Ricard Zapata-Barrero

University Pompeu Fabra | UPF · Department of Political and Social Sciences

Today, cities are under multiple pressures because they must provide responses to global migration challenges, but have limited governance capacity. This is placing chronic stress on physical infrastructures, basic resources, and urban planning, which most often cities must face alone. There is a rising awareness that doing nothing may increase ins...

This article bridges the fields of urban politics, migration governance and border studies by exploring Barcelona as a case study. It raises a first critical question about what happens to so-called borderlands when "borders" move to other scales, such as cities that are not usually categorized as "border cities". Within this framing debate, this s...

This volume seeks to cover the overall Mediterranean regional dimension on migrations. The basic purpose is to provide a basis for future research synergies by showcasing a plurality of perspectives to and applications of Mediterranean Migrations. This provides a direct opportunity and a reflective invitation to think the Mediterranean as a categor...

This chapter explores how the economic context shapes the Transnational Migrant Entrepreneurship’s (TME) Policies in three different migratory regimes: Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. First, the theoretical background, linking the traditional migration and development debate with a more recent discussion linking migration, transnationalism, and entr...

Quickly reviewing images on “Mediterranean migrations” in Google Analytics (November 2022) and even going through Google Scholar Analytics, we can infer several premises. First, negative aspects by far dominate the public representation and research narrative over the positive ones, ruled by the same rhetoric most governments have constructed: cris...

The issue of working out a viable relationship between accepting and/or living with diversity on the one hand and fostering integration on the other has occupied public debates, political agendas, and social sciences for decades. Our point of departure is that the contemporary European context provides distinct challenges. We need to understand how...

Public space is essential to foster a sense of belonging among immigrants and racialized groups. This is especially true for groups who are still framed as different in relation to an abstract but taken-for-granted notion of we-ness that remains strongly connected to colonial thinking (Mayblin & Turner, 2021), according to which people perceived as...

Tunisia is discovering a new migration pattern, with new arrivals staying rather than transiting, given the agreements between the EU and Tunisia to secure their borders. And this is happening in an extremely unstable environment that oscillates between democracy and autocracy. In this scenario, Tunisian cities are becoming catalysts for migration...

Most of the recent literature in migration and ethnic studies, and particularly the debate on the “local turn”, mention multi-layered pressures that cities must address to develop their governance capacities, but few theorize an approach to better grasp these challenges. As cities move from state loyalty to empowerment, we enter the puzzle of urban...

This brief note deals directly with what is interpreted as John Mollenkorpf’s epistemological, comparative and regional critique to conceptual thinking in migration studies. The paper is devoted to meta-conceptual thinking. From an analytical point of view, there are three main lines of thought that inspired the author to define a geography of conc...

Within the framework of Mediterranean migration studies and as a contribution to the emerging debate on the ‘local turn’, and on multiscalar approaches of region-making from different disciplines, the main objective of this article is to analyse an empirical trend that theoretically reinforces the view that cities can shape new regional domains. Th...

Interculturalism (IC) is presently discussed as a foundational basis for local public policy aimed at managing migration-related diversity within ethno-culturally plural societies, especially at the local level. Despite its increased saliency over the last decade, IC is neither theoretically new nor was it always intended for mere application in st...

Discrimination of immigrants and racialized minorities as the Roma is increasing in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Different policy approaches to diversity management tackle this issue differently, both in terms of recognizing ethnic discrimination as a key obstacle to integration and in terms of defining the ideal forms of conviviality in supe...

The unprecedented demographic transformations due to global human mobility and its multifaceted social, political, and economic consequences in both countries of reception and origin, have motivated an increase of interest in having reliable information and deeper knowledge about migratory patterns and the subsequent accommodation of diversity issu...

The core reflection of this article is to explore the potential of using the Mediterranean as a category of analysis for migration studies, what epistemological and ontological effects this may have and how this could be done. To better capture this focus, I will speak about Med‐Thinking. This Mediterranean scale of analysis invites us to follow me...

Abstract The Mediterranean is paradoxically, rarely considered a category of analysis in most Mediterranean migration research. If it were to be taken as a geographical, regional and geo-political area, it could provide migration studies a particular framework of comparison, a much needed structure for the dispersed research currently being carried...

The question of how to reconcile diversity and integration has occupied public debates, political agendas and social sciences for decades. This WP provides a brief outline of how the project Negotiating Diversity in Expanded European Public Spaces addresses these matters. Our point of departure is that questions pertaining to the governing and reco...

Purpose This article aims to set a roadmap for an ethical programme, which we call “qualitative migration research ethics” (QMRE). It is a scoping review that maps current ethical challenges that migration scholars often face and provide guidance, while acknowledging the fact that many researchers deal with ethical issues on a case-by-case basis....

This article seeks to contribute to the debate on contemporary political theory, a baseline for how to live together within diversity settings, by incorporating interculturalism into the normative theorizing of citizenship. Interculturalism’s nuclear philosophy lies in privileging people-to-people relations, and hence for a micro-identity politics....

