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Global Mobility Regimes: A Conceptual Framework

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Abstract

Advances in transportation and communications technology increase the potential for international migration around the world. As international migration becomes less inhibited by physical or economic constraints and more of a function of legal constraints imposed by states, it becomes an increasingly important issue in politics among states. As such, international migration is an issue area for possible international cooperation within international organizations or through the formation of less formal international regimes, initially defined by John Ruggie as “mutual expectations, rules and regulations, plans, organizational energies and financial commitments, which have been accepted by a group of states.”1 While an international refugee regime based on the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol on the Status of Refugees, as well as the ongoing activities of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is well established,2 there is no international migration regime. If one follows the UN definition of international migration, according to which migrants are those who have lived outside of their country of nationality or birth for more than one year, there is relatively little international cooperation on international migration at the global level.

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... Migration governance represents an important challenge today (Betts, 2011;Ghosh, 2000;Koslowski, 2011;Martin et al., 2006aMartin et al., , 2006bKunz et al., 2011) and even though many countries now recognise that they have an interest in international dialogue and cooperation in the field of migration, there is less clarity in terms of the framework of legal norms and organisational structures. The majority of the formal rules that do exist in relation to migration pre-date World War II like the passport-regimes, treaties on labour rights, and the basis of the refugee policy that emerged from the inter-war years and the subsequent formal multilateralism has merely supplemented or updated these institutions (Betts, 2012). ...
... Global mobility is thus now managed by three distinct policy areas rather than one comprehensive regime: those for refugees, those regarding international travel and the nearly non-existent regime governing labour mobility (Koslowski, 2011). Many authors agree that the refugee regime is the only area of migration governance to approximate a formal treaty-based regime with a specialised organisation, the UNHCR, responsible for its administration. ...
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... To states, regional agreements, policy networks of government bureaucrats, and dialogue platforms that are informal, network-based, and non-binding, often serve as palatable alternatives to formal multilateralism (Martin, 2008;Betts, 2010;Newland, 2010). These layers of global migration governance are unevenly distributed over issue areas; other than the international refugee regime, which is the most formalized of the migration regimes (Betts, 2010;Koslowski, 2011), other areas of migration governance are deemed to have weak or missing regimes. Adopting a liberal approach, scholars have applied a public goods framework to make sense of uneven constellations of global mobility regimes across issue areas (Rai, 2004;Betts, 2008;Hollifield, 2011;Koslowski, 2011;Woods et al., 2013). ...
... These layers of global migration governance are unevenly distributed over issue areas; other than the international refugee regime, which is the most formalized of the migration regimes (Betts, 2010;Koslowski, 2011), other areas of migration governance are deemed to have weak or missing regimes. Adopting a liberal approach, scholars have applied a public goods framework to make sense of uneven constellations of global mobility regimes across issue areas (Rai, 2004;Betts, 2008;Hollifield, 2011;Koslowski, 2011;Woods et al., 2013). For instance, since the benefits of refugee governance are nonexcludable and non-rival, refugee governance approximates a global public good, which explains the institutionalization of the refugee regime as mentioned earlier. ...
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... However, several authors argue that there is no global migration regime (Betts,2010;Hollifield, 1992;Koslowski, 2011) ...
... Countries must cooperate because it is difficult to overcome difficulties such as clandestine immigration or smuggling without international cooperation (Koslowski, 2011). Ronen Shamir therefore argues about "the emergence of a global mobility system, oriented towards closure and blockade " (2005: 199). ...
... The jury is out. The 'doubters' say that there is no global migration regime (Betts, 2010;Hollifield, 1992;Koslowski, 2011). Other work points in the opposite direction: discovering traces of a powerful 'sedentarization' regime that shapes how various actors control migration (). ...
... The jury is out. The 'doubters' say that there is no global migration regime (Betts, 2010;Hollifield, 1992;Koslowski, 2011). Other work points in the opposite direction: discovering traces of a powerful 'sedentarization' regime that shapes how various actors control migration (Bakewell, 2008;Hindess, 2000, Hyndman & Giles, 2011Shamir, 2005, Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013Salter, 2004;Walters, 2002). ...
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... Betts (2011) writes that with the notable exception of the refugee regime, there is no formal or comprehensive multilateral regime regulating how states can and should respond to the movement of people across national borders, and no overarching UN organization monitoring states' compliance with norms and rules. Rey Koslowski (2011), on the other hand, writes that global mobility is managed by three distinct sub-regimes rather than one comprehensive regime: those for refugees, those regarding international travel and the nearly non-existent regime governing labor mobility. ...
