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Remittances
Abstract
Remittances (i.e., the money, objects, ideas, and social capital migrants send to their families, kin, and communities in their places of origin) are a crucial part of the global economy and migration dynamics. On a micro level, they recognize, maintain, affirm, and disrupt social relationships across the world, mapping out a transnational space in which people work, live, and communicate with multiple belongings. In 2022, migrants sent 836 billion US dollars via official channels worldwide, causing social change in both the places of origin and destination. As such, remittances improve living conditions, facilitate access to education and health, enable the building of infrastructure, and boost the economy in the countries of origin. However, the power to improve individual and communal living conditions or even increase the gross domestic product mainly results from global inequality, and remittances mirror these asymmetrical relationships. Thus, they increase dependencies between sending and receiving countries, disrupt family relations, and create new inequalities along postcolonial routes.
As a key driver of the global economy, remittances have received a significant amount of attention from global institutions, policymakers, and researchers of various disciplines, maintaining a focus on the nexus of migration and development. However, studies in social science and humanities have also shown that transnational money transfers are often accompanied or reciprocated by social (ideas, know-how, norms), political (narratives, voting patterns), or material (gifts, objects) remittances.
From an anthropological perspective, remittances are social practices. By earning, sending, receiving, and spending remittances, actors establish, sustain, erode, or even control relations between families, kin, and communities in the places of destination and origin. The focus on individuals and their practices reveals connections as well as frictions in remittance relations, challenging the remittance mantra (i.e., the assumption that the multiple transfers from the Global North bring nothing but wealth and knowledge to the Global South). However, it should not be overlooked that through remittances, global inequalities are projected onto personal relationships, generating cross-border forms of participation and belonging as well as exclusion and discrimination.
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In public and academic migration discourse, transnational migrants are often viewed from two opposing perspectives. As immigrants in the place of residence, they are expected to participate, incorporate, and invest in situ. As emigrants, they are expected to stay economically, politically, and emotionally loyal to their places of origin. This paternalistically ascribed cross-border dilemma becomes evident when looking at remittances, money transfers migrants send to their families and friends in their places of origin. Based on ethnographic research in the context of the so-called guest-worker migration between Turkey and Austria/Germany from the 1960s until today, this chapter explores how sending remittances shapes the biographies of migrant actors. To this end, what I aim to show is not how remittances mirror and control transnational social relationships but, rather, how interwoven remittance and migration narratives function as practices of sense-making that provides an alternative to diverging cross-border expectations. By applying a narrative analysis, this chapter provides a methodological contribution to remittance research, which still mostly focuses on the motivations for sending money or the impacts these transfers have on the regions of origin.
Transnational corporations have been long recognized as the building blocks of global system theory and their impact is widely acknowledged and studied. By comparison, we have insufficient understanding of transnational practices 'from below'. We argue that focusing on transnational migrant entrepreneurship is a novel opportunity to gain insights into the social and economic processes of 'globalization from below'. Such processes refer to the dynamics and practices initiated by actors outside the hegemonic socioeconomic spheres who, using various resources, move people, goods and ideas across national borders to create small-scale enterprises thus connecting distant places and people around the world. This introduction to the special issue brings together a transdisciplinary group of researchers who examine the spatialities, mobilities and resources of transnational migrant entrepreneurs in Asia, Europe, North Africa, South America and the USA. The rich empirical base, coupled with diverse research methods, provides new insights into the phenomenon to scholars, policymakers and practitioners.
This open access book explores the transformative effects of remittances. Remittances are conceptualized as flows of money, objects, ideas, traditions, and symbolic capital, mapping out a cross-border space in which people live, work, and communicate with multiple belongings. By doing so, they effect social change both in places of origin and destination. However, their power to improve individual living conditions and community infrastructure mainly results from global inequality. Hence, we challenge the remittance mantra and go beyond the migration-development-nexus by revealing dependencies and frictions in remittance relations. Remittances are thus scrutinized in their effects on both social cohesion and social rupture. By highlighting the transformative effects of remittance in the context of conflict, climate change, and the postcolonial, we shed light on the future of transnational society.
