MIGRATION STUDIES 2017  1–14 1 of 14

Re-thinking the politics of

migration. On the uses and
challenges of regime perspectives
for migration research
Kenneth Horvath ,y, Anna Amelinaz and Karin Peters§
y
University of Lucerne, Frohburgstrasse 3, 6002 Lucerne, Switzerland
z
Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Erich-Weinert Str. 1, 03046 Cottbus, Germany and
§
Wageningen University and Research Centre, 6708 PB Wageningen, Netherlands

Corresponding author. Email: horvath@ph-karlsruhe.de

Abstract
The aim of this special issue is to critically assess the potential of regime theory for
migration research. Against the background of contemporary political dynamics,
regime terminology has become rather popular in migration studies. There has, how-
ever, been little debate on the foundations and implications of the very notion of
‘regime’. Although regime is anything but a unified concept, in this article we argue
that there are commonalities in analytical perspectives useful for migration research.
Current usages in migration research are informed by at least four different strands of
theory building that differ in their epistemological, ontological, and methodological
foundations: (i) international relations—notions of regimes as international regulatory
frameworks, (ii) conceptualizations informed by welfare regime theories, (iii) regime
notions that stem from the French regulation school, and (iv) regime theories inspired
by governmentality studies. The collection of articles in this special issue mirrors this
constellation. The contributions come from different disciplinary and methodological
backgrounds, employ different regime notions, and focus on a wide range of aspects of
contemporary European migration politics. While it seems crucial to acknowledge this
conceptual variety, we argue that there are also important points of convergence
between these strands of theory building: attention to the complexities and contra-
dictions of regulatory practices, a focus on normative and discursive orders, and con-
sideration of relations of power and inequality. This specific simultaneity of variety and
convergence may open spaces for academic debates that move beyond established
conceptual and methodological boundaries.

Keywords: migration regimes, regime theory, migration politics, Europe, borders,

mobilities

doi:10.1093/migration/mnx055

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 2 of 14  K. HORVATH ET AL.

1. Contested politics and the need for new conceptual

tools
Few issues stand as high on the current European political agenda as migration. All across
Europe, migration is considered to be among the key political and social challenges and as
such stands at the heart of often vicious political campaigns. One of the important conse-
quences of these developments is that migration politics have become highly contested.
Neo-nationalist forces (Eger and Valdez 2015) as well as current restrictive mainstream
politics are increasingly confronted by radical egalitarian ideas that dispute the legitimacy
of current migration politics—calling for ‘open borders’ or even ‘no borders’ (Bauder
2016). These different standpoints are informed by diverging political rationalities and
value orders. What seems inevitable and self-evidently legitimate to some has no political
or analytical validity for others. These current struggles over values and borders are
linked—even if in subtle and indirect ways—to global political and economic relations
(De Genova and Peutz 2010; De Giorgi 2010; Amelina et al. 2016).
Against this background, migration research is faced with multiple challenges. In a
nutshell, we need analytical tools that allow us to deal with the complex, contradictory,
and contested nature of current migration politics in order to understand contemporary
political dynamics and their manifold implications. This endeavour is complicated by the
number and variety of issues and actors involved. In many cases, researchers themselves
need to be seen as part of the very constellation they thrive to analyse. Politics and research
have become deeply entangled over the past years—partly consciously under the banners of
expert-based policy making and migration management (Geiger and Pécoud 2012). There
is, in other words, arguably a need for analytical tools that allow for self-reflexivity. To give
but one example, this need for self-reflexivity is mirrored in calls for clearly differentiating
between categories of analysis and categories of (political) practice (Amelina and Faist
2012; Brubaker 2013).
This special issue aims to critically explore the potential of regime theories for facing
these challenges. Regime terminology has become rather widespread in migration research
over the past few years. Boucher and Gest (2015) describe as regimes what authors before
them have referred to as national models or types of immigration and integration control.
Before that, Sainsbury (2006) investigated the interplay of immigration and welfare re-
gimes, and Jane Jenson (1997, 2007) critically discussed emerging citizenship regimes in
Canada and the European Union. From a more critical perspective, Glick-Schiller and
Salazar (2013)—building on Shamir (2005)—speak of mobility regimes in order to capture
the intertwined patterns of global mobility and current orders of power and inequality.
Hess (2012), Bigo (2011) and Tsianos (2010) have likewise used regime terminology in
their critical analyses of recent migration management programmes and of control prac-
tices in the EU-border zones. Their theoretical approaches show important overlaps with
the concept of deportation regimes by De Genova and Peutz (2010) that has since informed
a number of critical analyses of current migration politics (e.g. Horvath 2014a). The
increasing relevance of regime theories for migration research is further mirrored in a
number of ongoing collaborative efforts, such as the international and multi-disciplinary