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... Their initiatives to encourage multilateral conversation on international migration were pursued along a number of strands, most notably the state-led consultations of the Berne Initiative, for which IOM served as secretariat, as well as the Global Commission on International Migration, which convened nineteen members from source, transit and destination countries and whose final report sought to generate consensus around a common groundwork for "comprehensive, coherent and effective migration policies" (GCIM, 2005). In the context of these consensus-building exercises, researchers and philanthropic foundations were drawn into the project as participants and supporters (Cholewinski et al., 2007;Betts, 2011b;Koslowski, 2011). Moreover, international organizations were likewise drawn into the project, both as an element in states' strategies and by acting entrepreneurially to channel their field of expertise toward migration (Geiger and Pécoud, 2014). ...
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This article explores migration governance training programs as a point of entry into the contemporary politics of migration and development. Leveraging a comparative ethnographic lens, it examines the curricular content offered in three different such capacity building settings. Its analysis also considers how this content is received and contextualized by program participants. The study finds migration governance assumed distinct forms, with differing priorities, across the training programs offered by international organisations. In addition, it shows how the participants’ prior experiences and their positionality within the professional field of those working on international migration contribute to shaping how they make sense of program content. By revealing how the meaning of migration governance shifts across the settings in which such knowledge is practically communicated and received, these findings open space for a more explicitly political approach to this domain of international law making.
... Migration and mobility may be conceived as political categories that reproduce and legitimise hierarchies of movement as part of broader governance regimes (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013;Koslowski, 2011). In such a reading, migration and mobility are alternatives, with one being placed above the other -generally, mobility is placed above migration. ...
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Categorising certain forms of human movement as ‘migration’ and others as ‘mobility’ has far-reaching consequences. We introduce the migration–mobility nexus as a framework for other researchers to interrogate the relationship between these two categories of human movement and explain how they shape different social representations. Our framework articulates four ideal-typical interplays between categories of migration and categories of mobility: continuum (fluid mobilities transform into more stable forms of migration and vice versa), enablement (migration requires mobility, and mobility can trigger migration), hierarchy (migration and mobility are political categories that legitimise hierarchies of movement) and opposition (migration and mobility are pitted against each other). These interplays reveal the normative underpinnings of different categories, which we argue are too often implicit and unacknowledged.
... En su análisis sobre los procesos de deslocalización, Urry (2014, p. 20) ya señaló que "el capitalismo tiene mucho que ver con el movimiento", pues "las sociedades capitalistas conllevan una incesante aceleración de la vida económica, social y política". Pero esa tendencia estructural se ha visto intensificada en las últimas décadas al aumentar la densidad de los flujos, las distancias recorridas y las velocidades, lo que ha permitido afirmar que vivimos en un régimen de movilidad global (Koslowski, 2011). ...
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Los Expedientes de Regulación Temporal de Empleo (ERTEs) se han convertido en un instrumento clave del ajuste laboral en España asociado a la crisis pandémica. El objetivo es valorar su impacto sobre el mercado de trabajo, estudiando su importancia según actividades y territorios, aspectos apenas trabajados en la literatura existente. Para ello, se analiza la información del Ministerio de Inclusión, Seguridad Social y Migraciones y se calculan tasas de cobertura sectoriales y provinciales. Los resultados confirman que los ERTEs han permitido amortiguar el impacto de esta crisis, a diferencia de lo ocurrido en la crisis financiera de 2008, en donde la aplicación de políticas neoliberales de austeridad provocó un elevado coste social. De este modo, allí donde se ha alcanzado un mayor nivel de cobertura, se observa el comportamiento “reactivo” de muchas provincias turísticas del litoral mediterráneo, además de Madrid y Barcelona. Estas provincias se vieron más afectadas al estallar la pandemia, pero también han logrado una rápida recuperación. Esto contrasta con el comportamiento más “vulnerable” de provincias industriales del norte del país, afectadas por la reducción de la demanda o por los problemas en las cadenas globales de producción, y donde el grado de cobertura de este instrumento ha sido menor.
... The right of countries to decide over the entry and admission of people, and of the rights of these people to obtain nationality and employment, has been considered a 'last bastion of state sovereignty' (Dauvergne 2009: 169) in the context of globalization. Others have pointed out the problem that international migration has been divided into various regimes and their corresponding specialized formal and informal organizations (Betts 2011;Ghosh 2000;Koslowski 2011;Trachtman 2009;Triandafyllidou 2018), thereby limiting the emergence of a more general and collective approach to problems linked to global migration. This has led to the emergence of a wide array of specialized, local, and ad hoc arrangements and agreements. ...
... Холліфілд, вказуючи на те, що широкий підхід до подачі феномену спричинює звуження сфери смислового навантаження для явища, що вивчається [9, с. 2]. Наприклад, у межах економічної науки вживають дефініцію "потоки людей" і де вони відбуваються [48], а в інших -політоло гії, соціології, демографії і географії -застосовують більш загальне висловлювання, як "мобільність" [35]. При цьому очевидно, що цей момент доволі двоякий, бо частково стає теоретичним бар'єром (навіть упередженням) до побудови такого симбіотичного поля, яке акумулювало б ключові соціогуманітарні концепти при визначенні міграції, але водночас він яскраво демонструє, як можна фокусувати увагу на конкретних аспектах, будучи в межах матриці. ...
