¹ Paul Lewis et al., ‘Revealed: No 10 explores sending asylum seekers to Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea’, The Guardian (30 September 2020), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/sep/30/revealed-no-10-explores-sending-asylum-seekers-to-moldova-morocco-and-papua-new-guinea} accessed 2 December 2020.

² Jamie Grierson and Sarah Marsh, ‘UN refugee agency hits out at Priti Patel's plans for UK asylum overhaul’, The Guardian (24 March 2021), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/24/priti-patel-defends-inhumane-overhaul-of-uk-asylum-system} accessed 4 April 2021.

³ Ayse Ceyhan and Anastassia Tsoukala, ‘The securitization of migration in Western societies: Ambivalent discourse and policies’, Alternatives, 27:3 (2002), pp. 91–126; Philippe Bourbeau, The Securitization of Migration: A Study of Movement and Order (London, UK: Routledge, 2011); Sarah Léonard and Christian Kaunert, Refugees, Security and The European Union (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2019); Melanie Griffiths and Colin Yeo, ‘The UK's hostile environment: Deputising immigration control’, Critical Social Policy, 41:4 (2021), pp. 521–44; Valeria Bello, ‘The spiralling of the securitisation of migration in the EU: From the management of a “crisis” to a governance of human mobility?’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2020), available at: {DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1851464} and other contributions to this Special Issue.

⁴ Statham, Paul, ‘Understanding the anti-asylum rhetoric: Restrictive politics or racist publics?’, Political Quarterly, 74:1 (2003), pp. 163–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bale, Tim, ‘Putting it right? Labour's big shift on immigration since 2010’, The Political Quarterly, 85:3 (2014), pp. 296–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Eve Hepburn and Michael Rosie, ‘Immigration, nationalism, and politics in Scotland’, in Eve Hepburn and Ricard Zapata-Barrero (eds), The Politics of Immigration in Multi-Level States: Governance and Political Parties (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 241–60.

⁶ To the knowledge of the author, to date there exists no study of the securitisation/contestation of migration in Scotland.

⁷ Holger Stritzel and Sean C. Chang, ‘Securitization and counter-securitization in Afghanistan’, Security Dialogue, 46:6 (2015), pp. 548–67; Ian Paterson and Georgios Karyotis, ‘“We are, by nature, a tolerant people”: Securitisation and counter-securitisation in UK migration politics’, International Relations, 36:1 (2020), pp. 104–26.

⁸ Thierry Balzacq (ed.), Contesting Security: Strategies and logics (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2015).

⁹ Lene Hansen, ‘Conclusion: Towards an ontopolitics of security’, in Balzacq (ed.), Contesting Security, pp. 219–321.

¹⁰ Hansen, ‘Conclusion’, p. 231.

¹¹ Beyond migration, securitisation theory has been applied to a diverse range of issues (health, terrorism, energy, the environment) and been the subject to much critique, including for perceived Western/Eurocentrism and an under-appreciation of gender. For a review, see Thierry Balzacq et al., ‘“Securitization” revisited: Theory and cases’, International Relations, 30:4 (2016), pp. 494–531. On the reconceptualisation of security, see Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

¹² John L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1962).

¹³ Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and desecuritization’, in Ronnie D Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 46–86.

¹⁴ Buzan et al., Security, p. 27.

¹⁵ See Buzan et al., Security; Michael C. Williams, ‘Words, images, enemies: Securitization and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 47:4 (2003), pp. 511–31.

¹⁶ Buzan et al., Security, p. 29.

¹⁷ Aradau, Claudia, ‘Security and the democratic scene’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 7:4 (2004), p. 389CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ See, for example, Jef Huysmans, ‘Migrants as a security problem: Dangers of “securitizing” societal issues’, in Robert Miles and Dietrich Thränhardt (eds), Migration and European Integration: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion (London, UK: Pinter Publishers Ltd., 1995), pp. 53–72; Lene Hansen, ‘Reconstructing desecuritisation: The normative-political in the Copenhagen School and directions for how to apply it’, Review of International Studies, 38:3 (2012), pp. 525–46; Jonathan L. Austin and Philippe Beaulieu-Brossard, ‘(De)securitisation dilemmas: Theorising the simultaneous enaction of securitisation and desecuritisation’, Review of International Studies, 44:2 (2018), pp. 301–23.

