The Securitization of Forced Migration

The systematic inclusion of refugees, asylum seekers, and other categories of migrants on the research agendas of security scholars is a relatively recent phenomenon. Forced migrants were mostly ignored by Security Studies during the Cold War. The growth in interest in the security dimension of forced migration has gone hand in hand with the widening of the security agenda taking place around the end of the Cold War. Refugee and migrant flows were among the earliest and most prominent new security issues proposed in the turbulent first years of the post-Cold War period. Twenty years later there is a vast and diverse literature, covering a range of theoretical perspectives within Security Studies, on the relationship between forced migration and security.

Applying the insights of the securitization approach, this chapter discusses the question of how, why, in what context, and with what consequences, refugees and asylum seekers (as well as other migrants) can be constructed as security issues. Different versions of the securitization approach are used to shed light on different securitization processes.