Beyond the City: Migration, Governance and Politics in Non-Urban and Peripheral Spaces

While migration studies have largely centred on urban contexts, struggles over migration increasingly unfold outside major centres. Those non-urban or peripheral areas offer a critical lens through which to understand how power, authority and mobility intersect. While state presence might be fragmented, alternative governance actors emerge. Political and governance challenges are closely linked to patterns of outmigration, population decline, and the perceived decoupling of migration-integration policy frameworks. Alternatively, those areas emerge as experimental policy spaces, sites of innovation and community resilience. It is essential to approach these contexts not as passive recipients of national policy, but as active arenas in which broader migration and integration regimes are enacted, contested and reshaped. In this light, there is a need to bring together insights from centre-periphery studies of political science and urban studies with the long tradition of migration studies, the more recent local turn in migration scholarship and its late shift to small and medium-sized towns and rural areas, with the aim to theoretically and empirically explore a broader understanding of the nexus between migration (broadly understood) and non-urban and peripheral spaces. This Workshop examines how diverse non-urban and peripheral settings intersect with different forms of mobility, including refugee migration, labour migration and internal movement. Focusing on the actors, politics and governance at play, it investigates migration politics and governance within complex multi-level systems outside the urban realm. The Workshop, co-directed by Miriam Haselbacher, Institute for Urban & Regional Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, lays the groundwork for a joint publication.

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1: How can we construct and redefine non-urban/peripheral spaces in relation to migration governance?
2: How do different types of migration shape non-urban or peripheral contexts today?
3: What roles do migrants play in shaping governance in non-urban or peripheral areas?
4: How do multi-level tensions emerge in governance processes at the margins?
5: How are authority and agency over migration governance and politics negotiated in non-urban places?

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