¹⁹ See, for example, Dimitris Skleparis, ‘“A Europe without walls, without fences, without borders”: A desecuritisation of migration doomed to fail’, Political Studies, 66:4 (2018), pp. 985–1001; Arif Sahar and Christian Kaunert, ‘Desecuritisation, deradicalisation, and national identity in Afghanistan: Higher education and desecuritisation processes’, European Journal of International Security (2021), pp. 1–18, available at: {DOI:10.1017/eis.2021.31}.

²⁰ See fn. 3.

²¹ Huysmans, ‘Migrants as a security problem’.

²² See fn. 18.

²³ Balzacq, Contesting Security, p. 8.

²⁴ Balzacq, Contesting Security.

²⁵ Matt McDonald, Security, the Environment and Emancipation (London, UK: Routledge, 2012).

²⁶ Balzacq, Contesting Security, pp. 85–7.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 86.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 13.

²⁹ Ibid. This includes ‘counter-securitisation’; see Stritzel and Chang, ‘Securitization and counter-securitization in Afghanistan’; Paterson and Karyotis, ‘“We are, by nature, a tolerant people”’.

³⁰ Balzacq, Contesting Security, p. 139.

³¹ Ibid., p. 140. On the ‘logic’/‘value’ of security, see Jonna Nyman, ‘What is the value of security? Contextualising the negative/positive debate’, Review of International Studies, 42:5 (2016), pp. 821–39.

³² Balzacq, Contesting Security, p. 170.

³³ Philippe Bourbeau, ‘Resiliencism and security studies: Initiating a dialogue’, in Thierry Balzacq (ed.), Contesting Security: Strategies and Logics (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2015), pp. 173–88.

³⁴ Hansen, ‘Conclusion’, p. 231.

³⁵ C.A.S.E Collective, ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A networked manifesto’, Security Dialogue, 37:4 (2006), pp. 443–87.

³⁶ Jef Huysmans, ‘What's in an act? On security speech acts and little security nothings’, Security Dialogue, 42:4–5 (2001), pp. 371–83. See also Didier Bigo, ‘Security and immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease’, Alternatives, 27 (2002), pp. 63–92. Despite an oft-oppositional framing in the literature, insights from both Copenhagen and Paris contribute complementary theoretical ‘bricks’. Philippe Bourbeau, ‘Moving forward together: Logics of the securitisation process’, Millennium, 43:1 (2014), pp. 187–206.

³⁷ Buzan et al., Security, pp. 27–8; Sarah Léonard, ‘EU border security and migration into the European Union: FRONTEX and securitisation through practices’, European Security, 19:2 (2010), pp. 231–54.

³⁸ Juha A. Vuori, ‘Religion bites: Fulungong, securitization/desecuritization in the People's Republic of China’, in Thierry Balzacq (ed.), Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2011), p. 191.

³⁹ Serhun Al and Douglas Byrd, ‘When do states (de)securitise minority identities? Conflict and change in Turkey and Northern Ireland’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 21:3 (2018), pp. 608–34.

⁴⁰ The importance of focusing on phenomena short of ‘termination’, and of focusing on non-discursive mechanisms is highlighted by an analysis of Floyd's theorisation of ‘functional actors’. Floyd demarcates functional actors as those who object/endorse securitisation on behalf of others: they seek to persuade securitising actors (those with the power to directly affect legislation which underpins ‘institutional facts’) to revoke/continue securitisation policies. Yet, this ignores direct, practical contestation activity for which no request or influencing of others is necessary: if deliberate migrant destitution is part of the suite of securitisation policies, actors preventing this destitution (for example, NGOs) move beyond functional actor status and become directly involved in (de)securitising processes as contestation actors. Rita Floyd ‘Securitisation and the function of functional actors’, Critical Studies on Security (2020), available at: {DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2020.1827590}.

