Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance

Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Branka Likic-Brboric, Raúl Delgado Wise, Gülay Toksöz, Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Branka Likic-Brboric, Raúl Delgado Wise, Gülay Toksöz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429627880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

How do the United Nations, international organizations, governments, corporate actors and a wide variety of civil society organizations and regional and global trade unions perceive the root causes of migration, global inequality and options for sustainable development? This is one of the most pertinent political questions of the 21st century.

This comprehensive collection examines the development of an emerging global governance on migration with the focus on spaces, roles, strategies and alliance-making of a composite transnational civil society engaged in issues of rights and the protection of migrants and their families. It reveals the need to strengthen networking and convergence among movements that adopt different entry points to the same struggle, from fighting 'managed' migration to contesting corporate control of food and land. The authors examine the opportunities and challenges faced by civil society in its endeavour to promote a rights-based approach within international and intergovernmental fora engaged in setting up a global compact for the management of migration, such as the Global Forum for Migration and Development, and in other global policy spaces.

Chapters 1, 3, and 6 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (Chapters 1 and 6) and a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) (Chapter 3).

Migration, civil society and global governance: an introduction to the special issue

Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Branka Likić-Brborić, Raúl Delgado Wise and Gülay Toksöz

ABSTRACT

The current special issue examines the development of an emerging global governance on migration and the spaces, roles, strategies and alliance-making of a composite transnational civil society engaged in issues of rights and the protection of migrants and their families. This question is connected with how different actors – the United Nations, international organizations, governments and a wide variety of civil society organizations and regional and global trade unions – perceive the root causes of migration, global inequality and options for sustainable development. The contributions included in the special issue interrogate from different perspectives the positionality and capacity of civil society to influence the Global Forum for Migration and Development. They examine the opportunities and challenges faced by civil society in its endeavor to promote a rights-based approach within international and intergovernmental fora engaged in setting up a global compact for the management of migration and in other global policy spaces.

A need for critical research

The making of a de-commodifying, rights-based, global governance of migration is essential for the capacity to confront problems of unfree labor and the precarisation of livelihoods and citizenship. It concerns civil, social and labor rights for the protection of labor migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who constitute the most disadvantaged in many societies of both the global North and South. Their marginal representation calls for research on civil society in the global governance of migration and in other global policy spaces related to migration.

Following several international conferences and reports,¹ the United Nations (UN) initiated a High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development (UN-HLD)² in 2006. And, in 2007, various governments launched the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD).³ The GFMD was designed as a state-led, nonbinding and informal process, but figures as the most comprehensive arena for continuous intergovernmental deliberations between sending, receiving and transit states on emerging standards for the global governance of migration. It is also informed by the exchange of ideas with a plethora of international organizations, multilateral global and regional bodies (e.g. the Global Migration Group, GMG),⁴ business actors and a broad civil society, including migrant organizations, trade unions and non-governmental think-tanks. Given the growing relevance of migration in the international arena and the meagre results derived from the GFMD process to engender an institutional framework for the global governance of migration, in September 2016 the UN General Assembly endorsed the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants that set off an extensive intergovernmental consultation and negotiation process aimed at culminating with the adoption of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Secure Migration by autumn-2018 (GCM).⁵ It is described as the ‘first, inter-governmentally negotiated agreement, prepared under the auspices of the UN, projected to cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner’.

