Articles by Corey Robinson
Review of International Studies, 2025
In this article, we analyse how anti-globalist conspiracy theories were mobilised online to deleg... more In this article, we analyse how anti-globalist conspiracy theories were mobilised online to delegitimise national authorities and policies designed to curb the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada. These conspiracy theories attacked the political authority underpinning public health measures and targeted purportedly ‘liberal’ policies and ‘globalist’ actors. Our case study examines the Freedom Convoy, a series of protests against Covid-19 vaccine mandates that began in Canada but inspired global demonstrations. The Freedom Convoy fostered and relied upon anti-globalist conspiracy theories, including the ‘Great Reset’ and ‘Great Replacement’, both of which posit a global conspiracy to erode national sovereignty and impose a ‘liberal’ international order. We investigate far-right social media commentary from 4chan’s Politically Incorrect imageboard /pol/, Infowars, and Rebel News, showing how conspiratorial claims were marshalled in alt-tech spaces. These narratives were used to delegitimise public health measures to combat Covid-19 and the Liberal Trudeau government by linking them to various ‘globalist’ forces. In exploring three mechanisms of delegitimation – externalisation, personification, and Othering – we argue that far-right movements like the Freedom Convoy, motivated by anti-globalist conspiracism, mobilise the international realm by leveraging the legitimacy gap of international organisations and agendas to undermine the political authority of actors at the national level.
Geopolitics, 2024
Using an analytic of problematisation that incorporates insights from governmentality studies and... more Using an analytic of problematisation that incorporates insights from governmentality studies and migration studies, this article documents and conceptualises the role of capacity building in the offshoring and outsourcing of Canada's anti-smuggling policy. I examine the problematisation of migrant smuggling in interviews, access to information requests and publicly available texts to show how, why and with what effects, the Canadian government, in collaboration with UN agencies, engaged in capacity building across Southeast Asia and West Africa to combat migrant smuggling and interdict migrant vessels before they departed for Canada. I argue that under the technocratic banner of capacity building, anti-smuggling policy constitutes migrant smuggling as an object of discourse. Anti-smuggling policy, I contend, frames, rationalises and obscures the interdiction of refugees and the externalisation of protection as politically neutral, technocratic efforts to build capacity to combat migrant smuggling. Though capacity building may include apparently positive measures to enhance international cooperation, if it frustrates access to asylum, as this article suggests, it can be said to externalise international protection responsibilities, contrary to the principles outlined in the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees.
Third World Quarterly, 2022
Offering return assistance and financial inducements to migrants and asylum-seekers, assisted vol... more Offering return assistance and financial inducements to migrants and asylum-seekers, assisted voluntary return and reintegration (AVRR) programmes are critical to the management of migration. While AVRR programmes have emerged as an area of study in their own right, little attention has been paid to the role of these schemes in the transnational politics of anti-smuggling policy. Building on insights from border studies, migration studies and security studies, this article examines the Global Assistance for Irregular Migrants (GAIM) programme. The GAIM programme is an AVRR programme funded by the Canadian government and implemented by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which targeted Sri Lankan nationals stranded following the disruption of smuggling ventures in West Africa. This article examines how the GAIM programme framed, rationalised and obscured the practice of neoliberal deportation as a humanitarian gesture in the interests of migrants themselves. It documents and conceptualises the humanitarian claims, narratives and representations mobilised by Canada and the IOM to explain and justify the return of stranded asylum-seekers. It argues that the GAIM programme can be analysed as a form of humanitarian securitisation, which obscures the politics of anti-smuggling policy, masks the violence of deportation and legitimises the return of stranded asylum-seekers.
Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Migration, edited by Catherine Dauvergne, 2021
The International Organization for Migration: The New ‘UN Migration Agency’ in Critical Perspective, edited by Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud, 2020
In the absence of a global regime on migration, a global dialogue on 'wellgoverned migration' has... more In the absence of a global regime on migration, a global dialogue on 'wellgoverned migration' has emerged over the past two decades. 1 Global policy dialogues have sought to manage institutional fragmentation, address knowledge gaps and generate greater consensus on how to govern or 1 This chapter is a substantially revised version of a previously published article: Corey Robinson, 'Making Migration Knowable and Governable: Benchmarking Practices as Technologies of Global Migration Governance', International Political Sociology 12.4: 418-437. Note: the IOM changed the name of the Migration Governance Index to the Migration Governance Indicators in 2018 (see IOM 2017c, 6). This chapter uses materials produced by the IOM to study the organisation's activities. Utilising the IOM materials to interrogate the organisation poses obvious difficulties for conducting empirical research since these documents are biased towards the IOM's self-interest. For a discussion about the methodological perils of using information produced by intergovernmental organisations in critical research, particularly as this problem pertains to the analysis of benchmarking, see Davis et al. 2012, and Broome and Quirk 2015.
Using the theoretical toolkit of material-semiotics, this article theorizes global migration gove... more Using the theoretical toolkit of material-semiotics, this article theorizes global migration governance as a governing technology that constitutes migration as an object of global governance. Methodologically, the analysis draws on event observation of the International Organization for Migration's International Dialogue on Migration. Empirically, the article uses the illustrative example of the International Organization for Migration's Migration Governance Index to make the case for a material-semiotic account of global migration governance more concrete. Overall, the article seeks to examine and enhance the contribution practice-theoretical approaches make to the analysis of global governance.
This article offers a process-mechanism explanation of securitization. To make the case for a pro... more This article offers a process-mechanism explanation of securitization. To make the case for a process-mechanism account more concrete, I use interpretivist process tracing to explain the crisis episode of the Sun Sea, a Thai cargo ship carrying Sri Lankan asylum-seekers, and the securitization of irregular migration in Canada. Drawing on interviews and grey literature, the article shows how securitization was possible and under what conditions, and argues that ideational dispositions of security organizations induced state officials toward a security interpretation of the the Sun Sea. The article aims to demonstrate that process-mechanism explanations represent a compelling methodological alternative with which to trace and explain securitization. The article sees itself as part of a broader refinement of a sociological variant of securitization theory. It seeks to examine and enhance the contribution that this 'post-Copenhagen' approach – its core assumptions and theoretical framework – makes to the analysis of securitization.
Mapping out the constellation between liberal universalism, cosmopolitanism and International Rel... more Mapping out the constellation between liberal universalism, cosmopolitanism and International Relations (IR) theory, the following works explicitly politicise the ethics of contemporary cosmopolitanism, thereby responding to the criticism that cosmopolitan theory offers little more than a moralisation of politics. In a series of sustained engagements with IR's major theoretical perspectives, the following books explore the ways in which conventional and alternative perspectives explain the origins, prospects and limits of a modern cosmopolitan view of world politics. Through an examination of recent work by Richard Beardsworth, Gideon Baker and John M. Hobson, this review essay highlights an emerging dialogue between cosmopolitanism and IR. In different ways, and with different implications for IR, the following works develop a theoretically rigorous account of and response to three distinct yet interrelated criticisms against modern cos-mopolitanism: the critique of liberal universalism; the charge of impractical idealism; and lastly, the alleged Eurocentric and imperialist legacy of modern cosmopolitanism. Taken as a whole, these books thus pose an interesting challenge, both to mainstream and...
Feminist IR is still often side-lined as a particularistic agenda or limited issue area, appearin... more Feminist IR is still often side-lined as a particularistic agenda or limited issue area, appearing as one of the last chapters of introductory volumes to the field, despite the limitless efforts of people such as Cynthia Enloe (Theory Talk #48) and J. Ann Tickner. She has laboured to point out and provincialize the parochialism that haunts mainstream IR, without, however, herself retreating and disengaging from some of its core concerns. In this Talk, Tickner elaborates-amongst others-on the specifics of a feminist approach to the philosophical underpinnings of IR; discusses how feminism relates to the distinction between mainstream and critical theory; and addresses the challenges of navigating such divides.
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Articles by Corey Robinson