⁴¹ Buzan et al., ‘Security’, pp. 37–8. However, it is important to note that despite being considered the central securitising actor, conceptualising the state as a coherent and unitary actor has been problematised. See, for example, Wilkinson, Claire, ‘The Copenhagen School on tour in Kyrgyzstan: Is securitization theory useable outside Europe?’, Security Dialogue, 38:1 (2007), pp. 5–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² But see Doty, Roxanne Lynn, ‘States of exception on the Mexico-U.S. border: Security, “decisions”, and civilian border patrols’, International Political Sociology, 1:2 (2007), pp. 113–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Matt McDonald, ‘Contesting border security: Emancipation and asylum in the Australian context’, in Thierry Balzacq (ed.), Contesting Security: Strategies and Logics (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2015), pp. 154–68; Nyman, ‘What is the value of security?’.

⁴⁴ Something that follows naturally if we accept, drawing on Cox's interpretation of theory, that security is always ‘for someone and for some purpose’. Cox, Robert W., ‘Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond International Relations theory’, Millennium, 10:2 (1981), pp. 126–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Charnovitz, Steve, ‘Two centuries of participation: NGOs and international governance’, Michigan Journal of International Law, 18:2 (1997), pp. 183–286Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Charnovitz, ‘Two centuries of participation’; Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007); Howell, Jude, ‘The securitisation of NGOs post-9/11’, Conflict, Security and Development, 14:2 (2014), pp. 151–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scott Watson and Regan Burles, ‘Regulating NGO funding: Securitizing the political’, International Relations, 32:4 (2018), pp. 430–48.

⁴⁷ Griffiths and Yeo, ‘The UK's hostile environment’.

⁴⁸ Cusumano, Eugenio, ‘Straightjacketing migrant rescuers? The code of conduct on maritime NGOs’, Mediterranean Politics, 24:1 (2019), pp. 106–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ McDonald, ‘Contesting border security’.

⁵⁰ Hirschauer, Sabine, ‘For real people in real places: The Copenhagen School and the other “little security nothings”’, European Security, 28:4 (2019), pp. 413–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵¹ Paul Statham and Andrew Geddes, ‘Elites and the “organised public”: Who drives British immigration politics and in which direction?’, West European Politics, 29:2 (2006), pp. 248–6.

⁵² Will Somerville and Sara W. Goodman, ‘The role of networks in the development of UK migration policy’, Political Studies, 58:5 (2010), pp. 951–70.

⁵³ Buzan et al, ‘Security’.

⁵⁴ Ceyhan and Tsoukala, ‘The securitization of migration’.

⁵⁵ Huysmans, Jef, ‘The European Union and the securitization of migration’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 38:5 (2000), pp. 751–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Léonard, ‘EU border security’.

⁵⁷ Bigo, ‘Security and immigration’.

⁵⁸ Basaran, Tugba, ‘Security, law, borders: Spaces of exclusion’, International Political Sociology, 2:4 (2008), pp. 339–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ Webber, Frances, ‘On the creation of the UK's “hostile environment”’, Race & Class, 60:4 (2018), pp. 76–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ James Kirkup and Robert Winnett, Theresa May interview: ‘We're going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception’, The Telegraph (25 May 2012).

⁶¹ Griffiths and Yeo, ‘The UK's hostile environment’.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ The co-option of civil society actors and broader ‘vernacularisation’ of immigration control is not unique to the UK's securitisation of migration. This demonstrates that the roles NGOs play in security politics are undetermined, that not all NGOs will contest and that a fine-grained, contextually grounded empirical assessments are required when exploring securitisation/contestation processes. See Anthony Cooper, Chris Perkins, and Chris Rumford, ‘The vernacularization of borders’, in Reece Jones and Corey Johnson (eds), Placing the Border in Everyday Life (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016).

