# **Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance**

### **Edited by Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Branka Likić-Brborić, Raúl Delgado Wise and Gülay Toksöz**

First published 2019

ISBN13: 978-0-367-14726-6

## Chapter 1

## **Migration, civil society and global governance**

An introduction to the special issue

*Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Branka Likić-Brborić, Raúl Delgado Wise and Gülay Toksöz*

(CC-BY-4.0)

### Migration, civil society and global governance: an introduction to the special issue

Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Branka Likić-Brborić, Raúl Delgado Wise and Gülay Toksöz

#### ABSTRACT

The current special issue examines the development of an emerging global governance on migration and the spaces, roles, strategies and alliancemaking of a composite transnational civil society engaged in issues of rights and the protection of migrants and their families. This question is connected with how different actors – the United Nations, international organizations, governments and a wide variety of civil society organizations and regional and global trade unions – perceive the root causes of migration, global inequality and options for sustainable development. The contributions included in the special issue interrogate from different perspectives the positionality and capacity of civil society to influence the Global Forum for Migration and Development. They examine the opportunities and challenges faced by civil society in its endeavor to promote a rights-based approach within international and intergovernmental fora engaged in setting up a global compact for the management of migration and in other global policy spaces.

#### A need for critical research

The making of a de-commodifying, rights-based, global governance of migration is essential for the capacity to confront problems of unfree labor and the precarisation of livelihoods and citizenship. It concerns civil, social and labor rights for the protection of labor migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who constitute the most disadvantaged in many societies of both the global North and South. Their marginal representation calls for research on civil society in the global governance of migration and in other global policy spaces related to migration.

Following several international conferences and reports,1 the United Nations (UN) initiated a High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development (UN-HLD)2 in 2006. And, in 2007, various governments launched the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD).3 The GFMD was designed as a state-led, nonbinding and informal process, but figures as the most comprehensive arena for continuous intergovernmental deliberations between sending, receiving and transit states on emerging standards for the global governance of migration. It is also informed by the exchange of ideas with a plethora of international organizations, multilateral global and regional bodies (e.g. the Global Migration Group, GMG),4 business actors and a broad civil society,

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including migrant organizations, trade unions and non-governmental think-tanks. Given the growing relevance of migration in the international arena and the meagre results derived from the GFMD process to engender an institutional framework for the global governance of migration, in September 2016 the UN General Assembly endorsed the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants that set off an extensive intergovernmental consultation and negotiation process aimed at culminating with the adoption of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Secure Migration by autumn-2018 (GCM).<sup>5</sup> It is described as the 'first, inter-governmentally negotiated agreement, prepared under the auspices of the UN, projected to cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner'.

Arrangements have been developed over the past years to include selected actors of civil society with the aim of instituting spaces for trust-building exchange between non-state and state actors. Since the inception of the GFMD, so-called 'Civil Society Days' <sup>6</sup> (CSD) have been organized which precede the GFMD meetings. The CSD are currently managed by the Migration and Development Civil Society Network (MADE).<sup>7</sup> A so-called 'Common Space', has been instituted as the interface between governments and civil society. Migrant and migrant advocacy actors in civil society have managed to continually expand their space for participation in these top-down processes while simultaneously establishing parallel events as autonomous spaces for deliberation and consensus-making between a multitude of variably positioned civil society organizations (transnational migrant organizations, trade unions, migrant advocacy civil society organizations (CSOs)); for example, the People's Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA).8 Invigorated and informed by alternative political visions forged at the World Social Forum (WSF) and in global networks such as the food sovereignty movement, their aim has been to mainstream alternative development and globalization models by framing them in global contexts such as UN conferences on climate change, women's rights, human rights, land rights and the ILO 'Decent Work Agenda' (DWA). Furthermore, they have established independent thematic chapters such as the World Social Forum on Migrations (WSFM)9 and civil society networks such as the Global Coalition on Migration. <sup>10</sup> Particularly, the Global Coalition is actively engaged in leading civil society and migrant organizations in the GCM towards its adoption by Member States in 2018.

