Saskia Bonjour
Biographic Data
| ID | 3677183 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Saskia Bonjour |
| GIVEN NAMES | Saskia |
| FAMILY NAME | Bonjour |
| SIGNATURE | BONJOUR S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 443 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Gatekeepers or agents of change? The political agency of lawyers in the Dutch family migration regime
Doing Family Before the State. Does Recognition of De Facto Families Lead to More Inclusive Migration Law Practices
Critical scholars have long called for state recognition of de facto families, beyond legal or biological ties, as a pathway toward inclusion of more diverse family forms. This article asks to what extent recognition of de facto families indeed leads to more inclusion, in the context of a restrictive immigration regime in which families need state permission to live together. It zooms in on migration law practice in the Netherlands, through an an…
Capitalizing on a crisis: The European Union Trust Fund for Africa
How do foreign policies and transnational projects become resistant to critique? This article seeks to better understand the legitimation of policies by studying the work involved in justifying public funding of migration and development initiatives. Government expenditures on migration and development have been increasing in recent years, despite widely shared concerns regarding the merits of such initiatives. In this article, we focus our atten…
Micro-practices of nation-building: Race and class in Jennifer Elrick’s Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism
How do race and class intersect in state practices of nation-building? This is one of the key themes in Jennifer Elrick’s book Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada. In this essay, I discuss Elrick’s conceptualization of the relation between race and class, which combines notions of class as a component of race on the one hand, and class as intersecting with race on the other hand. I argu…
Seeking Legitimacy Through Knowledge Production: The Politics of Monitoring and Evaluation of the EU Trust Fund for Africa
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is a form of expert knowledge that is central to migration governance. This article analyses M&E of the EU Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), created in 2015 to ‘fight the root causes of migration’. Combining institutionalist accounts with practice theory, we examine whether M&E knowledge production served the instrumental purpose of assessing policy impact or mainly legitimated particular policy actors and positions. W…
Transnational Marriage and Partner Migration: Constellations of Security, Citizenship, and Rights
This multidisciplinary collection investigates the ways in which marriage and partner migration processes have become the object of state scrutiny, and the site of sustained political interventions in several states around the world. Covering cases as varied as the United States, Canada, Japan, Iran, France, Belgium or the Netherlands, among others, contributors reveal how marriage and partner migration have become battlegrounds for political par…
Intimate citizenship: Introduction to the special issue on citizenship, membership and belonging in mixed-status families
This special issue investigates citizenship and belonging in mixed-status families, i.e. families consisting of both citizens and non-citizens. We critique the standard perception of citizenship as ‘hard on the outside and soft on the inside’. For citizens with non-citizen family members, the exclusionary nature of citizenship is very much ‘inside’, in the very heart of their families. We deploy the concept of ‘performing intimate citizenship’ to…
Families First? The Mobilization of Family Norms in Refugee Resettlement
European resettlement programs prioritize the admission of refugee families. While this is seen as the 'natural' thing to do, we argue that the mobilization of family norms is crucially political: in everyday bordering practices, interpretations of family norms are decisive for who is admitted to Europe. We study the selection of Syrian refugees in Turkey for humanitarian admission to Germany, which involves national governments, UNHCR, and NGOs.…
Epilogue: Shaping the Nation through Civic Integration: A Postcolonial Perspective on Paradoxical Policies
Civic integration policies shape migrants’ pathway to residence and citizenship in Europe and North-America. These policies invite or oblige migrants to learn the customs and language of their new country of residence. Either by inculcating migrants with certain skills and knowledge, or by barring certain migrants from accessing national territory and citizenship, civic integration policies are instruments through which states purport to shape th…
The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Migration in Europe
The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Migration in Europe provides a rigorous and critical examination of what is exceptional about the European politics of migration and the study of it. Crucially, this book goes beyond the study of the politics of migration in the handful of Western European countries to showcase a European approach to the study of migration politics, inclusive of tendencies in all geographical parts of Europe (including Ea…
Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Migration in Europe
Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies: An Introduction
The introduction to this special issue traces class at the interface between migration policy and migrant strategies. Scholarship on the politics of migration and citizenship has thus far largely neglected class. In contrast, we contend that discourses on migration, integration and citizenship are inevitably classed. Assessed through seemingly heterogeneous criteria of “merit” and “performance”, class serves as an analytical connector between eco…