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The article examines the problem of complexity within the framework of migration theory and consequences of interdisciplinary interaction between different humanities from a conceptual level. The relevance of the issue lies in the fact that the very concept of „general theory of migration” is a connotative matrix that combines and structures additional semantic loads in the process of collision of different areas of research, and, consequently, problematizes the dimension of analysis, taking into account certain variations that a scholar chooses as the focus of his attention. During the search for such „points of contact”, it was possible to identify convergent „bridges” of relevant interaction to define a coherent theoretical framework for the study of the phenomenon. As a result, the purpose of the article is to demonstrate how the views of researchers from eight areas of analysis of the migration topic have evolved on the way to the current established approach – interdisciplinary, which has become the basis for the identification of a „general theory” in scientific discourse. Particular attention is paid to the aspect of differences in the objects of study over the last decades, which contributed to the construction of a relatively unified scheme based on four criteria of analysis, in particular „research question”, „level of analysis”, „dominant theory” and „hypothesis model”. The article examines the essence of the conceptual difference in the definition of „migration” among scientists of various fields of knowledge, which, according to the author, has become a factor of interdisciplinary rapprochement and interaction. In order to achieve the goal of the research, tools such as historiographical (literature review method) and eclectic, that accumulated positivist and interpretive approaches, were used by the author. The key conclusion was the case of the current state of interdisciplinary cooperation between scientists regarding migration as a topic from eight humanitarian fields of knowledge. It is argued that the formation and conventional acceptance of the „general theory of migration” has already taken place among scholars, but at the same time has opened up new perspectives for migration studies that have been less popular or not studied at all. The actual directions of interdisciplinary research, in the opinion of the author, are determined. It is emphasized that the optimal form of implementation of the latter is international comparative projects. Attention is paid to ways of solving practical migration problems. It is indicated that politicians also implement this matrix in order to understand various problems better and in more detail, which is especially necessary and important from a practical point of view against the background of the escalation of events in 2022, when a large-scale Russian-Ukrainian war began.
... This subsection investigates the interrelation between Objectives 23 and 11 of the GCM, as steered by the GCM's principles pertaining to the intergovernmental realm; i.e., national sovereignty and migration governance. It does so in order to assess how this interrelation may shape international cooperation in the field of migration and asylum; that is, either by consolidating existing trends of global migration governance "without migrants" (Rother 2013b; on the notion of "migration governance", see also Betts 2011;Koslowski 2011) or envisaging innovative models of cooperation in line with the claim for good governance 9 . ...
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The quest for safe, orderly and regular migration underpins the UN Global Compact for Migration (GCM) and translates into “comprehensive and integrated” responses to large movements of refugees and migrants. The effort to de-compartmentalise the governance of cross-border human mobility through “comprehensiveness” shapes the overall search for greater policy coherence via regime interaction and shared responsibility within the GCM. A similar effort has been made at the EU level to overcome the “silos approach” characterising the distinct policies on migration, asylum, and border management. This parallelism is particularly meaningful as the reason is twofold: at the operational level, because of the role played by the EU in fashioning the cooperation models underpinning the GCM, which enhances the relevance of EU law and practice for the implementation of the GCM; at the normative level, because the GCM draws on four guiding principles—i.e., sovereignty, good governance, human-centricity, and the rule of law—which are also key features of the EU legal system. Departing from these premises, this article reveals the meaning of “comprehensive and integrated” responses to large movements of refugees and migrants in the GCM and EU border policies. It does so in order to provide a critical appraisal of the legal and policy implications of comprehensive approaches in the global and European governance of cross-border human mobility.
... Among those actors has emerged a form of inter-organisational alliance and cooperation, which this paper terms a 'voice institution'. Recently, academic interest in migration regimes has been mounting, and this paper attempts to engage with existing pieces of literature by focusing on voice institutions (Betts 2011a;Koslowski 2011;Tamas and Palme 2006). Furthermore, in examining the various motives and strategies of the participating actors, this paper argues that the structures of voice institutions are determined through accommodation and negotiation between them. ...
... Edward W. SOJA, Seeking Spatial Justice, University of Minnesota Press, 2010.NOTES 1. For a discussion of the influence of Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space (Blackwell, 1991) on mobilities theory, see Sheller, 2017; and for the origins of the concept of "spatial justice" see Soja, 2010; Lévy, Fauchille and Póvoas, 2018 ; and Pirie, 1983.2.On the concept of mobility regimes see, e.g.,Shamir, 2005;Koslowski, 2011;Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013. 3. The concept of mobility capital builds on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of various kinds of "social capital" yet focuses specifically on access to mobility and accumulation of motility as a form of capital, also closely related to class distinction. ...
