Abstract:
The book investigates how the United Nations, governments, and aid
agencies mobilise and instrumentalise migration policies and programmes
through a discourse of safe migration.
Since the early 2000s, numerous non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), UN agencies, and governments have warmed to the concept of safe
migration, often within a context of anti-trafficking interventions. Yet, both
the policy-enthusiasm for safety, as well as how safe migration comes into
being through policies and programmes remain unexplored. Based on seven
years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mekong region, this is the first book
that traces the emergence of safe migration, why certain aid actors gravitate
towards the concept, as well as how safe migration policies and programmes
unfold through aid agencies and government bodies. The book argues that
safe migration is best understood as brokered safety. Although safe migration policy interventions attempt to formalize pre-emptive and protective
measures to enhance labour migrants’ well-being, the book shows through
vivid ethnographic details how formal migration assistance in itself depends
on – and produces – informal and mediated practices.
The book offers unprecedented insights into what safe migration policies
look like in practice. It is an innovate contribution to contemporary theorising of contemporary forms of migration governance and will be of interest
to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and human geographers
working within the fields of Migration Studies, Development Studies, as
well as Southeast Asian and Global Studies.
