ABSTRACT In an era of globalization, much research has explored what those disadvantaged by globalization want from future democracy, while less is known about the preferences of those who benefit from and support globalization, namely, cosmopolitans. This article investigates the governance preferences of German cosmopolitans using original survey data. It introduces cosmopolitanism as a multidimensional concept and links these dimensions to support for representative, technocratic and participatory democracy. Results show that the foundations of cosmopolitan orientations are decisive to governance preferences. While nearly all dimensions align positively with expert governance, only institutional cosmopolitanism (entailing support for political supranationalism and economic globalization) is connected to significant and consistent support for representative government. Meanwhile, moral cosmopolitanism and cultural cosmopolitanism are associated with participatory democracy (concretely, referendums and citizen assemblies). The findings lend insight into the understudied democratic preferences of cosmopolitan citizens, and show that they hold divergent perspectives on democracy.
ABSTRACT A growing literature examines the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) networks and economic development using measures of countries’ positions within the global investment system. While these studies provide valuable insights into the structure of international investment, they reveal little about how the configuration of countries’ immediate investment relationships influences development and resilience. This study addresses this gap by analysing the local FDI network neighbourhoods of 172 countries using annual IMF Coordinated Direct Investment Survey (CDIS) data for 2009–2024. Local network structure is characterised using measures of effective size, density and hierarchy, capturing diversity, embeddedness and concentration in countries’ inward and outward investment relationships. Two‐way fixed‐effects panel models demonstrate that the developmental implications of local network structure vary systematically across stages of development. Developing economies benefit from diverse outward investment neighbourhoods and dense inward investment communities, suggesting that access to heterogeneous external opportunities and embeddedness within investor networks both contribute to development. Local network effects are generally weaker in least‐developed economies, consistent with constraints on the ability to exploit investment network opportunities. In advanced economies, outward investment structure is more important than inward investment structure, with dense and concentrated outward investment neighbourhoods associated with weaker development outcomes. These findings underline the importance of local FDI network structure for understanding economic development and resilience and suggest that policies should consider not only the volume of FDI but also the configuration of countries’ investment relationships.
ABSTRACT Although irregularity can arise at different stages of migration, existing scholarship has focused more on irregular entry than on theorising pathways into and out of irregular status after arrival. This article addresses this gap through the case of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong who overstayed their visas following contract termination and subsequently sought protection. Their trajectories show a shift from regular labour migration to irregular status, followed by a form of quasi‐regularisation through entry into the protection process. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 31 protection claimants in Hong Kong who had previously worked as migrant domestic workers, we show that these transitions are shaped by a wider migration infrastructure. We highlight the interplay of migration regimes, including employment‐tied visas and a short post‐termination grace period, intermediaries that deepen indebtedness and constrain exit options, social networks that provide information and practical support and contingent events that often trigger shifts in migration trajectories. Pathways into and out of irregularity reflect migrants’ bounded agency as they navigate these structural and circumstantial constraints.
ABSTRACT With the rising number of migrations in the last few decades, immigrant entrepreneurship has increasingly attracted scholarly and policy attention globally. Yet, the nature and role of a crucial resource for immigrant entrepreneurs (IEs)—networks—have not been organized systematically. This paper systematically reviews and synthesizes existing literature at the intersection of immigrant entrepreneurship and networks, drawing from 132 studies identified from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Using the embeddedness approach, our analysis shows that migrant entrepreneurs utilize different network types that are socially, spatially, institutionally and multi‐contextually embedded. We also introduce the concept of the liability of migrant identity , which limits IE's access to host‐country networks and, subsequently, affects their business performance. This review contributes to the literature at the intersection of migrant entrepreneurship and networks by unpacking the black box of network types and their roles, while also offering definitional clarity on the various network types. Finally, we suggest avenues for future research, both as a firm starting point for new researchers on the topic and guidance for existing researchers aiming to advance the field.
ABSTRACT This article examines the linguistic landscapes of three bus stations in Mexico where there have been attempts to stop migration flows from reaching the US border. The linguistic landscapes exhibit an institutional identity check policy, which requires travellers to show an identity document such as a passport when buying a ticket. Analysing the linguistic landscapes through a geosemiotics approach, on the one hand, sheds light on how an identity check policy contributes to the reconfiguration of bus stations into assemblages of surveillance, signs and institutions that function together to regulate and constrain human behaviour and mobility. On the other hand, examining language in place indexes the US–Mexico cooperation in the management of migration. This study foregrounds the externalization of migration that involves passport and visa checks by transport companies.