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The collapse of travel demand due to the coronavirus pandemic-related closure of borders has severely disrupted tourism around the world at a time of already existing concerns over climate change, over-tourism, pollution, and the general sustainability of existing modes of tourism. In these circumstances, this article addresses how we might begin to imagine tourism’s ethical futures. This is a compelling moment to find new approaches to reduce the over-dependence on tourism, to mitigate the heavy carbon-footprint of tourism, as well as to repair the harmful effects of “over tourism”. Yet the viral mobilities of Covid-19 have also unleashed a vast intensification of existing uneven relations of (im)mobilities. This article argues that sustainable tourism must be integrally linked to projects of mobility justice that help support the rebuilding of resilient regional ecologies and regenerative economies rather than extractive economies and predatory tourism.
... Moreover, I argue that the car also operates in broader and more unequal regimes of mobility that control not only the car but the mobility of people, capital, knowledge, resources, and things. Regimes of mobility are uneven social, economic, and political power structures that shape the mobility and stasis of individuals (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013) and are composed of norms, policies, regulations, and forms of infrastructure that govern movement (Jensen, 2013;Kesselring, 2014;Koslowski, 2011). ...
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This article unpacks informal practices related to modernity’s quintessential mobility machine: the car. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among low-wage Romanian immigrants in Spain who maintain transnational connections with their regions of origin in Romania, this paper addresses the role of the automobile system and of informal practices in migrants’ daily work and life mobilities. I contend that informal automobilities are a set of livelihood strategies and infrapolitical activities that use cars to confront the constraints of geographical and social mobility regimes. The result is a heavily controlled car system that also provides the flexibility to move informally between formal rules in order to make a living. The transnational approach allows us to go beyond earlier accounts of informality that focus on the local and/or national scale by treating the car as a translocal object embedded socially and economically in transnational relationships. These conclusions contribute to increasing our knowledge of post-structural informality and mobility, but they are also relevant to understanding how a future carless or post-car world would impact on the populations that need, or exploit, the automobile system to survive and would oppose unequal mobility regimes.
... The regimes of mobility dealt with here are approached from both functionalist and discursive perspectives (Baker, 2016). On the one hand, the functionalist approach looks at the norms, policies, regulations, and infrastructure that govern movement and mobile subjects (Jensen, 2013;Kesselring, 2014;Koslowski, 2011). On the other hand, the discursive approach seeks to understand how power structures shape the mobility and stasis of individuals through categories such as race or class (Glick Schiller, 2018;Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013). ...
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People around the globe rely on informal practices to resist, survive, care and relate to each other beyond the control and coercive presence of institutions and states. In the EU, regimes of mobility at multiple scales affect various people on the move who are pushed into informality in order to acquire social mobility while having to combat border regimes, racialisation, inequalities, and state bureaucracies. This text explores how mobilities and informality are entangled with one another when it comes to responding to the social, political, and economic inequalities that are produced by border and mobility regimes. Within this frame, the ethnographic articles in this special issue go beyond national borders to connect the production of mobility and informality at multiple interconnected scales, from refugees adapting to settlement bureaucracies locally to transit migrants coping with the selective external borders of the EU, or from transnational entrepreneurs' ability to move between formal and informal norms to the multiple ways in which transnational mobility informally confronts economic, social and political constraints. In sum, this volume brings together articles on informality and mobility that take account of the elusive practices that deal with the inequalities of mobility and immobility.
... In this way, the states grant more extensive rights with one hand, while blocking off access with the other. This political oxymoron is reminiscent of the number versus rights dilemma identified regarding economic migration: countries who grant fewer rights to immigrant workers often do admit more of them and vice versa (Koslowski 2011;Martin 2011;Ruhs 2013). Our analysis suggests that the trade-off also plays a role in asylum policy: the granting of increased rights by courts drives states to restrict entry by blocking access. ...
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This article analyses the recent growth in asylum applications both in and at the borders of Europe. It enriches the scholarship on the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ with an emphasis on structural transformations and geographical processes. While an increase in regional violence near Europe in 2015 played a key role in triggering displacements, we suggest three longer-term factors that may have facilitated access to European borders but led to urgent and often dangerous migratory situations for asylum seekers: the ‘shortening’ of distances, the crisis of containment policies and the geographic asymmetry of rights. On this basis, we interpret the EU policy of closing borders as an attempt to (re)create a geographic buffer separating refugees from their destinations in the context of the globalization of asylum-related issues.