Presenting empirical case studies from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Turkey, Lebanon, USA, Japan, and various European countries, as well as historical North America and the Habsburg Empire, we explore remittance relations from a range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, history, design, architecture, governance, and peace studies.
This chapter explores the social, political, and cultural agents that drive the engines of gifting academic knowledge. It considers knowledge as a form of social remittance. Viewing knowledge transfers as remittance practices makes processes of (neo)colonial exchange flows visible. It also allows us to see such remittances as what they are: political and social scripts that determine legitimacy, value, and currency of knowledge in a world of economic and social inequalities. We can view knowledge according to Bourdieu as academic capital with skewed exchange rates. This chapter explores the question: How are the positions of sender and receiver linked to neo-colonial inequities? In a world system of university rankings, regionalized hubs of academic influence, money flows, and uneven power relationships, the exchange of knowledge and the definition of what constitutes knowledge is a fraught and fascinating topic when approaching it within a frame of remittance economy.
This chapter discusses the cultural impact and adoption of migrant gifts as material remittances in Turkey. It presents a conceptual framework for exploring migration through the biographical stories of gifts brought from European countries to Turkey from the beginning of the planned Turkish labor migration in the 1960s. Gifts are a material medium to explore the change of value regimes as well as a medium to communicate migrant narratives. The perceived value of the migrant gift in its culture of origin shifts when it becomes a gift and is taken to Turkey not only because it inherits the exchange value as a gift but also because it inherits an exotic quality as it is brought to a country with a different material climate. Discussing the value shift and the adoption of the gift objects throughout their cultural biographies also enlightens us about the social and economic changes that were simultaneously occurring in Turkey.
This final chapter questions remittances as a global success story and sheds light on possible trends of remittance economies. Highlighting recent developments like digitalization, the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental changes, and growing global inequality, we explore the shifts and effects of remittances on transnational society. To this end, we apply a transformative perspective, embedding remittances in the actors’ relations and analyzing their cohesive as well as disruptive effects from a temporal and spatial angle. Thus, we give an outlook on the possible future of transnational society in the context of historically generated global power relations.
Research on remittances mainly focuses on the nexus of migration and development, economic effects on the places of origin, and motives for remitting. However, little is known about the materiality of remittances. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography in Stubai Valley (Austria) and Usṃak (Turkey), this chapter introduces the concept of remittance affordances by following the spatial and temporal trajectories of a crucial type of material remittances in the encountered research field, namely knives and tools manufactured by the Stubai cooperative. It examines the transformative effects of migration on the involved actors and the built landscape. I argue that in order to be appropriated in the intended way, the remitted objects depend on certain criteria, such as impact of the transactors’ relations, which are historically accumulated and hierarchically constituted, on the material and biography of the object and the bodily incorporated practices of usage.
This chapter explores how the practice of remittances has been used as a form of political activism. The case study looks at the role of remittances in the transnational Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora broadly and the Swiss-based second-generation diaspora specifically. It shows that while political remittances were used during the Sri Lankan civil war as a way to sustain and perpetuate the violence conflict between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the role of remittances in the diaspora since the end of the war has changed and, in some ways, become depoliticized.
Emerging discourses in the field of climate change adaptation finance contend that remittances could complement other sources of financing adaptation given their propensity to reach the most vulnerable in comparison to public expenditure. This notwithstanding, fewer empirical studies have examined this claim. Employing an Order Rank Logit (ORL) and multinomial logit structural decomposition models, this study found that remittances influenced smallholder farmers’ engagement in off-farm jobs, irrigation farming, cultivation of improved crop varieties, use of compost/animal manure, and crop rotation, but inversely predicted Indexed-based Insurance (IBI). The study concludes that remittances are vital in financing climate change adaptation and, if appropriately yoked into climate intervention policies, could strengthen and enable farmers fashion out adaptation strategies that present high-medium to long-term dividends.
