The autonomy of migration as travelling theory: Situated principles from Nepal

‘To speak of the autonomy of migration’, Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos write, ‘is to understand migration as a social movement in the literal sense of the words, not as a mere response to economic and social malaise.’ They go on: ‘The autonomy of migration approach does not, of course, consider migration in isolation from social, cultural and economic structures. The opposite is true: migration is understood as a creative force within these structures’ (2008: 202). To engage with the autonomy of migration thus requires a ‘different sensibility’, a different gaze , I would say. It means looking at migratory movements and conflicts in terms that prioritize the subjective practices, the desires, the expectations, and the behaviours of migrants themselves. This does not imply a romanticization of migration, since the ambivalence of these subjective practices and behaviours is always kept in mind. New dispositifs of domination and exploitation are forged within migration considered as a social movement, as well as new practices of liberty and equality. The autonomy of migration approach in this regard needs to be understood as a distinct perspective from which to view the ‘politics of mobility’ – one that emphasizes the subjective stakes within the struggles and clashes that materially constitute the field of such a politics. It shows, to employ the terms proposed by Vicki Squire in the introduction to this book, how the ‘politics of control’ itself is compelled to come to terms with a ‘politics of migration’ that structurally exceeds its (re)bordering practices. Indeed, it allows for an analysis of the production of irregularity not as a unilateral process of exclusion and domination managed by state and law, but as a tense and conflict-driven process, in which subjective movements and struggles of migration are an active and fundamental factor. Mainstream accounts of migrant movements or struggles often employ the lens of citizenship and contend that migrants want to become citizens. The autonomy of migration approach does something different from this. It looks at the fact that migrants –documented and undocumented – act as citizens and insist that they are already citizens (Bojadžijev and Karakayali 2007: 205). This requires a conceptualisation of citizenship which is distinct from the one employed by mainstream studies, where the latter is centred upon a concern for the integration of migrants within an already existing legal and political framework. In contrast, we stress the importance of practices and claims of those who are not necessarily citizens in juridical terms for the development of an understanding of the transformation of the legal framework of citizenship itself. This opens up the possibility of conceptualizing the movements and struggles of irregular migrants as central to the construction and transformation of citizenship as an ‘institution in flux’ (Balibar 2001; Isin 2002 and 2009; Mezzadra 2004). Nevertheless, from my point of view (and this is where I differ from the position adopted by Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos), the autonomy of migration approach has to be further developed in relation to our understanding of the role played by mobility in the history and the contemporary reality of capitalism. Far from reducing ‘mobile subjectivities to a productionist subjectivity of capitalism’ (Papadopoulos; Stephenson;

In migration scholarship, questions of social conflict and transformation tend to be addressed as the backdrop rather than as central dynamics in changing migration practices. This article calls for the integration of migration within wider sociological analyses of social struggle and change. While it is true that the emergence of interdisciplinary approaches, such as Transnational Studies, Diaspora Studies and Mobility Studies, has moved migration studies in new directions, migration continues to be addressed separately from scholarship on social conflict and change. Nonetheless, these new domains challenge received sociological categories and develop more nuanced accounts by identifying distinct experiences of migration as shaped by contemporary mobilities and transnational processes. In this article I review these approaches and consider their potential for opening up new directions for the study of migration as an aspect of wider social struggles. I also examine the extent to which these fields of study work against the ‘capture’ of knowledge on migration by those forces that attempt to control it. Given the limitations identified, I argue that the ‘autonomy of migration’ approach provides important pointers for how social struggle and the politics of knowledge production might be centred in the study of migration.

