By Ester Nergis Canefe
The field of forced migration studies stands at a critical epistemological crossroads. For decades, the dominant discourse surrounding human mobility, asylum, and border regimes has been mediated by Westphalian state-centric frameworks and Eurocentric humanitarian models. This preliminary planetary bibliography serves as a deliberate intervention, shifting the analytical lens away from state-sanctioned metrics of “crisis management” and toward a comprehensive, globally balanced critique rooted in Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), post-colonial theory, and critical race theory and critical border studies. By centering historical continuums of empire, settler-colonial erasure, and racial capitalism, this collaborative collection reframes contemporary forced displacement not as a series of isolated, technocratic anomalies, but as the direct, predictable consequence of ongoing planetary inequalities.
Indeed, decolonizing forced migration studies demands a radical restructuring of knowledge production. Historically, displaced populations from the Global South have been treated as mere data repositories or passive recipients of Western humanitarian aid, while the authorship of migration theory remained concentrated in the Global North. Scholars within this bibliography challenge this structural hierarchy by advancing indigenous epistemologies, autoethnographic methodologies, and refugee-led research paradigms. Through these interventions, they critique the institutional co-optation of academic publishing and the “double translation” required of non-Western thinkers. They unpack the Eurocentric de-politicization of the refugee subject into a clinical “person of concern,” which sanitizes the imperial and economic violence driving displacement. Finally, they undo the imposition of extractive research dynamics, countering them with frameworks of answerability, responsibility, collaborative co-creation, and intersectional methodologies.
The modern legal architecture of asylum—principally derived from mid-20th-century European contexts—is increasingly deployed to containerize rather than protect mobile populations from the Global Majority. Critical legal and political theorists across Southwest Asia, Africa, and Latin America document how state bureaucracies intentionally manufacture precarity and legal illegality to control migrant labor while withholding formal rights. This bibliography traces the multi-scalar operations of border imperialism through examining how the Global North uses funding and technological surveillance to co-opt transit states into acting as outsourced containment buffers. Analyzing how spatial exceptions and temporary documentation schemes produce permanent underclasses of “informal citizens” stripped of physical and economic sovereignty is an essential aspect of decolonial critique. In addition, conceptualizing the chronopolitics of fragmented transit, where prolonged asylum delays and arbitrary legal limbo are structurally weaponized to exhaust and control racialized bodies, is a key aspect of this collective endeavour.
Finally, the intersection of ecological collapse and forced migration reveals that the decolonial approach to environmental displacement rejects the standard Western isolation of “climate refugees” from historical resource extraction. Instead, it advances a framework of Planetarity from Below, viewing migration as an ecological and economic reparation. The texts collected herein demonstrate that ancestral cartographies and vernacular transnationalism pre-date colonial lines, offering fluid models of regional hospitality, sanctuary, and shared survival that subvert the violent restrictions of the Westphalian state. Ultimately, this planetary bibliography asserts that decolonization is not a metaphor for academic diversification; it is a structural mandate to dismantle the violent legal, spatial, and epistemic borders that continue to partition our shared world. This is by no means an exhaustive collection but an invitation for us to keep building a repository of sources for communal use at the IASFM and beyond.
A Preliminary Bibliography on Decolonizing Forced Migration Studies
Abdelkhah, F., & Olszewska, Z. (2007). The Iranian Afghans. Iranian Studies, 40(2), 153–165.
Abrar, C. R., & Malik, S. (Eds.). (2021). Towards a South Asian regional refugee framework. Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU).
Abu Moghli, M., & Kadiwal, L. (2021). Decolonising the curriculum beyond the surge: Conceptualisation, positionality and conduct. London Review of Education, 19(1), 1–16.
Abu Moghli, M., & Shuayb, M. (2022). Equitable partnerships for education: A myth or a panacea. Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques, 53(1), 177–201.
Acciari, L. (2019). Decolonising labour, reclaiming subaltern epistemologies: Brazilian domestic workers and the international struggle for labour rights. Contexto Internacional, 41(1), 39–64.
Achiume, E. T. (2019). Migration as decolonization. Stanford Law Review, 71(6), 1509–1574.
Adepoju, A. (n.d.). Operationalizing the ECOWAS protocol on free movement of persons: Prospects and challenges for sub-regional integration. Human Resources Development Centre, Lagos.
Ahimbisibwe, F. (2020). The international community and the refugee crisis in Uganda: A critical analysis of burden-sharing. African Journal of Stability and Development, 14(1), 45–72.
Akkad, A. (2026). Displaced academics’ mobility and translocational positionalities: ‘Academic poverty’, ‘academic death’, and ‘academic re-existence’. Higher Education, 91(2), 741–758.
