Violence,Networks, and International Migration from Colombia

Although Colombia is a major country of emigration, little is known about its citizens' motivations for migration. Social and economic conditions have been studied as determinants of migration, but violence has received less attention. We examine how social networks and violence function to promote emigration from Colombia by linking event‐history data from the Latin American Migration Project to external data on violence and economic conditions. We show that emigration is more likely to be initiated by those with higher education, those with network connections to migrants, and during periods of greater violence and increased police presence. Although violence acts powerfully to determine when people migrate, the geographic distribution of social capital determines where they go. Not surprisingly, migrants go to locations where people in their social networks are currently living or have been earlier.     

Ethnic Violence,Local Security and Return Migration: Enclave communities in Kosovo

Forced migration has become commonplace in the international political landscape. In 2015, 60 million people were displaced by violence, more than ever before recorded (UNHCR, 2015). While we know that violence leads to displacement, we know little about return migration after conflict – who comes back and where they settle. This article seeks to engage and supplement the literature on return migration after conflict, advocating for a broader understanding of the security choices made by displaced people. Emphasized here is the importance of a local understanding of safety and the role played by enclave communities in providing a secure context in which people can enjoy the society of their co‐ethnics.     

Status Compatibility,Physical Violence,and Emotional Abuse in Intimate Relationships

This article analyzing national data (N = 7,408) examines the connection between men's and women's relative economic contributions in families and the risk of husband‐to‐wife physical violence and emotional abuse. Family violence researchers have conceptualized the association between economic variables and the risk of intimate partner violence with respect to the structural dimensions of sociodemographic factors, whereas feminist researchers connect economic power to family dynamics. Marital dependency and stress frustration theories treat income, education, and employment as socioeconomic resources, whereas some feminist research points to the need for research that treats these economic variables as symbolic resources. Although income and educational attainment reduce women's risk of physical violence and emotional abuse by husbands, I find that status incompatibilities between partners that favor women increase the likelihood of emotional abuse.     

Economic Incorporation,Civil Inclusion,and Social Ties: Plans to Return Home Among Central Asian Migrant Women in Moscow,Russia

This study uses data from a survey of female labor migrants from three Central Asian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – in Moscow, Russia, to examine factors that influence these women's plans to return to their home countries. The conceptual framework considers three types of factors of migrants' attachment to the host society – economic incorporation, civil inclusion, and social connectedness – while also accounting for migrants' ties to their homelands. The results of multivariate analyses point to the importance of sector and type of employment, income, legal status, experience of ethnically motivated harassment, and social ties to adults relatives and friends in the host society in shaping return plans. In contrast, connections in the home country do not appear to influence the likelihood of having plans to return. These findings are contextualized within the political, socioeconomic, and ethnocultural reality of the post‐Soviet world and related to the cross‐national scholarship on return migration.     

Lightning Rods in the Local Moral Economy: Debating Unauthorized Migrants' Deservingness in Israel

Localized debates about who unauthorized migrants are and what they do, or do not, deserve unfold in a culturally specific register that is deeply charged with emotion and moral valuation. Structuring such debates are vernacular discursive frames that emerge from, and reflect, a common “local moral economy.” Taking Israel as case study, this article examines six elements of the country's local moral economy – biopolitical logic, historical memory, political emotion, popularized religion, an ideology of “fruitful multiplication,” and hasbara (“public diplomacy”/propaganda) – and explores their impact on public debates about unauthorized and irregular forms of migration. Here, as elsewhere, conventionalized distinctions that frame much migration scholarship – e.g. “economic” vs. “political” migrants, “migrant workers” vs. “refugees,” even the terms “authorized” and “unauthorized” themselves – bear but limited salience. Migration researchers who hope to influence local policy debates must recognize the weight and influence of local moral economies, and the chasms that divide vernacular from conventionalized frames. Achieving this sort of nuanced understanding is, at root, an ethnographic challenge.     

From democratic participation to civic resistance: the loss of institutional trust as an outcome of activism in the refugee solidarity movement

Adding to the literature on non‐institutional political action and trust, this article argues that the loss of institutional trust is not only a cause but also an outcome of political activism. Studying the Danish refugee solidarity movement in a mixed‐methods research design including survey and qualitative interview data, the article shows that three kinds of activism – political activism, humanitarian activity, and civil disobedience – relate differently to the loss of trust in the institutions of the Parliament, the legal system, and the police. Political activism primarily affects a loss of trust in the Parliament due to low external efficacy and a closed political opportunity structure. Civil disobedience affects a loss of trust in the legal system and the police due to a perceived lack of procedural justice. Humanitarian activity does not affect a loss of institutional trust because it does not imply interaction with the institutions to the same extent as the other kinds of activism. The consequence of losing trust in the political institutions is not an abandonment of democratic values, nor political apathy, but rather a change in civic engagement from a mode of democratically legitimizing participation in the institutions to a mode of contending and questioning the legitimacy of the political institutions. This finding indicates that in turn loss of institutional trust may cause an increase in extra‐institutional political action which is consistent with the commonly assumed causality in the literature. This leads to a final integrating argument for conceptualizing activism and loss of institutional trust as reinforcing factors in a process where, in line with the main finding of this study, activism may cause a loss of institutional trust which, in turn, may cause additional activism, as argued in the existing literature.     