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 RE-THINKING THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION  3 of 14

working group on migration regimes at the German Institute for Migration Research and
Intercultural Studies (IMIS) (see https://migrationregimes.com/).
Its increasing popularity in migration research notwithstanding, ‘regime’ does not refer
to a closed and stable field of theory building. Rather, it is itself a contested concept that
brings different strands of theory building into contact. We therefore need to pay careful
attention to its multiple meanings, its epistemological and political underpinnings, and its
methodological implications. At the same time, these various regime theories share a
number of commonalities that make them attractive for current migration research. In
the following, we first provide an overview of relevant strands of regime theory; on this
basis we briefly introduce the contributions to this special issue that serve as examples for
the wide variety of applications regime perspectives may find in migration research and
hence illustrate their potential usage for analyzing current political and social formations.
We conclude by discussing some shared characteristics of different regime notions that may
serve as a basis for moving current debates beyond established disciplinary and methodo-
logical boundaries.

2. Contested concept: the multiple origins of regime

terminology in migration research
‘Regime’ is not a unified concept. On the contrary, regime terminology has developed in
different strands of theory building and has, as a result, also entered the field of migration
research via different routes. The resulting conceptual ambiguity is a key feature of the
general notion of regimes; it is a source of miscommunication, but might also allow the
crossing of established academic boundaries. In this section, we outline four strands of
regime theory. All four conceptions play a relevant role in current migration research. The
ontological and epistemological foundations of these different regime perspectives vary
widely. As a result, they define their object of enquiry differently: some speak of migration
regimes, others of immigration or incorporation regimes, others again of border regimes.
Although we use the somewhat more established term of ‘migration regime’ as an umbrella
term, we sometimes need to switch between these vocabularies in the following in order to
correspond to the respective analytical perspective.
The first and probably most influential regime approach was developed in the field of
international relations (Keohane and Nye 1977). Mirroring epistemological differenti-
ations within political science, there is considerable variation and also debate within this
strand of regime theory (Haggard and Simmons 1987). Hasenclever et al. (2000) distin-
guish three distinct approaches that correspond to usual fault lines in the field of interna-
tional relations: neo-liberalism, realism and cognitivism. Apart from strong constructivist
research programmes, the general understanding of the term ‘regime’, however, converges
across these subfields: regimes are seen as ‘networks of rules, norms, and procedures that
regularize behavior and control its effects’ on an international scale (Krasner 1982), such as
international trade agreements, monetary regulations, or environmental policies. Building
on this kind of regime understanding, Gosh (2000) was among the many renown scholars
who have called for the introduction of an international migration regime (see also, e.g.

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 4 of 14  K. HORVATH ET AL.