Migration scholars, and the universities and institutions who fund them, at times neglect to address the ways in which the traces of the imperial past, and references to the ‘post’ colonial serve to obfuscate and legitimize discriminatory practices in their work. The ‘imperial eyes’ of the academy set the terms and limitations on interactions, locations, and relationality in research, reducing the agency of migrants, producing stratified configurations in the positionality of both migrants and researchers and, subsequently, exacerbating dynamics of exclusion and extraction. As early-stage researchers, we see a critical need for an approach to migration studies which undermines the ongoing impact of colonialism and the normativity of institutionalized, hierarchical narratives that haunt academia. Our research builds on the work of scholars who write about the autonomy of migration, liberation theorists, and critical Indigenous perspectives, but our positions are also influenced by those on the ‘frontlines’ resisting various manifestations of violence and exclusion. In this article, using an interdisciplinary model, we propose the notion of collective self-inquiry to critically question and inquire into our own methods and approaches and provide a set of methodological tools that can be applied by other researchers within and outside of the university. These tools invite us to work collectively and look more critically at the b/ordering of movement(s) across former empires, thus helping us navigate towards the undercommons, a place where the liberatory potential of the academy can be realized.

As with all social processes, human migration is a dynamic process that requires regular theoretical reflection; this article offers such reflection as related to the role of the natural environment in contemporary migration research and theory. A growing body of evidence suggests that environmental contexts are increasingly shifting social and ecological realities in ways that are consequential to migration theory. We review some of this evidence, providing examples applicable to core migration theories, including neoclassical economic and migration systems perspectives, the "push-pull" framework, and the new economics of labor migration. We suggest that neglecting consideration of the natural environment may yield misspecified migration models that attribute migration too heavily to social and economic factors particularly in the context of contemporary climate change,. On the other hand, failure to consider migration theory in climate scenarios may lead to simplistic projections and understandings, as in the case of "climate refugees". We conclude that migration researchers have an obligation to accurately reflect the complexity of migration's drivers, including the environment, within migration scholarship especially in the context of global climate change.

Due to its crucial role in sustainable development, the economic structure transformation has attracted much attention at both national and provincial levels. For various reasons, the importance of regional linkages, especially spatial interaction in economic structure transformation, is not recognized and thus ignored in economic policies. This study addresses this literature gap with an empirical analysis of taking Vietnam as the study area and examines the impact of spatial interaction with metropolises on the provinces' economic structure transformation. To evaluate the impacts, this paper used Moran I statistic based on the geographic information extracted from GADM (Database of Global Administrative Areas) and the data of economic structure in the period from 2015-2018, collected from the General Statistics Office of Vietnam. The spatial panel data analysis is then performed to interpret spatial interaction influences on economic structure transformation extensively. The results show that the regional relationship can explain economic structure transformation by clustering economic activities in provinces. The spatial interaction with metropolises has positive effects on provinces' economic structure transformation. As such, stronger linkages with metropolises through investing in the transportation system, especially the infrastructure connecting areas, could also play a crucial role in reducing agricultural sector share in provinces' economic structure.

The Turkish Republic was established in 1923 as an invention of the modernist– Westernist elites who sought a radical transformation of traditional Ottoman Islamic social, economic, and political structures after the three-year War of Independence (1919–22) against foreign occupation in Anatolia. The transformative modernist project of the Westernist elites took capitalism as the new economic basis of society; the nation-state and parliamentary democracy as its political structure; and secularization as its cultural process. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu first used the term “Kemalism” on 28 June 1929 to refer to the new nation- and state-building ideology that defined the legitimate political vocabulary constituting the basic principles and values of the Turkish path to modernity.1 Then the term “Kemalism” was used in the mainstream histography of the Turkish Revolution to refer to a new political stand that interpreted the revolutionary practices that had taken place between 1923 and 1935 within the framework of the tradition of ideological positivism. It broadly implied a philosophical–political stand that was shaped by an adherence to the formal “six arrow” principles of the Turkish Revolution. Ali Kazancigil argued that Kemalist ideology was an amalgam of the ideas associated with laicism, nationalism, solidarist positivist political theory, and 19th-century scientism.2 The dominant trend in the histography of the Kemalist revolution saw it as a late-Enlightenment movement that had its roots in the secular-rationalist tradition of ideological positivism and characterized the politics of the era as a zero-sum game between secular-modernist Kemalists in action and religiously oriented anti-modernists in reaction. Yet both the progressive Kemalists and reactionary groups had heterogeneous structures and were composed of many groups formed around different philosophical–political understandings about the novelties brought about by the Turkish Revolution. This study, however, limits itself to the goal of illustrating the plurality of groups and approaches to the Turkish Revolution within the modernist–Kemalist ranks of which the neo-republican conservatives were an organic part. How alternative interpretations of the Turkish Revolution, including the neo-conservative one, became part of the Kemalist histography is an open-ended question that requires a comprehensive survey of the ideological and philosophical trends prevalent within the ranks of the modernist elites in the 1920s and 1930s.