In this article, I will defend interculturalism as a main methodology to reboot the same European identity. My focus will combine normative, epistemological and policy-oriented scholarship and documentary analysis. After contextualizing the terms of the debate within the on-going project of Europe, I will follow six main streams. First, as a matter...

As part of the post-multicultural era, transnationalism, super-diversity, cosmopolitanism and solidarity develop a sense of awareness to live in a complex society. This requests us to identify the epistemological barriers preventing us to produce new knowledge, since there is a raising consciousness that these new frameworks cannot be addressed wit...

In the framework of the emerging field of research on transnational migrant entrepreneurship at the crossroads of business and migration studies, the main purpose of this article is to assess the change of the Moroccan policy paradigm concerning their diaspora engagement policy, which has shifted from a guest-workers policy narrative (remittances b...

This rejoinder reacts to the comments I have received of my defence of interculturalism (key-article of this Special Issue). Basically it defends the need to take seriously the distinctiveness between MC and IC, as friends rather than foes. It is also argued that the emergence of IC must be placed in the context of legitimacy crisis of MC and the p...

As the dynamics of migration in Europe have been continuously changing, diverse empirical, theoretical, and methodological challenges have defined the landscape of migration research agenda. This chapter aims to reflect on the current state and overtime development of Qualitative Migration Research in Europe (QMR-E). For this purpose, we have condu...

This chapter proposes a framework for a dialogue between theoretical normative issues and empirical research in migration studies. My point of departure is that political theorists and qualitative researchers are likely to be working in different academic rooms but within the same social science building. Their links, however, have been unexplored....

Migration is not only transforming sending, transit, and receiving countries, but also social scientific studies. The expansions of human mobility, profound demographic transformations, and their diverse social, political and economic consequences have brought unprecedented theoretical and empirical attention to the phenomenon. While migration rese...

What interests me in trying to link the already consolidated transnationalism literature and the most recent interculturalism literature is to identify their overlapping affinities in two ways: first, in the way in which they deal with multiple national identities (or complex diversity) and the value that they agree to regarding the importance of r...

This chapter focuses on interculturalism as an emerging policy paradigm for diversity management. I concentrate my core contribution in arguing that in migration-related diversity management, we are in the process of a policy paradigm change, going from a multicultural to an intercultural policy paradigm, and that mainstreaming is a core driver of...

The main purpose of this article is to formulate a defence of the emerging intercultural policy paradigm for the benefit of those who are still somewhat reluctant to accept its proper place within the current migration-related diversity policy debate. My defence will take two main lines of argumentation: Firstly, I will state that the increasing in...

Intercultural policy and multi-level governance in Barcelona : mainstreaming comprehensive approach The main purpose of this article is to analyse Barcelona’s mainstreaming approach to intercultural policy from the beginning of its immigration process. My key questions are threefold: (a) why was Barcelona attracted by the intercultural approach so...

The focus of this chapter is the role of origin countries in influencing immigrants’ political and civic participation in their host societies. It is our aim to understand how these processes can affect immigrant integration in destination countries. More specifically, our objective is to explore the following questions: first, whether and how emig...

The point of departure of this special issue is that in spite of the existence of a large debate on cultural policies, on the one hand, and on migration-related diversity policies, on the other hand, there are still few studies that deal with the intersection between these two policy fields. All contributions of the special issue bridge this gap by...

After conceptualizing multiculturalism and interculturalism as two main categories of analysis, I propose an interpretive framework to identify the main drivers of change/continuity in mainstream cultural policy when incorporating diversity. I will use Montreal as a case study and I will undertake documentary analysis and in-depth interviews with t...

The aim of this article is to present the findings of an analytical framework we have designed to monitor discriminatory political discourse on immigration. Through the understanding of how some of the most relevant studies in three disciplines (political science, social psychology and linguistics) have framed racism, we try to infer how such racis...

The impetus for this book emerged out of an upsurge of interest in interculturality, both as a concept and as a policy articulated in different ways as the basis for managing diversity and dealing with a broad understanding of the ‘rapprochement of cultures’

The question of the democratic participation of immigrants has been the object of an extensive, theoretical and empirical literature. Nevertheless, we still lack detailed information on those internal dynamics of political parties which shape patterns of participation and representation of immigrants and their descendants, especially in Spain. We f...

This Special Issue seeks to explore the potentialities of strengthening a new field of research within migration and diversity studies: Immigrant incorporation in political parties. The point of departure of all contributions is that there is what we call a “diversity gap” between political parties as public representative organisations and diversi...

This article is a theoretically oriented contribution seeking to review the existing literature directly or indirectly addressing the “diversity gap” in political parties. Within this particular field I identify two main areas to conduct research: participation and representation. The premise is that the particular features of political parties, gi...

This chapter engages with some recent authors who believe that an alternative to multiculturalism must be sought in order to understand and live with diversity. These authors are not anti-diversity but they share the view that multiculturalism is no longer a persuasive intellectual or policy approach. For example, the Council of Europe's White Pape...

