Mobility & Politics

This book broadly analyzes the displacement or forced relocation of Adivasis Indigenous peoples from the Narmada Valley in India due to the construction and execution of a large development project, the Sardar Sarovar project, which has substantially transformed Adivasi lives, roles, practices, and autonomy, and increased their dependence on capital, market, unsustainable farming practices and urban jobs. Globally, Indigenous communities live within a legacy of environmental dispossession due to economic development that dismantles their mental and physical well-being and a land-based way of life. Appropriation, dispossession, and accumulation is historical and contemporary. Stories of Adivasi people illustrate the horrors of systematic marginalization, in general, and Adivasi women’s reduced autonomy and economic sufficiency, in particular. Key to mention here is that decades of resistance, protests, counter-struggles, marches, direct action did not overturn bureaucraticregressions or structural and direct violence towards marginalized or resettled Adivasi people, but enabled networks of solidarity arguing their rights and access. The book does not attest to state or corporate power, but validates Adivasi agency and autonomy.

After a long time of neglect, migration has entered the arena of international politics with a force. The 2018 Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration (GCM) is the latest and most comprehensive framework for global migration governance. Despite these dynamics, migration is still predominantly framed as a state-centric policy issue that needs to be managed in a top-down manner. This book proposes a difference approach: A truly multi-stakeholder, multi-level and rights-based governance with meaningful participation of migrant civil society. Drawing on 15 years of participant observation on all levels of migration governance, the book maps out the relevant actors, “invited” and “invented” spaces for participation as well as alternative discourses and framing strategies by migrant civil society. It thus provides a comprehensive and timely overview on global migration governance from below, starting with the first UN High Level Dialogue in 2006, evolving around the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and leading up to the consultations for the International Migration Review Forum in 2022.

This book focuses on processes of bordering and governmentality around the Greek border islands from the declaration of a ‘refugee crisis’ in the summer of 2015 up until the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The chapters trace the implementation of the EU migration hotspot approach across space and time, from the maritime Aegean border to the islands (Lesvos and Samos) and from the islands to the Greek mainland. They do so through the lenses of peoples’ refusal to succumb to categories that get reified as identities through the hotspot approach, such as that of the ‘deserving refugee’, the ‘undeserving economic migrant’, the ‘translator’, the ‘volunteer’, the ‘tourist’ and the ‘researcher’. This book explores how ‘migration management’ in Greece from 2015-2020, along with the reshaping of space and time, reconfigured peoples’ relationships with one another and ultimately with one’s self.

Over a million Kurdish-Yezidi refugees are dispersed across European cities and towns. However, they are neither recognized as a distinct community of stateless immigrants nor as a distinct European ethnic or religious minority. They are frequently utilized as data sources without having a voice to address their challenges. This oral testimony project, moving beyond, but contributing to, conventional academic research, provides these communities with a space to tackle multiple questions in their own languages and with their own voices. The book seeks to answer what drives their departures from their home countries, how they escape, what shapes their lives in receiving cities, and finally, how homeland affairs influence their lives in new environments. By addressing all these themes, this book presents refugee-centric knowledge by and with refugees as objects and subjects of their narratives and transcends neoliberal humanitarian, state-centric, and colonial hegemonic epistemes that limit refugees' epistemic capabilities and viewpoints.

This edited book focuses on the intersection of return migration and crises in non-Western countries. The book explores a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives while offering practical insights to address the intricate issues surrounding return migration and crises. The topics covered within this volume include return migration trends, the pivotal roles and contributions of return migrants, the social, psychological, and policy challenges faced by returnees, emerging issues stemming from return migration in their home countries, and the public and formal responses to return migration and the reintegration of returnees, and the roles of crises in these areas.

This edited volume brings together diverse perspectives of academic researchers, practitioners, and policymakers on return migration. The book features cases of multiple non-Western countries in Asia (Philippines, China, India), Europe (Lithuania, Turkey, & Ukraine), the Middle East and North Africa (Morocco), and South America and the Caribbean (Mexico, Peru & Dominican Republic). Findings provide a unique opportunity to critically explore current thinking on return migration and investigate the relationship between migration and crisis from varying policy and operational viewpoints. This book, hence, attends to practitioners to develop creative solutions to both global and local policies and practices of return migration management in emerging market countries, which will support and accommodate both their returnees and residents amid challenging times.