Beyond venue shopping and liberal constraint: A new research agenda for EU migration policies and politics
European Union (EU) asylum and immigration politics and policies have witnessed a major change since their communitarization in the early 2000s. Studies on EU migration, however, do not agree on the impact that EU institutions now have on policy outputs and outcomes. While some argue that supranational institutions are able to impose ‘liberal constraints’ on member states, other studies consider them unable to shift the ‘policy core’ of EU migrat…
"The "migrant with poor prospects: Racialized intersections of class and culture in Dutch civic integration debates
The recent trend towards selective immigration policies is based on the racialization of certain categories of migrants into irretrievably unassimilable Others. In Europe, this trend has materialized largely through the application of integration requirements to the immigration of foreigners, the so-called "civic integration turn". Based on an analysis of parliamentary debates about civic integration policies in the Netherlands, this paper asks w…
Speaking of Rights: The Influence of Law and Courts on the Making of Family Migration Policies in Germany
The impact of the judiciary on immigration policies has been simultaneously overestimated and underestimated. Migration scholars broadly assume that courts have forced liberal states to admit unwanted migration. Based on an analysis of family migration policy making in the Federal Republic of Germany (1975‐90), I show that the direct policy impact of court rulings was limited, as courts were reticent to impinge upon democratic sovereignty. Howeve…
Public Debate and Policy-making on Family Migration in the Netherlands, 1960-1995
Is ‘public opinion’ systematically opposed to immigration? And has this pushed policymakers to implement restrictive migration policies? To answer these questions, we investigate the impact of public opinion, as expressed in media debates, on the making of family migration policies in the Netherlands. Based on newspaper articles, parliamentary documents and ministerial archives, we analysed three debates on family migration from the 1960s, the 19…
A proper wife, a proper marriage: Constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in Dutch family migration policy
Migration policy is a product and producer of identities and values. This article argues that discourses and policies on family reunification participate in the politics of belonging, and that gender and family norms play a crucial role in this production of collective identities, i.e. in defining who ‘we’ are and what distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘the others’. Tracing the development of political debates and policy-making about ‘fraudulent’ and ‘forc…
When Europeanization backfires: The normalization of European migration politics
Governing diversity: Dutch political parties' preferences on the role of the state in civic integration policies
This article analyses political debates about civic integration policies in the Netherlands, so as to identify different conceptions of the role of the state in ensuring social cohesion by governing diversity. Drawing on the literature on party systems, it presents an analysis of political party positions on the role of the state in civic integration along two dimensions: economic distribution on the one hand, and sociocultural governance on the …
Gender, Generations and the Family in International Migration
Albert Kraler, Eleonore Kofman, Martin Kohli and Camille Schmoll (eds), Gender, Generations and the Family in International Migration Amsterdam: IMISCOE/Amsterdam University Press, 2012, 404 pp., €
Political Debates on Islamic Headscarves and Civic Integration Abroad in France and the Netherlands: What Can Models Explain
This article evaluates the explanatory capacity of national models of migrant integration, through a comparative analysis of the regulation of Islamic headscarves on the one hand and civic integration abroad policies on the other hand, in both France and the Netherlands. It argues that national models—defined as historically rooted conceptions of nationhood, polity, and belonging—matter because they enable and constrain the framing of policy prob…
The Power and Morals of Policy Makers: Reassessing the Control Gap Debate
For more than 15 years, there has been a lively debate among migration scholars in Europe and North America about how to explain “why liberal states accept unwanted migration.” This paper assesses existent hypotheses in the “most-likely” case of the making of Dutch family migration policies. This empirical test raises serious doubts as to the validity of the broadly shared assumption that national policy makers have lost the power to regulate mig…
Constructing and Imagining Labour Migration: Perspectives of Control from Five Continents – Edited by E. Guild and S. Mantu
FLWIN
Doing family: Responses to the constructions of ‘the migrant family’ across Europe
This paper draws on how constructions of ‘the migrant family’ in political discourse influence migrants' and their families' lives. In specific national contexts, ‘the migrant family’ is determined according to the national and European debates and expressed by their respective rules and regulations. By ‘doing family’, migrants and their families develop strategies in order to fit these requirements of living a certain family life. Fulfilling spe…
"The "migrant with poor prospects: Racialized intersections of class and culture in Dutch civic integration debates
The recent trend towards selective immigration policies is based on the racialization of certain categories of migrants into irretrievably unassimilable Others. In Europe, this trend has materialized largely through the application of integration requirements to the immigration of foreigners, the so-called "civic integration turn". Based on an analysis of parliamentary debates about civic integration policies in the Netherlands, this paper asks w…
