Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic paper politicizes our understanding of the migration & development nexus by moving beyond win-win-win characterizations and examining instead the contradictory relation between migration crisis and structural, institutional and situated processes of uneven and combined development.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will examine some of the key tenets and contradictions that define the policy consensus on the migration and development nexus as well as the fantasies associated with win-win-win policy scenarios, in the context of the so-called European migration crisis. I will first discuss how recent initiatives have reversed the ways in which policy makers conceive of such relationship: rather than harnessing migration to improve development prospects, it is development that is now harnessed as a way of reducing migration. I will then seek to move beyond such simplistic conceptualizations through a case study, which complicates simplistic notions of development as a cause of migration or a symptom of development failures. The paper draws from ethnographic evidence collected over ten months in asylum seekers reception centres in a central Italian province to illustrate how three distinct development processes reverberate in their rooms: processes of combined and uneven capitalist development, i.e. the structural context in which migration to Europe takes place; processes of uneven incorporation of European peripheries, i.e. the institutional context that modulates inter- and intra-European space and beyond; processes related to the uneven incorporation of Italian regions into the national space, the situated context where M&D dynamics articulate with each other. On these bases, the paper suggests that the real M&D nexus is a political one. It is about more equitable forms of development, freedom of movement, and the eradication of inequalities beyond and across the migrant/non-migrant divide.