... Future research could apply the prediction of structural contingency theory (Burns & Stalker, 1961), for example, to test whether and when skunk works teams likely achieve better "structural fit" with uncertain environments than do traditional mechanistic structures. Global and national events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2017 U.S. travel ban generate a high level of uncertainty for international migration and bear significant implications for labor demand-supply relationship in certain regions (Rey Koslowski, 2011). More skunk works may be adopted in organizations forced to address HR challenges generated by these events, and this may further vary as a function of other aspects of the country context. ...
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Increasingly, organizations find that they need to be more flexible and innovative in responding to unexpected and emergent human resource (HR) issues affecting their members, such as outbreaks of infectious diseases (e.g., COVID-19) forcing massive transition to remote work, changes in industry landscape altering learning and development, and politically-driven global mobility regulations restricting people flow. Organizations have long utilized informal structures known as “skunk works”, flexible groups empowered to work rapidly with minimal management constraints, to address technological challenges. In this article, we aim to better understand when and how organizations similarly employ skunk works-like structures to help them deal with rapidly evolving HR-related challenges. We discuss three examples of organizations that have utilized this approach. We then integrate the learning insights from these examples to develop a framework supported by a set of research questions to guide future scholarship into HR skunk works. We emphasize that there are both benefits and drawbacks of innovative organizational structures for addressing HR challenges alongside regular, established ways of working.
... Indeed, accelerated globalization brought an effect that helped the formation of mobility regimes and produced social inequalities across and beyond national borders. Among many global mobility regimes, labor migration, only next to international travel, might have had the largest number of people getting involved (Koslowski, 2011). Obviously, the dynamics between global mobility and state regulations turned labor migration into a global issue, which in turn caused challenges to nation-states in many ways. ...
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Purpose This paper is mainly focused on labor migration from Southeast Asia to Taiwan, showing a route of south–south mobility and discussing the causes of migrant workers in Taiwan, the issues faced by migrant workers as well as public response to migrant workers. Design/methodology/approach Besides a literate review on the topic of migrant worker researches in Taiwan, the data for this research was also based on qualitative interviews and observations conducted both in the fieldwork in Taiwan and in Indonesia between June and August during the summer of 2018. Findings The transnational mobility let many migrants from Southeast Asian countries to Taiwan end up losing their cultural capital and “make money” instead. For these migrants, they have experienced a downward social mobility of class through transnational mobility. Research limitations/implications Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. More migrant laborers from various origin countries were encouraged to include for further research. Practical implications Labor migration cases from Southeast Asia to Taiwan could very well serve as good examples in the carrying out of a reflection on the limit of focusing on social science only inside nation-states in order to push a forward thinking on the transnationalization of social inequality. Originality/value This paper calls attention to the close linkage between transnational mobility and social inequality. It showed how the transnationalization of social inequality could get new faces through the new waves of labor migration.
... Some of the best attempts include a recourse to the notion of a Foucauldian 'dispositif' in speaking of the 'international police of aliens' (Walters, 2002) or a 'migration apparatus' (Feldman, 2012). Other attempts have focused on the formation of 'regimes' of deportation (De Genova and Peutz, 2010), of global mobility (Koslowski, 2011) and of detention (Pickering and Weber, 2014). In a similar vein, stressing even more the racialised and racialising components of this universal Form, some scholars chose to speak of 'global apartheid' (Besteman, 2019;Nevins, 2008;van Houtum, 2010). ...
... Some of the best attempts include a recourse to the notion of a Foucauldian 'dispositif' in speaking of the 'international police of aliens' (Walters, 2002) or a 'migration apparatus' (Feldman, 2012). Other attempts have focused on the formation of 'regimes' of deportation (De Genova and Peutz, 2010), of global mobility (Koslowski, 2011) and of detention (Pickering and Weber, 2014). In a similar vein, stressing even more the racialised and racialising components of this universal Form, some scholars chose to speak of 'global apartheid' (Besteman, 2019;Nevins, 2008;van Houtum, 2010). ...
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Focusing on the particularities of migration management and bordering in Portugal, contributions to this Special Issue inevitably raise our awareness about a more universal form that increasingly structures the management of mobility in states across Europe and beyond. This universal form that dominates migration management is colonial in its constitution, global in its reach, technologically advanced in its control, dehumanising in its implementation, and oppressive in its essence. Inspired by articles in this Special Issue, this afterword suggests that a key for studying critically the spread of the universal form in its particular instantiation is a reorientation of the ethnographic gaze towards moral subjectivities of bureaucrats and policymakers in institutions that implement oppressive migration policies. We must attempt to trace, analyse and understand how state actors justify servicing a blatant new form of an Arendtian 'banality of evil' that leads to the dehumanisation and exclusion of illegalised migrants and refugees.
... In this respect, geographers are already helping to shift the IR debates. Mainstream IR scholars have been largely inattentive to the governance of violent exclusion at the global scale because there has been no treaty or policy which explicitly states this goal (Betts, 2010;Hollifield, 1992;Koslowski, 2011). Geographers have formed a major part of an inter-disciplinary conversation, which has filled this gap, discussing the emergence of a "global mobility regime" (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013;Shamir, 2005). ...
