borders
During the Syrian conflict that sparked after the insurgency in 2011, 5,6 million Syrians sought refuge in other countries. During their life-changing journeys, in order to achieve mobility, Syrians have had to seek illegal services of some intermediaries. These professionals, whom Syrians call “simsar,” are brokers of mobility, across borders
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Refugees are vilified for using illegal practices. But illegality is deeply embedded in Europe’s asylum system: hotspots formalize smuggling routes as a precondition for asylum; illegal ‘push-backs’ push migrants to destroy papers; and overburdened states pressure refugees to move to more prosperous ones, illegally. There is a clear shift in
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People worldwide rely on informal practices to resist, survive, care, and relate to each other beyond the control and coercive presence of states and formal institutions. This blog series introduces a recently published special issue of Migration Letters that ethnographically explores how mobilities and informality are entangled in responding to
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There are two kinds of uncertainties we as researchers are faced with: There are those things we are aware of that we do not know, but also those we are unaware of that we do not know. Dealing with this range of uncertainties can be demanding in ‘normal’ times and
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The pandemic impacted people’s transnational movements as well as research on mobility and migration. As a Ph.D. student doing multi-sited research, I used to cross national borders several times a year to do fieldwork, but suddenly I was forced to immobilize. What happened next, to me as a researcher, to
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