Militarized Borders and the Politics of Immigration in the 21st Century

In recent decades, countries around the world have instituted increasingly harsh measures, including militarized borders, offshore detention facilities, and pushback operations, to deter people from accessing their territories while simultaneously creating new pathways for immigration in an effort to overcome shortages in domestic labor markets. Drawing on case studies from around the world, this talk examines the tension between state efforts to simultaneously facilitate and obstruct migratory flows in an effort to make sense of complex politics of immigration in the 21st century. 

Osman Balkan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College and Senior Fellow at the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching focuses on the politics of global migration, race and ethnicity, identity and inequality, Islam in the West, and necropolitics. Balkan's first book manuscript, Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) examines how minoritized communities navigate end-of-life decisions in countries where they face structural barriers to political inclusion and equal social standing. Balkan's work has appeared and is forthcoming in journals such as Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Project on Middle East Political Science, Theory & Event, Journal of Intercultural Studies, and Contemporary French Civilization. He has published book chapters in edited volumes such as Turkey's Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance, Muslims in the UK and Europe, and The Democratic Arts of Mourning: Political Theory and Loss.