City Research Online

Abstract

This research examines the ways the hostile environment in the UK utilizes domestic violence as a deterrent measure, weaponizing this endemic form of interpersonal violence against migrant women. I argue that the state’s own processes of accountability and responsibility for domestic violence fatalities, and the active exclusion of migrant women from state-provided services that are key in intervening in cases of domestic violence, are sufficient for domestic violence against migrant women to be constituted as state violence. I frame this in the context of what an ontological security approach can offer to our understanding of the multiplicity of encounters and experiences that migrant women have with a state apparatus that is designed to offer both security and accountability to address the particularly gendered insecurity of domestic violence. The active exclusion of migrant women from these monitoring mechanisms embeds both an affective and a very real empirical insecurity in the lives of migrant women. This ontological insecurity is both inside and outside of state, making ontological security for some while unmaking it for others.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article has been accepted for publication in Review of International Studies (RIS) by Cambridge University Press. The version of record will be available online at: www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies
Publisher Keywords:	Ontological security, insecurity, migration, domestic violence, state violence
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Violence and Society Centre
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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