⁶⁴ Wilcock, Cathy A., ‘Hostile immigration policy and the limits of sanctuary as resistance: Counter-conduct as constructive critique’, Social Inclusion, 7:4 (2019), pp. 141–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ Nira Yuval-Davis, Georgie Wemyss, and Kathryn Cassidy, ‘Everyday bordering, belonging and the reorientation of British immigration legislation’, Sociology, 52:2 (2018), pp. 228–44.

⁶⁶ Griffiths and Yeo, ‘The UK's hostile environment’.

⁶⁷ Flynn, Don, ‘Frontier anxiety: Living with the stress of the every-day border’, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 61:XX (2015), pp. 62–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁸ Mulvey, Gareth, ‘Refugee Integration Policy: The effects of UK policy-making on refugees in Scotland’, Journal of Social Policy, 44:2 (2015), pp. 357–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁹ Webber, ‘On the creation of the UK's “hostile environment”’.

⁷⁰ Antonio Zotti, ‘The immigration policy of the United Kingdom: British exceptionalism and the renewed quest for control’, in Enrico Fassi, Sonia Lucarelli, and Michela Ceccorulli (eds), The EU Migration System of Governance: Justice on the Move (London, UK: Palgrave, 2021), pp. 57–88.

⁷¹ Mulvey, ‘Refugee Integration Policy’, p. 363.

⁷² Mulvey, Gareth, ‘Social citizenship, social policy and refugee integration: A case of policy divergence in Scotland?’, Journal of Social Policy, 47:1 (2019), pp. 161–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. To highlight these complex, blurred boundaries, as asylum policy is reserved, housing for asylum seekers is provided by UK government contracted agencies. Yet, housing is a devolved issue, meaning this accommodation must meet minimum standards set by the Scottish government. Once refugee status is granted, Scottish housing policy becomes fully dominant, with refugee housing rules varying from those in England.

⁷³ Mulvey, ‘Refugee Integration Policy’, p. 373.

⁷⁴ A full treatment of the Scottish government's own contestation of the UK government's securitisation of immigration, asylum and refuge, including the many hypotheses as to why it is being pursued (economics, demographics, state-building) and how it is facilitated (political culture, public attitudes) is beyond the scope of this article. Future attention will be useful to further illuminate the intricacies of both ‘UK’ migration policies and sub-state actors’ roles in securitisation processes.

⁷⁵ Mulvey, ‘Refugee Integration Policy’.

⁷⁶ Angus Howarth, ‘Scotland takes twice UK average of refugees’, The Scotsman (23 September 2019), available at: {https://www.scotsman.com/news/uk-news/scotland-takes-twice-uk-average-refugees-1407054} accessed 2 November 2020.

⁷⁷ Paterson and Karyotis, ‘“We are, by nature, a tolerant people”’.

⁷⁸ Additionally, the existence and accessibility of crucial documentary evidence was most plentiful across 2018 and 2019.

⁷⁹ The majority of activity/organisations concentrate in Glasgow, Scotland's only asylum dispersal location (receiving approximately 10 per cent of person's seeking asylum in the UK, with an estimated population of five thousand). Organisations contracted by the Home Office (for example, Migrant Help) were excluded, as were several long-standing inter-organisational networks (to prevent duplication).

⁸⁰ Thus, while capturing a substantial element of the contestation terrain, this is by no means an exhaustive or fully representative list. Scholars are encouraged therefore to build on this initial investigation.

⁸¹ To be clear, the mode of engagement (securitising actor, executor of securitisation, functional actor, contestation actor) cannot, however, be known a priori.

