Shifts in the global migration order and migration transitions in Europe: the cases of Turkey and Russia

Abstract

This paper takes as a premise that world economics, world politics and global labour are changing and that whilst migration is a driver as well as a consequence of change it is changing, too. For long, conventional research focussed on north-north and south-north migrations, like across the Atlantic or from agricultural and industrialising to industrial countries. This was in part inspired by the economic and political dominance of the ‘global north’, but also driven by a western and Eurocentric bias. Meanwhile, a long period of economic and political transformations and turbulences gave rise to new economic powers, diversified the sending-receiving country matrix and thus fundamentally changed the determinants for international migration. I elaborate the concepts migration order and migration transition to argue that these are useful for analysing the changes in the configuration of sending, receiving and transit states. To illustrate the argument, this article takes Russia and Turkey and developments from the early 2000s as case studies and analyses the shifts in the regional and global migration flows.