Local Economic Opportunity and the Competing Risks of Internal and U.S. Migration in Zacatecas,Mexico1

This article uses a competing risks model to examine the effects of origin economic conditions on the probability of temporary U.S. and internal labor migration in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. We measure origin economic conditions with municipal‐level indices of employment and small‐scale investment opportunities that we constructed from population and economic census data. The results of our analysis demonstrate the important influence of local employment and investment opportunities on migration outcomes. Controlling for the prior municipal rate of U.S. return migration and other factors, positive opportunities for small‐scale investment are associated with a higher risk of temporary migration to the United States. This result is consistent with investment oriented migration predicted by the new economics of labor migration theory. We also find comparable social network effects for both internal and U.S. migration. Having social ties to active migrants of one type (U.S. or internal), encourages migration of the same type and discourages migration of the other type.     

Institutionalizing Recent Rural Emigration from China to Europe: New Transnational Villages in Fujian

The prevalence of irregular migration from a small region in the central parts of Fujian province has associated Chinese emigration with organized crime, exploitation and opportunism in a range of popular and academic writings both in China and outside China. Although migration brokers (“snakeheads”) play an important role in maintaining migratory flows already underway, they should not be seen as the root cause of migration from Fujian. In this article, we report on recently conducted fieldwork in two villages in central Fujian characterized by large‐scale emigration to Europe. Emigration from this part of China is strongly embedded in local political, sociocultural and economic institutions and histories. Migration brokers are certainly a part, but not more than that, of these local institutions. We conclude that the local embeddedness of migration renders population mobility from each area in China highly specific, and broad generalizations on the causes, nature and direction of the totality of Chinese, or even Fujianese, migration are bound to misrepresent a highly complex reality.     

Global Distribution of Transnational Human Rights NGOs: The Effects of Domestic Resources and Institutions

This article examines domestic sources of the uneven distribution of human rights transnational NGOs (TNGOs) across countries. I compile an original dataset covering 787 human rights TNGOs during the 2005–2010 period from the Yearbook of International Organizations (supplemented by the directories produced by Human Rights Internet and the Encyclopedia of Associations). I employ the zero‐inflated negative binomial model to explore domestic conditions influencing the location of TNGO headquarters. The analysis distinguishes two processes. First, population size and political institutions are particularly important for the likelihood of hosting any human rights TNGOs. Human rights TNGOs are likely to exist only in strong democratic countries with relatively large populations. Second, domestic resources (economic and human) and institutions (political and regulatory) affect the count of human rights TNGOs in a country. A high level of economic development, a large and well‐educated population, strong democratic institutions, and a less regulatory environment provide favorable conditions for the establishment of more human rights TNGOs. Although human rights TNGOs are transnationally oriented, their establishment is still greatly influenced by domestic factors.     

The linear imagination,stalled: changing temporal horizons in migrant journeys

In this article, I engage with a growing interest in questions of time in the study of migration to consider how changing temporal horizons in migrant journeys play an important role in shaping multilocal migration imaginaries. I draw on two ethnographic cases with migrant care workers from the Philippines, of different generations and at different points of their migration journeys, to examine how initially held linear imaginaries of migration become confounded and stuck over time. Snapshots of migrant lives at these different points of the journey – ‘(pre)‐departures’, ‘stepping stones’, ‘settling’ – reveal how migrants’ temporal horizons shift as a consequence of changing state and political‐economic conditions, as well as migrants’ own dynamic subjective and affective engagements. New uncertainties, possibilities and dilemmas unfold and initial linear imaginaries give way instead to those that are open‐ended and asynchronous. A temporal perspective reveals that mobilities are not marked by a beginning and an end but rather involve ongoing, multiple and provisional journeys across locales and over time and the life course.     

The paradox of illicit economies: survival,resilience, and the limits of development and drug policy orthodoxy

ABSTRACT

The illicit drug crops opium and coca are conventionally regarded as sources of instability, an ‘evil’ that breeds fragility and violence. Fragile states are supposed to be most vulnerable to their production and consequent harms. Yet by looking into the local contexts of the world’s leading opium and coca producers – Afghanistan, Myanmar, Colombia and Bolivia – these illicit crops are found to also be sources of stability, even drivers of economic growth. They enable marginalized communities and territories abandoned by the state to be reinserted into national and global markets. Within so-called ‘fragile’ and conflict-affected areas are displaced and dispossessed households adopting innovative and unorthodox strategies for coping and survival in changing and insecure environments. This paper maps out an approach, useful for examining the resilience that has emerged amidst violence and uncertainty in illicit-crop-producing territories, and which can hopefully tackle the continuing disconnect between drugs and development policy.     