However, could the UN-initiated GFMD process indeed open the door for the representation of migrant civil society in, and impact on, a global governance of migration in transformation? This question is the focus of this special issue on Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance. The issue's overall theoretical approach is aligned with approaches in international political economy (e.g. Birchfield, 1999; Cox, 1977; Gill, 2005), combining influences from Gramsci and Polanyi in bridging international relations and the national scale of analysis. Taken in its broadest sense, Polanyi's notion of 'counter-movement' could be seen as an incipient theory of counter-hegemony. Today, as Gill (2003, p. 8) puts it:

[W]e can relate the metaphor of the 'double movement' to those socio-political forces which wish to assert more democratic control over political life, and to harness the productive aspects of world society to achieve broad social purposes on an inclusionary basis.

This approach harnesses the essence of Polanyi's (1944/1957) theorem of the 'double movement', to a critical understanding of the present condition of globalization and its contestation, whether through policy regulation 'from above' (states and international organizations) or through civil society intervention 'from below'.

Based on these overall premises, the contributions of this issue set out, from different angles, to examine the development of an emerging global governance on migration and the spaces, roles, strategies and alliance-making of a composite transnational civil society pushing for a broad human rights-based approach to migration and development. The issue deals with the following questions: Will the factoring of migration politics into the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development<sup>11</sup> affect changes in a fundamentally asymmetric neoliberal governance regime in ways that could facilitate civil society influence? What is the actual positionality and capacity of civil society organizations, engaged in the GFMD process, to re-politicise a dominant neoliberal migration narrative and, more specifically, to formulate game-changing approaches to the reproduction of informal labor and irregular migration from a rights-based perspective? Which dilemmas and which hegemonic politics of co-optation and appropriation are faced by 'inside-outside' <sup>12</sup> strategies of composite civil society 'networks of equivalence' which endeavor to change the rules of the game in 'invited spaces' <sup>13</sup> of global international and intergovernmental fora such as the UN-HLD, GFMD and GCM? How to foster links with other global governance fora relevant to migration, such as the Committee on World Food Security or the UN Human Rights Council, which arguably provide more congenial space for counterhegemonic civil society engagement. The issue discusses specifically the case of Turkey which is presented as a new immense strategic space and regional player in the governance of migration. This is addressed with emphasis on the ambivalent predicament of 'representation'. For example: How was the 'problem of migration' represented by agenda-setting governmental actors on the occasion of the GFMD summit in Istanbul in 2015? What was the actual 'representation' of migrants and their organizations in defining and managing 'the problem'? What is the agenda of Turkish trade unions concerning migration? Last, but not least, alternative narratives and strategies of contending movements of migrant organizations, migrant advocacy organizations, and trade unions are discussed. That is, civil society actors, global movements and events which follow alternative 'outside' strategies, critical towards a UNHLD-GFMD process which they see as co-opting, depoliticizing and neutralizing civil society agendas through appropriation. This is a question connected with how civil society organizations perceive the root causes of migration framed by an exclusivist neoliberal political economy and its contingent regime of migration management.

The current state of the art in research indicates that critical questions raised by this special issue have received relatively limited academic attention. Indeed, there is ample research on civil society and global governance in general (Betts, 2011; Buckley, 2013; Scholte, 2011; Smith, 2008; Tallberg, Sommerer, Squatrito, & Jönsson, 2013). Further, it is argued that transnational activism can contribute to the transformation of global institutions (Smith, 2012, p. 9) particularly when priority voice is accorded to organizations representing social actors most affected by the policies under discussion (McKeon, 2015). Several studies on global governance have brought to attention that the engagement of CSOs could improve the democratization of global governance; in terms of enhanced participation and accountability, advancing global social justice and promoting an integrated approach to development. Nevertheless, these studies also warn for unsubstantiated optimism (cf., Bexell, Tallberg, & Uhlin, 2010; Scholte, 2011). However, there are few studies on the role of CSOs in global and regional migration governance. Research on CSO involvement in the global governance of migration has been initiated by several scholars (e.g. Kalm & Uhlin, 2015; Piper & Grugel, 2015). Yet, existing studies of global governance of migration in general, and publications that address the case of GFMD in particular, focus on policy practices and documenting the process, but are – with certain exceptions (e.g. Geiger & Pécoud, 2013; Rother, 2018; Schierup, Ålund, & Likić-Brborić, 2015) – without critical theoretical ambitions. There is, claims Betts (2010), a connection between this relative absence of critical academic studies of migration as a global political topic and a lack of a global political vision in formulating effective migration policies that enhance human development and empower migrant agency. International migration has become a central theme of international politics; 'a bellwether theme, that decides elections and makes or breaks alliances' (Castles, 2018, p. 239). However, it is, as argued by Castles (2010), essential to investigate and theorise international migration and political regimes into which it is embedded, as profoundly integrated with studies of wider processes of neoliberal transformation.

