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The Political Economy of Migration Processes: An Agenda for Migration Research and Analysis

This Working Paper proposes the development of an approach to researching and analysing migration processes that combines a livelihoods approach to exploring local-level migration dynamics with a relational political economy perspective that deepens understanding of the broader social, economic and po…

The Recession and Migration: Alternative Scenarios

The current recession, expected to be the worst in a generation, is likely to affect international migration and remittances differently than past recessions. In 1973-74 and 1981-82, a rise in oil prices was associated with recession in oil-buying countries and an economic boom in oil-exporting countries, enabling so…

Mobility and Human Development

This paper argues that mobility and migration have always been an intrinsic part of human development. Migration can be considered as a fundamental capabilities-enhancing freedom itself. However, any meaningful understanding of migration needs to simultaneously analyse agency and structure.

South-South Migration and Human Development: Reflections on African Experiences

This paper looks at the relationship between migration between developing countries – or countries of the global ‘South’ – and processes of human development. The paper offers a critical analysis of the concept of South-South migration and draws attention to four fundamental problems. First, there is…

Incident Reporting: Experimental Data Collection Methods and Migration Governance

African migrations are transforming political power and authority on the continent. The growing presence of large populations of undocumented and/or disenfranchised people, particularly in urban centres, exacerbates and complicates the already tenuous relationship between ‘states’ and ‘citizens’ in this r…

Intra-household tensions and conflicts of interest in migration decision making: A case study of the Todgha valley, Morocco

This paper explores the role of intra-household tensions and conflicts of interest in explaining the diverse return and pendulum migration strategies among Moroccan migrants who first migrated to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Migration strategies and motivations of migrants and their households are explor…

The Crisis and Migrants’ Remittances: A Look at Hispanics in the US

The latest economic downturn has affected large sectors of the population in developed and developing nations and international immigrants have not been the exception. This study documents the recent slowdown in workers’ remittances, the money that international immigrants send back home. Current data…

Migration System Formation and Decline: A theoretical inquiry into the self-perpetuating and self-undermining dynamics of migration processes

The migration literature has identified various mechanisms which explain why, once started, migration processes tend to gain their own momentum and become self-perpetuating, partly independent of their original causes, leading to the formation of migration systems. However, existing theories on the inte…

Tanzanian Migration Imaginaries

The European continent has been so inundated by images of African migrants trying to enter ‘fortress Europe’ that many Europeans now uncritically assume that the majority of Africans wants to emigrate. But how do Africans themselves imagine such migratory process? Based on ongoing fieldwork in Tanzania, t…

The environmental factor in migration dynamics: A review of African case studies

Claims that climate change will shape the future of global migration are continuously being made in academia as well as popular and policy circles. This paper questions the empirical basis for such claims, drawing on a critical review of 13 case studies of environmentally induced migration in the Sahel and th…

2014 Ebola Outbreak Exposes Large Gaps in Financing Adequate Healthcare in West African Countries

According to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine, the recent outbreak of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in West Africa might have originated in a toddler from the rural village of Meliandou, Guinea. After the child’s mysterious death in December 2013, symptoms, including high fever, diarrhoea, vomiti…

‘Saving the Congo’: transnational social fields and politics of home in the Congolese diaspora

This paper explores the diasporic ‘politics of home’ of Congolese migrants in Europe, in particular in the UK, and to a lesser extent in Belgium. We focus on the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the diasporic political sphere by examining the role of first generation activists, religious groups, as well as youth a…

A ‘Despicable Shambles’. Labour, property and status in Faya-Largeau, Northern Chad

Faya-Largeau, the largest oasis in northern Chad, seems to present a classic picture of Saharan labour relations and status groups. Colonial officers spoke of nomadic ‘overlords’ who used to exploit sedentary ‘serfs’ of slave descent, but indirectly favoured the latter; today, former status relations are renegotiate…

A Diaspora Returns: Liberia Then and Now

Sankofa is an Akan word from Ghana which, when translated literally, means: ‘We must go back and reclaim our past so we can move forward; we must understand why and how we came to be to know who we are today.’ Standing at the apex of Ducor in central Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, one can see why t…

A game of risk: Boat migration and the business of bordering Europe

Largely in response to irregular migration flows, a Euro-African border is under construction at the southern edges of Europe. The latest phase in this ‘borderwork’ is a system known as Eurosur, underpinned by a vision of a streamlined surveillance cover of Europe's southern maritime border and the Afric…

A Global Assessment of Human Capital Mobility: The Role of non-OECD Destinations

Discussions of high-skilled mobility typically evoke migration patterns from poorer to wealthier countries, which ignore movements to and between developing countries. This paper presents, for the first time, a global overview of human capital mobility through bilateral migration stocks by gender and e…

A New Profile of Migrants in the Aftermath of the Recent Economic Crisis

Growing international migration and diverse characteristics of migrant populations make internationally comparable high-quality data on migrants essential. Regular update of these data is crucial to capture the changes in size and composition of migrant populations. This document presents the first results of th…

A picture speaks a thousand words: Understanding women's migration in Johannesburg through visual diaries

Using the visual diaries of a group of African women migrants now living in Johannesburg, this article explores what is now termed the ‘feminisation of migration’. It does this less by drawing attention to the fact that women are moving, than by using women’s own images and narratives to reveal dimension…

Aborder le continuum des mobilites spatiales: proposition d'un protocole de mesure des migrations au sahel

Les sorties du continent africain ne sont qu’une facette d’un large éventail de pratiques migratoires, qui demeurent méconnues dans leur ensemble, en tout cas peu ou mal mesurées. Ces migrations et mobilités sont-elles toutes massives, durables ? Certaines sont à l’évidence versatiles parce qu’elles s’adapten…

AcAquiring a ‘voice’ through ‘exit’ How Moroccan emigrants became a driving force of political and socioeconomic change