Abstract
This chapter analyzes the interplay of organized violence and forced migration from a transnational perspective. Challenging extant debates in the literature about the migration-development nexus, the author proposes a novel and more comprehensive theoretical lens to study migration, which looks more directly into the relationship between development (or lack thereof), organized violence and population uprooting. This chapter, which shows how these three dimensions are transnationally entangled and in reciprocal interrelation, presents empirical evidence of the crucial role organized violence plays in Central-North America migration routes and contrasts it with those between Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The author illustrates how migratory routes between and across countries and regions are shaped by the interaction of a range of social, political and cultural factors including rising poverty, inequality, diminishing prospects and expectations of economic betterment and varied forms and logics of organized violence. He compellingly argues the case for studying this relationship through a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective that transcends the traditional division of labor in social sciences and avoids the perils of methodological nationalism. In so doing, he advocates for the development of middle-range theories and concepts that could explain the mutual reaction and reciprocal effects between development, violence and migration.
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Notes
- 1.
As put by Norbert Elias: “Societies assume the characteristics of nations if the functional interdependence between their regions and their social strata as well as their hierarchic levels of authority and subordination becomes sufficiently reciprocal for none of them to be able to disregard completely what the others think, feel or wish” (2008, 117).
- 2.
For a short overview and consequences for institutional approaches, see Berger and Elsner (2007).
- 3.
By referring to organized violence, not all forms of collective violence are included. Whereas organized violence is a durable arrangement comprehending more than one event, collective violence could occur only in a specific situation, for example, in a football stadium or between participants of opposing political manifestations; see also the distinction of social, economic, political and institutional violence in Imbusch et al. (2011, 89): as the first two forms include violence at the individual level, for the purposes of looking at the LD-OV-FM relations, we concentrate on the organized character of violence. By not drawing legality as the main line of definition, the term organized violence differs from that of organized crime. Organized crime normally is understood as joint and hierarchized action including using violence and force in order to obtain profit, power and other desired goods.
- 4.
Although not directly or exclusively related to organized violence, the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) has since 2001 offered valuable information on terrorist events.
- 5.
For Latin America, in general, Imbusch et al. (2011, 100f; see also 133) state in their literature review that public and organized violence is often related to a lack of development and long-lasting regional conflicts between (ethnic and social) groups.
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Pries, L. (2019). The Interplay of Organized Violence and Forced Migration: A Transnational Perspective. In: Feldmann, A., Bada, X., Schütze, S. (eds) New Migration Patterns in the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89384-6_2
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