Papers by Cetta Mainwaring
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Mar 31, 2023
a function of traditional rural social bases. Why Alliances Fail is analytically novel and is a t... more a function of traditional rural social bases. Why Alliances Fail is analytically novel and is a thorough addition to the literature on party-state relations in the Middle East and North Africa. While it claims to survey the micro-dynamics of party alliances in North Africa, the glaring absence of Algeria warrants further research and would be an excellent and much needed addition to the scope of Buehler’s theory of alliance durability in the region.
International Studies Perspectives, 2021
This paper explores the promises and pitfalls of using ethnographic methods to analyze global pol... more This paper explores the promises and pitfalls of using ethnographic methods to analyze global politics in turbulent times. Ethnography has not gone unnoticed by international relations (IR) scholars, but the method remains at the fringes of the discipline. While acknowledging more recent feminist and practice theorist contributions to ethnographic research in IR, this paper brings together contemporary research across diverse issue areas, ranging from humanitarian intervention to transnational migration, to ask about ethnography's larger contribution to understanding global politics: What kinds of knowledge does ethnography produce about IR? In what ways might ethnography, informed by local perspectives, challenge top-down approaches to the study of IR? We identify three primary justifications for ethnographic methods based on different, though overlapping, forms of knowledge that they can uncover: tacit knowledge, marginalized knowledge, and subversive knowledge. We acknowledge...
Structures of Protection?
There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consu... more There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the published version if you wish to cite from it.
Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 2020
Since 2015, new forms of migrant solidarity work emerged in Glasgow, spurred in part by refugee f... more Since 2015, new forms of migrant solidarity work emerged in Glasgow, spurred in part by refugee flows into Europe. Yet, for many organisations, much of their work has not changed since 2000, when the government began dispersing asylum seekers around the UK. Using histories and memories of place as an analytical lens, we examine solidarity work since the 2015 'crisis' as well as over the longer term. In our analysis, the 'crisis' is not a critical juncture but understood within a broader spatio-temporal context. This raises interesting questions regarding how history and memory are animated in the present, and when and what kinds of solidarity work emerge. In conversation with two community-led organisations in Glasgow, we suggest that as tropes of crisis and hierarchies of deservingness manifest around Europe, solidarity efforts can create spaces of resistance by drawing on a politics of place and recognizing the constructed nature of crises.
Social Science Research Network, Mar 1, 2017
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2021
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rescued over 110,000 people in the Central Mediterranean Se... more Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rescued over 110,000 people in the Central Mediterranean Sea between 2015 and 2017. From 2017, EU member states and agencies increasingly criminalized these organizations, accusing them of ‘colluding with smugglers’ and acting as a pull factor. In this climate, as Italy, Malta and the EU increased cooperation with Libya to stop people from taking to the seas, many suspended their operations. This article explores the search and rescue efforts of NGOs in the Central Mediterranean Sea between 2014 and 2018. We examine the criminalization of this NGO activity and argue that it is made possible through an oscillating neo-colonial imagination of the sea as mare nostrum and mare nullius, our sea and nobody’s sea, respectively. We build on the work of other scholars who have pointed to the activation of the Mediterranean as ‘empty’ in response to migration flows, erasing the historical connections of colonialism, empire, trade, and exchange in the Medi...
Migration Studies
Over the last twenty-five years, immigration detention policies and practices have proliferated a... more Over the last twenty-five years, immigration detention policies and practices have proliferated around the globe. We look at four liberal democratic countries with the largest immigration detention systems—Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and identify components of an immigration detention policy ‘package’ as well as historical parallels in the early adoption of detention in these countries. This ‘Anglo model’ of detention is based on three main features: (1) the existence of indefinite and/or mandatory immigration detention policies; (2) the use of private security actors and infrastructure; and (3) the use of creative legal geographies in order to interdict and detain people offshore. Past scholarship on detention has focused on single national case studies or assumed the leadership of the US as the primary innovator in the field. Our paper establishes the empirical and theoretical grounds for considering these countries as a group and suggests a more complex process of policy adoption among them. Identifying an Anglo model of detention lays the critical groundwork for understanding the expansion of immigration detention and the transnational diffusion of detention policies among these countries, as well as where and how countervailing pressures to detention might form.
