According to the latest World Migration Report, 12 of the 20 top destinations for international migrants in 2020 were countries not belonging to what are considered traditional (western) migrant-receiving countries in North America, Western Europe, and Australia. International organisations currently estimate that the international stock of migrants amounts to about 282 million people. Nearly half of these international migrants work and reside in non-Western migration locales. Yet, despite these ever-growing migratory processes towards non-Western migration locales, the mainstream literature remains largely focused on the study of migrants’ experiences and immigration policies in the context of the traditional Western liberal democracies in North America, Western Europe, and Australia. This means that major non-Western migration destinations elsewhere in the world remain underrepresented by existing theories and comparative research within migration studies—including those top migrant-receiving countries such as Argentina, China, Colombia, the Gulf states, Malaysia, Russia and Turkey. As the editors of the leading migration journal International Migration Review admit, 80% of its articles published in the journal since 2016 focus geographically on North America or Western Europe. This uneven geographic coverage illustrates the limited attention granted to non-Western migration dynamics and also “highlights the challenges that scholars writing about the wider geography of international migration face in attempts to situate their work in relation to hegemonic perspectives about two global regions”.
Another contributing factor to this lacuna is that the dominant literature on contemporary migration (governance) regime typologies primarily focuses on (Western) liberal democracies. True, there is a growing body of empirical and theoretical literature addressing the nuance and peculiarities of migratory processes and migration governance practices in non-Western autocratic contexts (as outlined in 1.1.2 The state of the art section of the proposal); however, the existing research remains fragmented and has not been sufficiently integrated into the overarching research agenda in comparative migration studies. Addressing this gap is particularly important given that many new migration hubs are nondemocratic, which in turn requires us to revise or produce new frameworks of analysis beyond existing migration regime typologies. In Western-style democracies, despite the tightening of immigration control through laws and policies, the state’s arbitrary power and penchant to curtail migrant rights are significantly constrained by the international human rights regime, independent national courts and active civil society. On the contrary, non-Western immigrant-receiving countries are often characterised by autocratic regimes, poor human rights records, a weak rule-of-law and arbitrary law enforcement, systemic corruption, a large shadow economy and poorly organised civil societies and labour unions. This implies that autocracies are less constrained than liberal democracies in terms of respecting and upholding the human rights of citizens (especially of migrants) and ignoring their populations’ antimigrant sentiments, leverage which enables autocratic regimes to adopt more liberal immigration policies. At the same time, the absence or the weakness of the rule-of-law and the widespread corruption in authoritarian contexts may lead to the proliferation of informal practices and extra-legal negotiations through which migrant workers, employers, middlemen and street-level bureaucrats negotiate and reconstruct the migration system. Given these differences, we cannot assume that theoretical frameworks constructed in the context of (Western) liberal democracies apply within the context of non-democratic migration contexts. However, the above argument does not imply that we need to dismiss or reject theories and frameworks built from Western cases but rather construct more consolidated theories for migration studies, not two separate sets of theories on Western and non-Western settings. Both research strands – focused on studying migration processes in Western liberal democracies as well as in autocratic regimes – remain confined within a binary logic that divides the world into “global North/global South” or “democracy/autocracy”. In other words, our attempt should be to understand differences and similarities rather than assuming that they are so dissimilar that they cannot be compared/studied together.
MARS is a research and staff exchange programme intended to enhance our knowledge and scientific understanding about global, regional and national governance of migration and mobilities and thereby contribute to the global and national efforts to facilitate safe, regular and orderly migration. This aim will be accomplished by conducting interdisciplinary research and training programme on non-Western migration regimes.More specifically, MARS is constructed around three interlinked goals which are to: 1) produce original empirical material data and comparative perspective on migration governance and migrants’ experiences in non-Western migration locales; 2) engage with and situate our research in relevant theoretical debates in (comparative) migration studies and thereby contribute to theory-building efforts in migration studies by developing new conceptual and methodological insights on migrants’ experiences and migration governance practices in non-Western migration locales; and 3) provide strategic intelligence and policy insights for international organisations, development agencies and decision makers and practitioners inside and outside the EU on possible ways to better understand and improve migration governance practices, and thereby support the implementation of the Global Compact on Migration and Global Compact on Refugees.
This will be made possible thanks to a multi-sited, interdisciplinary and multisectoral research and staff exchange programme involving 11 leading European universities and organisations, namely Lund University, Leiden University, the University of Helsinki, the University of Zurich, the University of Salzburg, Istanbul Medipol University, Marmara University, Vilnius University, the University of Eastern Finland, Society for the Protection of Uzbek Women’s Rights in Turkey and University of Bristol and 13 associated partners operating in Central Asia, Middle East, North and West Africa, Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Gulf States and Latin America, namely the General Prosecutor’s Office of Uzbekistan, Nazarbayev University, Kurultai Research and Consulting, Migrant Info, American University in Cairo, Vatandoshlar Public Foundation, University of Ghana, University of Gadjah Mada, University of Tsukuba, Tashkent State University of Law, the Fletcher School at TUFTS University, Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.