A special theme of the journal “International Migration”, which I guest edited together with Nicola Piper, University of Sydney, has just been released. Its aim is to make an explicit link between migration and democracy or democratization which so far has been a fairly neglected field in research and even more so in policy debates. The contributions address issues such as migration, democracy and the Arab spring; citizenship rights; democratizing regional migration governance; and migration, precarization and the democratic deficit in Global Governance. The little attention democracy receives in recent debates on migration, in particular the ones on migration and development, is somewhat surprising, since
international migration poses fundamental questions to the definition of democracy: Who is part of the demos and who is not and which rights and obligations are linked to these various levels of membership? Many of the current “hot topics” in migration research such as transnationalism, the assumed territorialization of the nation-state, citizenship and voting rights, social remittances, all challenging the container model of the nation state, can easily be linked to larger questions of democracy and democratic development.
A rare case where this issue was debate in the context of the GFMD was during a workshop at the 2014 PGA in Stockholm on migration and democracy: Claiming migrant voices through suffrage, see here:
Here are the contributions of the new issue:
MIGRATION AND DEMOCRACY
Guest edited by Stefan Rother and Nicola Piper
Migration and Democracy: Citizenship and Human Rights from a Multi-level Perspective
Guest editors: Nicola Piper and Stefan Rother
Transnational Immigrant Narratives on Arab Democracy: The Case of Student Associations at UC Berkeley
Tamirace Fakhoury
The Democratic Potential of Enfranchising Resident Migrants
Luicy Pedroza
Alternative Regionalism from Below: Democratizing ASEAN’s Migration Governance
Stefan Rother and Nicola Piper
Migration, Precarization and the Democratic Deficit in Global Governance
Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Aleksandra Alund and Branka Likić-Brborić
P.S. A few years ago Jürgen Rüland, Christl Kessler and myself guest edited a special issue on “International Migration and Democratisation in East Asia” which can be found here:
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/15700615/8/2
My contribution can be found free to download here:
http://essays.ssrc.org/remittances_anthology/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Topic_21_Rother.pdf
The GFMD, Migration, Development and Human Rights 