A proper wife, a proper marriage: Constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in Dutch family migration policy
Migration policy is a product and producer of identities and values. This article argues that discourses and policies on family reunification participate in the politics of belonging, and that gender and family norms play a crucial role in this production of collective identities, i.e. in defining who ‘we’ are and what distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘the others’. Tracing the development of political debates and policy-making about ‘fraudulent’ and ‘forc…
Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies: An Introduction
The introduction to this special issue traces class at the interface between migration policy and migrant strategies. Scholarship on the politics of migration and citizenship has thus far largely neglected class. In contrast, we contend that discourses on migration, integration and citizenship are inevitably classed. Assessed through seemingly heterogeneous criteria of “merit” and “performance”, class serves as an analytical connector between eco…
Doing family: Responses to the constructions of ‘the migrant family’ across Europe
This paper draws on how constructions of ‘the migrant family’ in political discourse influence migrants' and their families' lives. In specific national contexts, ‘the migrant family’ is determined according to the national and European debates and expressed by their respective rules and regulations. By ‘doing family’, migrants and their families develop strategies in order to fit these requirements of living a certain family life. Fulfilling spe…
The Power and Morals of Policy Makers: Reassessing the Control Gap Debate
For more than 15 years, there has been a lively debate among migration scholars in Europe and North America about how to explain “why liberal states accept unwanted migration.” This paper assesses existent hypotheses in the “most-likely” case of the making of Dutch family migration policies. This empirical test raises serious doubts as to the validity of the broadly shared assumption that national policy makers have lost the power to regulate mig…
Beyond venue shopping and liberal constraint: A new research agenda for EU migration policies and politics
European Union (EU) asylum and immigration politics and policies have witnessed a major change since their communitarization in the early 2000s. Studies on EU migration, however, do not agree on the impact that EU institutions now have on policy outputs and outcomes. While some argue that supranational institutions are able to impose ‘liberal constraints’ on member states, other studies consider them unable to shift the ‘policy core’ of EU migrat…
Speaking of Rights: The Influence of Law and Courts on the Making of Family Migration Policies in Germany
The impact of the judiciary on immigration policies has been simultaneously overestimated and underestimated. Migration scholars broadly assume that courts have forced liberal states to admit unwanted migration. Based on an analysis of family migration policy making in the Federal Republic of Germany (1975‐90), I show that the direct policy impact of court rulings was limited, as courts were reticent to impinge upon democratic sovereignty. Howeve…
Families First? The Mobilization of Family Norms in Refugee Resettlement
European resettlement programs prioritize the admission of refugee families. While this is seen as the 'natural' thing to do, we argue that the mobilization of family norms is crucially political: in everyday bordering practices, interpretations of family norms are decisive for who is admitted to Europe. We study the selection of Syrian refugees in Turkey for humanitarian admission to Germany, which involves national governments, UNHCR, and NGOs.…
When Europeanization backfires: The normalization of European migration politics
Seeking Legitimacy Through Knowledge Production: The Politics of Monitoring and Evaluation of the EU Trust Fund for Africa
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is a form of expert knowledge that is central to migration governance. This article analyses M&E of the EU Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), created in 2015 to ‘fight the root causes of migration’. Combining institutionalist accounts with practice theory, we examine whether M&E knowledge production served the instrumental purpose of assessing policy impact or mainly legitimated particular policy actors and positions. W…
Political Debates on Islamic Headscarves and Civic Integration Abroad in France and the Netherlands: What Can Models Explain
This article evaluates the explanatory capacity of national models of migrant integration, through a comparative analysis of the regulation of Islamic headscarves on the one hand and civic integration abroad policies on the other hand, in both France and the Netherlands. It argues that national models—defined as historically rooted conceptions of nationhood, polity, and belonging—matter because they enable and constrain the framing of policy prob…
Public Debate and Policy-making on Family Migration in the Netherlands, 1960-1995
Is ‘public opinion’ systematically opposed to immigration? And has this pushed policymakers to implement restrictive migration policies? To answer these questions, we investigate the impact of public opinion, as expressed in media debates, on the making of family migration policies in the Netherlands. Based on newspaper articles, parliamentary documents and ministerial archives, we analysed three debates on family migration from the 1960s, the 19…
Governing diversity: Dutch political parties' preferences on the role of the state in civic integration policies
This article analyses political debates about civic integration policies in the Netherlands, so as to identify different conceptions of the role of the state in ensuring social cohesion by governing diversity. Drawing on the literature on party systems, it presents an analysis of political party positions on the role of the state in civic integration along two dimensions: economic distribution on the one hand, and sociocultural governance on the …