Jandl and Stacher 2004). This understanding of ‘regimes’ is dominant among current
migration researchers, especially those from a political science background (cf. Samers
2016), but it is by far not the only relevant conceptualization.
A second key strand of theory building has developed in the field of social policy and is
best illustrated by Esping-Andersen’s (1990) seminal typology of welfare regimes. Esping-
Andersen enquires into how varying constellations of states, (labour) markets and families
in modern welfare states lead to varying degrees and forms of (de-)commodification of
labour. On this basis, he famously distinguished three types of welfare state: the social
democratic, the conservative/corporatist and the liberal model. There are a number of
noticeable differences between this understanding of a regime and the above-mentioned
IR-notion. The focus here is rather on national than on international regimes—and more
on institutional configurations and path-dependencies than on norms and regulations.
Methodologically, the emphasis is on comparative research with nation-states as units,
drawing on different kinds of data from administrative and survey data to legal documents.
Sainsbury’s (2006) work on the relations between migration and welfare policies,
Sciortino’s (2004a) analysis of migration to the Mediterranean welfare state or the
volume by Schierup et al. (2006) provide illustrations of research that is partly informed
by this second kind of regime perspective. In her studies of citizenship regimes,
Jenson (1997, 2007) also partly draws on Esping-Andersen’s theoretical notions, as do
Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck (2011) in their analysis of the interplay between welfare,
care, and migration regimes (for a critical account see also Lutz (2017)). There are further
important epistemological and methodological parallels to conceptualizations of
immigration policy regimes (Faist 1995a, b) which also focus on the level of national
policies and legal/administrative regulations. Castles and Miller (1993) give an early
example in distinguishing imperial, ethnic, republican and multicultural immigration
regimes. Later typologies focus on the axis of inclusiveness–exclusiveness and on the
rules and norms that affect the possibilities of migrants becoming full national citizens
(e.g. Sainsbury 2006).
A third important strand of regime thought goes back to the French regulation school
which is well known for its analyses of Fordist and Post-Fordist regimes of accumulation
(Boyer and Saillard 2002). This variant of regime theory has left strong traces, for example,
on critical examinations of current regulatory practices in the new European borderlands,
such as the diffusion and extension of control practices or the establishment of new forms
of migrant and refugee internment (Tsianos 2010; Hess 2012). This perspective is informed
by an understanding of the liberal state that is different from the one implied by the IR and
the social policy perspective. The modern nation-state is not conceived of as a fixed entity
but rather as a set of social relations. Policies are accordingly analysed in their interdepend-
ence with relations of power, domination and inequality. Conceptually, most studies that
follow this approach focus on actual practices of control and mobility, pointing among
others to the autonomous agency of migrants in contesting and circumventing control
measures (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Correspondingly, this perspective often goes hand
in hand with a methodological emphasis on ethnographic research and discourse analysis
with an interdisciplinary stance that draws, among others, on human geography, anthro-
pology, and political science (see Bartels (2017), and also Scheel (2017)). There are also
numerous studies that build more directly on the original political-economic framework of

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 RE-THINKING THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION  5 of 14

the regulation school and hence include quantitative components—e.g. on social structures
and labour markets—into their research designs (e.g. Horvath 2012; van Puymbroeck 2016;
Clark 2017).
Finally and partly overlapping with the third variant, the dynamic field of governmen-
tality studies may be seen as a regime-theoretical approach in its own right. This approach
shifts our attention to the contingent political rationalities that inform the political tech-
nologies that are used for the governing of human mobility. The general impetus is to
scrutinize what seems self-evident to our political common sense and to explore the mul-
tiple entanglements of discourses, power relations, and subjectivities. William Walters’
(2006) work on border controls or the notion of deportation regimes proposed by
De Genova and Peutz (2010) are examples of how Foucauldian notions of the liberal art
of governing may be employed in analyses of the governing of borders and mobilities.
Similarly, Geiger (2016) discusses the complex entanglements between current political
rationalities concerning European belonging, border controls, mobility of freedom, and
European integration in the Balkan region. A similar perspective has been utilized for
intersectional regime analyses. Using the example of the EU, Amelina (2017) approaches
the EU’s migration regime as a nexus of knowledge and power which incorporates
gendered categories (visible in regulations of family reunification), ethnicized/racialized
references (visible in naturalization procedures) and class-related narratives (visible in
Blue-Card regulations, or regulations for seasonal workers, among many others). The
interplay of these narratives affects both the selective channelling of movements into the
EU and the specific formation of (embodied) migrant subjectivities.
In short: the variety of regime notions is considerable. And it has important implications.
First and foremost, we need to be aware of these disciplinary and methodological traditions
when using the term in one way or another. For example, Samers’ (2016) argument that it
does not make sense to refer to current European temporary migrant worker programmes
(TMWPs) as ‘regimes’ is made on the basis of an international relations regime perspective;
starting from another approach one might draw different conclusions (e.g.
Horvath 2014b). On the other hand, the conceptual polyphony by implication means
that regime terminology is in principle compatible with different social science contexts
and might, hence, serve as a kind of conceptual interface for moving beyond thematic,
disciplinary and methodological boundaries. For example (and perhaps most importantly),
using a ‘regime’ perspective might allow to add sociological and ethnographic stances to the
analysis of political dynamics, hence bridging a long-standing divide in migration research
between those focusing on the politics of migration and those dealing with the practices of
mobility and settlement (Sciortino 2000; Zolberg 2000; Guiraudon and Joppke 2001). After
all, the different strands of theory building do show relevant overlaps that may corroborate
their potential for bridging such established divides. The following section uses the con-
tributions to this special issue to demonstrate the variety of questions we might pose and
the strategies we might employ to answer them on the basis of (different) regime theories.
Following this exposition, the concluding section discusses aspects of the conceptual
ground that different regime approaches share and makes an argument for using the
notion of regime as a focal point for scholarly debates that move beyond established aca-
demic boundaries.