Levitt's groundbreaking concept of social remittances has inspired numerous empirical studies in migration research. However, the theoretical foundations of the concept remain weak. Most fundamentally, the interpretations of what social remittances are have multiplied, leaving the concept to not much more than a catchphrase. This paper puts forward a systematic review of different conceptualisations of social remittances. It identifies four major fields in which the existing literature diverges in its interpretation of social remittances: the scope, transfer process, spatial dimension, and delineation of different subtypes of social remittances. Starting from the discussion of these ambiguities, we advance Levitt's initial concept toward what will be called intangible remittances. In contrast to earlier conceptualisations, we account for the multidimensionality of the concept and provide essential clarifications in delimitation and terminology. In addition, we put forward a fine-grained typology of different subtypes of intangible remittances that specifies the content (that might be economic, environmental, political, or socio-cultural) and form (knowledge, normative structures, or practices) of intangible remittances. Thereby we provide a much-needed umbrella concept that interlinks other recently developed concepts such as political remittances and smoothly blends into the superordinate concept of remittances.
This paper describes findings from 53 interviews conducted with Moroccan and migrants from The Democratic Republique of the Congo living in Belgium, with an emphasis on discussing the extent to which environmental factors in the migrants’ home countries may or may not have influenced their migration decisions. A comparative approach clarifies and disentangles the relationship between natural environmental factors and other drivers of migration in two distinct contexts. Applying a comparative approach and having extensive biographical accounts of each interviewee’s migration trajectory and history enables us to understand how individual migration aspirations develop gradually and how the importance of environmental factors changes during different stages. Conceiving of migration as a multi-stage process, this study demonstrates how environmental factors are closely linked to other factors and play different roles during a migration trajectory.
Remittances have played crucial and shifting roles in Eritrea and its diaspora. They were fundamental to the achievement of national independence and are a resource with which the current government strengthens its power. Households have been reliant on remittances for survival, while for migrants they have been crucial to reinforce their sense of national belonging. Drawing from fieldwork, this article analyses remittances as a powerful tool to assess the ongoing (dis)connection between segments of the Eritrean diaspora and their homeland. The article firstly addresses financial remittances and shows how (in)formal flows play differing functions in relation to the government, communities, and families. Aft er highlighting how social remittances are contributing to current transformations within Eritrean society, it reflects on the potential role remittances may play in the future of the country.
The existing literature focuses extensively on the macroeconomic impact of remittances. Yet, the plausible heterogeneity in the remittance-output relationship is understudied. Different country characteristics and mediating factors of remittances suggest that the remittance-output relationship may vary across countries. Uncovering this cross-country heterogeneity can help tailor country-specific policies in managing the aggregate effects of remittances. We use panel data for 80 developing countries over 1970-2014 to systematically study the heterogeneous long-run remittance-output relationship. We find that an increase in remittances is associated with a marginal increase in long-run output on average. This, however, conceals a large cross-country heterogeneity, which uncovers that the impact of remittances on output varies from 0.59% in Dominican Republic to-0.53% in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Differences in the size/sign of the impact of remittances on consumption and investment across countries explain this variation. This cautions against a one-size-fits-all argument for the aggregate impact of remittances.
Transnationalism as a perspective that scrutinizes localities in more than one nationstate has helped to illuminate those aspects of lives of migrants that remain hidden when migration is seen through the lens of conventional migration theory. Social connectivity provides a context in which effects of migration can be studied. Yet reducing transnationalism to connectivity is unproductive for understanding currentday sociality as possibly distinct from a national one. This paper proposes to consider how nationalism is embedded in migrants’ ‘deep stories’, and how these stories are altered in migration. It exemplarily analyses narrations from interviews with Polish migrants in England. The paper argues that connectivity and social context are equally important for transnationalism, but transnationalism cannot be reduced either to one or the other. In turn, we must define transnationalism as outcome of multiple belongings, practise and dispositions coming together.
Remittances—money sent back by migrants to their place of origin—are considered to be both economic and social practices mapping out a transnational space of migration. By sending and receiving money, objects, ideas, and social norms, migrants and non-migrants strengthen their social ties and express their multiple belongings. Remittances can thus be read as a practice of multi-local participation and inclusion. When remittance develops a negative trend, the remittance decay hypothesis thus concludes a shift in belonging: The longer migrants stay in their host country and build a life there, the less they remit. In this article, the remittance decay hypothesis is tested with ethnographic data from interviews and participant observation in the migration nexus between Uşak, Turkey, and Fulpmes, Austria. Remittance to Turkey has declined markedly in the last two decades from a record high of 574 USD million in September 1998 to a record low of 11 USD million in August 2019. Ethnographic data with members of three generations of Turkish-Austrians in Fulpmes can help to explain this process from a diachronic perspective: for changing remittance practices and a transformation in remittance scripts, e.g., as investment, compensation, help, gift or charity donation, demonstrate that there is more to the story than a fading sense of belonging.