⁸² It is possible to query whether this activity is fairly called NGO contestation. It is common, for instance, that a portion of NGO funding (including among organisations under study) comes from the Scottish government, and these NGOs can directly and indirectly implement elements of Scottish government asylum and refugee policy (although, the intricacies of devolution mean that this funding is restricted and cannot be used to fund projects that remain the preserve of Westminster, such as provision of asylum housing). Yet, this does not mean that NGOs are merely implementing Scottish government policy as ‘executors’ of contestation. Beyond the many elements of NGO activity and practice that are not tied to Scottish government funding/direct policy, the culture of partnership that exists between the Scottish government and the third sector, and the extent to which NGOs have driven and co-created asylum and refugee policy and practice in Scotland – epitomised by the New Scots strategy, see section 5.3 – mean that, in many places, it is difficult to fully disentangle NGO/Scottish government work. Thus, in the Scottish context, NGO activity and practice, even if tied to implementing elements of Scottish government policy, is still fairly considered as NGO contestation of the hostile environment. Yet, while this conceptualisation is argued to be justified in this case, more broadly, boundaries of contestation/non-contestation activity, similar to boundaries between securitising actors/executors of securitisation policies – blurred when considering the role of ‘little security nothings’ in constructing securitisations (see also fn. 40) – require further theoretical refinement through studies across issue and context. Moreover, while beyond the scope of this study, further explicit exploration of the relationship between NGOs and (sub)state actors offers a fruitful pathway forward.

⁸³ The methodology does not enable robust exploration of the differences between organisations regarding effectiveness in contestation. Although beyond the scope of this study, this offers a promising avenue for further scholarship.

⁸⁴ The distinction and language of ‘surviving’ and ‘thriving’ draws upon asylum/refugee literature and practice. See Alexander Betts et al., ‘Thrive or survive? Explaining variation in economic outcomes for refugees’, Journal on Migration and Human Security, 5:4 (2018), pp. 716–43.

⁸⁵ GCP, for example, provided 1,800 food parcels. Govan Community Project, ‘Annual Accounts, 2018–19’, available at: {https://www.govancommunityproject.org.uk/about.html} accessed 2 November 2021.

⁸⁶ Refugee Survival Trust (RST), ‘Annual Review 2018–19’, available at: {https://www.rst.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/RST_Annual_Review_2018-2019_v5.pdf} accessed 2 November 2021.

⁸⁷ Ibid.

⁸⁸ Positive Action in Housing, ‘Impact Report, 2018–19’, available at: {https://d1wt0km90huff3.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/24.-Annual-Report-2018-19.pdf} accessed 2 November 2020.

⁸⁹ Unless indicated otherwise, the information in this paragraph is derived from, ‘A Site of Resistance: An evaluation of the Stop Lock Change Evictions Coalition’, available at: {https://www.scottishrefugeecouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Stop-Lock-Changes-FINAL-VERSION.pdf} accessed 2 November 2021.

⁹⁰ Scottish Refugee Council (SRC), ‘Annual Impact Report 2018/19’, available at: {https://www.scottishrefugeecouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Annual-report-2018-2019.pdf} accessed 2 November 2021.

⁹¹ RST, ‘Annual Review’.

⁹² Ibid.

⁹³ SRC, ‘Annual Impact Report’.

⁹⁴ Balzacq, Contesting Security, p. 139.

⁹⁵ Ibid.

⁹⁶ Although beyond the period of analysis, it is deemed fair to include as this is the culmination of a campaign active throughout 2018–19.

⁹⁷ The campaign to extend voting rights to asylum seekers continues.

⁹⁸ This follows the original New Scots strategy (2014–17).

⁹⁹ Scottish government, ‘New Scots’, p. 10.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., p. 13.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., p. 10.

¹⁰² Ibid., p. 12.

¹⁰³ Scottish government, ‘New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy, 2018–22’, available at: {https://www.gov.scot/publications/new-scots-refugee-integration-strategy-2018-2022/} accessed 2 November 2021.

¹⁰⁴ SLCEC, ‘A Site of Resistance’.

¹⁰⁵ SRC, for example, have over 25,000 followers on Twitter (for context, the largest opposition party, the Scottish Conservatives have 45,000).

¹⁰⁶ Refugee Festival Scotland, ‘About’, available at: {https://www.refugeefestivalscotland.co.uk/about/} accessed 2 November 2020.

¹⁰⁷ SRC, ‘Annual Impact Report’.

¹⁰⁸ See Buzan et al., Security, p. 25; Vuori, ‘Religion bites’, p. 191.