Al-Hamad, A., Yasin, Y. M., Rahman, R., Zhang, A., & Yasin, L. (2026, March). Arts-based methods for resistance and decolonization in refugee women’s research. In Women’s Studies International Forum (Vol. 115, p. 103274). Pergamon.
Al-Ali, N. (2007). Iraqi women: Untold stories from 1948 to the present. Zed Books.
Alhayek, K., & Zeno, B. (2023). Decolonizing displacement research: betweener autoethnography as a method of resistance. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 55(3), 548-555.
Anghie, A. (2005). Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law. Cambridge University Press.
Arat-Koc, S. (2020). Decolonizing refugee studies, standing up for indigenous justice: Challenges and possibilities of a politics of place. Studies in Social Justice 14, no. 2, 371-390.
Asif, M. A., Moorman, M., Namakkal, J., & Nikpour, G. (2025). Decolonization Now. Radical History Review, 2025(153), 1-9.
Awwad, G., Dunagan, L., Gamba, D., & Rayan, T. N. (2025). Collective memory and narrative cohesion: A computational study of Palestinian refugee oral histories in Lebanon. arXiv.
Banerjee, P., & Samaddar, R. (2018). Why critical forced migration studies has to be post-colonial by nature. In Forced Migration (pp. 44-59). Routledge.
Banerjee, P., Chowdhory, N., & Singh, P. (Eds.). (2025). The Postcolonial Compendium: Keywords in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies. Springer Nature.
Barros, A., & Alcadipani, R. (2023). Decolonizing journals in management and organizations? Epistemological encounters and the double translation. Organization, 30(6), 1189–1207.
Bashi, V. (2023, September). The practice of decolonizing migration studies. In Sociological Forum (Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 886-895).
Bauder, H., Dreher, S., Luhan, J., & Asolo, A. (2023). Decolonizing migration studies: The case of hospitality, sanctuary, and solidarity (Working Paper No. 2023-03). Toronto Metropolitan Centre for Immigration and Settlement.
Bhatia, A. (2013). We are all here to stay? Indigeneity, migration, and ‘decolonizing’ the treaty right to be here. Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice.
Bilotta, N. (2021). Refugee-inspired ethical guidelines from Kakuma: Moving toward decolonising research practice. Societies, 11(4), 133–145.
Bishara, A. (2022). On the Arab democratic question: Detours, dilemmas, and definitions. Oxford University Press.
Canefe, Nergis. “Decolonizing forced migration studies: Notes from borderlands.” In Decolonial politics in European peripheries, pp. 110-125. Routledge, 2023.
Carpi, Estella, and Portia Owusu. “Slavery, lived realities, and the decolonisation of forced migration histories: An interview with Dr Portia Owusu.” Migration Studies 10, no. 1 (2022): 87-93.
Carayannis, T. (2013). The complex wars of the Congo: Transnational networks and local dynamics. African Affairs, 112(447), 180–201.
Chakrabarty, D. (2022). Planetary humanities: Straddling the decolonial/postcolonial divide. Daedalus, 151(3), 222-233.
Chatty, D. (2021). When perceptions and aspirations clash: Humanitarianism in Syria’s neighboring states. In Everybody’s War: The Politics of Aid in the Syria Crisis (pp. 112–135). Oxford University Press.
Chimni, B. S. (1998). The geopolitics of refugee studies: A view from the South. Journal of Refugee Studies, 11(4), 350–374.
Chimni, B. S. (2017). International law and world order: A critique of contemporary approaches (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Chowdhory, N., & Singh, P. (2026). New Frontiers in the Register of Migration and Refugee Studies. In New Frontiers in the Register of Migration and Refugee Studies (pp. 1-23). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
Constantinou, C. M., McConnell, F., Dirik, D., Regassa, A., Loong, S., & Kuokkanen, R. (2025). Reimagining self-determination: Relational, decolonial, and intersectional perspectives. Political Geography, 118, 103112.
Daley, P. O. (2008). Gender & genocide in Burundi: The search for spaces of peace in the Great Lakes region. James Currey.
Fakhoury, T. (2021). Elusive decolonisation of IR in the Arab world: Epistemic exclusions and the performativity of localism. Review of International Studies, 47(4), 512–531.
Fakhoury, T., & Chatty, D. (Eds.). (2020). Refugee governance in the Arab world: The international refugee regime and global politics. Bloomsbury Academic.
Farah Schwartzman, L. (2021). Seeing African and Indigenous states and societies: Decolonizing and degrouping race scholarships’ narratives of conquest and enslavement in the early modern Atlantic world. Political Power and Social Theory, 38, 223–253.
Farah Schwartzman, L. (2021). Seeing African and Indigenous states and societies: Decolonizing and degrouping race scholarships’ narratives of conquest and enslavement in the early modern Atlantic world. Political Power and Social Theory, 38, 223–253.
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2020). Recentering the South in studies of migration and displacement. Migration Studies, 8(1), 1–18.
