By Rustamjon Urinboyev

While migration has become a vital issue worldwide, mainstream literature on migrants’ legal adaptation and integration has focused on cases in Western-style democracies. We know relatively little about how migrants adapt in the ever-growing hybrid political regimes that are neither clearly democratic nor conventionally authoritarian. This book takes up the case of Russia—the third largest recipient of migrants worldwide—and investigates how Central Asian migrant workers produce new forms of informal governance and legal order. Migrants use the opportunities provided by a weak rule of law and a corrupt political system to navigate the repressive legal landscape and to negotiate, using informal channels, access to employment and other opportunities that are hard to obtain through the official legal framework of their host country. This lively ethnography presents new theoretical perspectives for studying legal incorporation of immigrants in similar political contexts.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020. 186p.

By Magdalena Kmak

This book analyses the multifaceted ways law operates in the context of human mobility, as well as the ways in which human mobility affects law. Migration law is conventionally understood as a tool to regulate human movement across borders, and to define the rights and limits related to this movement. But drawing upon the emergence and development of the discipline of mobility studies, this book pushes the idea of migration law towards a more general concept of mobility that encompass the various processes, effects, and consequences of movement in a globalized world. In this respect, the book pursues a shift in perspective on how law is understood. Drawing on the concepts of ‘kinology’ and ‘kinopolitics’ developed by Thomas Nail as well as ‘mobility justice’ developed by Mimi Sheller, the book considers movement and motion as a constructive force behind political and social systems; and hence stability that needs to be explained and justified. Tracing the processes through which static forms, such as state, citizenship, or border, are constructed and how they partake in production of differential mobility, the book challenges the conventional understanding of migration law. More specifically, and in revealing its contingent and unstable nature, the book reveals how human mobility is itself constitutive of law. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to those working in the areas of migration and refugee law, citizenship studies, mobility studies, legal theory, and sociolegal studies.

Abington, Oxon: New York: Routledge, 2024. 205p.

Peter Scholten

This open access textbook provides an introduction to theories, concepts and methodological approaches concerning various facets of migration and migration-related diversities. It starts with an introduction to migration studies and continues with an introductory reading of migration drivers, migration infrastructures, migration flows, and several transversal topics such as gender and migration. It also covers politics, policies and governance as well as specific research methods.

As an interactive guide, this book develops an innovative format that brings a connection with various online sources. This means that whereas the chapters bring together literature in a coherent way, they are also connected to IMISCOE's online interactive Migration Research Hub for further reading and for more empirical material on migration and diversity.

As such, this textbook provides a very useful introductory reading for undergraduate and graduate students as well as for policymakers, policy advisors, and all those interested in studies on migration and migration-related diversities.

Springer Cham