States of Suspicion: How Institutionalised Disbelief Shapes Migration Control Regimes

This special section emerged out of discussions between a group of scholars researching border and migration control regimes in Europe. In our research, we had all identified suspicion as characteristic of migration governance. We saw it in the anxiety-ridden public discourses surrounding ‘unwanted’ immigration, in increasingly repressive legal frameworks, in bureaucratic classification schemes and technologies designed to identify suspected, illegalised travellers or deserving from undeserving asylum applicants, and finally, in the distrustful gaze of street-level bureaucrats enforcing migration law. We had also experienced suspicion directed against us as researchers by the state agencies we were researching. Based on these observations, this introduction develops a conceptual framework of states of suspicion, which captures how suspicion permeates migration control on the individual as well as structural level: as an affective element, as codified in law and institutionalised practice, and as manifested in material border and migration control technologies. The contributions to the special section shed light on these various elements, and taken together, enabling us to capture the constitutive nature of suspicion in contemporary migration control regimes. The special section discusses the implications of suspicion, in particular for those people who are rendered suspicious by default. Studying suspicious states, we argue, enables us to trace how migration control produces, sustains and normalises racialised global inequalities.