#### Stratagems of our current great transformation

Seen in this perspective, migration is a critical component in broader processes of the erosion of social and labor rights and the institutionalization of precarity (Schierup, Hansen, & Castles, 2006). New forms of niched labor markets are driven by the ways in which transnational migration is instrumentalised in the regulation and remaking of economies and contemporary societies in terms of the construction of institutionalized uncertainty. It produces 'precarious workers' over whom employers and labor users have particular mechanisms of control (Anderson, 2010, p. 300). The wider historical-structural context is the generation of a, multiple million strong, 'surplus population' over the past three and a half decades. It is a globally mobile reserve army of labor at the disposal of transnational corporations, sub-contractors and franchises; forged by austerity programs rolling back the social compacts of welfare and developmental states, and the spread of neo-colonial economies forging a predacious extractionism in the 'poorer nations' (Prashad 2012/ 2014) of the Earth. It has grown on the ruins of existing socialism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China. It has exploded due to the consequences of imperial wars scrambling for the Middle East and large parts of Africa in particular.

#### The suppressed issue of irregular migration

Piore (1979), for one, argued that international migration is driven by demands for a reserve army of labor staffing the secondary segment of 'dual labor markets'. Bauder (2006) goes, with reference to neo-Marxist regulation theory, beyond Piore, in exploring migration as integral to corporate and state strategies for actively shaping and regulating labor markets. Along similar lines, Slavnic (2010) analyses the informalisation of labor as a strategic instrument for current neoliberal restructuring connected with irregular migration as a clandestine regulatory instrument. Deepened informalisation – with irregular migration as an exemplary manifestation – is, Slavnic argues, contingent on a structural discrepancy between old Fordist and welfare statist modes of regulation and new, neoliberal, regimes of accumulation. Established regulatory frameworks become politically unacceptable to dominant power-blocks that see them as inadequate for embedding changing modes of accumulation. This implicates that all involved actors develop their own coping strategies, which move beyond existing regulatory frameworks that have habitually defined distinctions between formal and informal economic activities. Thus, the incremental informalisation of labor, the proliferation of grey ethnic labor market niches and irregular migration belong to evasive strategies for managing transition in a conjuncture. Here, the normative and legal regulatory regime is out of pace with modes of capital accumulation and hegemonic coalitions' uncompromising demands for 'flexibility' in terms of wage shrinking, diminished labor and social rights, contingent employment and de-unionisation. Refugees are, in the context of this process, thrown 'out of the frying pan' of the asylum system and 'into the fire' (paraphrasing Koser, 1998) of the informal economy where they keep company with illegalized migrants from the 'darker nations' (Prasad, 2008) of the global South and those precarious white migrants from the European East (Likić-Brborić, Slavnić, & Woolfson, 2013), whom Sivanandan (Sivanandan, 2001) refers to in terms of 'poverty is the new black'.

Thus, irregular migration and migrants' informal employment continue to feed the labor needs of a multitude of employers across the world, in the global North as well as in the South. It is about the hyper-exploitation of an abundant reserve of 'forced labour'; that is vulnerable workers caught in positions marked by a severe limitation of freedom of choice in the labor market and a high degree of external constraints or indirect coercion which take many different forms (ILO, 2007). A scrutiny of the reproduction of informal labor and irregular migration, and in particular the approach to the subject in an emergent global governance of migration, is therefore crucial. It is especially important, argues Gülay Toksöz in her contribution to this special issue, to interrogate the capacity of civil society to critically address the question, and formulate and drive constructive rights-based perspectives. She offers an analysis of irregular migration as a crucial form of forced migration, in the global North as well as in the South, and a comparative scrutiny of deliberations on the subject in 'Government Days' versus 'Civil Society Days' (CSD) across a series of GFMD summits. She argues that there is a reluctance to discuss the underlying causes behind the most precarious forms of migrant labor. This pertains, not least, to irregular migration and migrants' informal employment. She demonstrates that, while governments consistently emphasize circular migration as a remedy for regulating migration, civil society actors have been urging for rights-based policies, decent work and social protection, which could not totally be rejected by governments. The overall approach by governments has been to accept neoliberal globalization without questioning it. Root causes of irregular migration and the precarisation of labor in terms of uneven development have hardly been discussion themes in the government forum. In turn, discussions of the root causes in the CSD have most often been deferred in favor of developing piecemeal recommendations targeted at improving working and living conditions.