During the fifth century, the Roman population of southern Gaul was confronted with continuously changing power relations and the transformation of traditional Roman social, political and economic structures. This article seeks to address differing perceptions of the new barbarian rule by analysing a sermon from the so‐called Eusebius Gallicanus collection. The sermon reflects the tense atmosphere in a community located in southern Gaul at the end of the fifth century. The preacher, however, attempted to put the people's fears into perspective by assigning the qualities of Christian Roman morality to the Goths, while dismissing the behaviour of the Romans as impious and barbarous.

In recent years a substantial body of literature has grown up around the application of the theorectical insights of regulation theory to the evolution of patterns of local governance and the structures of the local state (Geddes 1988: Goodwin, Duncan and Halford 1993; Painter 1991: Peck and Tickell 1992: Stocker 1989 inter alia). These new patterns of local governance are characteristically seen to be associated with the replacement of the formallly accountable, democracitcally elected structures of local government with a plethora of unaccountable and non-elected agencies involving public-private sector ‘part-nership’, Within this literature the emergence of new patterns of local governance is accounted for in terms of a response to the crisis of Fordism. In this article it is argued that regulation theory's principal analytical strength lies in its analysis of the internal contradictions and dynamics of modes of regulation, but that it has thus far failed to develop an adequate explanation of the transition between modes. As a consequence, existing accounts of the emergence of new modes of local governance couched in terms of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (or after-Fjordism) have tended to fail to reveal the complex mechanisms and processes linking global economic dynamics and the transformation of the structures of the national and local state. By interrogating the concept of ‘crisis’ in regulation theory and by considering the processing of the failures of Foprdism through the state at national and local level as a condition of any response to crisis, it is hoped to begin to develop a theory of the transition between modes of regulation. Such a theory, as it is hoped to demonstrate, might provide the basis for a more nuanced understanding of the complex process and mechanism resulting in the transformation of political and economic structures at the local level.

This review analyzes the book Rental Society: In the Shadow of Labor, Capital, and Democracy. The book’s authors consider factors and conditions for the transition from a social state and a society of mass labor to a rental type of society. The main reasons for this transformation are the depletion of resources on a global scale and the replacement of humans by machines, which entails the growth of social groups living off various forms of rent (benefits, unconditional basic income, additional payments, etc.). Meanwhile, fewer and fewer people are involved in the production of wealth. Under these conditions, the only active political subject becomes a non-democratic and non-egalitarian state, which distributes rents to various social groups. Simultaneously with the transformation of economic, political, and social structures, the content of moral consciousness also changes during the transition from a labor society to a rent society. There is a transition from labor morality to rent-parasitic morality, which, in view of the objective conditions for the existence of the rent majority, is internalized and gradually becomes a new moral norm. Two possible scenarios for the further development of the rental society are discussed. The positive scenario is a formation of a new type of economy due to the development of science, personality, new socialization forms. Negative scenario is associated with the deepening and globalization of rent processes, leading to “neoliberal feudalism,” to a society without mass labor and economic growth but with a hierarchy of class-rent groups, between which the state distributes rents and privileges using non-economic methods. In addition, the article shows significant shortcomings of the reviewed research: inconsistent understanding of the concept of rent, overly broad understanding of the subjects of rental processes, unjustified extrapolation of rent relations to the whole history of mankind (so called rent presentism).

