International Migration Governance Across World Regions: Actors and Processes in the Diffusion of Policies and Practices

This panel aims at bringing together scholars from different world regions to tackle a specific aspect of international migration governance namely the actors and processes of the diffusion of policies and practices. Policy diffusion and policy transfer have deservingly received much scholarly attention. In the field of international migration, few scholars have addressed the diffusion of norms, laws and practices across borders of polity. This has led to the analyses of the role of international organizations, private companies and policy implementers. Although emblematic of states’ sovereignty, migration and border control are addressed internationally and increasingly involve cooperation with other states. The cooperation with third parties such as other countries has led to the emergence of key concepts such as ‘remote control’ and the externalization of border and migration control. The externalization of bordering strategies has led to the emergence of strong foreign affairs dimensions to international migration governance encapsulated by the definition of ‘migration diplomacy’.
This panel invites research that contributes to debates about diffusion, transfer, externalization, migration diplomacy, international cooperation by taking sociological and anthropological perspectives into the study of actors and processes. This panel is particularly interested in papers that focus on processes of diffusion and transfer in the the context of asymmetric power relations including but not limited to Europe and North/West Africa, United States and Central America, Australia and South-East Asia world regions.