Migration Studies and Colonialism - Lucy Mayblin

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are criticisms to be made of the extent to which world systems theory adequately accounted for, or then instrumentalized, race and gender in the world system (Grosfoguel 2011). Nevertheless, this is undeniably a corner of migration studies which has sought to incorporate an account of historical colonial power relations in seeking to make sense of the present. Equally, Latin American decolonial work on the ‘coloniality of power’ is indebted to world systems theory even as it departs from its primarily economic focus (Quijano 2000). It is here that we see emerging some decolonial analyses of migration which are alive to the importance of colonial histories, and indeed presents (Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou 2015).

      There are, nevertheless, prominent volumes in the field which barely mention colonialism, postcolonialism or decolonization (e.g. Brettell and Hollifield 2008; Carens 2015; Faist 2000; Kivisto and Faist 2010; Sassen 1999; Soysal 1994). Likewise, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship is frequently ignored as a way of theorizing migration in key textbooks (even those professing to ‘diversify’, for example Castles, de Haas and Miller 2020). There are also many postgraduate ‘Refugee and Forced Migration’ programmes at ‘world-leading’ universities which cover neither these themes and theories nor issues of race and racism. As historical-structural approaches, such as those deriving from world systems theory, have been dismissed as overly structurally deterministic and have fallen out of favour, with them we have lost a focus on global racism and the legacies of colonialism as structuring axes of inequality and im-mobility. The focus has moved towards the more agential meso- and micro-level theories of ‘communities’, ‘networks’, ‘circulations’ and individual migrants within the context of globalization. But at the same time as acknowledging people’s power to act upon their own lives, these approaches pay too little attention, as previously noted, to structures of race and racism.

      A further issue is the extent to which migration studies continues to be quietly invested in ‘modernization theory’ (see Bhambra 2014). This is the idea that Europe and the white settler colonies at some point became ‘modern’ (wealthy, democratic, rational, secular, rights-based, egalitarian, capitalist, etc.), and that this process (the ‘European miracle’) was endogenous. In order for other parts of the world to become like Europe and its settler colonies (an aim assumed to be desirable), and particularly for them to eradicate poverty, modernization theory advocates that they can and should follow the path laid out by Europe and the wider Global North. This idea of modernization underpins the idea of ‘development’ (Escobar 1995). It centres Europe and European history as the reference point from which a road map into the future is imagined for countries deemed ‘underdeveloped’. The concept of ‘development’ is important in migration studies and is rarely paid critical attention. There is an assumption that development is the same as poverty reduction and that migration may facilitate or hinder this desirable process, or that from the opposite perspective development can facilitate or curtail migrations. That is not to suggest that poverty reduction is a problematic aim, but that we do need to acknowledge: (a) the colonial history which facilitated wealth accumulation in ‘the West’ – development in this part of the world was not endogenous and unrelated to impoverishment and exploitation in other parts of the world (Rodney 2018 [1972]) and cannot therefore be simply mimicked elsewhere; and (b) the ongoing power relations which facilitate inequality in both mobilities and immobilities but also in concentrations of wealth and poverty globally. An interrogation of the colonial origins of the idea of development facilitates an alternative framing of the issues at stake.

      But there have also been recent suggestions that a post- or decolonial frame risks reconfirming the national territory as a site of analysis (Anderson 2019; Sharma 2020). A central danger, some argue, is that migration researchers might be cementing or confirming the migrant/native distinction by working from such perspectives when what we should be doing is denaturalizing such binaries through de-nationalizing and de-territorializing our work (see also Davies and Boehmer 2019). We contest this reading of post- and decolonial perspectives though concede that too often binaries are reinforced rather than complexities embraced. Undeniably, anti-colonial movements have historically drawn on nationalist discourses as a move to resist colonial definitions of belonging, but this has not been without significant intellectual critique (for example, see Fanon 2008 [1952]). Equally, indigenous studies have been criticized for promoting an exclusionary ‘nationalist’ agenda and the debate rages about how solidarities can be built across colonial/modern lines of racialized distinction which were the very basis of the formation of settler-colonial states (Lawrence and Dua 2005; Sharma and Wright 2008–9; Tuck, Guess and Sultan 2014). While we would distinguish between projects of self-determination under conditions of colonial occupation on the one hand and anti-migrant nationalism on the other, the point here is that such struggles are certainly not the totality of intellectual discussion within decolonial or related fields.

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