MECM90003 Chap.2 Migration, Freedom and Capability
Migration, Freedom and Capability
Week 2 asks why people migrate, how global migration challenges nation states and who decides who counts as a good migrant. Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom supplies the main lens: development is the expansion of real freedoms, and a resource matters only through the functionings and capabilities a person can achieve with it.
The week adds Cohen and Sirkeci's culture of migration, the scale of forced displacement in UNHCR's 2022 report, Seuferling and Leurs on humanitarian technophilia, and Urry's complexity model of global networks and fluids. Its capability vocabulary returns in at least four later weeks, so it repays careful reading early.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Three lenses on why people move: economic gaps, unfreedom and a culture of migration
- 02
Sen's development as freedom: constitutive and instrumental roles of freedom
- 03
Functionings, capability and conversion factors, illustrated by Sen's bicycle
- 04
The five instrumental freedoms and how they reinforce each other
- 05
Forced displacement in the UNHCR Global Trends report for 2022
- 06
Refugee, migrant and expat: categories as sites of power
- 07
Humanitarian technophilia and the history from camps to code
- 08
Urry's global networks and global fluids
Worked example · free
Capability, not commodity: assessing a resettlement bicycle scheme
- 1Treat the bicycle as a commodity: handing it over shows access, not what anyone can now do.
- 1Name conversion factors: physical ability, safe roads, distances to work and school, and social norms about who cycles shape use.
- 1Describe the functioning that matters: moving about the town to reach work, study and services.
- 1Propose the measure: judge the scheme by whether families gained the real freedom to move around town, the capability, not by bicycles delivered.
Key terms
- Development as freedom
- Development as freedom is Sen's view that development is the process of expanding the real freedoms people enjoy.
- Functioning
- A functioning is something a person achieves being or doing, for example being well fed, schooled, able to travel or included in a group.
- Unfreedom
- Unfreedom is Sen's term for conditions such as poverty, tyranny, poor economic opportunity and repression that restrict what people can do.
- Culture of migration
- A culture of migration is a community's common outlook in which leaving home is ordinary and expected.
- Humanitarian technophilia
- Humanitarian technophilia is faith in media tools as an efficient way to sort, manage and contain displaced people.
- Global fluids
- Global fluids are erratic, hard-to-predict streams of people, pictures, data and danger that follow fixed routes less than networks do.
Migration, Freedom and Capability FAQ
Why does the subject use Amartya Sen to study migration?
Sen shifts attention from what people own to what they can actually do and become. That lets you treat a decision to move as a response to unfreedom and a pursuit of a valued life, while also seeing how visas, borders and detention can turn mobility itself into a new restriction on freedom.
What is the difference between a refugee and a migrant?
Refugee is a legal status set by the 1951 Refugee Convention for people with good reason to fear persecution, who are owed protection by other states. Migrant is a broader, contested label that public discourse often frames as voluntary or economic, which shapes who is seen as deserving.
How many people were forcibly displaced in 2022?
UNHCR's Global Trends report counts 108.4 million forcibly displaced people, including 35.3 million refugees and 62.5 million internally displaced people, plus 4.4 million stateless people. The lecture uses these figures to show the strain on asylum systems and the limits of twentieth-century border tools.
What does Urry's complexity model add to explanations of migration?
Urry describes globalisation as interacting global networks, with regular and predictable paths, and global fluids, the irregular flows of people, images, information and risk. Local moorings persist inside both. That makes simple push and pull stories too neat, since movement and its governance arise from unpredictable meetings of flows, institutions and local life.
Assessment move
Learn the capability vocabulary precisely, because it returns in later weeks on ICT, the public sphere, AI and method. Practise by taking any technology or policy from the news and writing the chain from commodity to capability in four short lines, naming at least one conversion factor. Then add a second lens, economic or cultural, so your explanations of migration never rest on a single cause.
Keep the UNHCR figures as evidence of scale, not as the argument itself. The Week 2 tutorial also suggests researching a diaspora case, such as the Greek diaspora in Australia, so try the four-line chain on a group you know.
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