Motives of Mobility, Drivers of Displacement ꟷ Cross-Country Analysis

Abstract

Current asylum and migration policies tend to assume a categorical distinction between refugees fleeing an untenable physical threat and “economic” migrants seeking new opportunities. Yet recent research has shown that most migratory movements and even individual decisions represent a mix of motives and that various individual and circumstantial factors play a role. This panel brings together a set of papers that delve deeper into understanding why people move in the first place, why they move on, and which of these factors are open to policy interventions while in other cases policies need to address primarily the social, economic, human and other consequences of mobility. Recent research into motives and drivers of human mobility has begun to address the issue with a diversity of methods (quantitative and qualitative) and approaches (cross-country and at individual level). In order to advance our understanding of motives of mobility and drivers of displacement, these two panels include both theoretical and empirical approaches and combine papers that employ quantitative and qualitative research methods at different levels of analysis. The first panel and its papers focus cross-country analysis, while the second panel focuses more on case studies.