Arrangements have been developed over the past years to include selected actors of civil society with the aim of instituting spaces for trust-building exchange between non-state and state actors. Since the inception of the GFMD, so-called ‘Civil Society Days’⁶ (CSD) have been organized which precede the GFMD meetings. The CSD are currently managed by the Migration and Development Civil Society Network (MADE).⁷ A so-called ‘Common Space’, has been instituted as the interface between governments and civil society. Migrant and migrant advocacy actors in civil society have managed to continually expand their space for participation in these top-down processes while simultaneously establishing parallel events as autonomous spaces for deliberation and consensus-making between a multitude of variably positioned civil society organizations (transnational migrant organizations, trade unions, migrant advocacy civil society organizations (CSOs)); for example, the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA).⁸ Invigorated and informed by alternative political visions forged at the World Social Forum (WSF) and in global networks such as the food sovereignty movement, their aim has been to mainstream alternative development and globalization models by framing them in global contexts such as UN conferences on climate change, women’s rights, human rights, land rights and the ILO ‘Decent Work Agenda’ (DWA). Furthermore, they have established independent thematic chapters such as the World Social Forum on Migrations (WSFM)⁹ and civil society networks such as the Global Coalition on Migration. ¹⁰ Particularly, the Global Coalition is actively engaged in leading civil society and migrant organizations in the GCM towards its adoption by Member States in 2018.

However, could the UN-initiated GFMD process indeed open the door for the representation of migrant civil society in, and impact on, a global governance of migration in transformation? This question is the focus of this special issue on Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance. The issue’s overall theoretical approach is aligned with approaches in international political economy (e.g. Birchfield, 1999; Cox, 1977; Gill, 2005), combining influences from Gramsci and Polanyi in bridging international relations and the national scale of analysis. Taken in its broadest sense, Polanyi’s notion of ‘counter-movement’ could be seen as an incipient theory of counter-hegemony. Today, as Gill (2003, p. 8) puts it:

[W]e can relate the metaphor of the ‘double movement’ to those socio-political forces which wish to assert more democratic control over political life, and to harness the productive aspects of world society to achieve broad social purposes on an inclusionary basis.

This approach harnesses the essence of Polanyi’s (1944/1957) theorem of the ‘double movement’, to a critical understanding of the present condition of globalization and its contestation, whether through policy regulation ‘from above’ (states and international organizations) or through civil society intervention ‘from below’.

Based on these overall premises, the contributions of this issue set out, from different angles, to examine the development of an emerging global governance on migration and the spaces, roles, strategies and alliance-making of a composite transnational civil society pushing for a broad human rights-based approach to migration and development. The issue deals with the following questions: Will the factoring of migration politics into the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development¹¹ affect changes in a fundamentally asymmetric neoliberal governance regime in ways that could facilitate civil society influence? What is the actual positionality and capacity of civil society organizations, engaged in the GFMD process, to re-politicise a dominant neoliberal migration narrative and, more specifically, to formulate game-changing approaches to the reproduction of informal labor and irregular migration from a rights-based perspective? Which dilemmas and which hegemonic politics of co-optation and appropriation are faced by ‘inside-outside’¹² strategies of composite civil society ‘networks of equivalence’ which endeavor to change the rules of the game in ‘invited spaces’¹³ of global international and intergovernmental fora such as the UN-HLD, GFMD and GCM? How to foster links with other global governance fora relevant to migration, such as the Committee on World Food Security or the UN Human Rights Council, which arguably provide more congenial space for counterhegemonic civil society engagement. The issue discusses specifically the case of Turkey which is presented as a new immense strategic space and regional player in the governance of migration. This is addressed with emphasis on the ambivalent predicament of ‘representation’. For example: How was the ‘problem of migration’ represented by agenda-setting governmental actors on the occasion of the GFMD summit in Istanbul in 2015? What was the actual ‘representation’ of migrants and their organizations in defining and managing ‘the problem’? What is the agenda of Turkish trade unions concerning migration? Last, but not least, alternative narratives and strategies of contending movements of migrant organizations, migrant advocacy organizations, and trade unions are discussed. That is, civil society actors, global movements and events which follow alternative ‘outside’ strategies, critical towards a UNHLD-GFMD process which they see as co-opting, depoliticizing and neutralizing civil society agendas through appropriation. This is a question connected with how civil society organizations perceive the root causes of migration framed by an exclusivist neoliberal political economy and its contingent regime of migration management.

