Prolonged Immobility and Uncertain Futures: Rethinking Migratory Entrapment

The externalization of borders, the tightening of migration control, increasingly restrictive asylum policies, and other mechanisms of migration governance have produced growing numbers of migrants who remain unable to move onward, return, or settle elsewhere for prolonged and uncertain periods. Once considered exceptional, these situations have become an increasingly common feature of contemporary migration.

This phenomenon has stimulated growing scholarly interest across migration contexts, giving rise to concepts such as waiting, involuntary immobility, stuck in mobility, containment, liminality, and migratory entrapment. Together, these perspectives reflect a shared concern with understanding how constrained mobility is produced and reshapes migration trajectories, social relations, and everyday life.

Among these approaches, migratory entrapment offers a promising framework for linking the structural production of constrained im/mobility with the lived experiences of those whose migration projects remain unresolved. It draws attention not only to interrupted movement but also to the social worlds that emerge under prolonged uncertainty, where people continue to work, study, care for their families, build relationships, participate in community life, imagine futures, and negotiate belonging.

These situations invite renewed reflection on conventional understandings of integration, which often presuppose settlement. By blurring the distinction between transit and settlement, prolonged immobility calls for new ways of understanding participation, belonging, and incorporation.

This session welcomes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions examining the production, experience, or conceptualization of prolonged im/mobility across geographical regions and migration contexts. By bringing diverse perspectives into dialogue, it seeks to advance comparative understanding of this phenomenon and its implications for migration studies.