This study examines the economic integration processes of student migrants from Pakistan and India in Finland-both students on scholarships and those who are self-funded-drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and life story interviews. Transnational family ties and remittance dynamics are shown to shape varied career pathways, from low-skilled sectors to professional roles. The article discusses the 'odd job visa trap', whereby precarious employment taken to maintain legal status and support families abroad compromises academic and career progression. Through the lens of remittances, the study views integration as a process embedded in transnational family contexts, rather than solely shaped by host-country institutions. It complicates host-centric perspectives by highlighting how transnational family resources and obligations also influence student migrants' labour market outcomes. Thus, student migrants' study-to-work transition and economic integration processes are better understood when going beyond too rigid views of integration, instead encompassing transnational perspective and remittances.
This Special Issue centres well-being as a primary lens for understanding transnational family life. Drawing on eight papers that employ qualitative and quantitative methods, the collection examines diverse family members, including parents, children, youth, adults, grandparents and descendants across varied transnational configurations in countries such as Poland, Moldova, Ukraine, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland and Germany. The papers collectively reveal four key insights. First, well-being is multi-dimensional, encompassing social, cultural, mental and physical elements, and is relational, shaped by caregiving, support and family dynamics. Second, well-being is not merely a state of being, but is actively practised, sustained and sometimes repaired through everyday practices. Third, certain dimensions become more salient depending on developmental stage, gender and life course. Finally, political, socio-cultural and geographical contexts influence mobility, expectations and caregiving, profoundly affecting relationships and well-being in transnational families. Together, the contributions advance nuanced understandings of care, connection and flourishing across borders.
Drawing on theory and practice of social network research, this article examines the nexus between networked migration experiences and de-networked migration policies in countries of arrival. Building upon classical network scholarship and our own contributions to qualitative network research, we show how migration policies in Europe tend to ignore or actively oppose the relational, meso-level of migrants' experience. This includes, for example, kinship networks, involving narrow definitions of family and 'worthiness'. Such approaches, increasingly enforced by governments across the whole policy spectrum, hinder migrants' social trajectories but also push them to find (networked) ways to resist and circumvent policy regimes, as demonstrated through our case studies of Sub-Saharan forced migrants in Italy and Afghans in London. By taking a network lens-and working at the intersection of Relational Sociology and Policy Analysis-our argument goes beyond the agency-versus-structure binary, exploring the mediating meso-level of relationality.
In Poland, the mobilisation of help for refugee assistance and support in light of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine was swift, agile and unprecedented. Decentralised and informal networks of local leaders, amongst them Ukrainian nationals, neighbours, businesses, aid organisations and, crucially, forced migrants themselves, mostly women, formed largely on an ad hoc basis. This research focuses on the development of these networks on a local level through which new forms of association and agentic opportunities emerged, particularly for Ukrainian women with forced migration experience. Through qualitative social network analysis and mapping techniques from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with key civic actors in the city of Krakow, we analyse two emergent civic ecosystems of migrant support, analysing the role of interactants with forced migration experience and their positioning, resources and types of relations which typified their networks. Our findings point to the building of both strong and weak interdependent connections between diverse stakeholders, laying the foundation for local civic ecosystems wherein the agency of previously marginalised actors, particularly forced migrants, becomes the driving force.
This article investigates care circulation within the transnational families of Vietnamese marriage immigrant women in Taiwan. Drawing on interviews with 30 immigrant women and 10 of their Vietnamese mothers, the study demonstrates how caregiving is negotiated across generations and borders under structural constraints. Women carry a double burden: performing intensive childcare and domestic work in Taiwan while providing financial and emotional support to Vietnamese families. Grandmothers travel to Taiwan to assist with childcare when visa policies permit, temporarily easing care burdens and enabling limited cultural transmission to grandchildren. However, care circulation is uneven and precarious. Care flows primarily through female networks while men remain peripheral, reproducing gendered divisions. Visa restrictions limit stays to short periods, creating dependency and recurring separations. This study advances care circulation theory by demonstrating that caregiving in marriage migration is multidirectional but fundamentally constrained by gender norms, state policies and unequal resources. Rather than a harmonious exchange, care circulation operates as a negotiated and inequitable practice that provides partial relief without challenging patriarchal care structures.
