Virtual Library

This article conducts a critical discourse analysis of the Hungarian government’s National Consultation campaign on ‘immigration and terrorism’ in early 2015. The analysis draws on a discourse-historical approach to illuminate how the language and contents of the consultation draw on the discursive and political repertoires of the post-2010 Orbán governments and how, at the same time, they are underpinned by particular elements in the history of migration and diversity in Hungary. The consultation framed immigration as both an economic and security threat and conflated asylum seekers, economic migrants and terrorists, as well as regular and irregular migration. Nevertheless, these discourses would later feed into the government’s response to the large number of asylum seekers who entered the country in the summer of 2015 and would be used to legitimize the actions subsequently taken to tackle what would internationally come to be defined as a ‘crisis’.

This paper examines why young women in rural Ethiopia decide to migrate as domestic workers to the Middle East. Based on survey data and 84 in-depth interviews, it explores the forces shaping young women’s aspirations and capabilities to migrate, challenging the dominant narratives of trafficking, deception, and victimization that surround this migration corridor. It finds, first, that migration to the Middle East is one migration trajectory embedded within a broader urban transition occurring across Ethiopia. For rural women, labor emigration is often a long-distance, short-term strategy to access the capital needed to realize a long-term, short-distance move to town. Second, the aspiration to migrate emerges at a particular moment in the life course, as young women transition from adolescence into adulthood and when local opportunities do not provide promising pathways to achieve their life aspirations. This paper shows why labor emigration can simultaneously be a reasonable, capabilities-enhancing choice for young women and a response to a critical lack of capabilities in other domains of their lives. Finally, through applying an aspiration–capability framework, this paper advances a theoretical approach that avoids the common binary between “forced” and “voluntary” migration and thus contributes to advancing research on other forms of precarious migration occurring under highly constrained conditions.

This article explores the effects of the legalization of international human rights on citizens and non-citizens within states. Adopting a sociological approach to rights it becomes clear that, even in Europe, the cosmopolitanization of law is not necessarily resulting in greater equality and justice. In fact, ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitan citizenship is characterized by a proliferation of status groups that concretize new forms of inequality, including those of super-citizens, marginal citizens, quasi-citizens, sub-citizens and un-citizens. Far from inaugurating a new era of genuinely universal human rights, in some cases cosmopolitan law may even contribute to the creation of conditions in which fundamental human rights are violated.

As important aspects of purported tendencies toward globalization and pluralization, recent immigration waves and the resulting presence of culturally different ethnic minorities are often seen as fundamentally challenging liberal nation‐states and traditional models of citizenship. According to this perspective, migrants and ethnic minorities contribute through their claims making both to the external erosion of sovereignty (the postnational challenge), and to the internal cultural differentiation of liberal nation‐states (the multicultural challenge). In contrast, alternative theoretical approaches have emphasized the continuing relevance of the nation‐state in the processes of inclusion and exclusion of minorities. From these three perspectives on citizenship (postnational, multicultural, and national) a set of hypotheses is derived and tested with data on the collective claims making of migrants and ethnic minorities in two European countries, Britain and Germany, for the period 1990–95. The data show very little support for the postnational approach, mixed results regarding the multicultural model, and strong support for the continuing relevance of national models of citizenship. Counter to claims that national modes of migrant incorporation have become insignificant, the evidence shows that migrant claims making is still forged in the image of a particular nation‐state.

Scholarship on the dissemination of human rights norms and principles has focused predominantly on the socialization of nation-states into the values which have been widely endorsed. I argue in this article that the socialization mechanisms, discussed by such scholars as Meyer et al. (1997) and Risse and Sikkink (1999), do not capture the complex processes of the negotiation of more controversial rights. Distinguishing between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic human rights principles, I suggest that we need to explore the ways in which human rights activists advance, interpret, and negotiate counter-hegemonic human rights. Focusing on migrants' rights advocacy in the US and Canada, I argue that pro-migrant activists draw on other human rights principles that do enjoy a greater degree of recognition and/or on instrumental reasons to pressure nation-states to grant more rights to migrants.

This article situates forced migration amid intersections of burgeoning human insecurities that force increasing numbers of people to leave their homes and become susceptible to exploitation. Drawing upon data on trafficking in Pakistan, the author argues that marginalized groups often go through multiple migrations that can include episodes of trafficking for sex, labor, or other purposes. The disjuncture between policies and realities on the ground, and the trend of current interventions do little to address the human security of these migrants. The article emphasizes that the human security frame provides a more nuanced human rights-based approach to analyze this form of migration and address the root causes and risks associated with the forced displacement of people.

Although family and migration scholars recognize that intimate partner violence (IPV) can motivate women’s movement between countries, little research considers IPV or other gendered family violence further back in women migrants’ life histories or explores the legacy of gendered family violence in cases where such violence is not the primary push factor. Here, we analyze in-depth interviews conducted among thirty-four Latin American women seeking asylum or international protection from a diversity of threats to comprehensively understand their experiences with childhood and adult family violence prior to migration. Our analysis reveals three key takeaways. First, IPV, incest, abandonment, and other forms of gendered family violence can characterize women’s family dynamics across the life course even when these experiences do not directly prompt migration. Second, amidst pervasive patriarchal norms, family violence has the power to destabilize women’s social circumstances and fracture their ties to family members in ways that indirectly encourage migration. Third, owing to these same gender norms, even when gendered family violence directly prompts migration, women may conceptualize their primary motive as protecting their children rather than themselves. These findings move beyond common conceptualizations of the family violence–migration nexus and highlight the breadth and implications of gendered family violence among migrants seeking protection from a broad spectrum of intra- and extra-familial threats.

A temporal overlap involving the constructivist turn in sociology and national and transnational human rights struggles has transformed human rights into an important research topic within political sociology. This article establishes the principal sociopolitical research questions in the field of human rights and conducts a review of academic literature on the subject, establishing three main fields of human rights research within the sub-discipline: human rights as the articulating axis for collective action; subject participation in the construction of discourse and the effects of domination and emancipation on this construction; and transformations to the category of citizenship resulting from the challenges posed by global migration.

Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society (ACS) in the 1820s as an African refuge for free blacks and liberated American slaves. While interest in African migration waned after the Civil War, it roared back in the late nineteenth century with the rise of Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement throughout the South. The back-to-Africa movement held great new appeal to the South's most marginalized citizens, rural African Americans. Nowhere was this interest in Liberia emigration greater than in Arkansas. More emigrants to Liberia left from Arkansas than any other state in the 1880s and 1890s. In Journey of Hope, Kenneth C. Barnes explains why so many black Arkansas sharecroppers dreamed of Africa and how their dreams of Liberia differed from the reality. This rich narrative also examines the role of poor black farmers in the creation of a black nationalist identity and the importance of the symbolism of an ancestral continent. Based on letters to the ACS and interviews of descendants of the emigrants in war-torn Liberia, this study captures the life of black sharecroppers in the late 1800s and their dreams of escaping to Africa.

This article examines the disjuncture between the theory of international refugee protection, human rights and citizenship rights and their practice. Drawing on data from a sub-sample of 500 Zimbabwean migrants taken from a larger survey of 1000 Zimbabweans in South Africa and the UK, it explores the labour market and transnational lives of undocumented migrants and compares them with migrants with other immigration statuses. The article demonstrates that while the protection and rights frameworks exist, in reality undocumented migrants cannot access protection and/or rights.