#### A plurality of forced labour

It is important to see informalisation and the rise of irregular migration as only one facet of a growing 'global migrant precariat' (Schierup & Ålund, 2015). Neoliberalism does mean abandoning positive protective and redistributive regulation in welfare states of the North as well as developmental states of the South; not to speak of past state-bureaucratic planning and redistribution in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China and other states of existing socialism. But it does not mean diminished regulation. What is colloquially called 'de-regulation' is actually a combination of de-regulation and re-regulation; in effect, meaning not less, but more, regulation (Standing, 2011). Majone (1997) conceptualizes this in terms of a regulatory statereplacing a so-called 'positive', redistributive state. That is a state characterized by growing negative regulatory capacities for eliminating institutional and social obstacles to the commodification, or re-commodification, of labor, money and nature.

Applying the argument to the development of contemporary migration, we currently see a global tendency towards formally regulated, so-called, 'managed migration', with irregular migration increasingly criminalized. While the latter represents a prevalent vehicle for 'flexibilisation' in a post-Fordist conjuncture of transition, the former is a mode generated at a growing scale by a more 'mature' neoliberal regulatory state, in labor importing countries of the global South as well as the North. This refers, in particular, to the formalized, and mostly rigidly regulated, temporary and circular migrant workers schemes installed under the trade mark of 'managed migration'; an institutional alternative to mass irregularity gaining global political clout in the EU, NAFTA, the Gulf states, Australia, East and South-East Asia, and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Governments meet employers' demands for cheap and 'flexible' labor, while seeking at the same time to appease xenophobic populism through employment practices which claim to avoid the 'errors' of earlier policies that allowed migrants to settle and achieve gradual incorporation into denizenship or citizenship. They are matched by selective schemes for sifting off designated categories of resource endowed or professionally specialized migrant workers, judged valuable for the purposes of longer term settlement.14

Seen in the wider context of neoliberal globalization, temporary and circular migration – together with a range of other attempts at re-regulating migration (e.g. directives of the WTO) – constitute an integrated part of re-regulation practices driving the commodification or recommodification of labor. These develop in tandem with the restructuring of contemporary labor markets at large, and with the constitution of the regulatory state – alias the 'post-national workfare state' (Jessop, 2002) – embedded in regional communities such as the EU, NAFTA, ASEAN and SADC. We may thus understand 'managed migration' as one dimension of a disciplinary workfare but shifting access to rights and entitlements from the realm of social policy to that of migration management.

In contrast with, for example, post Second World War central European 'guest-worker' systems, which left legal-institutional openings or informal loop-holes for migrants to access citizenship (Guiraudon, 2000), most of the world's present-day temporary migration worker schemes are likely to be more rigorously monitored (Barrientos, 2007). Thereby, they also tend to be more deeply 'Apartheising' economies and societies (Galabuzi, 2006). Supposedly, win-win-win policies – combining migration and labor force management with development partnerships between receiving and sending countries (Triandafyllidou, 2013) – may per design contribute to restricted incorporation into the 'host-lands' of toil, while profiting from consigning lifelong social reproduction to native 'homelands'.

Temporary workers are usually bound to a single employer. They are notoriously difficult to organize, and thus the worldwide growth of schemes for circular and temporary migration is one of the most complex current challenges for trade unions and migrant and migrant advocacy organizations (Barrientos, 2007). There is, on this background, reasons to restate the argument by Mingione (1996) that different modes of exclusion cannot be understood in isolation but need to be investigated in mutual articulation within a wider conflict-laden social order. Schemes of temporary migration propel competition within precaritised labor markets (Schierup & Castles, 2011). 'Undocumented' migrant workers and refouled asylum seekers are likely to still belong among the economically 'most needed'. But, contrasted with the formalized status of a growing category of heavily monitored temporaries, undocumented migrants' defamed 'status' as the politically 'least wanted' is likely to become exacerbated through further criminalization, securitization and public vilification, legitimized through the discourse of 'illegality'.

