Introduction: Migrant Lives in a State of Exception

Abstract

Migrant states of exception proliferate around the world – as do walls and border fortifications in an ostensibly globalised world. In fact, as Thomas Nail prophesies, the twenty-first century may well become ‘the century of the migrant’. At the end of its first decade, as announced by the UN, numbers levelled off at one billion internal and international migrants, displaced persons, refugees and asylum seekers. Ten years later, the UN Migration Report estimates that there were 272 million international migrants, an increase of c. fifty million in just one decade (c. 220 million in 2010). This means that one in every thirty people around the world is an international migrant. Internal migration, too, has increased and is likely to grow further in the future, due to the effects of globalisation, war and climate change: In the decade between 2009 and 2019, seventy-nine million new internal displacements occurred, while only thirty-one million people were able to return to their places of residence. And while the observation that we are ‘all becoming migrants’ or ‘wanderers’ runs the risk of obscuring the very disparate ways and conditions that shape contemporary forms of mobility, there is no doubt that movement constitutes one of the defining features of our epoch, at least prior to the current global Covid-19 pandemic. It is precisely because different forms of movement and mobility define the present moment to an unprecedented degree and on an unprecedented scale that questions such as ‘who moves?’, ‘why?’, ‘where to?’, ‘when?’, ‘how?’ and ‘who can afford to stop moving when movement becomes a health hazard?’ are of central concern.