Fortier, C. (2017). Unsettling methodologies/decolonizing movements. Journal of Indigenous Social Development, 6(1).
Gathii, J. T. (2020). Promise of international law: A third world view (including a TWAIL bibliography 1996–2019 as an appendix). Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting, 114, 165–187.
Ghosh, S. (2023). A border close to home: Everyday life and surveillance on the Indo-Bangladesh border. University of Minnesota Press.
Gonzalez, C. G. (2020). Migration as reparation: Climate change and the disruption of borders. Loyola Law Review.
Gopinath, P., & Brueck, L. (2024). Introduction: Decolonizing Futures. In The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature (pp. 1-12). Routledge.
Gray Meral, A. (2024). Win–Win for who? Complementary–labour pathways for refugees through a decolonial feminist lens. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 44(4), 595–617.
Guma, T., Blake, Y., Maclean, G., MacLeod, K., Makutsa, R., & Sharapov, K. (2024). “Are we criminals?”–everyday racialisation in temporary asylum accommodation. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 47(4), 742-762.
Hanafi, S. (2023). Spacio-cide and the bio-politics of refugee encampment in the Levant: Decolonizing spatial exceptions. Center for Arab Unity Studies.
Hari, K. C., and Nicola Piper. “Rethinking the migrant rights agenda in global migration governance: a decolonized rights-based approach.” In Handbook on Migration and Development, pp. 400-416. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024.
Hashem, R. (2021). Creating Space in the Archive for an Anti-oppressive Community Project: Recording Border Control and Subversion. Displaced Voices: A Journal of Archives, Migration and Cultural Heritage, 2(1), 74-81.
İçduygu, A., & Millet, E. (2022). Syrian refugees in Turkey: Shadows of a protracted guest status. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 24(3), 411–428.
Kabbanji, L. (2022). The politics of data production and border externalization in West Africa: A decolonial assessment of migration management in Senegal. Population, Space and Place, 28(5), e2554.
Karmakar, G. (2025). Decolonial hope and planetary solidarity: Fostering sustainability through African life narratives. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 61(3), 313-330.
Kanyinga, K. (n.d.). The politics of land, identity, and displacement in Kenya. Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi.
Kathiravelu, L. (2026). Decolonizing the figure of the “migrant”: non-binary categorizations and intra-Asian mobilities. In Migration Studies and the Decolonial Challenge (pp. 286-304). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Khoday, K. (2022). Decolonizing the environment: Third World approaches to the planetary crisis. Indonesian Journal of International Law, 19(2), 189-211.
Khosravi, S. (2010). ‘Illegal’ traveller: An auto-ethnography of borders. Palgrave Macmillan.
Kilicaslan, G. (2022). Deprovincializing Kurdish politics: Forced migration and activism across Kurdistan, Turkey and Europe. York University Repository.
Kibria, N. (2023, September). Decolonizing migration studies: A brief introduction. In Sociological Forum (Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 852-855).
Landa, N. M. (2026). Epilogue: Decolonizing Borders and Bordering. In Gender, Power and Space-Making in the City of Johannesburg: Understanding the Lives of Zimbabwean Women (pp. 235-256). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Landau, L. B. (2019). A chronic case of posture without policy: Reflections on researching migration in Africa. Journal of Refugee Studies, 32(1), 155–164.
Lokyitsang, D. (2021). Sovereignty in exile: The anticolonial agency of Tibetan refugee education systems in India. Leiden University Repository, 11(2), 145–168.
Lunstrum, E., & Bose, P. S. (2022). Environmental displacement in the Anthropocene. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112(3), 644-653.
Malambo, N. (2025). “It never really has a face that is fully ours”: perspectives on ownership, antiracism and the decolonization of development. Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 46(4), 656-673.
Mamdani, M. (2001). When victims become killers: Colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press.
Martin, Staci B., and Deepra Dandekar. Global South scholars in the Western academy. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022.
Memmi, A. (2006). Decolonization and the Decolonized. U of Minnesota Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2020). Reflections on collaborative knowledge production in the context of forced migration. Feminstische GeoRundmail.
Modirzadeh, N. K. (2023). ‘[L]et us all agree to die a little’: TWAIL’s unfulfilled promise. SSRN Electronic Journal, 65(1), 79-105.
Mongia, Radhika. “Rethinking Decolonization.” Journal of World-Systems Research 27, no. 2 (2021): 390-395.
Murshid, N. (2014). The politics of refugees in South Asia: Identity, resistance, manipulation. Routledge.
Mwangi, J. M. (2024). Spatial containment or subaltern mobility? A decolonial history of the encampment of Somali refugees in Kenya. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 18(2), 201–224.
Nasser-Eddin, N., & Abu-Assab, N. (2020). Decolonial approaches to refugee migration. Migration and Society, 3(1), 190–202.
