Migration governance between sovereignty, security and rights: An analysis of the literature

By Bridget Collrin, Harald Bauder

The concept of migration governance has captured scholarly attention in recent decades. In this paper, we present the results of a bibliometric analysis and a scoping review of this concept and explore how it is defined by authors across the social sciences. Based on our sample of literature, we find that a majority of definitions assume a state-sovereignty perspective of migration governance, leading to discussions that can fail to account for the role of migrant rights and autonomy. Our review reflects upon this result and discusses other findings on the conflation of migration governance with migration management and on the significance of externalized, multi-level and transnational migration governance in the literature. We conclude that migration governance is a complex concept that must pay closer attention to migrant rights and autonomy.

International Migration, Volume63, Issue3, June 2025, 17p.