We advance a concept of political remittances that offers a distinct analytical perspective and enables a comparative assessment across time and space. By providing a new conceptualisation of political remittances, this article elaborates on the link between different kinds of remittances, delimiting the boundaries between political, social, economic, or cultural remittances. We understand political remittances as influencing political practices and narratives of belonging, thereby linking migrants’ places of destination and origin. The state, in this conceptualisation, mediates political remittances. The article distinguishes between factors influencing the transmission of political remittances such as the characteristic of the messengers, the relative space between sending and receiving contexts and the composite nature of political remittances. Illustrating the contours of a future research agenda, we suggest ways to operationalise research into political remittances drawing on the articles in this special issue which closely analyse political practices, narratives of belonging and the role of the state. Covering migration processes since the early 1800s, the case studies exemplify that political remittances are not a new phenomenon as such but rather a relatively recent analytic perspective.
Carving up the world into Global North and Global South has become an established way of thinking about global difference since the end of the Cold War. This binary, however, erases what this paper calls the Global East – those countries and societies that occupy an interstitial position between North and South. This paper problematises the geopolitics of knowledge that has resulted in the exclusion of the Global East, not just from the Global North and South, but from notions of globality in general. It argues that we need to adopt a strategic essentialism to recover the Global East for scholarship. To that end, it traces the global relations of IKEA’s bevelled drinking glass to demonstrate the urgency of rethinking the Global East at the heart of global connections, rather than separate from them. Thinking of such a Global East as a liminal space complicates the notions of North and South towards more inclusive but also more uncertain theorising.
Fluctuations in the volume and the value of financial remittances received from abroad affect the livelihood of households in developing economies across the world. Yet, political scientists have little to say about how changes in remittances, as opposed to the receipt of remittance payments alone, affect recipients’ political attitudes. Relying on a unique four-wave panel study of Kyrgyz citizens between 2010–2013 and a cross-sectional sample of 28 countries in Central Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, we show that when people experience a decrease (increase) in remittances, they become less (more) satisfied about their household economic situation and misattribute responsibility to the incumbent at home. Our findings advance the literature on the political consequences of remittance payments and suggest that far from exclusively being an international risk-sharing mechanism for developing countries, remittances can also drive fluctuations in incumbent approval and compromise rudimentary accountability mechanisms in the developing world.
This paper shows how economic remittances undergird the circulation of social remittances between New York, Paris, and Dakar. It compares the transnational practices of Senegalese-born migrants living in France and in the United States during the 2012 Senegalese presidential campaign to demonstrate how economic and political transnational practices mutually reinforce each other.
This paper contributes to scholarship in three key ways: it confirms the benefits of combining qualitative and quantitative transnational data, collected from origin and destination countries. It offers a welcome geographic extension to a literature on social remittances from which Africa remains absent. It makes a significant theoretical contribution by connecting economic sociology and migration studies to illuminate the impact of migrants’ transnational practices.
In this article, through a case study of transnational Islamic charity, we explore the intersection between migrant development engagements and religious practices. While migrant engagement in development is well known, the intersections of these with everyday religious practices are less so. We use the prism of ‘everyday rituals’, understood as human actions that connect ideals with practices. Everyday rituals not only express but also reinforce ideals, in this case those of Islamic charity in a context of sustained migrant transnationalism. The article draws on 35 interviews about Islamic charity, transnationalism and development with practising Muslims of Pakistani origin in Oslo, Norway. We argue that everyday rituals are a useful tool for exploring the role of religion in motivating migrant development engagements. This is because they include transcendental perspectives, bridge ideals and practices that connect the contemporary to the hereafter, encompass transnational perspectives, and are attentive to the ‘here’ and ‘there’ spatially in migrants’ lives.