Nasser, R. (2026). “The child that I left behind”: Memory, trauma, and the reconstruction of childhood in Nakba narratives. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, e1656549.
Nijim, M. (2026). Indigenous epistemologies and decolonising genocide research on Palestine. Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 25(1), 45–68.
Özkahraman, G. (2021). Decolonising Kurdish refugee studies: The need for a critical, reflective and emancipatory approach. Refugee Research Online, 14(2), 112–129.
Padilla, B. (2025). Decolonizing migration studies. Comparative Migration Studies, 13(1), 44.
Pahuja, S. (2011). Decolonising international law: Development, economic growth and the politics of universality. Cambridge University Press.
Panayi, P., & Virdee, P. (Eds.). (2011). Refugees and the end of empire: Imperial collapse and forced migration in the twentieth century. Springer.
Pandey, S. (2025). Narrative injustice and the legal erasure of indigeneity: A TWAIL reframing of the Kashmiri Pandit case in postcolonial international law. Laws, 14(6), 96.
Patel, L. (2015). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. Routledge.
Raja, M. (2024). Colonial cartography and regional fractures: Decolonizing postcolonial South Asian border regimes. Routledge.
Ramasubramanyam, J. (2024). TWAIL, archives, and refugee law. Journal of Refugee Studies, 37(4), 994-1007.
Ramirez, C. (2020). Decolonizing migration studies: A Chicanx studies perspective and critique of colonial sociological origins. Río Bravo: A Journal of the Borderlands, 24, 1–29.
Rega, I. (2025). Shifting the Collaboration Paradigm: Towards Decolonization Through Refugee-Led Research. In Global South-North Dichotomies in Higher Education (pp. 122-137). Routledge.
Ribeiro, G. L. (2023). From decolonizing knowledge to postimperialism: A Latin American perspective. American Ethnologist, 50(3), 375-386.
Riley, A. R., & Carpenter, K. A. (2021). Decolonizing Indigenous migration. California Law Review, 109(1), 63–123.
Samaddar, R. (2020). The postcolonial age of migration. Routledge.
Santos, F. (2025). Decolonizing the migration archive: Haitian refugees at Fort Allen, Puerto Rico, 1981–82. Comparative Migration Studies, 13(1), 94.
Savaş, Ö., & Dutt, A. (2023). Decolonial and intersectional feminist psychology for the future of (forced) migration and refugee resettlement. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 4, 100124.
Seppälä, T. (2016). Feminizing resistance, decolonizing solidarity: Contesting neoliberal development in the Global South. Journal of Resistance Studies, 2(1), 12.
Sharma, N. (2026). Decolonizing migration studies= abolishing nation-states and their borders. In Migration Studies and the Decolonial Challenge (pp. 90-112). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Singh, N. S., Lokot, M., Undie, C. C., Onyango, M. A., Morgan, R., Harmer, A., … & Heidari, S. (2021). Research in forced displacement: guidance for a feminist and decolonial approach. The Lancet, 397(10274), 560-562.
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.
Stel, N. (2025). The agnopolitics of refoulement: Migration diplomacy and the un/knowing of regional refugee deportation to Syria. Review of International Studies, 51(4), 1–21.
Stierl, M., & Tazzioli, M. (2023). Mare nero? Undoing the decolonial redux, multiplying (post)colonial legacies and struggles. Global Networks, 23(4), 2700–2715.
Tesfaye, A., & Mukuna, T. Decolonizing Knowledge Production in Forced Displacement: Challenging Colonial Narratives and Amplifying Displaced Voices.
Taha, D. (2022). Intersectionality and other critical approaches in refugee research: An annotated bibliography. Local Engagement Refugee Research Network (LERRN).
Thambinathan, V., & Kinsella, E. A. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies in qualitative research: Creating spaces for transformative praxis. International journal of qualitative methods, 20, 16094069211014766.
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Weber, L., Newitt, R., & Loughnan, C. (2023). Place, borders, and the decolonial. In The Routledge international handbook on decolonizing justice (pp. 67-77). Routledge.
Vanyoro, K. (2024). Chronopolitics: Decolonising African migration studies. Critical African Studies, 16(3), 399–414.
Yum, H. J. (2025). Vulnerable Resisters: Decolonizing Voices of Asian Migrants in a Settler Colonial and Religious. Asian Canada Is Burning: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, and Praxes, 299, 45.
Zong, E. Y. (2026). Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora. University of Michigan Press.
Professor Ester Nergis Canefe (SJD, PhD) is an international legal scholar and political theorist based at York University, Canada, currently serving as the IASFM President. Her research is at the intersection of critical legal studies, public international law, TWAIL, and forced migration in the Global South and East. She is the author of 7 books and over 50 academic articles.
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A great epistemological dimension.