Violence, Injustice, and Inequality: The State of International Migration

This research focuses on the gross inequality that is evident in international migration governance and management. Framed in the concept of inequality as it is variously yet incompletely theorized in international relations scholarship and drawing on Ranciere’s equality as practice, I situate violence as an indicator of inequality that reveals injustice. Using a case study of domestic violence in the context of the UK’s “hostile environment,” I demonstrate how states, exemplified by the UK, adopt domestic violence as a mechanism of immigration deterrence. I argue that, despite the acceptance of domestic violence as a social wrong, and the evidence that domestic violence is pervasive in society, migrant women in insecure status are denied access to necessary forms of protection, which leads to prolonged exposure to domestic violence and reveals continuous violence against migrants in insecure status. Attending to violence, and in particular state violence, in the global politics of migration reveals the injustice of embedded inequality in the international system. While injustice is immediately legible in violent events, injustice is also embedded in the unequal social order, continuously ordering and bordering protection from and submission to violence.