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3. Repair work, discourses, power, and inequality in

migration politics: overview of the special issue
This special issue presents exemplary studies that use different regime approaches to in-
vestigate contemporary political dynamics in the field of migration. The authors of the
special issue come from different disciplinary fields and from different methodological
backgrounds. The empirical analyses presented employ quantitative survey research as
well as ethnographic field work, institutional ethnography and critical discourse analyses,
among others. This very diversity may encourage self-reflexivity in regime-inspired migra-
tion research, since it allows for linking different cases and studies: the blind spots of one
analysis become the focus of another, thus permanently furthering our general understand-
ing of the contested politics of migration. Three questions were of particular importance for
the articles collected. First, what crucial characteristics of current migration, mobility, and
border politics, particularly in the European context, can be adequately addressed using
regime terminology? Second, what implications does a regime perspective—or different
variants thereof—have for empirical research? Third, how are different traditions of the-
orizing regimes related in the respective studies?
Notwithstanding their conceptual and methodological differences, the articles presented
in this special issue also allow to identify important points of convergence between different
regime approaches, namely their focus on (i) the repair work that is necessary due to the
complexities and contradictions of current political formations, (ii) the role of norms and
discourses in the regulation of migration, mobilities, and borders, and (iii) the interplay
between regulatory practices and relations of power and inequality.
The first article by Inken Bartels provides a detailed analysis of the trans-Mediterranean
border regime that regulates human circulation from the non-EU borderlands into the EU.
Her critical regime analysis is inspired by both the French regulation school and govern-
mentality studies and builds on ethnographic work that has been carried out at the geo-
graphic fringes of the EU border regime—in this case in Morocco. The article provides
intriguing insights into the daily ‘repair work’ that the International Organization for
Migration (IOM) is forced to do in the face of permanent contestation and critique by
the very populations it purports to support. Particularly, Bartels’ institutional ethnography
illustrates how daily practices of border regulation are embedded in and linked to dis-
courses on human rights and to the securitization of migration. Against this background,
the contested quality of border and migration governance in the European borderlands
appears as an inevitable element of contemporary migration regimes that in a somewhat
paradoxical twist to common rhetoric of ever increasing mobility in a globalized world
explicitly aim to immobilize subjects but produce the opposite effect.
While the article by Inken Bartels discusses the EU’s ex-territorialized governing of
mobilities and borders, the second contribution by Godfried Engbersen, Arjen Leerkes,
Peter Scholten and Erik Snel focuses on the regulation of movements within the EU and, in
particular, on the EU’s labour mobility regime. This contribution draws on several regime
theoretic approaches and illustrates how different perspectives can be integrated in order to
further our understanding of current political and social constellations. The authors’ main
emphasis is on important but often overlooked contradictions in the governmental ‘repair