This article proposes a conceptual framework for studying remittances as social transactions that can take a number of different forms. For the past three decades, the dominant framework for understanding remittance relationships has been the continuum of senders' motives from altruism to self-interest. This approach has its roots in economics and has shaped much of the quantitative research on remittances. In parallel, a growing body of ethnographic research has examined transnational money transfers with perspectives and data that differ from those of economists. The insights from these ethnographic studies are valuable, but remain fragmented and marginal in research on remittances. Two key points emerge from the ethnographic literature: Remittances are at the core of composite transactions with material, emotional, and relational elements, and there is great variation in the nature and logic of these transactions. The framework proposed here is designed to engage with both complexity and variation. It systematically draws upon a large body of ethnographic literature and introduces remittance scripts as an analytical tool.
The paper investigates the role of financial and social remittances in promoting new business creation in migrants’ home countries. By considering a panel of 143 countries during the period 2006-2018, we propose a way to operationalize the complex definition of social remittances and show that both financial and social remittances are positively correlated with the decision to create new firms, even though the effects of financial remittances crucially depend on the level of social remittances. This non-linear relationship points to the fact that countries with better institutions are likely to generate more intense flows of social remittances. However, they also allow for faster socio-economic integration of migrants and may weaken diasporas’ interest and direct financial engagement in entrepreneurial projects in the country of origin. Results obtained on the entire sample are confirmed when looking at the two subsamples of developing and non-OECD countries, respectively.
The idea that social rights are something we are eligible for based on where we live or where we are citizens is out-of-date. In Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders, Peggy Levitt, Erica Dobbs, Ken Chih-Yan Sun, and Ruxandra Paul consider what happens to social welfare when more and more people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship where they receive health, education, and elder care. The authors use the concept of resource environment to show how migrants and their families piece together packages of protections from multiple sources in multiple settings and the ways that these vary by place and time. They further show how a new, hybrid transnational social protection regime has emerged in response to this changing environment that complements, supplements, or, in some cases, substitutes for national social welfare systems as we knew them. Examining how national social welfare is affected when migration and mobility become an integral part of everyday life, this book moves our understanding of social protection from the national to the transnational.
Building on the reflexive turn in migration studies, the editorial proposes a conceptual heuristic for studying current conflicts over migration in Europe and beyond. The article integrates a non-essentialist understanding of migration, theories of belonging, membership and boundary-making and perspectives from cross-border studies. It calls to approach multiple social and political conflicts around migration as embedded in struggles over the migration-reladted classifications and powerful discourses of othering. Finally, it provides an overview of the contents of the special issue.
Migrant houses in countries of origin, referred to as ‘remittance houses’, are a visible marker of emigration. Case studies from diverse geographic contexts have explored their functions. Unlike the surrounding built environment, these houses span the local and transnational realities of migrant lives, while being grounded in specific places. We argue, first, for the need to move beyond locally-oriented reifying descriptions of what is a global phenomenon; second, for the need to analyse migrant remittance houses as part of a broader agenda for unravelling the practical and emotional significance of ‘home’ in migration studies. The paper unveils the constitutive dimensions of migrant houses: their roles as symbols of migration; their significance as economic investments; their presence as physical structures necessitating follow-up locally; their function as second homes for holidays and reminders of (elusive) return migration. Researching remittance houses is a source of insights on questions of broader theoretical relevance, like the temporality of migration, the reach and sustainability of migrant transnationalism and the forms of cultural diffusion associated with it. This calls for a distinctive methodological agenda to advance research, based on a typology of transnational housing investments, which differentiates the locations, functions and rationales of migrant houses.
This article investigates how commercial and government-based sectors in the Philippines deploy emotive mechanisms to promote the importance of connectivity services in addressing the affective and transnational needs of overseas Filipinos. By combining a walkthrough method with critical discourse analysis, the study compares and contrasts the interface, operating model and mode of governance of three selected case studies in the Philippines: Western Union, LBC Express Inc. and BaLinkBayan. The findings reveal that the emotionalising techniques of connectivity services construct what we call ‘platformed migrant subjectivity’. This conception articulates migrants as economic subjects and valued clientele within the commercial infrastructures and operations of an online platform. In sum, this article takes a nuanced approach to examine how commercial and government institutions utilise online platforms in mobilising emotional, transnational and digital transactions, which may redefine a migrant’s subjectivity, mobility and citizenship in a digital era.
