A journal article by Prof Loren Landau and Prof Tendayi Achiume

2015 marked a dramatic shift in global discourse on international migration. This article is a qualitative, socio-legal interrogation of two highly influential migration reports produced by the United Nations in that year: the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division’s International Migration Report 2015 and the United Nation’s Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Global Trends 2015. This article takes as a starting point that political actions, decisions and ‘objectivity’ flow from cognitive schema shaped in part by the kind of numbers and analysis these reports include. In this light, it considers the strengths and weaknesses of these reports, and their potential for shaping policy and policy responses to human mobility.

Landau, L.B., Achiume, E.T. 2017. Misreading mobility?: Bureaucratic politics and blindness in the United Nations’ migration reports. Development & Change, 48, 1182-1195.