Archives - Regards sur nos publications

Population and Development Review, 2024, 36 p. DOI: 10.1111/padr.12650. HAL: hal-04687266

Migrant destination states of the Global North generally seek to stem irregular migration while remaining committed to refugee rights. To do so, these states have increasingly sought to externalize migration control, implicating migrant origin and transit states in managing the movement of persons across borders. But do externalization policies actually have an impact on unauthorized migration flows? If yes, do those impacts vary across different migrant categories given that both asylum seekers and other migrants can cross borders without prior authorization? We argue that these policies do have an impact on unauthorized migration flows and that those impacts are distinct for refugees and other migrants. Using data on “irregular/illegal border crossings” collected by Frontex, the Border and Coast Guard Agency of the European Union (EU), we first find that the geographical trajectories of refugees and other migrants who cross EU borders without authorization are distinct. Using a novel method to estimate whether individuals are likely to obtain asylum in 31 European destination states, we find that “likely refugees” tend to be concentrated on a single, primary migratory route while “likely irregular migrants” may be dispersed across multiple routes. Through an event study analysis of the impact of the 2016 EU–Turkey Statement, a paradigmatic example of externalization, we show that the policy primarily blocked likely refugees while deflecting likely irregular migrants to alternative routes. Our findings ultimately highlight how externalization policies may fail to prevent unauthorized entries of irregular migrants while endangering refugee protection.

Paris, Karthala, 2024, 396 p.

C’est le reliquat de la guerre civile chinoise (1946-1950) et de la Guerre froide. À quelques kilomètres seulement des côtes de la République populaire de Chine, aux portes de la province continentale du Fujian, le drapeau de la République de Chine (Taiwan) flotte encore sur le petit archipel de Kinmen (Quemoy). La lecture de cet ouvrage s’impose à qui veut comprendre la question sino-taiwanaise et la menace qu’elle fait peser sur la paix mondiale, en ces temps dangereux. Et aussi à qui veut reprendre à nouveaux frais le rapport de l’État à la nation, dans une perspective comparative.

Oxford University Press, 2024, 352 p.

Identity documents provide rights to citizenship and social inclusion. They can also generate violence and conflicts. This book explores Côte d'Ivoire's 'ID war' as a paradigmatic case of a citizenship crisis, centered on the access to national identity cards and certificates. Using ethnographic and historical data, it shows how the documentary struggle for citizenship has continued in the post-crisis reconstruction, affecting the new policies of identification and registration based upon biometrics and new technologies. It describes how the latter have been overturned and reframed by the Ivorian society. Focusing on the production and negotiation of legal identities, the book delves into the social life of IDs and biometrics and describes the clandestine world of the 'margouillats', the corrupt brokers of the civil registry, the forms of documentary falsification aimed at taming legal and bureaucratic principles with the requirements of ordinary social life, the hidden practices of state apparatuses of identification and the local machinery of biometric registration, and the self-made censuses and systems of identification used by minorities seeking recognition in the public space. Through these ethnographic descriptions with a specific approach 'from below', the book shows that actual reforms supposed to depoliticize - and in the case of biometric technologies, to de-socialize - identification do not erase its constitutively political dimension. From a comparative perspective, the case of Côte d'Ivoire reveals the unprecedented revenge of the documentary state on the biometric state and encourages us to rethink their dyadic opposition in a more complex triangulation of identification, debt and recognition.

Paris, Fayard, 2024, 544 pages.

Bombay, devenue Mumbai en 1995, est surtout connue en France pour ses conditions catastrophiques de logement et pour son industrie cinématographique florissante, Bollywood. Au-delà de ces images attendues, Vanessa Caru et Christophe Jaffrelot ont voulu retracer l'histoire de cette cité devenue, depuis le XIXe siècle, la capitale économique de l'Inde ainsi que la ville la plus peuplée du pays, attirant migrants et migrantes à la recherche d'une vie meilleure. De port inséré dans de multiples réseaux commerciaux, elle s'est mue en une métropole industrielle et s'est imposée comme un des hauts lieux de la lutte pour l'Indépendance, mais aussi de puissants mouvements sociaux qui visaient à remettre en cause les inégalités de classe et de caste. Ressaisissant sa trajectoire historique, les auteurs éclairent les défis auxquels la ville est à présent confrontée : la montée de la xénophobie, notamment du nationalisme hindou, l'emprise du crime organisé, les effets de la désindustrialisation ainsi que des dégradations environnementales dont pâtissent au premier chef ses habitantes et habitants les plus précaires.