Mistrust in Migration

In a recent work I draw on extensive ethnographic data to explore mistrust as a foundational element of ontological insecurity in migration.

The proliferating research on trust in ontological security (OS) studies explores how irregular situations of ‘radical disjuncture’ remove the protective cocoon of routinized trust relations that enables the actors to
‘bracket out’ daily threats and dangers. Following this loss of trust, the actors perform a variety of OS-seeking strategies in their attempts to reestablish their lost trust in themselves and their surroundings. But what does it mean to search for trust—the constitutive element of feeling ontologically secure—in the context of protracted conflict, trauma, and forced migration?

In an article published in Political Psychology (2021), I rely on 60 in-depth interviews with Lebanese migrants in Israel to demonstrate how forced migrants engage in various OS-seeking strategies in relentless efforts to reconstitute trust. These strategies range from self-justification and securitizing identity through religious and communal practices, to a search for recognition from statist institutions and boundary-work vis-à-vis “sibling” disempowered “others” in the host state. However, the study shows how under political circumstances of protracted conflict and repeated perceived betrayal by the state, forced migrants are unable to reconstitute the routinized relations of trust on which OS is based.

By exposing the particularistic, dynamic, and highly political character of the migrants' quest for trust, the article sheds new light on the political psychology of an “old” conflict and on the multiple meanings of ontological (in)security in migration.

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