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Territorial exclusion is a multi-scalar phenomenon. However, research has tended to focus on exclusion at separate scales. This paper develops a conversation between research on the territorial exclusion of international migrants at the national scale and the territorial exclusion of lower- and working-class residents at the urban scale. Both strands of research have encountered a common empirical puzzle: territorially exclusive practices rarely comport with official government policies. The paper argues that these apparent “policy gaps”—and efforts to overcome them—can be more fruitfully studied as outcomes of the scalar structuration of legitimate violence, which shapes the way that policy-makers seek to achieve exclusionary goals. The paper suggests that this approach may be used as the platform for richer inter-disciplinary conversations between Human Geography and International Relations (IR) about territorial exclusion and the historical scaling and rescaling of legitimate violence over time.
... Flows of goods, services and finance reached $26 trillion in 2012, representing 36 per cent of global GDP (Manyika et al., 2014). People move also: billions of international border crossings take place every year in business and leisure travel; similarly, students, migrants, and asylum seekers move (Koslowski, 2011). The volume of tourism has increased perpetually. ...
... Yeung (1998, p.304 (Manyika et al., 2014). People move also: billions of international border-crossings take place every year in business and leisure travel; similarly, students, migrants, and asylum seekers move (Koslowski, 2011). ...
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The 1990s witnessed a major renaissance in border studies and also the rise of the borderless world thesis. The social and technological circumstances behind these phenomenona are well-known: the collapse of the geopolitical West-East divide, the development of the internet, the rise of flows and mobility, and the acceleration of globalization. This chapter will trace critically the rise of borderless world -thesis and the emerging new border studies that mostly opposed this thesis. This chapter traces at first the peculiar life-cycle of the notion of borderless world that has become ever more significant by ‘swimming against the tide’ in social science literature, hence providing an object of critique for border scholars in its apparently naïve cosmopolitanism. The chapter then compares this notion with the emerging ideas to the concepts of open borders and no borders and related activism. This analysis opens some novel horizons to reflect the links between borders and mobilities, and more widely to problematize the role of bounded spaces in the social scientific thinking and social practice.
... On the difficulties of publicly provided social protection for EU citizens migrating within the EU, see Carmel, Sojka, and Papiez 2016. 2. If we take a wide definition of migration, we could also speak of an implicit regime governing the mobility of tourists(Koslowski 2011). 3. http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ (accessed 25 February 2018).Social Rights and Social Standards in Migration ...
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This chapter looks at a crucial aspect of the transnational social question: how efforts to provide social protection for cross-border migrants affect social inequalities. While the ‘old’ social question of the conflict between workers and capitalists was addressed within the frames of national welfare states and social policies from the late nineteenth century onwards, the ‘new’ social question - running along diverse lines of inequalities such as gender, class, ethnicity and religion - has implications far beyond national borders since flows of persons, goods, capital and services are transnational. Migrations are of particular relevance for understanding the transnational social question because they link disparate and fragmented worlds of unequal life chances and social protection. Of particular interest is how cross-border social protection involving migrants serves to reinforce existing inequalities, e.g. between regions or within households, and creates new lines of inequalities. This state of affairs requires a rethinking of national social citizenship and its significance for the legitimation of social inequalities. There is no easy escape to global social policy, as we are dealing with complex local, national and cross-border assemblages of social protection and political struggles around it.
... Shamir stresses that the paradigm of suspicion constitutes the mobility regime both within and across borders, manifesting modalities of power through various disciplinary measures. Scholars who share Shamir's concerns develop this notion further (Koslowski, 2011; Salter, 2006; Turner, 2007) by pointing out that there are different intersecting regimes of mobility that ''normalize the movements of some travellers while criminalizing and entrapping the ventures of others'' (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013: 189). Kloppenburg (2013), for example, discusses air travel between the Netherlands and the Caribbean and argues that high levels of mobility go together with intensive regulatory practices. ...
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Using Singapore’s newly opened mega casino resorts as an example, this article illustrates how the expanding casino economy in Asia shapes, and is shaped by, an emerging mobility regime that works through the politics of exception. The coupling of mobility and exception creates a particular governing technology of tracking credibility through which mobile subjects and citizen subjects become manageable. Credibility demands that individuals must demonstrate their own rationality and capability in the exceptional space of global circulation. Exception is harnessed when logics of economic optimization and ethicalization are maintained to legitimize different processes of channeling, sorting, and bordering. They create new articulations of mobile identities and exclusion.
