different parts of the world (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2019).
There are, nevertheless, prominent volumes in the field which barely mention colonialism, postcolonialism or decolonization (e.g. Brettell and Hollifield 2008; Carens 2015; Faist 2000; Kivisto and Faist 2010; Sassen 1999; Soysal 1994). Likewise, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship is frequently ignored as a way of theorizing migration in key textbooks (even those professing to ‘diversify’, for example Castles, de Haas and Miller 2020). There are also many postgraduate ‘Refugee and Forced Migration’ programmes at ‘world-leading’ universities which cover neither these themes and theories nor issues of race and racism. As historical-structural approaches, such as those deriving from world systems theory, have been dismissed as overly structurally deterministic and have fallen out of favour, with them we have lost a focus on global racism and the legacies of colonialism as structuring axes of inequality and im-mobility. The focus has moved towards the more agential meso- and micro-level theories of ‘communities’, ‘networks’, ‘circulations’ and individual migrants within the context of globalization. But at the same time as acknowledging people’s power to act upon their own lives, these approaches pay too little attention, as previously noted, to structures of race and racism.
Refocusing on race and racism necessitates a renewed focus on the legacies of colonialism in contemporary power relations and particularly on the continued relevance of racial hierarchy for contemporary social, political, legal and economic life. Migration scholars tend to shy away from ‘race’ as a concept, as noted above, since it is associated with histories of racial science which we do not wish to lend legitimacy to. When studies do at least show an awareness of colonial histories, it is too often the case that colonial knowledge, racism and power are treated as something ‘in the past’ (see, for example, Castles, de Haas and Miller 2020: 312–16). Nevertheless, ‘race’ continues to hold meaning in the social world and racial ideas continue to significantly impact upon people’s lives (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Lentin 2020; Yancy 2016), as the recent renewed focus on racial capitalism has shown (Bhattacharyya 2018). In order to develop more adequate analyses of migration in the contemporary world, we need to acknowledge this and incorporate such analyses into migration studies.
A further issue is the extent to which migration studies continues to be quietly invested in ‘modernization theory’ (see Bhambra 2014). This is the idea that Europe and the white settler colonies at some point became ‘modern’ (wealthy, democratic, rational, secular, rights-based, egalitarian, capitalist, etc.), and that this process (the ‘European miracle’) was endogenous. In order for other parts of the world to become like Europe and its settler colonies (an aim assumed to be desirable), and particularly for them to eradicate poverty, modernization theory advocates that they can and should follow the path laid out by Europe and the wider Global North. This idea of modernization underpins the idea of ‘development’ (Escobar 1995). It centres Europe and European history as the reference point from which a road map into the future is imagined for countries deemed ‘underdeveloped’. The concept of ‘development’ is important in migration studies and is rarely paid critical attention. There is an assumption that development is the same as poverty reduction and that migration may facilitate or hinder this desirable process, or that from the opposite perspective development can facilitate or curtail migrations. That is not to suggest that poverty reduction is a problematic aim, but that we do need to acknowledge: (a) the colonial history which facilitated wealth accumulation in ‘the West’ – development in this part of the world was not endogenous and unrelated to impoverishment and exploitation in other parts of the world (Rodney 2018 [1972]) and cannot therefore be simply mimicked elsewhere; and (b) the ongoing power relations which facilitate inequality in both mobilities and immobilities but also in concentrations of wealth and poverty globally. An interrogation of the colonial origins of the idea of development facilitates an alternative framing of the issues at stake.
A growing number of scholars argue that our analyses of migration-related phenomena are enriched by an analysis which acknowledges histories of colonialism, and related racisms. On this theme, Adeyanju and Oriola (2011: 952) observe that ‘there is no notable scholarship in the existing body of literature on African migration that deals with the influence of the colonial discourse and ideology on Africans’ desire to immigrate to the West’. This is despite the fact that these discourses, which have endured the end of formal colonialism, are for them central to understanding the motivations behind African migration to the West, and despite the fact that African migration to ‘the West’ has received a significant amount of scholarly attention. Mains et al. (2013: 131) suggest that the critical interweaving of postcolonial theory and migration studies offers ‘a unique opportunity to reflect and ground our understandings of mobility in more complicated and (hopefully) sensitive ways’. A call to complication and complexity, then, goes to the heart of the potential of the bodies of literature discussed here.
But there have also been recent suggestions that a post- or decolonial frame risks reconfirming the national territory as a site of analysis (Anderson 2019; Sharma 2020). A central danger, some argue, is that migration researchers might be cementing or confirming the migrant/native distinction by working from such perspectives when what we should be doing is denaturalizing such binaries through de-nationalizing and de-territorializing our work (see also Davies and Boehmer 2019). We contest this reading of post- and decolonial perspectives though concede that too often binaries are reinforced rather than complexities embraced. Undeniably, anti-colonial movements have historically drawn on nationalist discourses as a move to resist colonial definitions of belonging, but this has not been without significant intellectual critique (for example, see Fanon 2008 [1952]). Equally, indigenous studies have been criticized for promoting an exclusionary ‘nationalist’ agenda and the debate rages about how solidarities can be built across colonial/modern lines of racialized distinction which were the very basis of the formation of settler-colonial states (Lawrence and Dua 2005; Sharma and Wright 2008–9; Tuck, Guess and Sultan 2014). While we would distinguish between projects of self-determination under conditions of colonial occupation on the one hand and anti-migrant nationalism on the other, the point here is that such struggles are certainly not the totality of intellectual discussion within decolonial or related fields.
The project of questioning colonial frameworks of hierarchical distinction (Mayblin 2017; Mignolo 2011a; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018a; Wynter 2003), of understanding histories as made up of movements and interconnections between societies and peoples rather than separateness (Bhambra 2014; Krivonos 2019; Nisancioglu 2019), of challenging Eurocentrism (Alatas 2006; Amin 1988; Bhabha 2005 [1994]) and critiquing the ways in which legal, social and economic definitions and functions of border regimes produce certain migrants as a problem (Achiume 2019; Anghie 2008; Pahuja 2011) is the very antithesis of parochialism, nationalism and ‘us and them’ politics. We hope to show this at length through the course of this book but also acknowledge that all fields and perspectives have their own blind spots, contradictions and unrealized aspirations – we are certainly not arguing that there is not a lot of work to do in this area. In the next section, we sketch out some of the key foci of three fields of work that have offered significant inspiration to us in our own work and in exploring in this book what a migration studies that centres colonialism might look like.
Postcolonialism, decoloniality and Third World approaches to international law
In relation to the intellectual projects which are associated with the agenda of ‘decolonizing the university’, postcolonialism, decoloniality, TWAIL, indigenous studies, global histories, South–South relations, black studies and subaltern studies, amongst other projects, are all seen in a variety of different disciplines and geographical locations to have contributed to this agenda. Three of particular relevance to the perspectives presented in this volume are postcolonialism, decoloniality and TWAIL. Here we briefly sketch out the main foci of these intellectual fields, but for an extended discussion of some of the broader theoretical issues at stake refer to chapter 2.
Leela Gandhi (1998: 4) describes postcolonialism as ‘a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of
