This book marks a critical contribution to the intercultural dialogue about immigration. Each year, thousands of Central Americans leave their countries and walk across Mexico, seeking to reach the United States. The author explores the dispossession process that drives these migrants from their homes and argues that they are caught in a kind of trap: forced to emigrate, but impeded to immigrate. This trap is discussed empirically through the analysis of immigration policies implemented by the United States government and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in some of “albergues” (shelters).

Using examples from the United States—Mexico border, Central America, and South America, this book argues that forced migration is not a spontaneous phenomenon, but rather a product of necropolitical strategies designed to depopulate resource rich countries or regions. Estevez merges necropolitical analysis with postcolonial migration and offers a new framework to study the set of policies, laws, institutions, and political discourses producing a profit in a legal context in which habitat devastation is legal, but mobility is a crime. Violence, deprivation of food or water, environmental contamination, and rights exclusion are some of the tactics used in extractivist capitalism. Private and state actors alike, use necropower, both its first and third world versions, to make people, living and dead, a commodity.

Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica are five small countries, and yet no other part of the world is more important to the US.

The sociology of Latin America, established in the region over the past eighty years, is a thriving field whose major contributions include dependence theory, world-systems theory, and historical debates on economic development, among others. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America provides research essays that introduce the readers to the discipline's key areas and current trends, specifically with regard to contemporary sociology in Latin America, as well as a collection of innovative empirical studies deploying a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The essays in the Handbook are arranged in eight research subfields in which scholars are currently making significant theoretical and methodological contributions: Sociology of the State, Social Inequalities, Sociology of Religion, Collective Action and Social Movements, Sociology of Migration, Sociology of Gender, Medical Sociology, and Sociology of Violence and Insecurity. Due to the deterioration of social and economic conditions, as well as recent disruptions to an already tense political environment, these have become some of the most productive and important fields in Latin American sociology. This roiling sociopolitical atmosphere also generates new and innovative expressions of protest and survival, which are being explored by sociologists across different continents today. The essays included in this collection offer a map to and a thematic articulation of central sociological debates that make it a critical resource for those scholars and students eager to understand contemporary sociology in Latin America.

This volume elucidates and explores the interrelationships and direct causal connection between serious international crimes, serious breaches to fundamental human rights, and gross affronts to human dignity that lead to mass forced migration. Forced migration most often occurs in the context of protracted armed conflict of a noninternational nature where terrorism, fierce fighting, deep animosity, tit-for-tat retaliation, and “rapid dominance” doctrine all lead to the commission of atrocity crimes. Accordingly, this volume makes a valuable contribution to the literature and to the cause of trying to resolve mass forced displacement at its root cause, to explore the course that it takes, and how it might be prevented. The collection comprises original research by leading legal scholars and jurists focusing on the three central themes of serious international crimes, human rights, and forced migration. The work also includes a Foreword from Sir Howard Morrison, QC, former President of the Appeals Division of the International Criminal Court. The book will be a valuable resource for students, academics, researchers, and policymakers working in the areas of international law, migration, human rights, and international criminal law.

Drawing together the work and ideas of a combination of the world's leading and emerging International Relations scholars, Refugees in International Relations considers what ideas from International Relations can offer our understanding of the international politics of forced migration. The insights draw from across the theoretical spectrum of International Relations from realism to critical theory to feminism, covering issues including international cooperation, security, and the international political economy.