The current state of the art in research indicates that critical questions raised by this special issue have received relatively limited academic attention. Indeed, there is ample research on civil society and global governance in general (Betts, 2011; Buckley, 2013; Scholte, 2011; Smith, 2008; Tallberg, Sommerer, Squatrito, & Jönsson, 2013). Further, it is argued that transnational activism can contribute to the transformation of global institutions (Smith, 2012, p. 9) particularly when priority voice is accorded to organizations representing social actors most affected by the policies under discussion (McKeon, 2015). Several studies on global governance have brought to attention that the engagement of CSOs could improve the democratization of global governance; in terms of enhanced participation and accountability, advancing global social justice and promoting an integrated approach to development. Nevertheless, these studies also warn for unsubstantiated optimism (cf., Bexell, Tallberg, & Uhlin, 2010; Scholte, 2011). However, there are few studies on the role of CSOs in global and regional migration governance. Research on CSO involvement in the global governance of migration has been initiated by several scholars (e.g. Kalm & Uhlin, 2015; Piper & Grugel, 2015). Yet, existing studies of global governance of migration in general, and publications that address the case of GFMD in particular, focus on policy practices and documenting the process, but are – with certain exceptions (e.g. Geiger & Pécoud, 2013; Rother, 2018; Schierup, Ålund, & Likić-Brborić, 2015) – without critical theoretical ambitions. There is, claims Betts (2010), a connection between this relative absence of critical academic studies of migration as a global political topic and a lack of a global political vision in formulating effective migration policies that enhance human development and empower migrant agency. International migration has become a central theme of international politics; ‘a bellwether theme, that decides elections and makes or breaks alliances’ (Castles, 2018, p. 239). However, it is, as argued by Castles (2010), essential to investigate and theorise international migration and political regimes into which it is embedded, as profoundly integrated with studies of wider processes of neoliberal transformation.

Stratagems of our current great transformation

Seen in this perspective, migration is a critical component in broader processes of the erosion of social and labor rights and the institutionalization of precarity (Schierup, Hansen, & Castles, 2006). New forms of niched labor markets are driven by the ways in which transnational migration is instrumentalised in the regulation and remaking of economies and contemporary societies in terms of the construction of institutionalized uncertainty. It produces ‘precarious workers’ over whom employers and labor users have particular mechanisms of control (Anderson, 2010, p. 300). The wider historical-structural context is the generation of a, multiple million strong, ‘surplus population’ over the past three and a half decades. It is a globally mobile reserve army of labor at the disposal of transnational corporations, sub-contractors and franchises; forged by austerity programs rolling back the social compacts of welfare and developmental states, and the spread of neo-colonial economies forging a predacious extractionism in the ‘poorer nations’ (Prashad 2012/2014) of the Earth. It has grown on the ruins of existing socialism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China. It has exploded due to the consequences of imperial wars scrambling for the Middle East and large parts of Africa in particular.

The suppressed issue of irregular migration

Piore (1979), for one, argued that international migration is driven by demands for a reserve army of labor staffing the secondary segment of ‘dual labor markets’. Bauder (2006) goes, with reference to neo-Marxist regulation theory, beyond Piore, in exploring migration as integral to corporate and state strategies for actively shaping and regulating labor markets. Along similar lines, Slavnic (2010) analyses the informalisation of labor as a strategic instrument for current neoliberal restructuring connected with irregular migration as a clandestine regulatory instrument. Deepened informalisation – with irregular migration as an exemplary manifestation – is, Slavnic argues, contingent on a structural discrepancy between old Fordist and welfare statist modes of regulation and new, neoliberal, regimes of accumulation. Established regulatory frameworks become politically unacceptable to dominant power-blocks that see them as inadequate for embedding changing modes of accumulation. This implicates that all involved actors develop their own coping strategies, which move beyond existing regulatory frameworks that have habitually defined distinctions between formal and informal economic activities. Thus, the incremental informalisation of labor, the proliferation of grey ethnic labor market niches and irregular migration belong to evasive strategies for managing transition in a conjuncture. Here, the normative and legal regulatory regime is out of pace with modes of capital accumulation and hegemonic coalitions’ uncompromising demands for ‘flexibility’ in terms of wage shrinking, di...