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 RE-THINKING THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION  7 of 14

work’ linked to intra-EU labour mobility. In particular, the ‘freedom of movement’—

central to the mantra of intra-EU mobility—runs counter to claims of national and local
integration policies that are informed by more sedentary points of view. The resulting
tensions become visible as soon as we move our focus from the international and national
levels of policy making to the concrete policies that are developed on the urban level. These
contradictions, on the one hand, result from the mutual shaping of different (supra-
national, national and urban) scales of regulation within the enlarged European Union.
On the other hand, these contradictions are linked to and aggravated by the stratification of
legal statuses within the EU that can be seen as an unintended by-product of the transition
periods connected to the last EU enlargement rounds. The authors substantiate their rich
theoretic account with data from several quantitative surveys on intra-EU mobility.
The third contribution of this special issue by Helma Lutz provides a theoretic reflection
of how regime theory can be meaningfully applied for analysing care migration in the
European context. Starting from a critical appraisal of Esping-Andersen’s typology of
welfare regimes—with a focus on its adequacy to address the complexity of care migra-
tion—the article provides two important conceptual innovations. First, it offers a multi-
level theory of the intersections between migration, gender, and care regimes and hence
outlines possibilities for overcoming the gender-blindness of current migration regime
approaches. Second, Lutz builds on Polanyi’s work on ‘fictituous commodities’ to argue
that the (contested) commercialization of care work in general and of care migration in
particular contributes to the inscription of gendered norms into the organization of em-
ployment relations. Hence, migration regimes contribute to the (re-)production of dom-
inant normative orders in the field of care work.
The first three articles of this special issue focus on practices and discourses which are
more or less directly located in the political field. The following three articles, by Julia
Dahlvik, Stephan Scheel and Elisabeth Badenhoop, in different ways move our attention to
administrative practices and to what happens within the professional settings of state
bureaucracies. These contributions discuss both the actual practices of state-administra-
tions and individual migrants’ strategies of dealing with the resulting constellations. The
contribution by Julia Dahlvik builds on an ethnographic study of the everyday processing
of asylum applications by Austrian state officials. This empirical study in itself provides
profound insights into the complex mechanisms involved in daily administrative prac-
tices—and gives glimpses of the manifold ways in which these are structured by discourses,
inequalities and power relations. The core contribution of this article, however, is a the-
oretical one. Dahlvik builds on Giddens’ social structuration approach to conceptualize the
social construction of the multiple forms in which asylum application processes are struc-
tured. She identifies three relevant processes of social construction—(i) ‘the construction
of facts’ about the biography of the applicant, (ii) ‘the construction of artefacts’, for ex-
ample regarding documents relevant for the asylum procedure, and (iii) ‘the construction
of (in)credibility’. On this basis she highlights that the power of naming and construing is
essential for the daily practices of decision making, but is also decisive for understanding
concrete inequality effects in terms of provision or non-provision of secure legal statuses.
The contribution by Stephan Scheel discusses the notion of appropriation as a theoretical
means to capture how migrants from the global South contest ever more restrictive mi-
gration regimes. Scheel shifts our attention to the daily ‘repair-work’ on the side of mobile

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individuals who seek to overcome the immobilization imposed on them by EU migration

and border policies. In a nutshell, the article makes two interrelated arguments. First, the
author deconstructs the currently dominant ‘bezness’ discourse on marriage migration and
identifies its roots in female sex-tourism to EU’s borderlands on the one hand and in highly
unequal access to mobility by EU and non-EU citizens on the other. Second, he discusses
how we may build on an Autonomy-of-Migration approach to make sense of the counter-
strategies that the affected individuals—in this case African male movers—develop in order
to circumvent these dominant regulation attempts.
The article by Elisabeth Badenhoop presents findings from comparative ethnographic
fieldwork on citizenship ceremonies in Germany and Britain. The ceremonial bestowing of
political membership is approached as a symbolic act that entails processes of political
subjectification. Building on regime terminology inspired by governmentality studies, the
article shows how ceremonial citizenship provision is discursively embedded in the dichot-
omy of ‘deserving’ versus ‘non-deserving’ mobile subjects. Further, Badenhoop argues that
these ceremonies hinge on the imagination of a ‘super-citizen’ who is expected to ‘build
bridges’ between migrant non-citizens and the ‘majority society’. She thus illustrates how
the power of naming in citizenship provision is intimately linked to more general tech-
niques of governance and processes of subjectification.
The final contribution to the special issue by Anna Korteweg also focuses on the power of
discursive narratives. Building on a critical reflection of different regime theoretic perspec-
tives, the article critically discusses contemporary integration discourses as techniques of
governance that bear the marks of the postcolonial past and are hence intimately linked to
still persistent patterns of racialization. In substantiating this account, the article makes two
important contributions. First, it reconstructs the genealogy of ‘Western’ integration dis-
courses and policies through a postcolonial lens. Second, building on gender-theoretic and
intersectional perspectives, it identifies inequality effects of integration policies using a
number of the authors’ own empirical studies in Europe and Canada, including among
others research on headscarf debates and on so-called honour-based violence. Korteweg’s
text thus powerfully contextualizes current integration discourses and shows their concrete
effects in terms of subject and/or group formation that result in persistent distinctions
between Us and the Other.

