About the JEMS special issue

Informality has attracted significant attention in migration studies, yet a fresh look is needed given the succession of world crises over the past 15 years and the increasing use of informality to deal with them. Why and how has migration governance experienced informality’s expansion in policies and practices? What are the drivers, sites, temporalities, and implications of such an expansion? How do power relations among different stakeholders affect such governance compared to normative and institutional logics? This collection sheds light on little explored socio-spatial and temporal aspects of informality’s use in such governance, on world politics and political regimes, governing polycentrically and using specific mechanisms of power. Building on extensive fieldwork and data-driven secondary research, this collection covers Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe, including Belarus and Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Turkey and Iraq in the Middle East, and Albania in the Balkans, as well as Thailand and Myanmar in Asia.

About the speakers

Maria Koinova is Professor in International Relations at the University of Warwick in the UK, studying how diasporas, refugees and irregular migration impact on the political development of conflict and post-conflict societies.

Zeynep Şahin Mencütek is a Senior Researcher at Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC) in Germany, leading a Horizon Europe project on migrant returns and return policies. Lisa Marie Borrelli is Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Work, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, studying social policies and migration governance, critical border regime studies and the anthropology of emotions and organisations.