Politikon: The IAPSS Journal of Political Science

This special issue of Politikon brings together a collective of scholars working at the intersection of migration studies, critical theory, and Latin American politics to offer a lexicon of key concepts shaping how we understand human mobility across the region. Guest edited by Mauricio Palma-Gutiérrez, Cécile Blouin, and Lucie Laplace, the issue presents a collection of original contributions, each structured around a single concept examined from multiple disciplinary angles and presented bilingually in English and Spanish.

Rather than offering a definitive glossary, this lexicon is an invitation to think critically about the language we use to govern, categorise, and contest migration. The concepts gathered here range from legal and institutional frameworks to vernacular migrant practices, from colonial genealogies to contemporary border infrastructures. Together, they challenge the reader to question what gets named, what gets obscured, and who gest to define the terms of mobility in the Americas.

The contributions draw on fieldwork conducted across the region — from Ecuadorian border towns to the Andean corridors, from humanitarian camps in Brazil to the Darién Gap — and engage critically with the actors, institutions, and power relations that shape migration governance. Whether tracing how the Cartagena Declaration has become a discursive façade for states' containment and deterrence practices, revealing the colonial logics embedded in regional border regimes, or recovering the embodied knowledge of Venezuelan migrants navigating roads without resources, each entry expands the analytical and political vocabulary available to researchers, practitioners, and readers interested in migration in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The cover illustration, In the Middle, Maybe, is designed by Fernando Garlin Politis. The image presents the Americas in fragments and layers — solid mass and loose, crayon-drawn outlines overlapping and drifting — capturing something of what this lexicon itself sets out to do: to hold the map steady while questioning the lines drawn across it.

The first section of this special issue, published in May 2026, comprises seven original contributions. A second section will be published in September 2026, with five additional pieces and the guest editors' introduction.