4. Shared ground, multiple perspectives: analyzing

complex, contested, and contradictory politics
The contributions to this special issue mirror how the mentioned four main strands of
regime theory differ in their epistemological foundations, preferred research strategies,
thematic focuses, and, sometimes, political implications. The meta-theoretical tensions,
for example between Realist political science and post-structuralist governmentality
approaches, are considerable. The aim, therefore, cannot be to offer a meta-regime concept
that integrates different approaches under a single roof. In line with Hasenclever et al.
(2000: 7), who argued for an integrated regime concept for the field of international rela-
tions, we maintain that in the face of vastly diverging ‘ontological and epistemological

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 RE-THINKING THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION  9 of 14

commitments’, ‘[i]ntellectual competition is both more likely and more desirable than ill-
fated attempts to merge two mutually exclusive paradigms of inquiry’. The contested
nature of regime concepts should not and need not be glossed over. On the contrary, we
believe that pointing to diverging perspectives opens possibilities for self-reflexivity. The
aim then is to establish forms of critical exchange on current political and social develop-
ments in the field of migration, mobilities, and borders. In order to assess the potential for
this kind of academic exchange, we need to move beyond naming differences between
strands of theory building and decipher points of convergence that may serve as
common ground for discussing current migration-related phenomena.
There are at least three important similarities between different regime notions that may
mark such a common ground and that are clearly visible in the contributions to this special
issue. It is fair to assume that this shared conceptual ground has led to the recent popularity
of regime terminology in migration research: regime perspectives promise fresh insights
and a deeper understanding for a number of problems that international migration schol-
arship has been struggling with for decades.
Sciortino (2004b: 33) offers an overarching definition of a regime that may serve as a
starting point. He emphasizes the capacity of regime notions to draw our attention to the
contradictions, and complexities involved in the regulation of borders and mobilities:
‘[t]he notion of a migration regime allows room for gaps, ambiguities and outright strains:
the life of a regime is the result of continuous repair work through practices’ (Sciortino
2004b: 33). This focus on the regulation of migration ‘in practice’ is a first important shared
characteristic. The field of migration politics abounds with phenomena that warrant ana-
lytical approaches that pay attention to context-dependencies and contradictions—as regime
theories do almost by definition: the manifold ‘control gaps’ (Cornelius et al. 1994), un-
intended consequences, and paradoxes so typical for liberal migration policies (Hollifield
2007), the multi-scalar character of current mobility regulation especially in the context of
the European Union (Boswell and Geddes 2011), the contradictions that arise between
these different scales (Engbersen et al. 2017), the interplay of state and non-state-actors in
framing migration politics (Samers 2016), or the increasing outsourcing of control prac-
tices (Menz 2009), are prominent examples that illustrate the need for sensitivity to con-
texts, complexities, and contradictions. Dahlvik’s (2017) article on the complex
entanglements involved in asylum decisions and Bartels’ and Engbersen et al.’s contribu-
tion on current EU-mobility/migration regimes serve as examples for the manifold ways in
which these aspects are reflected in this issue.
Second, the emphasis on norms and discourses is an important analytical asset of all four
regime perspectives discussed, even if in different forms and to different degrees. Be it the
IR-approach’s emphasis on (more or less formalized) internationally shared norms and
regulations, the role of norms and values (mirrored, e.g., in established gender orders) in
welfare regime theories, or the role of political rationalities in Foucauldian approaches—
the sensitivity to the relevance of the discursive realm is one of the main conceptual benefits
of regime theory. The massive politicization of migration over the past decades (Hammar
2007) already indicates the relevance of discursive dynamics in this policy field. The se-
curitization of migration, especially over the past decades, has had tremendous conse-
quences on the regulation of migration (Huysmans 2006). These securitizing
problematizations co-exist with other kinds of framing; most importantly, economizing,