Marginal movements and minority struggles? The case of the Japanese minority social and labour movements

In Japan, some of the socially, economically and politically marginalised have developed robust social and labour movements that engage with mainstream society. These movements have developed strategies challenging the conditions of the excluded, while also highlighting pathways to establish, or enhance, individual and collective participation in the labour market and the wider society. Two distinct though related, social and organisational forms of these movements are elaborated – firm‐centred and community centred respectively. The former especially has a combative past in the labour struggles of the 1950s in what are known as sa'ha shōsū‐ha kumiai (left wing Minority union, or, Minority‐faction union). However, this does not mean Minorities are inherently leftist in orientation. In the 1940s and 1950s, during a period of radical union hegemony, a collaborative form of second unions developed assisting the purge of radical leaderships. Our focus here is on a contemporary radical democratic current. While articulating concerns of those in full time employment outside the political mainstream they may also represent ethnically and otherwise socially marginalised workers. The community unions, a form of what are known as ‘new‐type union’, shingata kumiai (this term will be used here to describe the community unions) articulate the concerns of those socially and economically marginalized in the community and the wider labour market. Controversially, the term ‘Minority union’ is used to depict the different forms of oppositional social movement union in a broader sense than is typically understood in the literature. This is because they share a common concern with the articulation of Minority social and political interests in the context of the employment relationship and the local community. In considering the character of these social movement unions the article seeks to add to what Price (1997 ) describes as ‘bottom up history’ which we term ‘sociology from below’.     

Visual representations of ethnic violence: an Indonesian portrayal

The horrific violence that has marred Indonesia's ‘transition to democracy’ raises numerous disconcerting questions; not least of which is how future interested actors or governments – central and regional alike – will tackle these atrocities in a historical framework. How should a series of historical events, such as the killing of thousands of Indonesians by Indonesians be (un)officially remembered? Two paintings that hang in Sambas, West Kalimantan's most prominent cultural centrepiece, the Alwadzi Koebillah kraton, are remarkable, for they give us a glimpse as to how local voices might attempt to possess the historical meanings and readings of Indonesia's recent ethnic strife. Perhaps one of a kind in Indonesia, these paintings boldly portray the bloody battles that took place in Sambas in early 1999, pitting the ‘courageous’ and ‘youthful’ Malays of Sambas against the ‘middle-aged’ and ‘treacherous’ Madurese. These depictions make it abundantly clear that, through this bloodletting, Sambas Malays awoke from their slumber in time to mobilise, to confront and to defeat their nemesis. As an ethnopolitical force, the glorious rise of ‘Malay’ is unmistakable. The broader political context in which these paintings were commissioned, however, invests them with greater significance. Only in a decentralised state, one distinct from the excessive centralism of the New Order, would the (semi) public display of these heroic memorials to local, i.e. non-national, violence be made possible.     

Crafting social change: former global factory workers negotiating new identities in Sri Lanka’s villages

This article explores how former factory workers negotiate new identities in villages, as new brides, mothers and daughters-in-law, after 5–6 years of employment in an urban Free Trade Zone. I argue that their performances of self-discipline and disavowal of transgressive knowledges allow them to make use of the limited social, economic and political spaces available while gradually reshaping local understandings about the good daughter-in-law. Former workers’ strategic deployment of social conformity represents the foundation on which their entry into village social, economic, political spaces is based on. Although individual social conformity would conventionally be identified as everyday politics, I argue that former workers’ performance of self-discipline and social conformity is strategic and leads to changes in gender norms and village social hierarchies and thus represents a form of politics that is in between everyday and transformative politics – politics that creates conditions of possibility for social transformations.     

Chinese Migration and Entangled Histories: Broadening the Contours of Migratory Historiography

This paper broadens the analytical contours of Chinese migration by employing the paradigm of histoire croisée. By comparing three connected episodes within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: (1) British expansionism; (2) Kuomintang activities and British migratory legislation; and (3) the interconnection of the slump in China's silk industry, the anti‐marriage movement, and the intertwinement of historiographies of China and Singapore – the entangled histories approach offers analytic purchase for which Chinese migration can be scrutinised with attention paid to the interpellations of historical contingencies and economic relations. The paper therefore analyses broader sociocultural and political patterns that inflect migratory flows, and considers the significance of how migratory historiography bears upon social memory of Chinese female migrants.     

