Serena Marcenò

Migrations: governance, policies, and rights

Increased migration is a global phenomenon associated with regional instabilities and insecurities, including long-term push factors and other elements related to processes of globalization that influence economics (the gap between the global South and the global North), politics (expectations of human rights and democratic practices), demographics (declining population in the North, rising population in the South) and technology (innovation in transport and communication). Local push factors are also extremely important, however, and need to be properly assessed in order to understand on-going migration processes and their variations. In many parts of the world, the closure of nearly all legal channels for entry risks increasing irregular migration, with the collateral effect of encouraging people smuggling and human trafficking. Furthermore, unsafe methods of entry increasingly involve women and children. But despite the urgency of the question, we are still very far from the development of any rational, holistic approach to migration issues, even while they have become a highly divisive, conflictual site of confrontation between countries, and between regional, national and international bodies. The current volume demonstrates some of the limits and inadequacies of current migration initiatives, while also identifying - as in the case of the Global Compact (signed in Morocco in December 2018) - inclusive strategies that respect human rights and international law, and safeguard global security. As the Global Compact emphasizes, migration should be considered as “a cooperative structure” that examines human movement in all its dimensions. This collection brings together essays that propose new ideas, themes and approaches that speak to different aspects of migration studies, including socio-economics, politics, legal studies and philosophy, fields that can open up new ways of looking at migration that go beyond the logic of emergency, improving international cooperation.