Most studies on migration focus on migrants and the effects migration has on the host society. But for every migrant that leaves his or her origin country, there are also family members and loved ones that he/she ‘leaves behind’. This geographic separation has well-being consequences on both sides and involves complex transnational caring arrangements when it concerns dependent children or elderly. Yet, only in the past decade has research turned its attention to the ‘left behind’ or stayers. This chapter provides an overview of this recent literature and discusses the effects migration has for stayer children and elderly. The chapter focuses on the main topic investigated by these studies, namely, the effect of migration on the well-being of those who stay in the origin country. Well-being is broadly defined as mental and physical health, education, social behaviour, household labour and economic security. Qualitative anthropological and sociological in-depth studies are reviewed, as are larger-scale quantitative sociological, demographic and psychological studies.
Migration has existed in all times and places and people have migrated for a variety of (combined) reasons: environmental, economic, political, humanitarian, social and cultural. While social and political conflicts that have arisen out of environmental changes are not new, environmental changes have placed some living conditions and other reasons for migration under even more pressure. In this paper, we combine insights from two approaches to the study of environmental migration and displacement – namely ‘the sustainable livelihoods approach’ and ‘the new economics of labour migration’ – and build further on existing models and theories of migration aspirations and dynamics. Based on these insights, we develop a theoretical framework on the study of migration aspirations and how they take shape within the existing structural constraints or capabilities for people living in areas heavily affected by environmental change using a multilevel perspective. The novelty of this model is that it focuses on migration aspirations when confronted with environmental changes. The multilevel approach, which includes the local social environment, incorporating the culture of migration of the living environment, one’s personal local and transnational networks, perceptions on environmental changes and local discourses thereof, is therefore of particular relevance.
The article argues that empirical attention should be given to migrants’ personal engagements with the materiality of transnational dwelling, notably to ob- jects of everyday use. Such objects carried, sent and received across national borders facilitate familiar material practices that, in their turn, help the migrants to feel at home in different locations. At the same time, they lend a sense of connection between migrants, those who stayed behind and homes located in different countries. Positioned at the intersection between ethnology, migration research and studies of material culture, the article draws on Levitt and Glick Schiller’s analytical distinction between the ways of being and the ways of belonging, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, and Hage’s discussion of hexis. It suggests that ethnographic research on mundane objects in the context of transnational dwelling can destabilize the ways migrants are thought of in terms of difference and, thereby, contribute to critical studies of migration.
The social question is back. Yet today’s social question is not primarily between labour and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. While class has always been criss-crossed by manifold heterogeneities, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion, and language, it is these latter heterogeneities that have sharpened in situations of cross-border migration over the past decades. As in the nineteenth century, political conflicts arise, constituting the social question as a public concern. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices of the global South and the global North. It finds its expression in movements of people seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states in transnational social spaces; because of the cross-border diffusion of norms; and because there are implications of migration for social inequalities within national states. Casting a wide net in terms of conceptual and empirical scope, this book tackles both the social structure and the politics of social inequalities. It sets a comprehensive agenda for research which also includes the public role of social scientists in dealing with the transnationalized social question.
The notion of social remittances has gained a central position, discursively at least, in the literature on the effects of emigration on home societies. In this editorial we briefly review the strengths and limitations that this concept has displayed, since its early coinage in transnational migration studies. More of-ten than not, social remittances have been treated in the literature in a peripheral vein, ancillary to different foci of research. This Migration Letters special issue aims to move the debate on the theme beyond this unsatisfactory state of things. More specifically, we argue for four lines of research on social remittances to be further developed: the tensions between individualization and home-society based obligations and pressures, which shape the development and circulation of social remittances; the need to explore the embeddedness of economic remittances within a broader range of socio-cultural remittances (rather than vice versa); the interfaces between the categories of social remittances and social capital; the complex ways in which physical and social distance between senders and recipients affects the circulation of social remittances, as well as their impact on migrants' communities of origin.
