Despite their stated commitment to the 1951 Refugee Convention, liberal democratic states routinely interdict refugees, such as through the use of visa requirements, effectively blocking them from reaching their borders. How do liberal democratic states navigate this contradictory terrain? To answer this question, this article explores situations where normally routine and often invisible interdiction practices break down. Canada's approach to Roma arriving from the Czech Republic and Hungary between 1997 and 2001 is an illuminating example of such breakdown and repair, providing a rare glimpse into how one liberal democratic state manages its own interdiction contradictions.

Insecurity and fear in the global North produce political space to advance security measures, including the externalization of asylum. States in the global North make it increasingly difficult for asylum seekers to reach sovereign territory where they might make a refugee claim. While legal protection remains intact under the Refugee Convention, extra-legal measures employ geography to restrict access to asylum and keep claimants at bay through a variety of tactics. This article probes the ways in which fear of uninvited asylum seekers is securitized and looks at the tactics utilized to keep them at bay, far from the borders of states that are signatories to the UN Refugee Convention. Drawing on research in Europe and Australia, we demonstrate how states are promoting ‘protection in regions of origin’ through practices of de facto neo-refoulement. Neo-refoulement refers to a geographically based strategy of preventing asylum by restricting access to territories that, in principle, provide protection to refugees.

Most studies of how refugees are represented focus on negative media representations. Less attention has been paid to sympathetic counter-representations. This article explores the representations preferred by refugee advocacy organizations and how they tend to exclude the mass of ordinary refugees and the difficult arguments required to defend refugee rights. The article outlines the rise of the health paradigm for understanding the conditions of refugees. The contemporary representation of refugees as traumatized victims is inspired by compassion. However, the trauma framework implies impaired capacity and the need for individuals to surrender their welfare to expert authorities. The article argues that casting refugees in the sick role risks compromising their rights. The article is informed by the writing of the sociologist Talcott Parsons on the sick role and the philosopher Hannah Arendt on refugees.

This article examines the ideological function of ‘models’ of citizenship in shaping the contours of public debate and the ability of refugee women to make claims in the public sphere. Key elements of Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation are explored: ideology works by interpellating (‘hailing’) individuals, providing them with a social and juridical identity that constitutes them as subjects. The article argues that ‘models’ of citizenship serve as vehicles for processes of interpellation that restrict claim-making, through the imposition of a dominant hierarchy of identities and needs. These processes become visible through analysis of Somali refugee women's experiences in republican France.

Academic writing often portrays migrants as either passive victims of violence and aid recipients or as courageous heroes facing horrific indifference and hazards. This article recodes them and their activities as potent forces for reshaping practices of state power. In this depiction, displacement also becomes a lens for re-evaluating the nature of sovereignty in urban Africa. Through its focus on Johannesburg this article explores how migrant communities intentionally and inadvertently evade, erode and exploit state policies, practices and shortcomings. Rather than being bound by their ambiguous status, they exploit their exclusion to exercise forms of autonomy and freedom in their engagement with the state and its street-level manifestations. Through these interactions, displacement and the continued mobility of urban residents is generating new forms of non-state-centric urban sovereignties and new patterns of transnational governance shaped, but not controlled, by state institutions. To recognize these evolving configurations we must look beyond Manichaean perspectives to see the full nature and degree of territorial control.

Land is a key issue in the aftermath of wars. The return or resettlement of displaced populations accentuates land-related problems, and international support seeks to strengthen the state's administration of land. This article explores ethnographically a land conflict in Guatemala between returning refugees and former members of a civil defence patrol, including the intervention of state and international institutions. In dialogue with Carl Schmitt's idea that land appropriation, first measurements and division are constitutive of the order and orientation of political community, the analysis suggests that bodily presence at the land, potential use of violence and negotiated measurement, continue to be features of post-colonial states despite attempts to solve land problems once and for all.

This article directs attention to dynamics of refuge and governmentality in a region of the ‘global South’, South-East Asia, and brings into focus the major recipients of (forced) migrants, Malaysia and Thailand, neither of which is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, or the 1967 Protocol. Against the backdrop of the illuminating contrast offered by the Thai case, this article argues that, in the case of Malaysia, the mobilization of ‘volunteers of the nation’ in campaigns against ‘illegal migrants’ serves as a performative (re)enactment of ethnic identity and national citizenship in the making of Malays and Malaysians in this postcolonial ‘plural society’. The article explores the wider consequences of the (re)production of (il)legality and identity as a social reality experienced not merely by (forced) migrants, and not only at the border, but also by government officials and national citizens actively mobilized in high-profile campaigns to flush out ‘illegal migrants’ from markets, construction and plantation sites, as well as dwellings in kampong neighbourhoods, city blocks and jungle sites across Malaysia.