Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This final chapter provides an intervention developed out of a reflection on the debates raised in this book, such as the unsustainability of the current dynamics of labour management between sending and host countries, and the fallacy of migration governance through standard, state-centric diplomatic and international organizational mechanisms. It tries to open up new perspectives for a more inclusive governance through bottom-up politics, thinking of governing migration ‘from the margins’. As an attempt to advance the critique on labour and migration, starting from a context that has been almost systematically overlooked in the literature, it reflects on labour migration governance in participatory terms and from a migrant-oriented perspective. Thus, it stresses the necessity of an agency-centred approach, building on this book’s novel contributions. First, it speaks to the insights that the previous chapters bring up through the prism of the multiple scales and forms of governance active in this space, and from the perspective of migrant experiences and rights. Second, it raises questions of labour rights and dignity, by highlighting potential trajectories for migrant workers’ resistance in the South Asia to Gulf corridor to escape vulnerability and navigate the complex formations of illegality and irregularity.
Within the broader India–UAE migration corridor, the Kerala–Dubai corridor illustrates the complex assemblage of actors operating in a migration governance space and, in a variety of ways, challenging state sovereignty over this issue area. Where some view migration and citizenship governance as a ‘last bastion of state sovereignty’ (Dauvergne 2008: 169), others suggest growing evidence in various spheres of migration governance of ‘extraterritorial interventions’ by states and private actors (Rodriguez and Schwenken 2013: 381), and even ‘deterritorialized labour market regulation’ (Ennis and Walton-Roberts 2018: 179). In this chapter, we examine such contested governance and sovereignty in the Kerala–Dubai migration corridor through two cases: the process of recruitment and the establishment of a shared electronic migration regulatory system.
The emigration of skilled female workers, although it has not received the same level of attention as low-skilled female migration, is on the increase. This chapter examines nurse migration from India to various Gulf States, which since 2015 has been managed through the system of ‘Emigration Clearance Required’ (ECR) and routed through select public sector agencies. We evaluate this as a form of gendered transnational migration governance. This recent policy change is aimed at controlling predominately female migration in the nursing occupation through the use of the ECR process, which has been characterized as a means to discriminate based on education, and is typically only applied to low-skilled migration flows to Gulf nations. Since this policy was introduced, the number of nurses heading to the Gulf initially declined, but recent surveys of migrants in the Gulf suggest that available Indian data on the magnitude of ECR migration to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries may not correspond with the actual numbers of Indian migrants there. We argue that this extension of ECR to the migration of nurses structures and limits their formal migration options. However, evidence suggests informal migration pathways (bypassing Indian governance) remain, which, together with the lack of attention to working conditions for nurses in India and receiving nations, increases the vulnerability of these migrants. This chapter illustrates a broader trend in migration governance. As witnessed here in the cases of nurses, policies established by sending states that aim to protect migrants, de facto victimize them and limit their mobility through surveillance, pushing migrant workers into informal channels of migration. Increased state control over migration does not necessarily overlap with increasing rights or procedural guarantees for migrants,eitherduring the recruitment process or onceat the destination.
Based on a comparative analysis of data and policy attitudes in Nepal and Sri Lanka towards women’s migration for paid domestic work, this chapter delineates how women migrant workers contribute to social reproduction at both source and destination but are not recognized for their labour. While some existing protectionist interventions at source and destination countries aim to safeguard women migrant workers who are vulnerable to being trafficked and abused, I argue that such policy measures have had the opposite effect. In this chapter, I demonstrate that policy measures aimed at ‘protection’ have led to the absence, or ‘invisibilization’, of migrant domestic workers in official data, rendering their contribution to social reproduction unrecognized; thereby further marginalizing them in domestic and bilateral policy discussions, and within traditional migration governance channels altogether.
With its roots in a system of imperial labour governance that ‘delegated responsibility over the conduct of individuals to other parties’ (AlShehabi 2019), kafala has often been understood as a policy by which states in the Gulf regulate, police, and exploit migrant labour. This chapter instead works to develop a concept of kafala as a migration governance regime, a way for states to integrate citizens as actors in the migration governance complex and, in doing so, obfuscate questions of accountability, transparency, and regulation. This is most keenly seen in the case of domestic workers who stand to benefit the least from recent reforms to kafala across the region. By focusing on the ways that kafala integrates individual households into the migration governance complex, this chapter aims to foreground the importance of the socially reproductive work done by migrant labourers to the Gulf, and attempts to explain the mechanisms through which their work sits outside the purview of the state’s governance of migrant labourers to the Gulf. The chapter attempts to explain the mechanisms through which domestic work is often excluded from wider considerations regarding migrant labour, even as domestic work is the most common form that migrant labour takes.
The governance of migration has increased in complexity. Individual citizens (migrants and their families; political, professional, and ethnic communities), NGOs, regional and international organizations, and states (both central and subnational authorities) all have stakes in the migration process, and each serve as potential mechanisms of governance or venues for responding to migrant needs. Some scholars focus on the international level through the role of global institutions, while others concentrate on national migration and labour regulations. Yet frameworks that account for the multi-layered nature of migration governance across multiple sovereign political domains are lacking. This is a story of overlapping contested sovereignties, which occurs across, above, and below the involved states. We examine these dynamics by looking at one significant, albeit neglected, case: the South-to-West Asia migration corridor. Gulf countries host nearly 14 per cent of global labour migrants, the source of nearly one quarter of global remittances. Moreover, over 90 per cent of migrant workers from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and over 65 per cent from Bangladesh and Nepal, find employment in a Gulf country. By focusing on this dynamic corridor through a collection of studies from scholars coming from different disciplines and research methodologies (political science, geography, anthropology, economics, law), we seek to map the multiple, simultaneous processes that form a migration governance complex to build theoretical insights for migration and governance literature.
