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Este artículo defiende la necesidad de descentrar al estado y recentrar lo humano en el análisis de temas de movilidad dentro de los estudios de las Relaciones Internacionales. Para desarrollar nuestro argumento, usamos en conjunto ideas del pensamiento feminista y de los estudios críticos de seguridad, así como otras ideas multidisciplinarias. Con este conjunto abordamos los des/encuentros entre la persona en situación de movilidad y la aplicación de la soberanía nacional, subrayando como los continuos de in/movilidad e in/seguridad se entrelazan en este des/encuentro. De este modo, cuestionamos el concepto de seguridad en las Relaciones Internacionales que sigue siendo conceptualizado desde la perspectiva de la seguridad nacional, pesar de las críticas a dicho concepto que emanan de diferentes enfoques críticos. En la parte metodológica el artículo se basa en una extensa investigación etnográfica en la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos (EEUU) y en Marruecos. En la primera sección se discute la noción de soberanía nacional la cual es ejecutada en la propia frontera, pero que también ciertos estados han extendido más allá de sus fronteras. Este proceso, conocido como la externalización de controles fronterizos y de migración, puede ser entendido como un embate a la soberanía de los estados que deciden aceptar y aplicar estos controles en sus propias fronteras. Posteriormente nos centramos en el concepto de seguridad y cuestionamos de quién es la seguridad que está en riesgo. En este punto demostramos como la aplicación de la seguridad del estado amenaza la seguridad de aquellas personas sin privilegios en situación de movilidad dentro de las jerarquías globales de movilidad. En la segunda sección, discutimos como las perspectivas detalladas se manifiestan en nuestros dos lugares de investigación. Esta sección se enfoca a los continuos de in/movilidad e in/seguridad y se propone como se podría reconocer el posicionamiento de lo humano y su multiplicidad a la par de la figura racional reconocida en las corrientes tradicionales de las relaciones internacionales. Concluimos el artículo con una reflexión acerca de cómo este interés de recentrar lo humano es pertinente para los estudios en relaciones internacionales en lo concerniente a la coyuntura de la in/movilidad e in/seguridad humana, y de una posible contribución a una justicia en la movilidad humana.
This paper argues for a need to decenter the state and (re)center the human when exploring mobilities within international relations scholarship. To make this argument, we bring together feminist and critical security studies as well as multidisciplinary insights from human geography, social anthropology, and gender studies to address the encounter of the person on the move with the enforcement of national sovereignty. Throughout our analysis, we draw on and expand the feminist notion of ‘continuums of violence’ to highlight the continuums of in/security and im/mobility entwined in the encounter between the person on the move and the enforcement of national sovereignty. In so doing, we challenge the discipline’s understanding of ‘security’ that is often conceptualized from the perspective of state security only, despite critiques of such understanding that emanate from and build on different critical approaches that inquire after the referent object of ‘security’ or, in more simple terms, whosesecurity is to be considered when security is evoked in different contexts. Furthermore, feminist international relations scholarship and feminist security studies in particular have stressed the necessity to examine security and violence as continuums that traverse across sites ranging from the corporeal and intimate to the global and transnational, and span over time. Combined with mobility studies that focus on migrant trajectories across countries, regions, and continents with periods of chosen or unwanted immobility in between, these bodies of scholarship help us understand how border enforcement impacts diversely positioned persons’ lives. They also shed light on processes of border externalization, that is, the ways in which border enforcement is conducted far beyond actual borders of the states or supranational entities concerned. These perspectives push towards asking questions such as: how the border policies by geographically distant entities bear on individuals and groups on the move, how their migratory trajectories may be influenced by such externalized policies, and how the manifold forms of violence ensuing from or enabled by such policies are not necessarily taken into account when assessing their possible claims for asylum, for example. Therefore, it is pivotal to consider the human being on the move as a person with concerns and aspirations, and this including the perspective of persons in an unprivileged position within the global regimes of mobility. Especially feminist and decolonial scholars have reminded that there is no unified ‘human’, but a hierarchical constellation of humanness bounded to privileges and rights in the neoliberal sense. Critical interrogations of such constellations are useful and necessary for making visible the intended and unintended consequences of policymaking that is based on state interests only, and one that refuses to acknowledge the human beings who are caught in these consequences. Methodologically, the paper draws on long-term ethnographic research conducted at the Mexican side of the Mexico-US border and in Morocco, illustrated through ethnographic vignettes from these research sites. We have brought together insights from our respective research projects to address border externalization and its impact in two different parts of the world, enacted by two different states (the US) or supranational entities (the EU) on their neighbors to the South, likely to be economically and politically less powerful but supposedly similarly sovereign states. These country contexts illustrate how forms of state sovereignty clash and, while doing so, expose people on the move to increasingly difficult, life-threatening situations. Across these sites, we discuss how addressing human mobility in a way that begins from the human experience exposes the complex convergence of national sovereignty, power asymmetries, and continuums of in/security. In this convergence, the (im)mobile person’s positionality within the hierarchies of mobility and border regime exacerbates their potential vulnerabilities. The responses by states and supra-national entities have thus far amounted to increased and increasingly externalized forms of control that has done little to even acknowledge the insecurities thereby created and aggravated. Despite their extremely precarious positionalities and the forms of violence and insecurity on site or along the way, however, our interlocutors encountered at our research sites have defied challenges and pushed for the realization of their right to mobility, living it in the everyday. Through their individual and collective journeys and reflections along the way, they speak back to the international order and the positions it has allocated to them within what can be called uneven distribution of mobility. In so doing, their stories speak also to the international relations scholarship if the discipline dares to listen, reminding of the centrality of the human in international relations.The paper is organized as follows: we begin the first section by discussing the key notion of state sovereignty which is enacted at the border and demonstrate how borders of certain states extend far beyond their demarcated territories. This process, conceptualized as externalization of migration management and border control, can be perceived as contradicting the sovereignty of those states subjected to these externalization practices. We then move on to the notion of security and ask the question of whose security is at stake. Here we demonstrate how the enforcement of state security jeopardizes the safety and security of those people on the move who are located in less privileged positions in the global hierarchies of mobility. In the second section, we discuss how the perspectives outlined in the previous section manifest in our two research sites. This section focuses on the continuums of mobility and immobility and those of security and insecurity and proposes how we could begin addressing the diversely positioned human as a manifold, full subject recognized also in international relations scholarship that, we argue, usually ignores the human altogether or, at best, acknowledges the human in high-level politics drawing on the model based on the theory on rational actorness. Moreover, the analysis of insights gained at our research sites sheds light to the ways in which mobility is unevenly distributed, and how the enactment of mobility is gendered and racialized in complex ways. We conclude the paper by reflecting what these concerns might mean for international relations scholarship at the conjuncture of human im/mobility and security, and for contributing towards mobility justice.
