By Angelo Martins Junior & Julia O’Connell Davidson

Antislavery actors evoke the history of the transatlantic slave trade in campaigns to mobilise action to address the suffering experienced by contemporary migrants described as ‘victims of trafficking’. That framing has been picked up by state actors who present measures to supress unauthorised migration per se as necessary to protect migrants from a ‘modern-day slave trade’. Yet the parallel between trafficking and the slave trade is undermined by the fact that people who today are described as ‘trafficked’, as much as those described as ‘smuggled’, actively wish to travel and do so in the hope that by moving, they will secure greater freedoms. This article therefore asks whether there are similarities between the journeys of contemporary unauthorised migrants and those of enslaved people who fled from slavery in the Atlantic World, and if so, why. Bringing data from historical sources on slave flight into dialogue with data on the journeys of contemporary sub-Saharan African migrants to Europe and Brazil, it identifies a number of experiential parallels, and argues that for those concerned with migrants’ rights, enslaved people’s fugitivity potentially offers a more fruitful point of historical comparison than does the slave trade.

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Volume 48, 2022 - Issue 7

By Quah Ee Ling

Featuring stories of early settler and contemporary Asian migrant women in Asia-Pacific region, Fire Dragon Feminism discusses Asian migrant women’s encounters with coloniality and racial capitalism at their workplace and in their everyday life. Centring anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist philosophies and strategies, this open access book introduces 'fire dragon feminism' - a migrant feminist strand that aims to blow flames at colonial, racial capitalist and neoliberal structures and build solidarities for more just and sustainable futures. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 Asian migrant employees in Australian universities, the book examines how Asian migrant women are implicated and complicit in white race-making projects while being subjected to racialisation and marginalisation simultaneously. Fire Dragon Feminism presents a historicised and sociological discussion of the contradictions, trade-offs, complicities and refusals in the Asian migrant women’s tales of migration, coloniality and racial capitalism. The author ends the book with a celebration of anti-colonial, anti-racist grassroots feminist activisms.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. 

By Nieves Fernández-Rodríguez & Luisa Feline Freier

Against the background of remarkable policy liberalization and the subsequent steep increase of forced displacement in Latin America, the literature on immigration and refugee policy in the region has gained momentum. Although largely overlooked, this literature has the potential to provide a corrective to political migration theory from the Global South. In this article we carry out a systematic, critical review of the regional literature along three thematic axes: legal analyses, normative and explanatory studies. Based on the review of 108 journal articles, we describe the characteristics, main contributions and research gaps of each thematic area. By analyzing legal norms and policy implementation gaps, existing studies on Latin America provide an understanding of migration policy over time and offer important empirical evidence for the advancement of political migration theory, challenging some of the main assumptions attributed to policies in the Global South. However, the lack of engagement with the broader literature and the absence of systematic analyses of its determinants and effects significantly limit the potential of this body of work. We close by making concrete suggestions of how future studies could fill existing gaps both in theoretical and empirical terms, and which methodological approach should be employed.

Comparative Migration Studies volume 12, Article number: 15 (2024)