continuity? (Lemberg-Pedersen et al. 2022b: 12–15). Continuity in the form of ongoing and overtly justified practices of settler colonialism may be demonstrable in certain contexts, as was the case with the South African apartheid regime, and is still the case with the militarized settler colonial projects of Morocco in Western Sahara, and of Israel in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem (Khoury 2011). However, the concept of continuity still needs further untangling. The German “continuity debate” concerned the possibility of determining the validity of claims that causal, necessary, or contingent linkages existed between German colonialism in current-day Namibia and the rise of the Nazi racialized regime (see Kundrus 2005). A point made in this debate was that seeming equivalence to past practice, or the existence of colonial precursors in the form of statements, legislation, policies, tactics, texts, institutions, or archives may not always straightforwardly establish postcolonial continuity. This is because, just like today, colonial empires often appealed to each other's past practices as they perceived or wanted to represent the activities of rivals or allies. This had implications for political discussions at the time, but it also impacts today's archival tracing that seeks to examine continuities.

In their contributions, both Adderley and Reardon-Smith point out that the history of colonial encounters and imperial practices has undergone numerous revisions in the last decades. Adderley details how, in the case of the abolition of the Western slave trade, this reflects the various interests through which that history has been told and re-told, that is, the ideological and geopolitical competitions, or alliances, between the colonial powers of the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and the United States. Furthermore, if the political history of colonial practices itself is tortuous and dynamic, this means that any ambition to establish continuities between imperial and current-day practices requires multifaceted analyses, which recognize how colonial histories were and still are objects of strategic instrumentalization for diverse reasons. In turn, in the case of intersections between Aboriginal and asylum seeker politics, Reardon-Smith traces Australian authorities’ legislation on Aboriginal land rights and how their contraction and expansion have coincided strategically with White Australian rejection of asylum seekers.

Postcolonial and decolonial approaches must therefore engage with historiographical discussions about the curation of archives, including critical attention to whose voices they represent and whose they silence. Adderley meticulously details how the records and reports of planters, customs officers, and abolitionists would all have been guided by their particular interests, and would all prevent resettled Africans from having their own voices represented in the archives. Functioning as epistemological gate-keepers, archives of the past and present are themselves integral components of colonial matrixes of power. When left unchecked they may erect pervasive barriers for researchers, in terms of how the past is constructed, forgotten, remembered, and negotiated from available (or unavailable, lost, or destroyed) records, documents, literature, and memories (see Carter 2006; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2016; Mbembe 2002; Stoler 2010). Recognizing the “violence of the archive” (Fuentes 2016) demands that engagements with historical records be critically cognizant of the sociotemporal context and purposes within which data were originally generated and the implications for interpretations.

Assessing continuity therefore requires careful curation of texts, senders, receivers, networks, and archives, which helps explain the fruitful synergies between postcolonial and decolonial research, and historiographic and critical approaches. This allows for an understanding of postcolonial analysis that preserves its great strength and potential, namely as concerning situations that are still unfolding through contingent power matrixes or assemblages and taking place through diverse spaces and actors, as illustrated throughout this STS. For example, in Sahraoui's article on the gendered necropolitics of migration control in Mayotte, the assemblage of coloniality encompasses French migration policies in the European periphery and those who enact them as women navigate complex socioeconomic realities in Mayotte itself. Here, the case studies explored allow researchers to avoid underdetermined and generalized notions of colonialism, which do not take into account the implications of specific geographies, chronologies, and functions at work in key encounters. In terms of temporal sampling and comparisons, each of the contributions in this STS negotiates a tendency in forced migration studies, although heterogeneous and multidisciplinary, toward presentist biases, processes of active forgetting and “aversions” to thinking about the present through inclusive, deeper histories (Marfleet 2007; see Elie 2014; Lemberg-Pedersen 2019; Mayblin 2014, 2017; Mayblin and Turner 2021; Walters 2015).

By identifying and exploring continuities, genealogies, and contingent parallels between twenty-first-century migration and displacement politics, and older, imperial politics related to slavery and colonial mobilities, this STS pushes the boundaries in the existing literature on refugee and forced migration studies, humanitarianism, as well as topical and regional historiographic studies on colonialism. This requires a fundamental interdisciplinarity and attention to different geographic and political contexts, as represented in this STS. Equally, engagement with debates across migration and forced migration studies and historiographic research also aids in crossing barriers such as archival and linguistic nationalisms, and the insufficient efforts in much historical study to engage with implications for current issues and policies (see Gabaccia 2004).

Drawing this introduction to a close, we offer some final observations about the wider societal relevance of postcolonial and decolonial interventions along the lines of the project presented here. Its growing relevance—and urgency—are illustrated by the connections between research and emerging social movements informed by growing decolonial and postcolonial awareness; but also by fierce political attacks on researchers of postcoloniality, gender, race, and migration emerging and reinforcing each other, across several national political contexts (Lemberg- Pedersen et al. 2022b: 7–12). Social movements like Black Lives Matter have brought questions about colonial trajectories to the forefront and grounded them within the material realities of the present day (Murrey 2019). These movements are not only occurring across societies with settler colonial pasts (or presents), but also focus on both the epistemological erasure of diverse genders and minorities in university curricula, as well as higher education institutions’ continuous complicity within colonial structures of exploitation and extractivism (Hartocollis and Fawcett 2023). At the same time, reactionary politicians are engaging in aggressive and mediatized delegitimization strategies against researchers in countries such as France, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, the United States, Brazil, India, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Research informing decolonial and postcolonial awareness is framed as an unlawful threat to social cohesion (UK), and as biased and unscientific activism (Denmark), or even an Islamo-leftist form of “gangrene” to be amputated from society, in the shocking words of Frédérique Vidal, the French Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (Kanji et al. 2021).

While not exactly surprising, the political implications of research into the colonialities and postcolonialities of forced migration certainly undermine a common assumption and argument that colonial pasts hold little or no relevance for current politics. This recognition places great responsibility on researchers and societies alike to undertake academic work that enables a deeper, more nuanced, and more critical awareness of such dynamics of power, positionality and epistemology; an objective to which we hope this STS can contribute.