Transnational Agency and Migration

Actors, Movements, and Social Support

Stefan Köngeter, Wendy Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780415899079
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317397793
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Migrants, both spatially and mentally, no longer settle in only one national territory but interact or move across borders regularly, profoundly challenging the nation-state and the image of society as a container. This volume explores the ways in which migrants, activists and professionals connect social worlds across national boundaries through a variety of social practices. The contributions from various disciplines - anthropology, economics, political and social sciences, educational studies and social work - illuminate the meaning of agency in situations where the capabilities of transnational actors are constrained by nation-states, their borders and social institutions. Based on a relational understanding of transnational agency which builds upon new insights and developments within transnational studies and network theory, this compilation of chapters presents transnational processes and developments in and across various regions of the globe - in East Asia, the Americas, the EU, Southeast Asia, Africa and Australia, in the borderlands of Mexico and the US, in the transatlantic space of the 19th-century fin de siècle world - in order to demonstrate the importance of gaining, assisting and expanding agency in transnational contexts.

1 Transnational Agency

Migrants, Movements, and Social Support Crossing Borders

Stefan Köngeter & Wendy Smith

DOI: 10.4324/9781315680644-1

In today’s world, we experience fluidity in our social lives due to the border-crossing activities of workers, asylum seekers, and migrants, as individuals, families, or even whole communities. We also see the increasing interconnectedness of political conflicts (e.g. the Arab spring, Middle-East conflict), economic processes (e.g. the global economic crises of the last decade), and of everyday life through media usage (e.g. the global use and surveillance of the Internet), professional contacts (e.g. in multinational enterprises or academia), care arrangements (e.g. elderly care by transnational domestic workers), and many more. One of the most important and palpable phenomena in transnational processes is migration, voluntary, forced, or in the context of asylum seeking. Migrants, both spatially and mentally, no longer settle in only one national territory but interact or move across borders regularly: “Transmigrants develop and maintain multiple relations—familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political that span borders. Transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and feel concerns, and develop identities within social networks that connect them to two or more societies simultaneously” (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992, 2).

This definition already emphasizes two important aspects. First of all, it points to the fact that migration can no longer be conceptualized only in terms of nation-state policies, such as assimilation, integration, or multiculturalism. In fact, migrants do maintain ties, build up networks, and construct transnational social fields across national boundaries. Secondly, and more importantly for the intention of this book, is the emphasis on agency in the context of migration. Migrants are no longer conceptualized as victims of economic globalization or neoliberal governmentality, but are instead perceived as transnational actors in a world characterized by social inequality and power relations. Subsequently, a theoretical conceptualization of transnational agency has to keep in mind both the social conditions of global capitalism and the transnational practices that affect “power relations, cultural constructions, economic interactions, and, more generally, social organization at the level of the locality” (Guarnizo and Smith 1999, 5).

This edited volume examines the emerging importance of cross-border practices for gaining, expanding, and assisting agency. Its chapters include contributions from several disciplines, such as anthropology, economics, political and social sciences, educational studies, and social work, in order to illuminate the meaning of agency in transnational contexts in all its facets. Furthermore, the chapters present transnational processes and developments in and across various regions of the globe (e.g. in East Asia, the Americas, Indonesia and Australia, in the borderlands of Mexico and the US, in the transatlantic space of the 19th century fin de siècle world and many more). This introduction aims to provide a theoretical basis for the chapters that connects the topical and geographical breadth of the volume. More importantly, this chapter makes a case for a relational understanding of transnational agency that takes up new insights and developments of transnational studies and network theory and that is able to connect the variety of cross-border activities, namely migration, movements, and social support. Anna Tsing (2000) encapsulates the connectedness of these various practices in a brilliant metaphor that is the guiding idea behind this volume:

Imagine a creek cutting through a hillside. As the water rushes down, it carves rock and moves gravel; it deposits silt on slow turns; it switches courses and breaks earth dams after a sudden storm. As the creek flows, it makes and remakes its channels. Imagine an internet system, linking up computer users. Or a rush of immigrants across national borders. Or capital investments shuttled to varied offshore locations. These world-making ‘flows,’ too, are not just interconnections but also the recarving of channels and the remapping of the possibilities of geography. Imagine ethnic groups, corporations, refugees, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), nation-states, consumers, social movements, media moguls, trade organizations, social scientists, international lawyers, and bankers, all swarming alongside creeks and earthworms to compose the landscape, to define its elements, carve its channels of flow, and establish its units of historical agency. (327)

This metaphor reminds us that agency is the result of a great variety of actors with different perspectives and positions, including the academic community of social scientists who were responsible for an ongoing scientization of society (Brückweh et al. 2012). Therefore, our volume starts with the importance of migration for the transnationalization of the social world (Pries 2008), but follows the development of transnational studies that have broadened their scope and focus in the last twenty years.