In his contribution to the special issue, Raúl Delgado Wise discusses this contemporary plethora of migrant categories in terms of forced displacement or forced migration generated by a discriminatory character of global capital accumulation. It is a phase of accumulation marked by an unprecedently concentrated and powerful monopoly capital. It is the nucleus of a discriminatory geopolitical order that produces a large variety of forced migration at the same time as it imposes restrictions on the mobility of migrants, subjecting them to conditions of vulnerability, precariousness and extreme exploitation. Contending movements of civil society need, in consequence, to challenge the politicaleconomic and geopolitical root causes of migration to encourage free circulation and decent work. But, whether they will be in position to do so remains a pending subject.

#### What space for civil society in neoliberal governance?

Proceeding from similar presuppositions, Branka Likić-Brborić sets out in her contribution to scrutinize the 'Paradoxes of Sustainability' embedded in global migration governance. Against the background of what she diagnoses as an asymmetric global governance, integral to neoliberal globalization, her contribution reviews the processes through which a global governance regime has been formulated, informed by the restatement of politics on migration and development in terms of factoring migration into the UN 2030 Development Agenda and the sustainable development goals (SDGs). She questions whether linking migration to this newly conceptualized governance for development will indeed hold the institutional capacity to address ground-causes of the deep precarisation of life and work brought about by the decades of top-down implementation of uniform development policies attuned to investment and free trade neoliberal development models. It appears that the UN's organizational architecture, attuned to the implementation of the SDGs, through the establishment of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF),15 and made contingent on the mandate and required resources to promote hierarchical global economic governance, is insulated from democratic grievances, in a deeply regressive political economy. There is thus an urgent need for a serious interrogation of the potential of global civil society to resist persistent neoliberal globalization and an engrained free trade ideology undemocratically pushed for by the WTO and ongoing top-level negotiations.

The contribution by Kellynn Wee, Kudakwashe P. Vanyoro and Zaheera Jinnah on the question of 'Re-politicising International Migration Narrative' further interrogates the promises, potentials and limits to civil society in formulating and establishing an alternative counterhegemonic discourse within the context of the GFMD. Interrogating the GFMD-CSD forum as a 'hybridized, experimental and fluidly-defined discourse-led' global space, they probe into the validity of Antoine Pécoud's conceptualization of international organizations' (IOs) 'migration narratives' as representing a 'depoliticized' approach to migration. Contrary to this, the GFMD-CSD and the upcoming GCM, under UN auspices, are here seen to offer a certain openness and alternative to the IOs' generally static and technocratic migration narratives. It is therefore, they argue, pertinent to adopt a complex perspective on what de-politicization and re-politicization mean, and conceivably to 'reimagine' the GFMD-CSD as a space that continues to offer unique, albeit basically discursively and institutionally circumscribed, opportunities for contestation, opposition and politicization.

#### Movement politics across 'invented' and 'invited' spaces

Buckley (2013) emphasizes that counter-hegemonic politics should reconceptualise 'global civil society' in terms of 'transversal hegemony' as a subject of resistance against a 'transverse optimum' of a neoliberal hegemony. By understanding global civil society as 'a realm of contesting ideas', not just social groups, she proposes the understanding of global civil society as a historical concept, encompassing accumulated knowledge and imaginations of alternatives, and dialectically positioned to reality. Purcell (2009) suggests, along complementary lines, a fruitful way of moving forward in understanding the critical potential of still fragmented civil society actors that expands beyond the prevalent forms of class-based analyses and includes a multitude of ongoing struggles against variable contemporary forms of domination. He argues for a need to focus on 'networks of equivalence', that can come through collaboration between different social movements as a collective articulation of counter-hegemonic political values. It is an articulation through which the sameness and difference between groups blend, without dissolving differences into a homogenous unity. As a result, a coalitional group 'could arise from and be carried forward by multiple subject positions' (Purcell, 2009, p. 293).