Eurafrican Migration: Legal, Economic and Social Responses to Irregular Migration, 2015
The rise, since 2002, of irregular migrants arriving on Malta has become a serious challenge for ... more The rise, since 2002, of irregular migrants arriving on Malta has become a serious challenge for Maltese society and a top policy priority. The chapter traces the evolution of migratory flows from Libya to Malta, analysing the relationship between the deterrence policies of successive Maltese governments in the context of Malta’s status as a gatekeeper for the European Union. The chapter concludes that Malta has, to date, received little support for its handling of the migratory influx from fellow member states or the EU as an institution. It is in this light, that the plight of irregular migrants on Malta, accommodated in temporary camps with limited opportunities for work or education, and little prospect of leaving the island, should be seen.
Geopolitics, 2016
Acts of mobility require corresponding acts of immobility (or suspended mobility). Migrant journe... more Acts of mobility require corresponding acts of immobility (or suspended mobility). Migrant journeys are not only about movement. Indeed, in the present policy context, this is ever more true. Whether a migrant is contained within a hidden compartment, detained by migration authorities, waiting for remittances to continue, or marooned within a drifting boat at sea, these moments of immobility have become an inherent part of migrant journeys especially as states have increased controls at and beyond their borders. Migrants themselves view this stopping, waiting and containment as part of the journey to be endured. Drawing on the authors' fieldwork in Central America and Southern Europe, this paper destabilizes the boundary between transit and settlement, speaking to a larger policy discourse that justifies detentions and deportations from the United States and countries on the periphery of Europe. We argue that migrants' nested experiences of these 'matryoshka journeys' reveal how increased migration controls encourage them not only to take greater risks during the journey, but also to forfeit their agency at opportune moments. In turn, states exploit images of such im/mobility during the journey in order to emphasize the irrational risks migrants take in order to traverse seas and deserts and to cloak their own border policies in a humanitarian discourse of rescue.
Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 2014
This article examines how the power relationships between Malta and the Republic of Cyprus, on th... more This article examines how the power relationships between Malta and the Republic of Cyprus, on the one hand, and the European Union, on the other, shape irregular immigration policies in these two sovereign outpost island states in the Mediterranean. As member states on the EU's southern periphery, Malta and Cyprus have faced new institutional structures since their accession in 2004 within which they now construct their migration policies. Here, I examine how the new structures influence the discourse and logic of migration policies and politics and also how the seemingly small and powerless states affect regional policies. My contention is that, within this EU framework and with limited material power, the two outpost states have developed strategies based on nonmaterial power in order to defend and promote their interests. Such strategies have resulted in treating irregular immigration as a crisis in order to attract support. The new dynamics have thus resulted in more barriers to migration, and in negative consequences for the individual migrants and refugees on the islands. Although the strategies of Malta and Cyprus have been surprisingly successful in influencing regional migration governance, their long-term effectiveness is questionable, and their effects on the migrant and local population problematic.
Refugee Survey Quarterly, 2012
This article examines the role that Malta and the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) have played within the... more This article examines the role that Malta and the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) have played within the European Union in developing regional responses to irregular migration since 2004. It briefly compares their responses to those of other, larger southern Member States and traces the instances where Malta and the RoC have attempted to influence European migration and asylum policies, with varying degrees of success. It looks particularly at attempts by the two States to affect distalization processes, that is, policies that displace responsibility for migration and asylum away from the core of Europe towards its peripheries. In doing so, it questions the assumption that this is largely a one-way process, directed from large, powerful States at Europe’s core towards weaker Member States on the periphery. The article argues that, paradoxically, the processes of placing responsibility for migration and asylum on peripheral Member States have given Malta and the RoC more political clout in order to pursue their interests within the European Union.
Population, Space and Place, 2012
Malta remains the only country in the European Union that maintains an 18-month, mandatory detent... more Malta remains the only country in the European Union that maintains an 18-month, mandatory detention policy for all irregular migrants upon arrival. This paper examines the role that detention has played in the Maltese government's response to the flows of irregular immigration to the island in the 21st century. It argues that detention is symbolic of the crisis narrative that the Maltese government has constructed as a response to these immigration flows in order to gain more practical and financial support from the European Union. The detention policy also serves to reinforce this interpretation of irregular immigration. Such a portrayal, combined with the use of detention as a deterrent, produces detrimental consequences for the migrant population, as well as the wider Maltese society. The paper draws on over 50 interviews, conducted by the author, with government officials, non-governmental organisations, and migrants and refugees on the island.
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Papers by Cetta Mainwaring
work that challenges EU border practices and concomitant categories to
reimagine a more welcoming Europe.