Transnational processes are not only experienced by migrants, but affect the everyday life of the majority of the population in many countries (Herz and Olivier 2013; Mau 2010). Hence, transnational practices have profoundly challenged our modern social imaginaries (Taylor 2004) of nation-states as containers (Beck 1997). Transnational processes disturb the seemingly natural ordering of the social world into distinct nation-states: citizenship, sovereignty, social solidarity, and culture are all institutions which have been organized and perpetuated with primary reference to nations and nation-states (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, 226f). But as transnational social practices show, nationally constructed institutions are not the natural categories they appear to be at first sight. In fact, the nation-state and its institutions are the outcome of global historical processes which started in the 18th century and are still ongoing (Anderson 1983). Nation-states, therefore, play a paradoxical role in this context. On the one hand, they keep reasserting their national boundaries and sometimes try to erect impermeable borders. On the other hand, some nation-states recognize the potential of cross-border activities and strategically decide to weaken the national boundaries or encourage dual citizenship to obtain remittances from their citizens working abroad (see the chapters by Schaffar and Köngeter). Our concern with the topic of contemporary transnational processes emphasizes this resonance between the continuing transnational practices (e.g. of migration, advocacy, support, remittances) and the varying responses of nation-states and their institutions, and conceptualizes the growing importance of new practices and actors in the “world-making ‘flows’” (see Tsing 2000). In this chapter, we start with the discourse on agency in transnational studies (part 1) and develop from there a relational understanding of transnational agency (Part 2). This conceptualization of transnational agency is then exemplified and expanded, following the structure of our volume, to a focus on the transnational practices of migrants (Part 3), movements (part 4), and social support (part 5).

1 The Founding Principle of Agency in Transnational Studies

Transnationalism is a key term that is used in different disciplines with different objectives. One of the most cited starting points is migration studies, in which pivotal scholars such as Nina Glick Schiller, Roger Rouse, Alejandro Portes, and others have realized that migration is not a one-way street, but migrants do connect home and host country for longer periods of time by border-crossing activities. Only nowadays do we realize that these phenomena are much older, and historical research shows that transnational connections and contacts shaped the rise and fall of empires in the last 2500 years (Burbank and Cooper 2010).

However, as a modern phenomenon, transnationality has only been recognized and researched in the last forty years. Three disciplines, international relations, anthropology, and migration studies, have placed the emphasis on a transnational research perspective and have emphasized the importance of agency within this context. All of these disciplines oppose any predominant research focus perceiving the nation-state as a natural unit of research. This methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) led in the past to the neglect of research on the everyday activities of migrants (see for instance the emergence of transnational spaces, Faist and Özveren 2004; Pries 2001) and of political actors beyond the nation-states (see for instance the rising importance of transnational social movements in the political arena, Keck and Sikkink 1998). However, agency plays different roles in these disciplinary contexts, as we point out below.

In International Politics and International Relations, the rising importance of transnational relations was recognized first from the beginning of the 1970s, when Joseph S. Nye and Robert O. Keohane (1971) gathered a range of studies in the journal International Organization that exposed the gaps in international politics theory due to its primary focus on the relationships between states or state actors. Their often-cited introduction outlines a broad field of research on transnational relations and, in particular, shows how transnational interactions and organizations influence international politics. The increasing activities of transnational organizations, such as multinational enterprises, social movements, academic networks, etc. and their impact on national and international politics aroused the curiosity of many scholars. However, at the time most of the studies focused on large organizations, such as the Catholic Church, airlines, trade unions, and so on.

Only a few scholars took up the question of how individual actors can impact international politics as actors. One of the first was Robert C. Angell (1969), who emphasized the importance of the transnational participation of young elites for the development of global peace politics. This perspective was extended by Donald P. Warwick (1971), who criticized the fact that Angell neglected “public opinion” and focused so strongly on future elites and their influence on governmental representatives. Further research on transnational social movements and their influence on international and national politics endorsed this critique (Khagram, Rikker, and Sikkink 2002) and gave rise to more studies that pointed to the complex interplay of several actors in the global political arena and the power of social movements which give voice to people who are (or were once) subaltern and silenced (see for example Veneracion-Rallonza and Schaffar in this volume).

Although this was at the time not clearly foreseeable, Nye and Keohane envisaged the rising impact of collective agency, manifested only recently, for instance, during the Arab Spring, which was greatly facilitated and enhanced by new media technologies (cf. Khondker 2011):

As a result of global mass communications various groups in different societies, such as radical students, military officers, or racial minorities, can observe each other’s behavior and copy it when it seems appropriate. (. . .) Although its immediate effects are on the sensitivity of one state’s domestic politics to that of another, its secondary effects—or the effects of efforts to halt unwanted communication—may well have consequences for interstate politics. (Nye and Keohane 1971, 337)

The importance of agency beyond nation-states was also acknowledged by Anthropology and Cultural Studies. In contrast to world-system theorists (Wallerstein 1974) and historians of capitalism (Bayly 1989), Appadurai, for example, emphasized the simultaneity of a global diffusion of cultural practices and of resistances against them and suggested a complex analytical framework of overlapping landscapes of global cultural flows. In his perspective, the “individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival set of landscapes, for these landscapes are eventually navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part by their own sense of what these landscapes offer” (Appadurai 1990, 7). The act of considering the mobility of agents and their ability to create social spaces across nation-state borders was also a starting point for new ethnographic reflections on the meaning of location in a globalizing world. The paradigm of global ethnography (Gille and Ó Riain 2002) aims to reveal the interconnectedness of local processes and global economic, social, and political forces. Therefore, the salient focus of global ethnographers is to explore the intersection of different spatial scales (e.g. local, national, transnational, global) and to examine how these different scales were produced at different places (Gille and Ó Riain 2002). Unlike classic ethnography, these interdisciplinary arenas no longer simply investigate the local with a view to situating it in a world-system context (Wallerstein 1974). Rather, cultural phenomena are tracked at multiple locales and across national boundaries. Ethnography is no longer (merely) ethnography within the world system; it is simultaneously ethnography of the world system, as Marcus (1995) states in his seminal article.

The introducti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Transnational Agency: Migrants, Movements, and Social Support Crossing Borders
• PART I Transnational Migration
• PART II Transnational Movements
• PART III Transnational Education and Social Support
• Index