Migrant agency and states’ securitisation of migration: Implications for migrant participation and expanding notions of political inclusion

This paper seeks to answer how analysing migrants’ survival strategy on high-risk migration routes helps us better understand states’ moves toward increasingly securitised and extended enforcement regimes. Framed conceptually, it highlights two related elements of migration governance at the supranational and state levels: securitised migration and extraterritorial enforcement. The securitisation of migration—framing and treating migration as a security threat rather than a set of economic and social processes—provides the context for understanding states’ moves to harden enforcement and extend it to neighbouring states. This research makes distinct contributions, including (1) to our understanding of the fragmented nature of high-risk migration journeys from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe—(2) to reframe and add to our contemporary understanding of migrant agency by investigating migrants as resilient survivors—and more.