The migration-mobilities continuum: Rethinking migration as political demography

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• MPC: Migration Policy Centre

Who is moving internationally, and where are they going? What are the major patterns in global mobility, and how are they reshaping the world?

Join Adrian Favell as he presents the theoretical explanation to the work in progress on the Global Mobilities Project, which will trace a historical genealogy of what he calls the migration-mobilities continuum, from the post-war through the neo-liberal era, to the COVID interregnum and after.

The Global Mobilities Project at the Migration Policy Centre has set itself the task of splitting the migration atom. Despite numerous theoretical critiques of methodological nationalism and calls for demigranticisation, research on population mobility remains fixed on the figure of the migrant as a defining element of populations and territorial state bordering.

Yet, as the project shows, migration is only a small component of cross-border population movement, which has grown exponentially in the neoliberal era. However small "migration" is in relative terms, the governance questions this observation raises are enormous in consequence. These dynamics are now helping to drive populist politics worldwide, as well as the dramatic complexification of selective, extractive, and/or exclusionary categorizations of migrant labour and asylum, particularly outside the North Atlantic West.

Coinciding with the seminar, on 10 February, an updated version of the Global Transnational Mobility Dataset will be released.