Unwanted Stay: Institutional Claims to Legitimacy and Contested Forms of Mobility and Immobility

Project Description

Migration law defines certain forms of mobility and residence as unlawful and undesirable. The way nation states deal with people who nonetheless remain varies considerably. Institutional practices differ not only in terms of the extent of formalisation and the involvement of different institutional fields, but also in terms of their impact on the rights and the lived realities of the people concerned. This research project is interested in the institutionalised ways of dealing with unwanted stay in Germany, Morocco, and Spain. The focus lies on the complex relationship between the institutional fields involved (including administration, law, the labour market, and activist civil society) and the ambivalences, negotiations, and conflicts that such a pluralistic institutional environment implies. 

Our aim is to clarify whether and how the institutional practices reinforce and perpetuate unwanted stay across space and time, or contribute to challenging, disrupting or discontinuing it. Specifically, we investigate (1) the differences and similarities between the approaches established in the three countries for dealing with unwanted stay, (2) the actors and forms of institutional work involved in codifying, reproducing or changing these practices in specific locations, and (3) the translocal entanglements of institutional practices and mobility trajectories. We rely on a theoretical framework that uses concepts of institutional work, trajectories and translocality to examine the pluralistic and contested practices of dealing with unwanted stay with regard to institutional claims of validity and trajectories of mobility and stay.

The project is based on a qualitative methodology that is indebted to institutional ethnography and situational analysis. We use interviews, document analyses, observations and case-based trajectory analyses to explore institutional practices and mobility trajectories across different places and national contexts. With Germany, Morocco and Spain, we are examining countries that are connected in various ways, through migration routes, as well as through the European and North African border and migration regimes. The work programme comprises three work packages that serve to explore the legalinstitutional contexts (WP1), the institutional work in dealing with unwanted stay (WP2), and the translocal entanglements (WP3), and a work package dedicated to the continuous documentation and dissemination of results (WP4). With its objectives and work, the project provides insights into contested forms of im/mobility and decodes the institutional dynamics involved in dealing with unwanted stay.