... In other words, we are interested in the internal constitution and modular components of migration rather than in a bounded system. This also distinguishes migration infrastructure from the emerging concept of "mobility regime" that focuses on how mobility is structured by, and in turn becomes part of, hegemonic power relations (Koslowski, 2011;Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013). ...
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Based on the authors’ long-term field research on low-skilled labor migration from China and Indonesia, this article establishes that more than ever labor migration is intensively mediated. Migration infrastructure - the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility - serves as a concept to unpack the process of mediation. Migration can be more clearly conceptualized through a focus on infrastructure rather than on state policies, the labor market, or migrant social networks alone. The article also points to a trend of “infrastructural involution,” in which the interplay between different dimensions of migration infrastructure make it self-perpetuating and self-serving, and impedes rather than enhances people's migratory capability. This explains why labor migration has become both more accessible and more cumbersome in many parts of Asia since the late 1990s. The notion of migration infrastructure calls for research that is less fixated on migration as behavior or migrants as the primary subject, and more concerned with broader societal transformations.
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In this chapter, we analyse Uganda’s biosocial apparatus of security that was deployed to govern (im)mobility during the peak of the first phase of Covid-19. We demonstrate how partisan politics, contentious state visibility, structural graft and mistrust were constitutive elements of political instrumentalization of the pandemic. This chapter explains how pandemic related (im)mobility regime in Uganda evolved, developed, and was maintained, and talks about the social technologies that facilitated it and the types of social imaginings that sustained it. State’s regulatory and surveillance administration that (was) re-/shaped (by) the responses to the pandemic revealed an (im)mobility regime characterized by politics of closure, containment and entrapment. Observably, these institutional biopolitical interventions established new borders and re-enacted old ones, thereby reconfirming power inequalities and underlining the socially differentiated ability to move and to access opportunities for movement as a major stratifying force within a tense state-society relationship.
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This chapter introduces the thematic volume Governing Migration for Development from the Global Souths: Challenges and Opportunities. It presents the aims and scope of the Volume, and a discussion on contributions to migration studies from the global Souths, in particular analysing positive and negative aspects of the multilevel governance of migration. It also provides an overview of a broad conceptualisation of sustainable development through five dimensions—people, planet, profit, peace and partnerships—before highlighting the main contributions of the individual chapters. Finally, we conclude by underlining the insights brought by a multiplicity of perspectives from the global Souths to an analysis of the complex configuration of migration governance.
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In che modo e misura i cittadini europei fanno esperienza diretta di altre società europee? La dimensione transnazionale trova spazio nel loro vissuto? O la caratterizzazione locale e nazionale continua a dominare l'organizzazione della loro vita quotidiana? In questo articolo si esaminano tutte quelle attività individuali che proiettano oltre i confini del proprio Stato-nazione e si identificano configurazioni tipiche di pratiche di mobilità. In regime di libera circolazione, infatti, i cittadini europei possono muoversi senza restrizioni in Europa. È però vero che spesso del loro transito non restano molte tracce, così come le loro attività transnazionali risultano sostanzialmente invisibili per le statistiche nazionali, sia nel Paese d'origine, che in quello di destinazione, se non nel caso di vera e propria migrazione (per un quadro complessivo, Recchi 2013). L'articolo si avvale di una combinazione di dati quantitativi e qualitativi frutto di un lavoro di ricerca sul campo condotto in sei Paesi (Italia, Germania, Spagna, Danimarca, Regno Unito e Romania) per pervenire a una tipologia induttiva la cui descrizio-ne viene arricchita da interviste in profondità che esemplificano esperienze e significati associati a ciascuna configurazione. L'analisi prende le mosse dalla mappatura di una pluralità di forme di mobilità-immobilità che sono poste in relazione con variabili indi-viduali di carattere ascrittivo (sesso, età, nazionalità) e acquisitivo RASSEGNA ITALIANA DI SOCIOLOGIA / a. LVIII, n.
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Le terme de régime de mobilité est devenu important pour l’étude des régulations différentielles des mobilités et permet de répondre au problème de l’étude des relations inégales de pouvoir qui structurent les mobilités, avec des formes de mobilité encouragées, soutenues ou licites par rapport à d’autres interdits, régulés, empêchés, criminalisés. L’article vise d’abord à placer le droit comme un chaînon manquant de la géographie théorique. La notion de « géograpicité du droit » est proposée pour mettre cette dimension au centre de la géographie. Ensuite, la régulation des mobilités est analysée à travers la notion de régime de mobilité, qui est développée en focalisant sur l’articulation régulatoire de multiples échelles et domaines. Enfin, l’exemple de la loi sur la mobilité de 2018 à Berlin est développé pour montrer comment la loi opère un mobility turn qui modifie radicalement la politics des mobilités et permet de nouvelles normes d’habiter.