This study asks how former unaccompanied minors in Finland practice hospitality and reciprocity with those they value, both locally and transnationally, and how agency emerges in these encounters as they rebuild sustainable lives despite challenges. Previous research often frames unaccompanied minors and other young refugees primarily as aid recipients within support systems, overlooking their agency and capacity to shape their own social worlds. Drawing on Derrida's concept of hospitality and Burkitt's theory of relational agency, this study examines how everyday interactions transform hierarchical power relations into spaces of mutual transformation. It analyses visual social network maps generated through individual interviews with 12 young refugees and paired interviews with 12 individuals from their social networks. The findings reveal a shift from conditional, institutional support toward unconditional hospitality characterized by reciprocity, mutual care, trust and support. The research underscores the transformative potential of hospitality as a space for mutual becoming and co-agency.
Gender inequality remains a major barrier to inclusive development, yet the gender implications of deeper integration into global value chains (GVCs) are not fully understood across regions. This paper examines whether rising GVC participation is associated with lower gender inequality, focusing on East Asia and the Pacific (EAP) and South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa (SA&MENA) economies from 1990 to 2018. Using a country-year panel and two-way fixed effects (TWFE) models that exploit within-country changes in GVC participation, we find that higher GVC participation is associated with lower Gender Inequality Index (GII), with larger magnitudes in EAP than in SA&MENA. Forward linkages exhibit a stronger negative association than backward linkages. Component outcomes show improvements in employment equality in both regions, while health and education effects are clearer in the world sample and EAP. Interaction evidence suggests that productivity and legal frameworks condition the GVC-gender relationship. Policy implications are to promote upgrading toward higher value-added GVC integration and women's access to better-quality jobs across regions, and especially in SA&MENA, to strengthen and enforce women's overall legal protections and workplace rights to better translate integration into lower inequality.
Advocating the heuristic value of a relational approach, this article investigates how, in the context of forced migration, agency arises from the multiple interactions and interdependencies within refugees' social networks. Based on qualitative data, it examines the relational mechanisms underlying the coping strategies employed by Ukrainian refugees in Romania. By analysing the reconfigurations of personal networks and flows of social support during the migration process, it identifies four ideal-types of relational agency, defined by the outcomes they enable. These types emerge from diverse social ties and interdependencies within reconfigured personal networks, which can either constrain, enable or guide refugees' decisions and actions. They vary according to migrants' needs and goals, the resources embedded in their networks, and the relational work they invest in activating these resources in specific spatio-temporal contexts. Relational agency thus emerges as a context-sensitive continuum of doing agency unfolding within evolving configurations of personal relationships.
This study examines the intersection of digitalization, migration, mobility and citizenship through the case of Estonia's e-Residency program and proposes the concept of digitalized migration. Unlike conventional migration approaches centred on physical relocation, the study conceptualizes digitalized migration as a selective transnational process in which individuals remain spatially immobile while integrating into another national context through digital infrastructures. Within this framework, e-Residency is analysed as a form of mobility reconfigured through digital technologies that shares characteristics with migration. Empirically, the study is based on digital ethnographic observations of the online interaction networks of Turkish citizen e-Residents, complemented by in-depth interviews. The findings show that e-Residency produces transnational forms of subjectivity through digitalized business practices, virtual mobility and platform-based state-citizen relations. Although Turkish e-Residents pursue migration aspirations digitally, they remain embedded in local socio-economic and political contexts, as their engagement with e-Residency is primarily driven by economic opportunities rather than socio-cultural integration. At the same time, e-Residency operates as a digital border regime, limiting its cosmopolitan promise through selective access mechanisms, digital skill requirements and neoliberal mobility norms.
This article analyses the language of accountability and responsibility regarding the welfare of non-EU migrants in Romania. Romania is a country with little experience in receiving economic migrants. Although legal provisions are applied in immigration and work inspection offices, migrants’ employment, residence and welfare are largely governed by less formal practices, enacted by a mix of state and commercial actors. This network governance has a transnational dimension, because staffing agents from workers’ countries of origin remain involved in the provision of care over long periods of time. Fuzzy understandings of rights and legal obligations, as well as more vernacular and improvised rules, are an integral part of a network governance that is being constructed in the everyday encounters of non-EU workers with various public and private actors. This article explores how meanings and practices of responsibility over migrants’ welfare circulate and are negotiated between such actors.
