The paper explores how migration maps work within and upon security-migration nexuses.  The starting point is that the nexus and its politicisation operate by creating movements-spaces. Mapping devices deployed in the governance and politicisation of migration-security nexuses render conceptions of movement in conjunction with space production. The methods of mapping migration do not simply represent and capture movement. They also condition what movement is within their rendition of space and what space is within their rendition of movement. The paper aims to introduce nomadic counter-mapping methods and how they motion the security-migration nexus. By working with a conception of life and matter as essentially in motion, they do not just produce alternative spatial representations and methods but techniques and representations that unsettle instituted securitising conceptions of movement. In doing so, they work critically on the international and humanitarian security conceptions of movement-space through which migration and its regulatory possibilities are imagined and conducted.

Jef Huysmans is Professor of International Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He co-convenes the research cluster Doing International Political Sociology. 

He is best known for his work on the politics of insecurity, the securitization of migration, critical methods, and international political sociology. He is currently developing an international political sociology of fracturing worlds and motioning the politics of (in)security.

He has published widely in leading journals in international studies, politics, and European studies. He is the author of Security Unbound. Enacting Democratic Limits  (Routledge, 2014), The Politics of Insecurity. Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU.(Routledge 2006); and What is Politics? (Edinburgh University Press, 2005). He edited with Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik The Politics of Protection. Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency. (Routledge 2006); with Patricia Noxolo Community, citizenship, and the ‘war on terror’: Security and insecurity. (Palgrave 2009), with Xavier Guillaume Citizenship and Security. The Constitution of Political Being. (Routledge 2013), and with Claudia Aradau, Andrew Neal and Nadine Voelkner Critical Security Methods. New Frameworks for Analysis. (Routledge, 2014).