Critical insights on irregular migration facilitation : global perspectives

Abstract

In this short collection of essays, a group of scholars and practitioners sheds light on the experiences of the men, women and children who around the world work in the facilitation of migrant’s journeys –a practice that has been legally and often narrowly termed migrant smuggling. Relying on ethnographic work, archival research, and conceptual analyses, authors challenge the monolithic perceptions of smuggling as merely exploitative, inherently criminal, violent and male, by documenting the experiences of the people whose actions facilitate migration into Europe and the United States, across Africa, the Americas and the Pacific, and shedding light on everyday practices and interactions of mobility and their criminalization by the state.