Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

The five logics of the humanitarian migrant services industry

Humanitarian migration services can institute forms of governance that commodify clients and extract values from the labor power of low-wage non-migrant and migrant workers and volunteers. These processes were identified through an ethnography of migrant service provision in a di...

Situating the migration industry: governance, capital accumulation and global dehumanization: an introduction

To introduce this Special Issue, we begin by asking whether we are currently traversing a new phase of the migration industry. These transformations are characterized by the complete enmeshing of profit-making activities with the not-for-profit sector and by the state becoming an...

Quasi-exile as a condition: ‘Rùn’ from a post-COVID-19 China

This article introduces quasi-exile as a condition of displacement, where the act of leaving one’s country of origin takes precedence over the desire to arrive at a specific destination. Departing from rùn – a viral term for migration that emerged amid China's post-pandemic uncer...