Rethinking cross-border mobilities control and the humanitarian border

Abstract

To date criminologists have paid relatively little attention to the role of transnational and non-government organisations and development aid agencies in the control of cross-border mobilities, especially in what William Walters (2011) has termed the 'humanitarian border'. This paper seeks to address this imbalance by examining the emergence of a 'humanitarian industry' in migration control and its gendered consequences in the global South and the implications for a sociologically informed analysis of global control of unwanted migrants. By drawing on examples in Asia, this paper considers the emerging system of global governance of migrations and mobilities notably through a reformulation of borders as a problem of management, dissemination of norms and standards through transnational and donor agencies as 'novel assemblages' in migration management, and the meshing of border control and development aid in the name of human trafficking prevention.