Doing Family Before the State. Does Recognition of De Facto Families Lead to More Inclusive Migration Law Practices
Critical scholars have long called for state recognition of de facto families, beyond legal or biological ties, as a pathway toward inclusion of more diverse family forms. This article asks to what extent recognition of de facto families indeed leads to more inclusion, in the context of a restrictive immigration regime in which families need state permission to live together. It zooms in on migration law practice in the Netherlands, through an an…
Doing family: Responses to the constructions of ‘the migrant family’ across Europe
This paper draws on how constructions of ‘the migrant family’ in political discourse influence migrants' and their families' lives. In specific national contexts, ‘the migrant family’ is determined according to the national and European debates and expressed by their respective rules and regulations. By ‘doing family’, migrants and their families develop strategies in order to fit these requirements of living a certain family life. Fulfilling spe…
The Power and Morals of Policy Makers: Reassessing the Control Gap Debate
For more than 15 years, there has been a lively debate among migration scholars in Europe and North America about how to explain “why liberal states accept unwanted migration.” This paper assesses existent hypotheses in the “most-likely” case of the making of Dutch family migration policies. This empirical test raises serious doubts as to the validity of the broadly shared assumption that national policy makers have lost the power to regulate mig…
Constructing and Imagining Labour Migration: Perspectives of Control from Five Continents – Edited by E. Guild and S. Mantu
FLWIN
Political Debates on Islamic Headscarves and Civic Integration Abroad in France and the Netherlands: What Can Models Explain
This article evaluates the explanatory capacity of national models of migrant integration, through a comparative analysis of the regulation of Islamic headscarves on the one hand and civic integration abroad policies on the other hand, in both France and the Netherlands. It argues that national models—defined as historically rooted conceptions of nationhood, polity, and belonging—matter because they enable and constrain the framing of policy prob…
A proper wife, a proper marriage: Constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in Dutch family migration policy
Migration policy is a product and producer of identities and values. This article argues that discourses and policies on family reunification participate in the politics of belonging, and that gender and family norms play a crucial role in this production of collective identities, i.e. in defining who ‘we’ are and what distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘the others’. Tracing the development of political debates and policy-making about ‘fraudulent’ and ‘forc…
When Europeanization backfires: The normalization of European migration politics
Governing diversity: Dutch political parties' preferences on the role of the state in civic integration policies
This article analyses political debates about civic integration policies in the Netherlands, so as to identify different conceptions of the role of the state in ensuring social cohesion by governing diversity. Drawing on the literature on party systems, it presents an analysis of political party positions on the role of the state in civic integration along two dimensions: economic distribution on the one hand, and sociocultural governance on the …
Gender, Generations and the Family in International Migration
Albert Kraler, Eleonore Kofman, Martin Kohli and Camille Schmoll (eds), Gender, Generations and the Family in International Migration Amsterdam: IMISCOE/Amsterdam University Press, 2012, 404 pp., €
Public Debate and Policy-making on Family Migration in the Netherlands, 1960-1995
Is ‘public opinion’ systematically opposed to immigration? And has this pushed policymakers to implement restrictive migration policies? To answer these questions, we investigate the impact of public opinion, as expressed in media debates, on the making of family migration policies in the Netherlands. Based on newspaper articles, parliamentary documents and ministerial archives, we analysed three debates on family migration from the 1960s, the 19…
Speaking of Rights: The Influence of Law and Courts on the Making of Family Migration Policies in Germany
The impact of the judiciary on immigration policies has been simultaneously overestimated and underestimated. Migration scholars broadly assume that courts have forced liberal states to admit unwanted migration. Based on an analysis of family migration policy making in the Federal Republic of Germany (1975‐90), I show that the direct policy impact of court rulings was limited, as courts were reticent to impinge upon democratic sovereignty. Howeve…
The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Migration in Europe
The Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Migration in Europe provides a rigorous and critical examination of what is exceptional about the European politics of migration and the study of it. Crucially, this book goes beyond the study of the politics of migration in the handful of Western European countries to showcase a European approach to the study of migration politics, inclusive of tendencies in all geographical parts of Europe (including Ea…
Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Migration in Europe
Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies: An Introduction
