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Crossing Borders and Traversing Boundaries: Closing the ‘Gap’ between Internal and International Migration in Asia
Author(s) -
Hickey Maureen,
Yeoh Brenda S.A.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
population, space and place
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.398
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1544-8452
pISSN - 1544-8444
DOI - 10.1002/psp.1957
Subject(s) - internal migration , migration studies , discipline , economic geography , normative , conversation , sociology , political science , geography , social science , law , population , gender studies , demography , communication
Within migration studies, the division or ‘gap’ between internal and international migration research has grown over the past few decades despite growing calls to bring these literatures back into conversation. While distinctions between internal and international migration remain relevant in a world in which states retain the power to shape human movements across scales, this division within migration studies is problematic in light of the increasing complexity of human mobility. Scholars seeking to close the ‘gap’ highlight the common structural drivers of international and internal migration, and note an increasingly myopic focus on international migration overlooking the important economic and social contributions of internal migrants. While in basic alignment with these arguments, the contributions to this special issue focus instead on critically interrogating the relationship between internal and international migration research with the aim of provoking new insights across disciplinary and categorical boundaries. Each of the papers examines migration phenomena occupying the intellectual and empirical space between normative definitions of ‘internal’ and ‘international’ migration in order to relink them methodologically and empirically in contemporary migration research. The contributions included here draw on these migration phenomena that do not fit neatly into normative definitions of ‘internal’ and ‘international’ migration with the aim of not only narrowing or closing the ‘gap’, but of retheorising the relationship between them. The collective focus of this special issue, therefore, is to challenge ontological assumptions of ‘migration’ as a definable object of study and to theorise migration as a co‐constituted and relational process. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.