Research Project (Ongoing)

Mixed Migration in Asia: Research on Co-Constitutive Vulnerability and Multi-Actor Dynamics

Asia is experiencing significant transformations in human mobility under the compounded pressures of climate change, conflict, political instability and economic inequality. Mixed migration, in which people with heterogeneous backgrounds and motivations converge on shared routes, is expected to persist over the coming decades. Yet existing policy and assistance frameworks have not adequately conceptualized the mechanisms through which vulnerability is generated in the interactions between migrants and the intermediaries that mediate their movement.

The high incidence of deaths and disappearances along Asia's migration corridors cannot be explained by the inherent danger of routes alone. When a route acquires normative legitimacy as a "preferred" pathway, we argue, migrants and resources concentrate upon it, while alternative routes remain underdeveloped. This narrowing of options structurally may reinforce dependence on a limited set of pathways and produce a cumulative accretion of risk. The phenomenon is arguably not merely a problem of individual routes but a structural consequence of how the governance system is institutionally organized, a proposition this project undertakes to theorize and empirically substantiate. Concentration within the same temporal window, the same route, and the same intermediaries may amplify what would otherwise be dispersed individual risks, scaling them into structural ones.

Equally critical is the paradox that well-intentioned interventions can themselves generate new forms of risk. Designating “safe routes," certifying “trustworthy intermediaries," and introducing “standardized procedures" may appear, at first glance, to mitigate vulnerability. Yet such measures themselves constitute new normative pathways, accelerating concentration on particular routes and intermediaries, and thereby reproducing vulnerability in altered forms.

This leads to our first research question: How do the interactions among migrants, states, and transnationally extended intermediary (organizational) networks produce normative pathways in Asian mixed migration, and through what processes do these pathways narrow migrants' options and generate vulnerability?

To engage this question, the project reconceptualizes vulnerability not as a property reducible to migrants' individual attributes or to the characteristics of particular routes, but as a condition mutually constituted and reproduced within the triadic relationships among migrants, states, and intermediaries. We term this co-constitutive vulnerability.

Building on this conceptual move, the project's broader objective is to ask: How, through the elucidation of these triadic dynamics, can we construct an alternative theory of governance that moves beyond fixed frameworks of protection and control? What is required is not a predetermined model of protection or control, but an adaptive governance framework that takes the complexity of triadic interactions as its analytical starting point and remains responsive to evolving conditions. Through multi-sited fieldwork across Asia, the project aims to establish the theoretical and empirical foundations for such a framework.

[Co-researchers]
Leong Chan-Hoong (S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Gracia Liu-Farrer (Waseda University)
Lee Chiaki (Governance and Peacebuilding Department, JICA)