The introduction to this special issue traces class at the interface between migration policy and migrant strategies. Scholarship on the politics of migration and citizenship has thus far largely neglected class. In contrast, we contend that discourses on migration, integration and citizenship are inevitably classed. Assessed through seemingly heterogeneous criteria of “merit” and “performance”, class serves as an analytical connector between eco…
Beyond venue shopping and liberal constraint: A new research agenda for EU migration policies and politics
European Union (EU) asylum and immigration politics and policies have witnessed a major change since their communitarization in the early 2000s. Studies on EU migration, however, do not agree on the impact that EU institutions now have on policy outputs and outcomes. While some argue that supranational institutions are able to impose ‘liberal constraints’ on member states, other studies consider them unable to shift the ‘policy core’ of EU migrat…
"The "migrant with poor prospects: Racialized intersections of class and culture in Dutch civic integration debates
The recent trend towards selective immigration policies is based on the racialization of certain categories of migrants into irretrievably unassimilable Others. In Europe, this trend has materialized largely through the application of integration requirements to the immigration of foreigners, the so-called "civic integration turn". Based on an analysis of parliamentary debates about civic integration policies in the Netherlands, this paper asks w…
Epilogue: Shaping the Nation through Civic Integration: A Postcolonial Perspective on Paradoxical Policies
Civic integration policies shape migrants’ pathway to residence and citizenship in Europe and North-America. These policies invite or oblige migrants to learn the customs and language of their new country of residence. Either by inculcating migrants with certain skills and knowledge, or by barring certain migrants from accessing national territory and citizenship, civic integration policies are instruments through which states purport to shape th…
Intimate citizenship: Introduction to the special issue on citizenship, membership and belonging in mixed-status families
This special issue investigates citizenship and belonging in mixed-status families, i.e. families consisting of both citizens and non-citizens. We critique the standard perception of citizenship as ‘hard on the outside and soft on the inside’. For citizens with non-citizen family members, the exclusionary nature of citizenship is very much ‘inside’, in the very heart of their families. We deploy the concept of ‘performing intimate citizenship’ to…
Families First? The Mobilization of Family Norms in Refugee Resettlement
European resettlement programs prioritize the admission of refugee families. While this is seen as the 'natural' thing to do, we argue that the mobilization of family norms is crucially political: in everyday bordering practices, interpretations of family norms are decisive for who is admitted to Europe. We study the selection of Syrian refugees in Turkey for humanitarian admission to Germany, which involves national governments, UNHCR, and NGOs.…
Transnational Marriage and Partner Migration: Constellations of Security, Citizenship, and Rights
This multidisciplinary collection investigates the ways in which marriage and partner migration processes have become the object of state scrutiny, and the site of sustained political interventions in several states around the world. Covering cases as varied as the United States, Canada, Japan, Iran, France, Belgium or the Netherlands, among others, contributors reveal how marriage and partner migration have become battlegrounds for political par…
Micro-practices of nation-building: Race and class in Jennifer Elrick’s Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism
How do race and class intersect in state practices of nation-building? This is one of the key themes in Jennifer Elrick’s book Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada. In this essay, I discuss Elrick’s conceptualization of the relation between race and class, which combines notions of class as a component of race on the one hand, and class as intersecting with race on the other hand. I argu…
Seeking Legitimacy Through Knowledge Production: The Politics of Monitoring and Evaluation of the EU Trust Fund for Africa
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is a form of expert knowledge that is central to migration governance. This article analyses M&E of the EU Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), created in 2015 to ‘fight the root causes of migration’. Combining institutionalist accounts with practice theory, we examine whether M&E knowledge production served the instrumental purpose of assessing policy impact or mainly legitimated particular policy actors and positions. W…
Doing Family Before the State. Does Recognition of De Facto Families Lead to More Inclusive Migration Law Practices
Critical scholars have long called for state recognition of de facto families, beyond legal or biological ties, as a pathway toward inclusion of more diverse family forms. This article asks to what extent recognition of de facto families indeed leads to more inclusion, in the context of a restrictive immigration regime in which families need state permission to live together. It zooms in on migration law practice in the Netherlands, through an an…
Capitalizing on a crisis: The European Union Trust Fund for Africa
How do foreign policies and transnational projects become resistant to critique? This article seeks to better understand the legitimation of policies by studying the work involved in justifying public funding of migration and development initiatives. Government expenditures on migration and development have been increasing in recent years, despite widely shared concerns regarding the merits of such initiatives. In this article, we focus our atten…
Gatekeepers or agents of change? The political agency of lawyers in the Dutch family migration regime
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Economics (7 works)