The contribution by Ålund and Schierup to this special issue brings the salience of forming and continuously reproducing contending 'networks of equivalence' to bear on an analysis of the longterm trajectory of People's Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights, the PGA, stretching over two consecutive UN-HLD meetings and a series of GFMD summits. The GFMD summit in Mexico, 2010, the UN-HLD in New York, 2013 and subsequent GFMD summits in Stockholm, 2014 and Istanbul, 2015, are described as breaking points in terms of direction, impact and embeddedness of the PGA's particular'inside-outside'strategy for making alternative civil society conceptions of migration, development and human rights bear on the global governance on migration. The paper combines a conceptualization and analytical operationalization of transversal politics and networks of equivalence with the notions of 'invited' and 'invented' spaces, inspired by the work on contentious social movements by Gaventa (2006), Miraftab (2004) and others. The PGA developed as the hub of a global movement of civil society; an ideotypical example of a global network of equivalence which focused, under the banner of 'human rights', on what had been identified as widely shared issues of dispossession and social justice with activists representing the global South at the forefront. From dominant perspectives of migrant organizations and migrant advocacy NGOs/INGOs, it vied for the rapport with powerful, but every so often ambivalent, allies among global unions. It devised a dual 'inside-outside' strategy for impacting debates in the GFMD and in particular its 'invited spaces' (the CSD and Common Space) for government-civil society deliberations, but empowered by preparatory debates and analyses in the context of its own autonomous 'invented space' for deliberation across a worldwide plural network of migrant organizations and migrant advocacy NGOs/INGOs. The study presented here exposes an inclusionary, but selective and subordinating, hegemony management and appropriation of movement objectives by governments, business interests, powerful international organizations and chosen gate-keeping humanitarian INGOs such as the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC).<sup>16</sup> It underlines a necessity for contending movements to continuously critically recreate and consolidate their own 'invented spaces', in order to be able to develop a sustainable capacity as counter-hegemonic political subjects.

#### The Turkish case in focus

Turkey's development from a country of high emigration into one of high immigration in the 2000s is a remarkable case of social transformation. Moreover, Turkey's role as a country and a cardinal node in the international migration system surged with the reception of close to four million refugees after the start of the war in Syria (2011), which made Turkey one of the most important refugee receiving countries of the world. In the 2000s, Turkey has adopted several laws directed towards the regulation of labor migration and the rights of asylum seekers and their families (e.g. Erdoğdu & Şenses, 2015). On this background, it is not by chance that Turkey took on the role of organizing the GFMD summit in Istanbul in 2015. In their contribution to this volume on 'the Problem of Representation', Cavidan Soykan and Nazlı Şenses discuss the positionality of Turkish CSOs in the Istanbul summit. They take their point of departure in Alexander Betts' (2012, p. 12) concept of 'facilitative multilateralism', with respect to facilitating dialogue between states and civil society. In the context of the GFMD, this would implicate the representation of migrants and their claims for rights. This pushes a critical theoretical discussion of the concept of 'representation' to the fore. Yet the CSD of the Turkish GFMD remained a heavily monitored 'invited space' without significant migrant representation including positions with the potential to incorporate a potent migrant voice, with the host (the government) in firm control of 'representing the problem' of migration. Civil society representation from Turkey was not diversified or representative of the country's millions of diversified migrants; therefore, a problematic 'problem of representation'. There was a conspicuous absence of Turkish trade unions and trade union reports with other civil society actors, as well as the discussion of the country's numerous refugees from the perspective of labor. In conclusion, there was, seen from a critical perspective, no basis for a meaningful facilitative multilateralism in the Istanbul GFMD.

Seyhan Erdogdu further contextualizes the problem of the representation of migrants and of migrants, and in particular refugees, in her text on 'Syrian Refugees in Turkey' and trade union responses to their presence. She argues that this problem needs to be framed against a general background of shrinking union inclusion in Turkey. A solidaristic rhetoric and attempts to forge inclusive union policies dominant on the confederal union level dovetails with the Turkish government's 'open door' politics towards Syrian refugees. However, at a lower organizational and day to day operational level, refugee issues are hardly to be found on the agenda. Despite demands for the formal and regulated employment of refugees, at the workplace level, union positionality is generally exclusive and stigmatizing. There is a conspicuous lack of articulation between central unions and the workplace level. Imaginaries among union members are characterized by worries concerning a perceived negative impact of large scale refugee presence, and in particular refugee labor, on employment and wages, working conditions and the bargaining power of local labor, as well as on access to housing, education, health and social assistance. This general situation of stalemate in the positionality of Turkish labor unions may be part of an explanation for their conspicuous absence, rather than a forceful representation, in a Turkish GFMD generally steered by a business-friendly representation of problems rather than by concerns of unions and labor.