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 10 of 14  K. HORVATH ET AL.

utilitarian forms of cost–benefit calculations have left their traces on current migration
politics. In their interplay, these different framings have allowed for the differentiated
deprivation of rights that characterize today’s migration politics (Horvath 2014a, b).
Norms, values, and discourse matter; be it as enabling or as contextual factors that influence
the concrete effects a policy or regulation develops. Correspondingly, the contributions to
this issue direct our attention to very different forms in which norms and discourses
become effective in the regulation of migration and to intricate details of the daily repair
work involved; be it the role of gendered knowledge orders that Lutz discusses, citizenship
narratives investigated by Badenhoop or integration discourses scrutinized by Korteweg.
Connected to this is, third, the analytical potential to take structures of power and
inequality into account (Amelina and Vasilache 2014). Social structures are inherent to
the more sociological and cultural-anthropological regime approaches described above.
But the IR-notion is not blind to these aspects either, even if the focus is clearly on aspects of
power, less on inequalities. Already Haggard and Simmons (1987: 500) stated that ‘the
relationship between power, ideology, and knowledge is one of the most exciting areas of
theoretical debate’ in the field of international regimes. Realist and liberal scholars within
the field of international relations have had intense discussions on the role of the ‘hegemon’
and possible forms of cooperation in the formation of international regimes (Hasenclever
et al. 2000). The focus in this case is clearly on state actors, but these can easily be con-
ceptualized as embedded in wider intra- and inter-national power relations. This analytical
openness to social relations is an important shared feature that corresponds to the chal-
lenges of analysing current border and mobility constellations. The rights and life chances
of migrants are still very unevenly distributed and the mobility of different parts of the
world population is in many ways structured by legal regulations, labour market relations
etc. (Shamir 2005; De Giorgi 2010; Amelina et al. 2016). One of the benefits of a regime
perspective in this context is that it does not only draw our attention to unequal relations,
but also allows us to take the agency of migrants—who respond to, contest and circumvent
control practices—into account (Papodopoulos and Tsianos 2013), thus helping to avoid
perceiving migrants merely as passive actors and countering tendencies of over-simplifi-
cation and of victimization. Scheel’s analysis of ‘bezness’ phenomena serves as an obvious
example for the various ways in which power and inequality become effective in current
cross-border migration orders—but as is the case for the other commonalities, similar
aspects are present in all contributions to this special issue.
Finally and based on these three commonalities, we maintain that regime perspectives
offer a basis for analytical self-reflection: Conceptualizing scholars and their research efforts
themselves as elements of migration regimes is part and parcel of these types of research.
Regime perspectives may stimulate self-reflexivity in at least two different ways. First, the
multivalence of the regime concept—if taken seriously—urges us to reflect about our own
epistemological and political positions. Second, the links between politics and research can
be captured in regime-theoretic terms. In this context, the conceptual focus on norms,
rationalities, and discourses plays an important role: the diffusion of terms and narratives
between political and social-scientific fields has effects on policy making as well as on the
concrete practices of regulations; ‘discourse’ may hence be one of the main forms in which
research affects regimes.

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 RE-THINKING THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION  11 of 14

Considering the political saliency of migration issues, increasingly strong anti-migrant

moods and rising neo-nationalist tendencies in contemporary Europe and beyond, we
believe that migration researchers need to face three crucial questions over the coming
years: how to analyse the increasingly complex political configurations that regulate mi-
gration on multiple scales, how to define their own role in relation to these politics, and
how to include the voices of those who are usually construed as objects in both political
discourses and research activities. By illustrating the analytical possibilities as well as po-
tential challenges which regime perspectives hold for migration research, this special issue
aims to contribute to these ongoing debates.

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