Sara Kalm

Liberalizing Movements? The Political Rationality of Global Migration Management

The past few years have seen the emergence of a global policy discourse on international migration. A number of international commissions and independent initiatives have explored the causes and consequences of worldwide migration, as well as its implications for policy-making. Various international and nongovernmental organizations now approach international migration from their respective points of view. And since 2007, states from all corners of the globe now meet on an annual basis to discuss the question in the newly established Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). The emerging ‘global governance’ of international migration now displays a complex pattern of agents and forums that operate at and between the national, regional and global levels, with sometimes overlapping goals and mandates.

Diaspora strategies as technologies of citizenship

In recent years, a growing number of origin countries have begun to more consciously engage with their diasporas abroad. In order to connect and nourish the relationship with their absent citizens, states now use a range of measures that are referred to here as “diaspora strategies”. These include the promotion of dual nationality, the permission of absentee voting, the encouragement of diaspora investments and, the official proclamation of emigrants as “national heroes”. This article analyses diaspora strategies from the perspective of citizenship. Firstly, it classifies existing diaspora strategies as legal, political, economic and cultural and relates them to the citizen roles as constituents, political participants, taxpayers and co-nationals. Secondly, it analyses diaspora strategies as technologies of citizenship that actively partake in shaping the diaspora. Thirdly, it analyses what particular citizenship ideal is promoted by diaspora strategies. It finds that emigrant citizens are shaped as mobile and entrepreneurial but also as loyal to their national community. The theoretical framework derives from Michel Foucaults notion of governmentality and elaborations by other scholars. The article argues that diaspora strategies seek to instil and strengthen emotions of national obligations and thereby work to secure international migration.

A democratic critique of precarity

The term ‘precarity’ has become increasingly popular as a way to capture the material and psychological vulnerability resulting from neoliberal economic reforms. This article demonstrates that such precarity is incompatible with democracy. More specifically, it makes two arguments. First, and inspired by Montesquieu’s analysis of ‘the principles’, or public commitments behind different forms of government, it argues that modern democracy is a sui generis form of government animated and sustained by a principle of shared responsibility. Second, it shows that this principle is negated by the neoliberal form of governing. The neoliberal policies currently operating in many democratic countries not only push ever more people into precarious conditions where they have to compete against each other for security and status; by displacing onto individuals a responsibility that ought to be shared and divided between citizens, they corrupt the core of democracy itself. The article thus suggests that precarity is pr...

Limits to Transnational Participation: the Global Governance of Migration

International migration is a conspicuous manifestation of contemporary globalization.1 As a result of improved and strengthened transborder interconnections, the numbers of migrants are growing at an accelerated pace and now comprise around 200 million people. Migratory movements have also expanded geographically so that all states and regions in the world are now affected at some point of the migratory chain — as destination, sending, or transit regions.

Mobility, Migration Control and Geopolitical Imaginations

Few ideas of the last decades have been as pervasive as the notion of ‘globalization’. Although the term often refers to processes that are of much earlier origin, it has become increasingly widespread as commentators grapple with words to characterize the world following the end of the Cold War. Whereas the visions and ideas of globalization are many and varied, it is possible to point to some often mentioned indicators: increased economic interdependence; the emergence of a single world market in the fields of capital, finance and traded goods; and increased inter-connectedness resulting from cheaper and faster transportation, the global reach of media and the new communication and information technologies. What these characteristics make apparent is that globalization is largely conceptualized as a spatial reorganization in which the borders marking out state territories in the Westphalian world order are becoming increasingly obsolete. For instance, Kenichi Ohmae (1990) has brought forward the notion of an emerging ‘borderless world’, Richard Rosecrance (1999) celebrates what he calls ‘the emancipation from land’ in the era of the ‘virtual state’ and Richard O’Brien (1992) has argued for the ‘end of geography’ thesis, claiming that the forces of economic integration and technological innovations render distances as well as geopolitical borders irrelevant.

Opposition in Global Governance: An Analytical Framework

This chapter presents the analytical framework that guides our empirical investigations. The frst part of the chapter is introductory. It recapitulates and discusses our definition of opposition in global governance and presents an overview of the types of agents in oppositional fields. In the second part of the chapter, we elaborate on the analytical tools used for answering our second research question — What is the pattern of civil society opposition targeting GGIs? At this point the aim is to find ways of characterizing the ‘oppositional’ field of CSOs targeting a particular GGI. The third and fourth parts of the chapter are related to our third research question — How can CSOs’ choice of strategy towards a particular GGI be explained? — and turn attention to the strategies of individual CSOs. We first present the different existing types of strategies and then develop a model for explaining CSOs’ choice of oppositional strategy towards a particular GGI.

Global Governance, Civil Society and Opposition: Empirical and Theoretical Context

This chapter continues the re-conceptualization of CSO-GGI relations in terms of opposition, which was initiated in chapter 1, and it also provides a crucial contextual backdrop to our area of inquiry. It draws out some of the more general points of our argumentation, whereas the analytical framework is specified in chapter 3. The structure is as follows. First, we sketch the historical evolvement of CSO-GGI relations and pinpoint some major current trends. Second, we discuss agency in relation to proposed theoretical explanations of the evolvement of this relationship. Third, we move from the notion of collective agency to introduce our conception of ‘oppositional felds’. Fourth, we present and defend our definition of opposition in global governance, through an engagement with the literature on opposition in comparative politics, as well as with the literature on resistance to global governance.

Opposition in Global Governance: An Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War, civil society organizations (CSOs) have increasingly targeted international organizations (IOs) and other global governance institutions (GGIs). Sometimes this has taken the forms of mass protests expressing grave critique or outright refusal, as was the case with the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, subsequently referred to as the Battle of Seattle, and similar protest events directed against economic globalization in the years that followed. At other occasions civil society actors have formed campaigns to influence GGIs in a particular area. An example is the Global Campaign for Decent Work and Rights for Domestic Workers which, in 2011, succeeded in having the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopt its Domestic Workers Convention. Besides, a large share of political engagement is of a slow and continuous character, as when CSOs strive to affect policy by participating in consultations and lobbying individual staff members. A broad range of CSOs, for instance, participate in more or less frequent consultations concerning overarching policies as well as specific projects of multilateral development banks. These varied examples show how organized civil society activism is not restricted to the local and national political arenas, but increasingly target GGIs as well. They also demonstrate the different forms this activism takes.

Conclusion: Opposing Global Institutions

In this chapter we first summarize our findings from the case studies and make comparisons across cases, answering our second and third research questions on the patterns and strategies of opposition. Second, we discuss the democratic dimensions of opposition in global governance, arguing that this is well captured both through notions of ‘counter-democracy’ (Rosanvallon 2008) and ‘monitory democracy’ (Keane 2009) and — especially in the field of development — a focus on global justice as a prerequisite for a more substantial form of global democracy. Finally, we return to our first research question on the re-conceptualization of CSO-GGI relations in terms of ‘opposition’ and discuss some further implications of this for research on civil society activism in a global governance context. We also suggest directions for future research in this field.

European Union Aid and Development Cooperation

In this chapter we analyse the oppositional field surrounding the EU’s policies and practices of aid and development cooperation and the strategies used by various opposition groups in this field. We begin with a brief description of the main features of the EU and its activities related to development cooperation and then turn to an analysis of the oppositional field. The next section contains an analysis of the political opportunity structure providing access and elite allies for civil society opposition. Then follows a section describing and explaining different inside and outside strategies that are applied by different opposition actors targeting the EU. Finally, we offer some conclusions from this case study.