In this article, I trace struggles regarding EU internal mobility and migrant labour as they emerge in the mobilization of South European migrants in Berlin. The effects of the 2007–2008 financial crisis and European austerity politics have reoriented migration flows within the EU, increasing South-to-North migration with Germany as a prime destination. German public discourse on the matter reveals a view on (EU) migration that focuses on its economic ‘usefulness’ and tries to regulate it accordingly. EU citizenship turns out to be a key instrument of such EU internal ‘<em>migration management</em>’. The emergence of migrant activist groups, however, hints at another force at play. In their fight for social rights and better working conditions, migrant activists show they will not allow themselves to be easily ‘managed’ into precarious ‘productivity’. Against this background, I argue that EU internal mobility is a field of struggle where attempts to control migrant labour clash with moments of <em>autonomy</em> and resistance. My aim is to explore this field from a migration perspective, analysing rationales of EU <em>‘migration management’</em> and their impact on migrants’ lives as well as investigating the strategies that migrants develop in response. Based on an analysis of EU legislation and interviews with Italian activists in Berlin, I trace conflicts around EU internal mobility and migrant labour. Against the background of critical migration studies, I analyse EU internal <em>‘migration management’</em>, especially regarding the role of EU citizenship. Then, I look at EU migrant struggles in Berlin through the lens of <em>autonomy of migration</em>, drawing on the example of the Italian activist group <em>Berlin Migrant Strikers.</em>

Italian Diasporic Studies: The Then and Now

Two opposed images have dominated discussions of the transformation of class structures in developed capitalist societies. The first of these is associated with the idea that contemporary technological changes are producing a massive transformation of social and economic structures that are moving us towards what is variously called a “post-industrial society” (Bell 1973), a “programmed society” (Touraine 1971), a “service society” (Singelmann 1978; Fuchs 1968) or some similar designation. The second image, rooted in classical Marxist visions of social change, argues that in spite of these transformations of the “forces of production,” we remain a capitalist society and the changes in that class structure thus continue to be driven by the fundamental “laws of motion” of capitalism. The post-industrial scenario of social change generally envisions the class structure becoming increasingly less proletarianized, requiring higher and higher proportions of workers with technical expertise and demanding less mindless routine and more responsibility and knowledge. For some of these theorists, the central process underwriting this tendency is the shift from an economy centered on industrial production to one based on services. Other theorists have placed greater stress on the emancipatory effects of the technical–scientific revolution within material production itself. In either case the result is a trajectory of changes that undermines the material basis of alienation within production by giving employees progressively greater control over their conditions of work and freedom within work.

Naturalism is the philosophy that adopted the theory of evolution and the domination of natural properties. The popularity of naturalism was due to the rise of the extensive biological researches and the evolution of natural sciences by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The emergence and the rise of these scientific theories were the contributing factors to the domination of naturalistic trends. It had an ample impact on urban and architectural schemes. Environmental catastrophes and the climate change that followed the second world war that reached its peak in the last two decades of the twentieth century were the major factors in attracting the attention to the importance of preserving nature. Naturalism was inspired by biological theories using a biological metaphor. The philosophy brought to mind techno-scientific images which drew out the concept of genetic architecture. These images tried to synchronize with the natural variables in order to achieve the concept of sustainable development. This paper aims to examine the concept of sustainable architecture by studying the architectural movements that are influenced by nature and biological theories, such as terms, models, projects, and buildings. For a deep understanding of the current discourse, this paper searches for the impact of the philosophy of naturalism on the history of sustainable architecture. The paper focuses on the notion of resilience while picturing the transformation of economic, political, social and physical structures into resilient urban spaces and organizational patterns which have the potential to grow and change—a subject mostly presented in a historical review.

Boundaries are defined and maintained to establish and preserve cultural, societal and political integrity. Boundaries change as territorial structures and their related meanings change over time, reflecting the transformation of economic, political, administrative and cultural practices and discourses, and inherent relations of power. The Israeli metropolis of Tel Aviv is no different in this context. The end of World War I and establishment of a British Mandate regime in Palestine resulted in the transformation of political, economic, social and cultural structures. The British Mandate afforded the rise of and development of Tel Aviv from Jaffa's Jewish garden suburb into a separate urban entity. Different internal and external factors affected the delineation of the urban bounds of Tel Aviv following its declaration by the British Mandate government as an autonomous township.

The intangibles and imponderables of the transition to democracy