Philippe Bourbeau’s research while affiliated with Université Laval and other places

Security is more than ever a central theme in the study of international migration. For the past twenty years, research on the securitization of migration has burgeoned. While these initiatives are to be applauded, we believe they may also have misdiagnosed the problem. For example, it may not be that the concept of ‘security’ needs to be ‘humanized’ in order to be more in tune with migrants’ concerns. Rather, the problem may lie in the use of the ‘migrant’ as an analytical category. The ‘migrant’ remains an inherently statist construct. The starting premise for the collection of articles in this special issue is that it is the tendency of academic research to mistake the statist category of the ‘migrant’ as an analytical category that has prevented the literature on the migration–security nexus from meaningfully reflecting the lived experience and aspirations of its human respondents, particularly as regards their encounters with forms of institutional authority, practices, resistance and resilience. We use the rubric of deportability to open up a variety of ways of thinking and talking about migration and security that do not fall back upon statist tropes. The authors in this collection take up this challenge by framing and employing concepts such as statelessness, sedentariness and expulsion to redefine our understanding of the relationship between movement and order. They take inspiration from multiple brands of social and political theorizing where conditions of violence and forced removal qualitatively differentiate the experiences and encounters of a particular group.

Resilience has become an oft-invoked concept in development and security policy circles and the subject of much debate in the literature. Yet, one aspect that needs to be further theorised is the complex relationship between resilience, conflict and gender. This introduction identifies the gradual congruence between the programmatic agendas of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) and resilience-building approaches in peacebuilding and argues that this convergence needs to be further scrutinised. Our main argument is that it is time for the scholarship to go beyond the simple categorisation of resilience as being either the new paradigmatic solution to international interventions, conflicts and crises or a meaningless and useless governmental buzzword. Instead, the contributions found in this Special Issue see resilience in terms of multiplicity. Resilience, understood in terms of multiplicity and in a multidimensional way, appears a valuable analytical concept to study both the systemic nature of gendered power relations and their prevalence and adaptation over time, as well as the responses of individuals, communities and institutions to the gendered effects of conflict. To add empirical richness to the Special Issue, these conceptual connections are analysed in multiple geographical case studies, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Iraq, Liberia, Palestine and Rwanda.

The theory of congruence in comparative federalism holds that institutional design will, eventually, reflect societal divisions by transferring central powers to new, autonomous entities. While this model helps to understand why many divided societies adopt federalism, it cannot explain why only certain unitary states transform into federal ones while others do not. We use a historical institutionalism approach to identify the critical junctures in the trajectory of two prominent plural polities, Belgium and Lebanon. We suggest that the politicization of identities during initial stages of state-building plays a major role in the transformation of a unitary state into a federation—which occurs in the former but not in the latter of our cases. The current contrast in both consociational democracies is explained here as a legacy of the late nineteenth century, which set in motion decisive logics of public governance that direct institutional dynamics until today.

A great deal has been written in the past years about the process of institutionally integrating international migration into security frameworks that employ and induce control, policing, and defence—i.e. the securitization of migration. The objective of this article is to complement these studies by focusing on the processes that contribute to the continuity of a securitized understanding of international migration. I suggest that the practice of detaining migrants in detention centres plays an important role in how the securitization of migration gets perpetuated as the dominant lens through which the international movement of people is understood. In studying the securitization of migration in Canada since the 1990s, I examine three processes: (1) that a mimetic process from criminal law to immigration law was instrumental in linking migration and security; (2) that practices and norms, especially the adjudication norms, were simultaneously at play in casting security as the dominant lens through which international migration is understood; and (3) that the practices of detaining migrants in centres resembling carceral facilities has helped to ‘lock in’ an understanding of migration as a security issue.

A great deal has been written in the International Relations (IR) literature about the role of resilience in our social world. Resilience has been employed to examine the response of international institutions and regimes in the face of exogenous challenges (Hasenclever et al. 1997), to explain the actions and attitudes of individuals caught up in violent conflicts (Davis 2012), to study societies’ responses to new inflows of asylum seekers (Bourbeau 2015a), to criticise liberal international intervention (Chandler 2015), and to revisit critical security studies (Dunn Cavelty et al. 2015).

Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - On Resilience - by Philippe Bourbeau

A great deal has been written about the role of resilience in world politics in recent years. But where does resilience come from? From which discipline was it “imported” into world politics? A particular genealogical analysis of resilience is structuring much of the literature: resilience was born in system ecology in the 1970s. On the basis of this particular genealogy, many critical theorists argue that resilience is a form of reasoning that participates in a neoliberal rationality of governance. For them, resilience is a by-product of a neoliberal mode of governance; seen in this light, resilience is lamentable. In this article, I propose a different, more extensive genealogy of resilience. I argue that before we can conduct an analysis of the application of resilience in world politics, we must understand the diverse paths through which resilience has percolated into international politics. By tracing the diverse expressions of resilience in world politics to various markers within the history of resilience, this article contends that this is an opportune moment to move scattered scholarships on resilience a step further and better theorize the relationship between resilience and world politics.