On the Road of Migration: Circulation, Risk and the Management of Uncertainty

Article

Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, vol. 41- n°1 | 2025
Directed by Loïs Bastide, Laurent Lardeux and Yann Scioldo-Zürcher Levi

Since the late 1990s, the growing framing of migration in terms of security risks in destination countries has been the subject of extensive literature, particularly in the fields of political science and critical geography. Surprisingly, however, the social sciences have paid very little attention to migrants’ perceptions of migration risks, unlike migration economics, which quickly addressed this question, making risk and its management by migrant populations a crucial component of migratory rationalities. The topical collection “On the Roads of Migration : Circulations, Risk, and the Managing of Uncertainty” aims to address this gap within the field of social sciences. The contributions acknowledge the predominant role of risks in the migratory experience and seek to initiate a structured reflection on this hyper-central yet neglected aspect of mobility trials. In response to this observation, they lay down an initial series of empirical and theoretical foundations to chart this research field, relying on case studies rooted in diverse geographical areas—French Guiana, the northern French coastline, the Île-de-France region, and Southeast Asia—and focusing on various populations, including asylum seekers, Roma populations, and migrant workers.

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Loïs Bastide contributed to the issue with an article entitled Dealing with Risk : Religiosity and Practical Rationalities between Java, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore.

In response to the major risks associated with migration, Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia and Singapore develop ritual, magical, and religious (i.e., spiritual) practices to ward off misfortune. At first glance, this approach appears incompatible with the sociological concept of risk, tied to a secularized view of the future inseparable from European modernity. However, it clearly reflects an active awareness of migration’s uncertainties, irreducible to fatalism. The analysis highlights the convergences and tensions between this conception of the future and sociological theories of risk. The article thus addresses migration through the lens of trials faced by migrants and questions the notion of risk from their perspective, contributing to sociological debates on how social actors cognitively and practically integrate the future in terms of uncertainty, risk, possibilities, and aspirations.