We have recently taken over as Book Reviews editors for Migration and Society and wanted to use this opportunity to introduce ourselves, as well as the rich selection of books reviewed in this current issue. As the co-editors of this section, we will prioritize book reviews that are critical in their approach and aligned with the ethos of the journal. We seek to represent diversity in our field and encourage readers, publishers, and authors to share with us books that straddle multiple disciplines, epistemologies, and methodological approaches that can provide our readers with a range of critical perspectives to understand migration and the societies we live in.
In this issue, while the books included are expansive in terms of their geographical, historical, and disciplinary scope, they all remind us how migration and borders need to be understood as deeply intertwined with historically rooted power structures. The common thread across all of the reviews is that we cannot understand contemporary migration and (im)mobility—and the policies and regimes that seek, often violently, to curtail and enforce mobility and displacement—without looking up (to how power operates from above) and back (to how these operations of power are entangled with histories of oppression and dispossession, including through colonialism, slavery, violent occupation, and war).
John Knudsen and Kjersti G. Berg's edited volume, Continental Encampment: Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East and Europe (reviewed by Josiane Matar), highlights the importance of a genealogical approach for providing historical context to contemporary forms of oppression, not in order to compare and contrast the past to the present but, rather, to examine how past oppressions linger in contemporary systems of inequality and dispossession, albeit in different guises. Ammar Azzouz's Domicide: Architecture, War and Destruction of Home in Syria (reviewed by Lewis Turner) provides crucial new perspectives on the destruction of the Syrian city of Homs, situating this process of “domicide” within longer histories of displacement and dispossession that extend beyond “war times” to include programs of regeneration and redevelopment led by wealthy elites. In Leah Cowan's Border Nation (reviewed by Nassim Majidi), we are confronted with how colonialism and racial capitalism continue to inform the UK's hostile migration and asylum regimes. Cowan's take on the genealogies of border(ing) practices and discourses in the UK provide a powerful personal and historical account of the violence inherent in borders and in their reinforcement.
The role of institutions and systems in producing and sustaining these unequal relations of power, which dehumanize and marginalize refugees and other migrants, is also a recurrent theme across the books reviewed. Blair Sackett and Annette Lareau's We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America (reviewed by Apa Pomeshikov) revisits the system of inequalities and institutional deficiencies that mark the welfare and resettlement systems. Through the lived experience of Congolese refugees in the United States, the authors speak of the indispensable role of cultural intermediaries, brokers, and institutional insiders, who can shape refugees’ access to public services and social safety nets, despite the bureaucratic hurdles. Jonathan Darling's Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum (which he discusses in an interview with Sarah Hughes included in the “Reflections” section of this issue), traces the processes of outsourcing and privatization of the UK's asylum accommodation and support system, which has been integral to the ongoing “patterns of violence, suffering, and social abjection” (8) that characterize asylum governance in the UK, with resonances beyond. Rather than focusing on systems and institutions as geographically or temporally bounded, or as separate from the everyday lives and agencies of migrants and refugees, several of the books here highlight the importance of multi-scalar approaches to migration, calling for perspectives that encompass global, national, local, and individual scales of analysis. Rawan Arar and David Scott FitzGerald's The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach (reviewed by Christina Clark-Kazak) takes an explicitly multi-scalar approach, positing the concept of “refugeedom” to examine relationships between refugees, state, and society, which they suggest is closely intertwined with individual experiences of becoming a refugee, what they term “refugeehood” (6). Finally, Anja Simonsen's book, Tahriib: Journeys into the Unknown. An Ethnography of Uncertainty in Migration (reviewed by Nauja Kleist) explores the temporalities of migration including questions of waiting and uncertainty in the context of young Somalis’ irregular migration to Europe, including their evolving hopes and dreams, while critically reflecting on the wider inequalities that fieldwork presents.
We look forward to bringing to you, in our book review section, critical migration scholarship, and wish you all a thoughtful read.