International migration

Nation-states' legal framework currently configures international migration as either a concrete or an abstract act of crossing national borders, depending on the demarcation that a specific state decides to enact. The concept has been subject to both an institutional and a cognitive expansion which inherently reflects the present proliferation of mechanisms of inequalities. Migration is a complex phenomenon. It can entail a mobility act – or not. It therefore demands to be interpreted through the meanings given to it by the variety of actors involved in the process and its study. Both insufficient and dispensable to establish who is a migrant, the tangible crossing of borders is widely studied in International Relations, as well as its counterforce: border controls, with their externalization and internalization, migrant profiling and the state of exception, and the securitization of migration, which have all been among the most examined issues in recent decades.