#### Alternative trajectories

In his contribution 'Angry Birds of Passage' on migrant rights networks and counter-hegemonic resistance to global migration discourses, Stefan Rother takes his point of departure in a discussion of positionalities among global civil society actors confronting and rejecting a hegemonic neoliberal discourse on the global governance of migration in general, and the GFMD process in particular. The focus is on an analysis of strategies and prospects for establishing counter-hegemonic movements, here represented by the International Migrants Alliance (IMA). A central tenet of the current hegemonic block driving the present neoliberal governance of migration is that of an overly repeated but under-defined notion of 'circular migration' as the pivot for a narrative of 'migration and development'. Praised by dominant policy-makers and think-tanks, circular migration appears as a benign way of upholding a world hegemony for which migrant labor circulates as a cheap commodity to be controlled, disciplined and 'managed'; 'unfree labour' alienated from fundamental social and labor rights, and resources and avenues for contestative collective organization. The migration and development slogan has also opened spaces for migrant and civil society voices as discussed across contributions to this special issue. However, in contrast to the 'inside-outside' strategy followed by, for example, the PGA (discussed in the contribution by Ålund and Schierup), others have remained 'outsiders by choice'. The IMA, for one, stands for a global alliance of organizations of grassroots migrants, refugees and displaced people contesting the GFMD agenda. This is viewed as a network of networks contending 'NGOism'; a civil society alliance which claims to be run 'by migrants for migrants'. At the same time, the forum provides them with opportunities to organize their own counter-space, continuously challenging the governments and international organizations involved in the GFMD process.

The paper by Nora McKeon provides a critical regional West African perspective on the 'root causes' of irregular migration, the European 'migration crisis' and a situation of increasing EU 'policy ambivalence' characterized by two different policy packages with opposed impacts promoted by powerful economic interests seeking profits from investments in African agriculture that dispossess peasants, on the one hand, and politically opportunistic xenophobic defenders of European security, on the other. She suggests that this contradiction might open opportunities for alternative policies rooted in alliances among social movements and organizations in Africa and Europe, drawing on the evidence and claims of the West African peasant movement whose cogent policy alternatives have been largely neglected in hegemonic framings of 'migration and development'. Their voices, and those of other components of the food sovereignty movement contrasting the rural dispossession that generates involuntary migrants, are heard most strongly at the global level in the UN Committee on World Food Security in which they participate on the same footing as governments.

Finally, the already mentioned contribution to this issue by Raúl Delgado Wise takes the question of civil society in global governance back to the fundamentals of contemporary capitalism and brings to the forefront a broad alternative global counter-hegemonic trajectory. He points towards the potential of the WSFM as an alternative 'invented space' with reach, legitimacy and organizational clout to potentially challenge the neoliberal win-win-win mantra of 'managed migration'. Departing from the foundational principles of the World Social Forum, the WSFM is an 'invented space' designed to link civil society organizations and movements in a permanent process of seeking and building alternatives.

In conclusion, the potential of organizations located at the crossroads of 'invented' and 'invited' spaces in the context of migration governance should not be neglected but their opportunities are limited, judged from the research presented in this special issue of Globalizations. Short time concessions may be obtained. However, the risks for depoliticizing co-option and appropriation would support the case for moving at a distance from the relative comfort of 'invited' spaces and into a more independent counterhegemonic field of contention, or for strategically transversing between the two, but ensuring the survival and growing strength of the independent 'invented' spaces. At the same time, there is a need to strengthen networking and convergence among movements that adopt different entry points to the same struggle, from fighting 'managed' migration to contesting corporate control of food and land.

#### Notes


#### Acknowledgements

This introduction and the Globalizations special issue on Migration, Civil Society and Global Governance is a product of the Swedish Research Links project, 'Migration and development. What space for civil society in global governance?' (MIGLINK). The MIGLINK project was developed in collaboration between researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Zacatecas, Mexico and Ankara University, Turkey with financial support through the Swedish Research Council [grant number 348-2013-6682].

#### Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

#### Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [grant number 348-2013-6682].

#### References

