Beyond the Contract: Structural Vulnerability, Spatial Control, and the Affective Realities of the Nepali Diaspora in Romania

As Romania increasingly relies on non-EU labor migration to address demographic decline and labor shortages, limited scholarly attention has been paid to the structural conditions shaping migrants’ lives beyond recruitment. This study examines the lived experiences of the Nepali diaspora in Romania through the concepts of structural vulnerability, spatial control, and societal security. Using a qualitative research design based on digital ethnography, narrative analysis, and snowball sampling, the paper analyzes how employer-sponsored migration systems intersect with legal dependency, administrative fragmentation, and everyday experiences of exclusion. Drawing upon Barry Buzan’s concept of societal security, Giorgio Agamben’s theory of Bare Life, Ananya Roy’s framework of informality as governance, and Étienne Balibar’s concept of neoracism, the study demonstrates how institutional arrangements may produce prolonged precarity despite formal legal inclusion. The findings suggest that employer-dependent visa regimes, unequal access to institutional protection, and racialized processes of othering contribute to conditions of structural vulnerability that extend beyond the employment relationship itself. The paper argues that understanding labor migration requires moving beyond contractual frameworks to examine how migration governance shapes the social, spatial, and affective realities of migrant life.