This chapter explains how the emergent controversy over multiculturalism/interculturalism resides in the logic of the necessary requirements for managing a society that recognises itself as diverse. The great multicultural debates of the late twentieth century, and even the early twenty-first century, followed a cultural rights-based approach to di...

The main purpose of this article is to analyse Barcelona’s mainstreaming approach to intercultural policy from the beginning of its immigration process. My key questions are threefold: (a) why was Barcelona attracted by the intercultural approach so early in 1997? (b) how can we understand the consolidation of interculturalism? and (c) how can its...

Cities are increasingly recognized as new players in diversity studies, and many of them are showing evidence of an intercultural shift. As an emerging concept and policy, interculturalism is becoming the most pragmatic answer to concrete concerns in cities. Within this framework, this book covers two major concerns: how to conceptualize and how to...

At the crossroads of citizenship, cultural and diversity studies, I enter in the emerging debate on cultural citizenship. Culture is seen as a channel for diversity inclusion, and cultural policy carries the function of enhancing citizenship. My reasoning will follow two steps. First, in overviewing the recent literature, I identify two main driver...

In this second decade of the twenty-first century, interculturalism is emerging as a new policy paradigm to deal with diversity dynamics. It is basically viewed as a set of policies sharing one basic idea: that the interaction among people from different backgrounds matters. Its concerns are to intervene politically and to propose a way to manage t...

Despite the reduced presence of the far-right in Catalonia, anti-immigrant stances and discourses have occupied a central position during political campaigns for local, autonomous, and national elections in 2010–2011. The Catalan case is based on the analysis of three case studies: the local exclusion from the census of undocumented immigrants by t...

In spite of the existence of an extensive debate on cultural policies on the one hand, and on local diversity policies on the other hand, there are still few studies dealing directly with this nexus. This emerging research trend will be discussed in the context of Barcelona and through the analysis of a specific cultural policy field: the planning...

In 1987, the Generalitat1 launched the institutional campaign’ som sis Milions’ (We are six million). It was aimed at expressing the idea that there are no differences between being born in Catalonia or being an immigrant (El Pais, 2009). Today Catalonia has more than 7.5 million inhabitants and most of this increase is due to the arrival of immigr...

This chapter constructs a theoretical framework for approaching both the impact of multilevel governance on immigration policies and the impact of immigration policies on multilevel governance. While the question could be applied to almost all federal regimes, we focus on multinational states. Within the emerging debate connecting multilevel govern...

Immigration has become one of the most contested issues in advanced democracies. Blamed for threatening national cultures and disrupting social cohesion, immigration has also been identified as the only way to mitigate the pending demographic crises of Western states. Yet despite these demographic arguments, there are few issues that have aroused t...

This book explores the politics of immigration in multilevel states from two viewpoints: governance and political parties. Six multilevel countries have been examined in depth: Belgium (Flanders and Wallonia), Spain (Catalonia), Canada (Quebec), the United Kingdom (Scotland), Italy (Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto and Calabria), Germany (Bavaria),...

A utopian political theory (UPT) can emerge from the analysis of borders. The significant increase in human mobility between State-borders constitutes the empirical referent distinguishing our “Utopian Age” from others in the past, as historical examples of UPT have not dealt with either the issue of human mobility or the topic of “Migration withou...

This article is based on the hypothesis that the relationship between politics and borders is being reshaped as a consequence of the movement of people between States. This process of redefining the concept of “border”, present in both the new approaches to managing migration and the public perception of immigration, is closely linked with the imag...

The main goal of the present position paper is to create an interpretative framework for the role of origin countries and societies in influencing the political participation of immigrants. Considering that we are opening a new line of research within the literature on political participation of immigrants and integration, we first consider the mor...

EMILIE examines the migration and integration experiences of nine EU Member States and attempts to respond to the so-called 'crisis of multiculturalism' currently affecting Europe. EMILIE studies the challenges posed by migration-related diversity in three important areas: Education; Discrimination in the workplace; Voting rights and civic particip...

Circular Temporary Labour Migration (CTLM) is being promoted as an innovative and viable way of regulating the flow of labour migrants. Based on a specific empirical case study, we identify an unexpected outcome of CTLM programmes: the emergence of a new empirical migrant category, the circular labour migrant, which is as yet theoretically unnamed...

This article discusses the need for an ethical code for states in international migration management (IMM). IMM is interpreted as an ethical context characterized by moral dilemmas, insofar as it is difficult to irrefutably know if the decision to “allow entry” or “deny entry” of people is good and right. This calls for an applied ethics approach d...

This chapter illustrates a particular case of territorial autonomy for stateless nations and the process of autonomy building in conditions of globalization and population mobility — that of Catalonia within Spain. This is partly a matter of the distribution of competences between Catalonia and Spain, but that is not the only question, since in thi...

Today, Temporary Labour Migration is a fundamental course of action promoted by relevant economic and political agents, such as EC, the GCIM, or the OECD. Based on a specific empirical case study of Temporary and Circular Labour Migration in the Catalonian agrarian sector, which has been distinguished as a particularly successful formula, we identi...