Uncertainty, exhaustion, abandonment – Leveraging the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to interrogate South/North distinctions in forced migration studies

Forced migration studies struggles to counterbalance policy assumptions that the governance of displaced people is of a fundamentally different nature in the Global South and North. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that questions the epistemic segregation and theoretical demarcation that reproduce such exceptionalism. It mobilizes the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to innovatively interrogate routinely assumed differences between migration governance in the Global South and North. It juxtaposes in-depth empirical case-studies of refugee governance in Lebanon, the country with the world’s highest per capita number of refugees, with a review of critical research on EUropean governance of forced and irregular migrants. This exploration demonstrates that the rationales and manifestations of the ‘politics of uncertainty’ that refugees are subjected to in Lebanon closely mirror those of the ‘politics of abandonment’ and ‘exhaustion’ that migrants face in EUrope. Under both regimes, strategic forms of ambiguity operate to spatially and temporally marginalize refugees and render them controllable, exploitable, and deportable.