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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.