Migration, Citizenship and the Challenge for Security ― An Ethnographic Approach

Migration, Citizenship and the Challenge for Security offers a compelling insight into the process and experience of migrating, drawing on participant observation in asylum seeker communities and narrative interviews with migrants. In using ethnographic methods to illustrate an experiential theory of security taken from the perspective of migrants and asylum seekers in Europe, this study offers a means of moving beyond state-based and state-centric theories in International Relations.
Innes situates the experience of migrating in the context of critical security studies and human rights, drawing on feminism to offer a theorisation of security as process and as practice. The use of experiential methods places migrants at the heart of the theory of security and incorporates the self-identity of asylum seekers into determinations of who asylum seekers are and what forms of security they seek. In doing so, this study privileges the embodied knowledge of people who self-identify as asylum seekers over the categories of the state, contributing a decentred understanding of international security.

Alexandria J. Innes is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of East Anglia. Her work on migration, security and International Relations theory has been published in Security Dialogue, Global Society, and International Relations, among others.