This introductory article presents the aims, context, and main findings of a symposium on return and readmission policies in Europe. It situates contemporary return policy within the historical transformation of European migration governance, from postwar labor recruitment and refugee protection to the politicization, securitization, and administrative intensification of removal. Drawing on eight national case studies covering seven EU member states and the United Kingdom, the article examines how return and readmission have become central organizing principles of migration governance. It identifies common patterns across the cases, including deterrence, detention, externalization, accelerated procedures, expanded discretion, weakened safeguards, and the production of deportability and legal limbo. The article argues that these developments reveal not merely technical changes in migration administration, but increasingly visible authoritarian tendencies within European return governance.

"This Handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the interaction between migration and development from a range of critical and counter-hegemonic perspectives. Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of existing practices connected with the migration and development nexus, contributing authors provide a clear understanding of their complex dynamics. Divided into three thematic sections, the Handbook opens with a range of cutting-edge theoretical insights and methodologies that seek to establish the current state of the art. Following this, chapter authors use exploitation and dispossession as overarching concepts to frame key aspects of migration and development from a labour and class perspective. The Handbook then looks ahead, considering the opportunities and dilemmas illustrated by the various initiatives aimed at framing a multi-level governance regime for migration and development across the globe. The Handbook on Migration and Development is an invaluable resource for students, academics and researchers in migration, development studies, sociology and social policy. Bringing together a wide range of underrepresented voices, this Handbook is also of benefit to policymakers working in international migration"--Provided by publisher.

The significance of migration to social and economic development has been widely recognized and discussed for many decades. It has, however, only been since the early 2000s that international migration has been acknowledged as a key global challenge and, thus, been placed squarely on the agenda of the United Nations. Unlike their predecessors, the millennium development goals (MDGs), the sustainable development goals (SDGs) also make explicit reference to migration, thereby incorporating migration into global development policy, alongside other pressing global challenges such as inequality, gender discrimination, and decent work deficits that are among the key reasons why people choose to embark upon migration. This chapter discusses the SDGs in relation to the emergence of global migration governance in terms of its institutionalization as a global policy area by also raising aspects of migration that are hidden or neglected but deemed vital by researchers and activists. By highlighting the centrality of paid work in the life of migrants and the feminization of migration, it focuses on two goals in particular: Goal 8 (decent work) and Goal 5 (gender equality, women's empowerment).

The relationship between migration and development has become a major academic and polit-ical issue encompassing national, regional, and global contexts. Hitherto, the agenda for dis-cussion has been largely dictated by the governments of the major migrant-receiving northerncountries (primarily the US and the European Union) and implemented by key internationalorganisations such as the World Bank and the International Organization for Migration, aswell as some regional organisations such as the Inter-American Development Bank, theInternational Centre for Migration Policy Development, and the Organization for Security andCooperation in Europe. This Handbook proposes giving voice to more critical and heterodoxperspectives as well as voices from the South, in a bid to articulate a counter-hegemonic vision(see, in the same vein, Munck et al., 2020).

Against the presentation of an asymmetric global governance, this article analyzes the formation of global migration governance with its focus on the politics of migration and development. It traces the marginalization of a rights-based approach to migration and the streamlining of migration governance into business-friendly migration management and a geopolitical securitization agenda. It also reviews the trajetory towards factoring migration into a global development policy discourse as formulated in the UN 2030 Development Agenda. Specifically, it indicates that the inclusion of migration inte the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may promote migrant workers' rights because several of these invoke universal human rights instruments, social protection and the observance of the ILO decent work agenda. However, this will only be possible if civil society critically engages powerful state and non-state actors in the process of monitoring the SDGs' implementation, and resists their streamlining into investment and free trade neoliberal development regimes.

How do the United Nations, international organizations, governments, corporate actors and a wide variety of civil society organizations and regional and global trade unions perceive the root causes of migration, global inequality and options for sustainable development? This is one of the most pertinent political questions of the 21st century.

This comprehensive collection examines the development of an emerging global governance on migration with the focus on spaces, roles, strategies and alliance-making of a composite transnational civil society engaged in issues of rights and the protection of migrants and their families. It reveals the need to strengthen networking and convergence among movements that adopt different entry points to the same struggle, from fighting ‘managed’ migration to contesting corporate control of food and land. The authors examine the opportunities and challenges faced by civil society in its endeavour to promote a rights-based approach within international and intergovernmental fora engaged in setting up a global compact for the management of migration, such as the Global Forum for Migration and Development, and in other global policy spaces.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.

This chapter discusses dilemmas of global civic activism from a neo-Gramscianperspective as both subordinated and a potential challenge to hegemonicneoliberal order. With the investigational focus on the People’s Global Actionon Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA) event, the space forcivic activism relating to the intergovernmental Global Forum on Migrationand Development (GFMD) and its associated Civil Society Days and CommonSpace is analysed. The article asks how the future of PGA activism may beinfluenced by its formalized representation within the GFMD. It posits thatthe PGA has landed at a crossroad between becoming a global activistcounterhegemonic movement to a dominant neoliberal migration policy andbeing captured in a tokenist subordinated inclusion within a truncated‘invited space’ for interchange. This ambiguous position jeopardizes itsimpact on global migration governance, discussed with reference to theoriesof transversal politics and issues of counterhegemonic alliance-building.

The current special issue examines the development of an emerging globalgovernance on migration and the spaces, roles, strategies and alliancemakingof a composite transnational civil society engaged in issues of rightsand the protection of migrants and their families. This question is connectedwith how different actors – the United Nations, international organizations,governments and a wide variety of civil society organizations and regionaland global trade unions – perceive the root causes of migration, globalinequality and options for sustainable development. The contributionsincluded in the special issue interrogate from different perspectives thepositionality and capacity of civil society to influence the Global Forum forMigration and Development. They examine the opportunities and challengesfaced by civil society in its endeavor to promote a rights-based approachwithin international and intergovernmental fora engaged in setting up aglobal compact for the management of migration and in other global policyspaces.