This article traces two generations of scholarship in the climate change-migration debate, which often focus on ‘resilience’ of migrants. The author finds the concept of resilience is deeply biased toward blaming the victims (migrants) and argues that it should be discarded. Moreover, he claims that the debates on climate change and forced migration are based on the idea that nature and society/culture can be neatly separated. Considering this as a false dichotomy, the author points out the need for a new generation of scholarship, which should devote more attention to how responses to climate change (including migration as adaptation) are implicated in reproducing existing social inequalities.
While measured remittances by migrant workers have recently soared, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We propose three new explanations for this puzzle. First, a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory – arising from changes in measurement. Second, cross-country regressions may lack power to detect such growth effects. Third, remittances rise primarily with rising emigration, whose opportunity cost to GDP creates endogeneity bias. Migration and remittances clearly have first-order effects on poverty, migrant households’ welfare and global GDP but detecting the effect of remittances on economic growth faces important challenges.
In this paper the authors show how the Kurdish Alevi and predominant Zazakî-speaking people from Dersim/Tunceli have engaged in the rewriting of their regional history, the protection of landscapes and their sociality. They have often emphasized their differences of religion, language and ethnicity and contributed to a remarkable circulation of political and historical knowledge and transnational practices between Turkey and Europe. The authors follow these activities across borders in order to show how transnational engagement is shaping local transformations in different contexts, regions and nation-states. The examination of transnational, multidimensional, multilevel and multidirectional flows of critique, claims and protests allows rejecting ‘the receiving country bias’ and goes beyond a simplifying migration-development nexus.
‘An important contribution to debates about migration and social change. Based on interdisciplinary, longitudinal research on migration between three Polish communities and the United Kingdom in post-accession Europe, Grabowska and her colleagues carefully unpack how social remittance transfers actually work. In a world in which sending governments look increasingly to emigrants’ economic and social contributions, this book is an invaluable guide to how and when innovation, or resistance to it, occur.’ – Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College and Harvard University, USA
This book offers a unique and innovative way of looking at the paradoxical consequences of human mobility. Based on a three-year transnational multi-sited longitudinal research project, it demonstrates that not all migrants acquire, transfer and implement social remittances in the same way. Whilst the circulation of ideas, norms and practices is an important aspect of modernity, acts of resistance, imitation and innovation mean that whilst some migrants become ordinary agents of social change in their local microcosms, others may contest that change. By putting this individual agency centre stage, the authors trace how social remittances are evolving, and the ambiguous impact that they have on society. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, geography and anthropology.
Based on 324 in-depth interviews with Indian, Moroccan, Ukrainian, Bosnian and Filipino migrants based in four EU countries (Austria, Italy, Spain and the UK), our paper explores the relationship between social remittances and transnational mobility. We develop a new typology of social remittances as based on the principle of mobility. We argue that the degree to which transnational mobility is present in social remittances depends on the agency of the sender and on the nature of the receiving community. We further elaborate on such mobility-related concepts as “transnational re-scaling” (in reference to directionality of social remittances) and “translocal celebrity” (in reference to sender’s role in cultural production). Based on a large qualitative dataset, this study also contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between the local and the global.
A particular ‘Turkish taste in Vienna’, which has been formed through experiences of migration from Turkey and resettlement in Vienna, serves as a significant aesthetic and social medium for constituting a collective sense of belonging. This article explores how Turkish people in Vienna constitute, perform and enunciate belongings through practices and discourses around travelling forms and spaces of material culture. Underpinned by an ethnography founded on a repertoire of Turkish objects in Vienna, this article addresses the relational constitution of a particular taste and a diasporic belonging within a specific context of displacement and relocation of both people and material objects. ‘Taste diaspora’ refers to a certain diasporic sphere that is formed through a collective taste in material objects and enunciated in the aesthetics of the everyday.
This article examines dealing with money as a social and cultural form of dealing with the self and with others. Based on empirical case studies from the discipline of European Ethnology, money and consumption are contextualized as a means of self-positioning between frugality and generosity, biographical self-emancipation, and social inclusion and exclusion. The examples have one aim: by deconstructing economic practices, the economy as such can be, anthropologized' (Paul Rabinow), i.e. stripped off its allegedly self-evident universal claim and revealed in all its culturally and historically specific functions.