Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article theorizes everyday forms of uncertainty that immigrant and refugee populations negotiate as a form of violence. We argue that while the state has made immigrants and refugees an explicit target on which to exercise sovereignty through detention and deportation, sovereignty also operates through a necropolitics of uncertainty where immigrants and refugees face inconsistent and spatially diffuse states of exception that target their material, social, and psychological wellbeing. To support this argument, we draw on three case studies that illustrate how avoiding or opting out of social services and health care, or by “self-deporting,” are effects of targeted violence.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Comparative Migration Studies, Volume 13, 2025.
Rights
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
APA Citation
Grace, B., Doering-White, J., & Roth, B. (2025). The violence of uncertainty: Theorizing everyday immigrant necropolitics across three cases. Comparative Migration Studies, 13(1), Article 26.https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-025-00441-3