Sherzod Eraliev - Böcker

This open access book contributes new theoretical and comparative insights on migrant agency, undocumentedness and informality in non-Western, non-democratic migration regimes. The book is conceived as a critical reflection on the contemporary migration regime scholarship, and, more generally, on comparative migration studies, which primarily focus on migrants’ experiences and immigration policies in the context of liberal democracies in North America and Western Europe. Addressing this gap is particularly important when considering the fact that many new migration hubs are nondemocratic, which in turn requires us to revise or produce new frameworks of analysis beyond existing and dominant Western-centric migration regime typologies. This book takes up the case study of Central Asian migrants in Russia and Turkey—two archetypal non-Western, nondemocratic regimes and key migration hotspots worldwide—and investigates how migration governance outcomes are shaped by the informal power geometries and extralegal processes in physical and digital landscapes in which migrant workers, employers, middlemen, landlords, street world actors and street-level bureaucrats negotiate the contemporary migration system. This lively ethnography presents new empirical material, a comparative perspective and methodological tools for studying migrants’ experiences and migration governance processes in non-Western migration regimes.

This open access book contributes new theoretical and comparative insights on migrant agency, undocumentedness and informality in non-Western, non-democratic migration regimes. The book is conceived as a critical reflection on the contemporary migration regime scholarship, and, more generally, on comparative migration studies, which primarily focus on migrants’ experiences and immigration policies in the context of liberal democracies in North America and Western Europe. Addressing this gap is particularly important when considering the fact that many new migration hubs are nondemocratic, which in turn requires us to revise or produce new frameworks of analysis beyond existing and dominant Western-centric migration regime typologies. This book takes up the case study of Central Asian migrants in Russia and Turkey—two archetypal non-Western, nondemocratic regimes and key migration hotspots worldwide—and investigates how migration governance outcomes are shaped by the informal power geometries and extralegal processes in physical and digital landscapes in which migrant workers, employers, middlemen, landlords, street world actors and street-level bureaucrats negotiate the contemporary migration system. This lively ethnography presents new empirical material, a comparative perspective and methodological tools for studying migrants’ experiences and migration governance processes in non-Western migration regimes.

This open access edited volume offers a new global perspective on migration governance by rethinking the political economy of migration beyond Western-centric frameworks. Using the concept of assemblages of migration, the book conceptualises migration governance as historically layered, polycentric, infrastructural, stratified, embodied, and co-produced through formal institutions and everyday practices. The book offers critical insights into migration in non-Western regions and advances a more comprehensive, globally inclusive migration studies agenda. Through empirically rich case studies spanning Asia, Africa, Eurasia, and Europe, contributors examine colonial legacies, regional mobility regimes, diaspora governance, gendered migration, family migration, and migrants’ everyday legal navigation. By bringing together perspectives from international political economy, political science, socio-legal studies, anthropology, history, and migration studies, the volume advances a genuinely multidisciplinary and global approach to migration governance. It is essential reading for scholars, students, and policymakers interested in comparative migration studies, global political economy, and the governance of mobility in non-Western contexts.