Securitizing Mobilities
The securitization of mobilities is the effort to make mobilities safe for the state, the public and for the migrants themselves, though one party’s safety is often another party’s hazard. Specific measures include contact tracing; logistical intervention; contactless delivery; and traveller screening and qualification. These measures do not necessarily reduce mobilities, and a key goal of the securitization is to ensure continuous circulations of goods, capital and people as a basis of the economy.
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Since the mid 2000s, safe migration programmes have grown in popularity within the aid sector in the Mekong region, which denotes a qualitative spatio-temporal shift in migration governance. Anticipation (intervening prior to exploitative labour migration manifesting itself) and traceability (targeting labour migrants throughout their migration cycles regardless of their location) are key characteristics within safe migration discourse. As I show below, safe migration programmes operationalise these spatial and temporal qualities through re-embedding migrants as instruments of policy interventions.
Sverre Molland
Published online 22 March 2022
Labour agencies specializing in domestic care work in urban China monitor care workers’ mobility and impose control on them during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some also extend surveillance to their clients, namely the families whom the care workers work for. Agencies do so in order to minimize disruptions to the work routine. These commercial intermediaries play a central role in “securitizing” mobility.
Chaoguo Xing and Biao Xiang
Published online 10 March 2022
“The securitization of mobility” is state-led intervention in individual mobility to minimize perceived public threats. The securitization does not aim to limit mobility, but rather to ensure the continuity of population mobility and therefore to maintain the established social order. The securitization measures can have significant impacts on individual privacy as well as on various socioeconomic relations.
Biao Xiang
Published online 24 February 2022
This entry considers what migration scholars might learn from the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of securitizing mobilities. Mobility governance during the pandemic has accentuated territorial and de-territorial policy modalities. In this entry, I delineate the interactions between these two modalities to show how they present three paradoxes of mobility governance: populist sedentarism, accentuated and realigned social boundaries and territorial borders, and the reproduction of status quo through circulation.
Sverre Molland
Published online 8 November 2021
The 21-day national lockdown to halt the spread of COVID in South Africa did not end abruptly, but instead it has been eased progressively through four levels of mobility policies. These easing policies ranged from reduction of curfew hours, progressive uplifting of mobility and international flights bans, and the authorization of businesses and social/recreational centers to operate.
Mengnjo Tardzenyuy Thomas
Published online 29 June 2021
After the lockdown, the Chinese government organised the return of rural-to-urban migrants to work through point-to-point transport and rigorous health checks, while creating a new business niche for intermediaries.
Biao Xiang
Published online 22 June 2021
Mobility restriction in South Africa led to protests by health workers, taxi drivers, NGOs and others against job loss and government corruption.
Mengnjo Tardzenyuy Thomas
Published online 29 June 2021
The Chinese government reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic by imposing blanket monitoring over the entire population through ‘grids’ of residential communities. This measure of securitizing mobilities is new as compared to what the government did during the SARS outbreak in 2003. This is due to changes in patterns of mobility and in governance.
Biao Xiang
Published online 12 May 2021
The ambiguous policy of the Swedish Migration Agency regarding non-European students’ resident permits and the decentralised decision-making process created uncertainties for both students and universities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gloria Gemma
Published online 25 March 2021
Contact tracing apps have been employed to control and contain COVID-19, with varying consequences for everyday life, and implications for individuals’ rights to privacy.
Vidya Ramachandran
Published online 27 April 2021
