Critical Security Studies and Gulf Migration
zahra babar
Adopting a security perspective for various domains of human life, argue some scholars, is a positive, as this “securitization” serves to make human accountability and action the means by which to address matters that we might otherwise discount as naturally occurring or inevitable. Via this classical logic, when the domains of human mobility and migration become securitized it is a good thing, as we are then forced to address migration as some kind of systemic human failure, identify its risks at a multi-scalar level, build capacity, and deploy (or divert) resources that enable us to “manage” it. Migration then in its various forms is to be scrutinized not as natural or as inevitable, but as something outside the norm, destabilizing and potentially dangerous. It is driven by a variety of unpredictable, complex, and overlapping factors that need to be understood, ordered, and disciplined through appropriate mechanisms and proactive human action.
Much of the research I have done over the past sixteen years has specifically examined the ways in which labor migration is governed, focusing on the role of transnational actors, the international migration policymaking community and apparatus, and the state (at the sending and receiving end). Fundamental to the functioning and role of each of these key migration stakeholders are their particular conceptions of security, and that they take as self-evident that migration poses a global/national security threat, be that political, economic, or social.
Migration studies as a field represents a fundamental gap when it comes to recognizing, understanding, and critically interrogating ideas of security. Critical Security Studies (CSS) at the broadest level states that migration has become securitized and that it needs to be de-securitized. But more importantly it suggests that more is needed in terms of probing how and where this securitization of migration occurs, the ways it manifests in different geographies and contexts, how it is resisted, and what the ethical, moral, as well as political costs are of identifying migration as a security issue rather than a systemic and deliberate feature of our global political economy. Critical approaches to security suggest there is no such thing as an objective threat, and that there are multiple political interventions (and inventions) when it comes to identifying threats. Critical approaches also encourage us to interrogate blanket notions of security, to acknowledge that “security” has an ambiguity to it, and that its construction is a reflection of the inherent power inequalities in our world. Migration itself is another reflection of inherent power inequalities in our world, and one of the most visible means by which we see how this power inequality creates imbalances in political, social, cultural, and economic resources among states.
As Aboueldahab argues in her essay, Critical Security Studies adopted in tandem with other critical approaches can press back on power imbalances in knowledge production that occur at a planetary scale. Like Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), both critical border and critical migration studies in conjunction with CSS can offer insights that conventional approaches to security elide, while also addressing the problematic issue of migration theories that have almost all been developed out of European and Western experiences.
Securitization and de-securitization of migration takes different form in different contexts. The Middle East occupies a very specific geography for this to be studied – particularly through its colonial legacies and afterlives, the effects of the War on Terror, the Arab Uprisings, the civil wars in Syria and Libya, the refugee “crisis” in Europe, and in the Gulf which hosts the third largest global hub of economic migrants. Adopting a Critical Security Studies lens allows one to think through concepts of security operating at a multi-scalar level in regional migration. From the Gulf perspective, I see security as tangible at least four levels – at the international, nation state, and community levels, and, as demonstrated in the quotes I have drawn on for this essay, at the micro or everyday individual level.
International organizations that govern migration, the humanitarian aid complex that engages with states and people on issues related to migrants/refugees/asylees, multinational businesses and corporations that transport goods and people (legally and illegally) around the world, and a host of transnational private actors from labor recruiters to security agencies all engage with and influence various aspects of international migration within the Middle East. Nation states have an outsized role in managing migration and create complex security infrastructures in doing so. Migrants are not naturally vulnerable nor innately insecure; rather the state is deeply implicated in constructing vulnerability and insecurity for immigrant communities, at least partially through their control over migrants’ mobility rights, the constructing and securing of hard borders, and using both imprisonment and deportation as part of its immigration apparatus. At the community level, both migrants and citizens have formal and informal associations which also express group ideas of security and migration. These community-level articulations and expressions feed into and react to international and state narratives.
The disconnect comes when notions of security that are embedded in and inform the superstructures of migration governance are juxtaposed against migrants’ own ideas about what constitutes their security at an everyday level. This echoes Al-Noaimi, who, in her essay, emphasizes the need to incorporate Gulf citizens’ historic and contemporary narratives of security and insecurity. Those who have undertaken migration narrate their lived experiences with multiple, and individualized reflections and interpretations of security. There are the security conditions involved in the challenges of physically undertaking a migration journey, from the point of their departure through transit points and to their potential return home. Economic migrants’ anecdotes and stories are often tied directly and indirectly to ideas of economic and social security. Their migration allows greater security for the family members left behind and allows for hope and dreams of a better future security for the next generation. Time spent away from family is a personal “sacrifice” for the greater security and the family’s wellbeing is an intrinsic component of labor migrants’ sense of security in the Gulf. Individual expression of what “local” security looks and feels like in a host state are highly influenced by gender, class, race, religion, and ethnicity as well as the situation of their home state. For some migrants they feel safe in a host state because “nobody bothers me” or “when you are out at night you are not worried about getting robbed or something happening,” or “I feel secure in my job and know I am valued.” For others they feel “a sense of peace and security and stability, it is not like being in other countries with war.”
Alexandria Innes suggested in her 2015 article that Critical Security Studies has not adequately addressed migration and argued that an ethnographic lens focusing on performative security offers:
“means to reconceptualize security that does not require excluding migrants, casting migrants as a threat, or reducing migrants to a passive subject position. Instead, performative security allows security studies to access alternative forms of security that are produced and practiced by people who do not have state-based security. ”
Innes’ work resonates with my own interests in moving beyond a top-down approach to studying migration and security and incorporating the bottom-up. In the Gulf though, demographic conditions have often placed citizens of many of the states into the position of being numerical minorities. I would suggest that it is important, therefore, to study experiential security from the perspective of both migrants and citizens.
references
Collier, Paul. 2013. Exodus: How Migration is Changing our World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Read More
Huysmans, Jef. 2006. The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration, and Asylum in the EU. Oxfordshire: Routledge. Read More
Innes, Alexandria J. 2015. Migration, Citizenship and the Challenge for Security: An Ethnographic Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Read More
Weiner, Myron. 1992-1993. “Security, Stability, and International Migration,” International Security 17 no. 3(Winter): 91-126. Read More
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zahra Babar is the Associate Director of Research at the Centre for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. Babar's research interests include rural development, migration and labor policies, and citizenship in the Persian Gulf states.
citation
To cite: Babar, Z. "Critical Security Studies and Gulf Migration." In Developing Critical Security Studies from Doha, edited by Hermez, S., Doha: #IAS_NUQ Press/Beirut: Arab Council for the Social Sciences, 2024.