Symposium: Walking with Migrants: Ethnography as Method in International Relations

[This is a post-publication review symposium] The ‘international’ is an abstract – and thus in one sense fictional – object of study, as are the other objects of social science disciplines such as ‘the economy’ or ‘society’. As scholars, part of our job is to conjure these abstract objects, and one of the ways in which we do this is through our choice of methods. Different methods therefore do not just give us a menu of choices through which to study a single, given ‘international’ object; instead, they are significant in part because they generate different incarnations of ‘the international’ as an object. This symposium on Noelle Brigden’s (2016) recent ISQ article explores the generative power of ethnography as method for studying the international, particularly as concerns mobility. Brigden’s article offers a close study of the pathways and lifeworlds of illegal transnational migrants in Mexico. Through this work, the article explores questions of identity across the migratory routes, highlighting their unstable, improvised and makeshift character. It also evokes the ways in which the presence of state and non-state violence conditions the production of identity, sovereignty and borders ‘from below’. [...]