Repoliticizing International Migration Narratives? Critical Reflections on the Civil Society Days of the Global Forum on Migration and Development

Abstract

This paper draws on Pecoud's international migration narratives (IMN) as an analytical framework to examine the Global Forum on Migration and Development's Civil Society Days (GFMD-CSD). We analyse the narratives both produced and challenged at the GFMD-CSD, suggesting that while the GFMD-CSD poses a gentle challenge to existing IMN, it falls short of meaningfully (re)politicizing predominant migration paradigms. This is partly due to how the forum is a fraught space that reflects and reproduces uneven power dynamics between the Global North and South, concealing and nullifying contestations of power. Nonetheless, the GFMD-CSD, as a hybridized, experimental and fluidly defined discourse-led 'global' space, still functions as an important arena through which challenges to depoliticized state-led rhetoric might slowly trickle. Therefore, a closer interpretation of self-reflexive GFMD-CSD civil society strategies might challenge Pecoud's conceptualization of what constitutes a 'depoliticized' approach to migration.