They Should Say “I Don't”: Norms About Midpregnancy Marriage and Job Loss

This study examined effects of local economic conditions on individuals' attitudes toward midpregnancy marriages using an experimental vignette method. Adults (N = 460) were each shown two vignettes about a hypothetical couple expecting a baby; within each vignette pair, vignettes randomly varied as to whether the couple lived in a community that had recently experienced job losses or had stable employment. Respondents indicated if the couple should and will get married before the baby's birth. Results showed that worse local economic conditions led people to believe that marriage would be less common. Among more socioeconomically disadvantaged respondents, if the hypothetical couple lived in a community with job loss, fewer respondents also thought that the couple should marry. In contrast, among more socioeconomically advantaged respondents, slightly more respondents thought that the couple should marry. When economic conditions worsen, low‐socioeconomic‐status individuals may believe that financial prerequisites for marriage become harder to meet.     

Migration Dynamics,Entrepreneurship, and African Development: Lessons from Malawi

Using data from Malawi, this study situates the discourse on migration, entrepreneurship, and development within the context of Africa's social realities. It examines self‐employment differences among three groups of migrants and corresponding group differences in agricultural and non‐agricultural self‐employment. International migrants are found to be more engaged in self‐employment than internal migrants. However, our results suggest that previous findings on the development‐related contributions of returning migrants from the West need to be appropriately contextualized. When returnees from the West invest in self‐employment, they typically shy away from Africa's largest economic sector – agriculture. In contrast, levels of self‐employment, especially in agricultural self‐employment, are highest among returning migrants and immigrants from other African countries, especially from those nearby. We also underscore the gendered dimensions of migrants’ contribution to African development by demonstrating that female migrants are more likely to be self‐employed in agriculture than male migrants. Furthermore, as human‐capital increases, migrants are more likely to concentrate their self‐employment activities in non‐agricultural activities and not in the agricultural sector. The study concludes using these findings to discuss key implications for policy and future research.     

Internal Migration of Ethno‐national Minorities: The Case of Arabs in Israel

Recent scholarship emphasizes differences among ethnic groups' internal migration patterns. Yet, with few exceptions, research has focused on the Anglo‐American world, neglecting experiences from other regions. This paper is part of a larger research project that studies mobility among the Arab minority in Israel and its driving forces. In this paper we examine patterns of internal migration by analysing the propensity to migrate as well as migrants' individual and social characteristics. First, we survey the theoretical backdrop that is suggested by recent geographic literature on internal migration among ethnic and racial minorities, including native groups. Second, we contextualize the group studied, providing necessary background information on the political, socio‐economic and demographic conditions of Arabs in Israel. We briefly discuss attributes that are – or have been – potential hindering factors to Arab mobility in the Jewish state. Finally, we analyse 1995 national census data at the micro scale and provide a basis for future explanations of the phenomenon. We conclude by outlying some future directions in the study of internal migration of minorities in Israel.     

Economic Distress and Intimate Violence: Testing Family Stress and Resources Theories

Hypotheses shaped by family stress and resource theories about the impact of household economic indicators on the risk of violence against women in intimate relationships are tested with a data set built from the initial two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) and the 1990 U.S. Census. Measures of employment status, job conditions, and economic well‐being for male and female partners are examined with logistic regression analyses as predictors of the odds of male‐to‐female intimate violence. Results underline the importance that partners attach to each other's work performance and their feelings of financial well‐being in assessing whether job holding and household income serve to elevate or reduce the risk of intimate partner violence toward women.     

Policy Implications for Addressing Roma Precarious Migration Through Employment at Home

Roma migration from Romania is often precarious and takes place in circumstances that increase pre‐existent levels of vulnerability. For many, migration is a last resort solution for navigating an insecure economic environment. For others, it has become a source of profit they draw upon, sometimes at the expense of the most vulnerable members of Roma communities. The major challenge this article addresses is how to create the enabling circumstances at home in order to provide alternatives to precarious migration for Roma. Informed by interviews with Roma migrants and with local authorities, this article examines the policy options at local level, addressing Roma precarious migration. It examines the limitations of the current employment policies in relation to Roma in order to identify what seem to work, what sounds promising and what does not work. It advises that job fairs and counselling campaigns are likely to fail, as they do not tackle the structural constraints keeping Roma outside the labour market. Unless linked with realistic employment opportunities, training courses also remain precarious strategies for labour market integration. The article also argues that individualized interventions (including repatriation schemes) are likely to increase community divides. The article supports structural, community‐level measures for tackling unemployment and argues that future policies need to have Roma communities as the ‘unit of intervention’, because the social preconditions for migration are likely to be generated at this level. This policy proposal is grounded in the research finding that an apparently consistent group of Roma migrants, prone to deceitful recruitment and precarious migration, would endorse reasonable and stable economic solutions at home. Yet accepting that circular migration may be inevitable for a number of Roma is an important ingredient when designing policy interventions.