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On 24 January 2017, U.S. president Trump addressed employees at the American Department of Homeland Security. In his speech, he announced that his administration was going to put into action his promise regarding building the wall along the country’s southern border with Mexico. The U.S. president said, “The Secretary of Homeland Security, working with myself and my staff, will begin immediate construction of a border wall. So badly you needed – you folks know how badly needed it is as a help – but very badly needed. This will also help Mexico by deterring illegal immigration from Central America and by disrupting violent cartel networks. As I have said repeatedly to the country, we are going to get the bad ones out – the criminals and the drug dealers and gang members and cartel leaders. The day is over when they can stay in our country and wreak havoc”. The border wall announced by the U.S. president is merely one step in his anti-migration policy. In addition, in his first month in office, the U.S president ordered the extension of the controls by which undocumented migrants might be apprehended more effectively, the enhancement of deportations, and the implementation of a travel ban on citizens of mainly Muslim countries.
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Our understanding of contemporary international relations rests on flawed images of the past. One of the most problematic dimensions of this history is the idea that the core institutions and practices of modern territorial sovereignty originated in Europe before being gradually extended to other parts of the globe. A key dimension of this Euro-centric historiography is the story that the territorial sovereignty norm was invented in Europe in the seventeenth century, before Europeans honed it into a standard technique of state practice in the twentieth. This paper uses original archival research to critically interrogate the consensus position. The paper demonstrates that the dominant narrative significantly misconstrues the way rulers and governments sought to control migration across the longue durée. European rulers were more collectively seeking to transnationally promote migration at the same time as they individually acquired territorial sovereign control over it. Extra-European states were the first to deploy territorial immigration controls, and non-Europeans shaped the forms of mobility promotion Europeans would adopt. The paper uses these findings to make the case for a new chronology of European migration governance and for a critical institutionalist approach to the way we write the history of the global migration regime.
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This paper explores how the United Nations (UN) system promotes mobilities for some employees while limiting the physical and social mobility of others. To this purpose, we take an ethnographic and comparative approach between four UN duty stations: the UN main offices in Geneva (Switzerland) and Vienna (Austria); and the UN field offices in Goma (DR Congo) and Gaziantep (Turkey). UN workers’ capital in the Bourdieusian sense has different importance in dealing with regimes of mobility in each place of assignment. Drawing on the regimes of mobility approach we focus on how workers pursue a career in the UN, including a large number of professionals, consultants, interns, and volunteers, internationally and locally contracted, who work in the field of development and humanitarian aid. We argue that while promoting a frame of cooperation for global mobility based on human rights, the UN (re)creates mobility regimes for its employees and is thus involved in the reproduction of the inequalities it aims to reduce. By unravelling the power relationships within the United Nations mobility regimes, this article makes an essential contribution in our understanding of uneven mobilities within multilateral organizations.
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This book is a comprehensive study of cooperation among the advanced capitalist countries. Can cooperation persist without the dominance of a single power, such as the United States after World War II? To answer this pressing question, Robert Keohane analyzes the institutions, or "international regimes," through which cooperation has taken place in the world political economy and describes the evolution of these regimes as American hegemony has eroded. Refuting the idea that the decline of hegemony makes cooperation impossible, he views international regimes not as weak substitutes for world government but as devices for facilitating decentralized cooperation among egoistic actors. In the preface the author addresses the issue of cooperation after the end of the Soviet empire and with the renewed dominance of the United States, in security matters, as well as recent scholarship on cooperation.
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War and Change in World Politics introduces the reader to an important new theory of international political change. Arguing that the fundamental nature of international relations has not changed over the millennia, Professor Gilpin uses history, sociology, and economic theory to identify the forces causing change in the world order. The discussion focuses on the differential growth of power in the international system and the result of this unevenness. A shift in the balance of power - economic or military - weakens the foundations of the existing system, because those gaining power see the increasing benefits and the decreasing cost of changing the system. The result, maintains Gilpin, is that actors seek to alter the system through territorial, political, or economic expansion until the marginal costs of continuing change are greater than the marginal benefits. When states develop the power to change the system according to their interests they will strive to do so- either by increasing economic efficiency and maximizing mutual gain, or by redistributing wealth and power in their own favour.
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International migration in the post-World War II period raises many questions for the study of international relations. The movement of individuals across national borders clearly affects relations between states, and it has had in some cases dramatic effects on the internal politics of states, particularly the liberal democracies of Western Europe. But despite its importance, theorists of international relations have yet to develop a framework for understanding international migration. Attention has been focused either on the economics (push-pull) or the politics (policies) of migration, without any clear attempt to examine the way in which the interaction of politics and markets affects migration. Special attention is given to the role of international institutions--such as the European Community--in regulating population movements, and to the prospects for the development of migration "regimes" in Europe and North America. The author finds that international migration reveals a contradiction between the main economic purpose of the postwar international order--to promote exchange--and the national perquisites of sovereignty and citizenship.
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