Ethiopian Jews (hereafter Beta Israelis) have been resettled in Israel since the 1980s after living in Ethiopia for centuries. Despite their relocation, Beta Israelis have sustained ties to Ethiopia through marriage. As a distinctive migrant group resettled in what is considered their ancestral homeland, they have unique motivations for these marriages. This study investigates these motivations through an inductive analysis of interview data and archival materials. Traditionally, it has been theorized that migrant men from patriarchal societies marry women from their birthplace because they find women in host countries unsuitable for non-egalitarian marriages. However, this article argues that the phenomenon transcends gender dynamics and encompasses other people's experiences married with spouses from their birthplace and the desire to emulate them. In addition, it highlights experiences of discrimination in the host country and the desire to reconnect to the birthplace as important factors in transnational marriages. Therefore, this phenomenon is complex and requires nuanced, context-sensitive analyses.
This special issue examines globalisation and resilience, variously conceived, from a network perspective. In an era that moved from hyperglobalisation to disruption—pandemics, geopolitical tensions, climate risks—we argue that a key orienting question should be how globalisation is being reconfigured across multiplex economic, social and industrial networks. With this special issue, we hope to motivate new bodies of literature deploying social network analysis to diagnose and analyse the resilience of global economic networks to exogenous shocks. Where are such shocks likely to occur? Do they get contained in network subgraphs? Or are they absorbed more equally throughout the network? In any given network, which actors and ties, or types of actors and ties, underpin systemic robustness? The four papers in the issue span a bibliometric synthesis of ‘network resilience’ across domains; an industry-level measure of supply-chain disruption linking logistics reliability to US output; a country-level study connecting embeddedness in the global FDI network to democratic resilience in less-developed countries; and a firm-level reconstruction of the EV corporate ownership network. We conclude by highlighting the substantive contributions of these papers, by calling for conceptual clarity on network resilience, and by suggesting a number of fruitful directions for future research.
What does integration look like when immigrants and refugees mobilize socioeconomic resources before arriving in their new destination countries to proactively navigate the integration process? To date, research in refugee studies has emphasized the importance of socioeconomic capital and access to digital technologies in facilitating employment, housing and language acquisition. In comparison, our empirical insights from 80 interviews with Afghan refugee women and displaced Ukrainians in Canada point to a growing use of online tools and transnational connections in destination countries as strategies for integration. Specifically, our participants relied on online tools and social connections to search for employment and housing opportunities prior to arrival in Canada. Due to the lengthy wait times for accessing language classes upon arrival, many participants, in turn, enrolled in affordable online English classes taught by tutors located in Eastern Europe. By incorporating this transnational digital landscape into current debates on refugee integration, policy and theoretical implications, it suggests that integration is increasingly influenced by transnational and digital dynamics which extend beyond the national boundaries of origin and host countries.
This article explores the organizational aspects of care relocation of German seniors to care homes for older adults in the Czech border regions. It examines the role of care entrepreneurs as transnational actors linking diverse contexts in order to create sustainable business projects. It conceptualizes their endeavours as the work of transnational acting grounded in geographic arbitrage, whereby socioeconomic disparities are not merely exploited but strategically mobilized and balanced. The article argues that care relocation arrangements are shaped through the entrepreneurial navigation of inter- and intra-national inequalities. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on care relocation and geographic arbitrage by analysing how care entrepreneurs construct transnational arrangements that are both profitable and organizationally sustainable over time. Ultimately, it demonstrates how global and regional care flows are not only sustained within structures of inequality but actively configured and reconfigured through entrepreneurial practice.
We examine the effect of the global foreign direct investment (FDI) network on electoral democracy in 93 less developed countries (LDCs) between 2001 and 2017, utilizing log‐log models with an Arellano–Bond estimator and two‐way fixed effects. We rely on bilateral data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's Bilateral FDI Statistics and the International Monetary Fund's Coordinated Direct Investment Survey . We find that inward coreness in the global FDI network has a robust positive effect on electoral democracy in LDCs, net of conventional control variables, and across a wide range of cases. We hypothesize that embeddedness in the global FDI network has a positive effect on democracy by stimulating economic growth and facilitating a diffusion of democratic ideals and processes that promote the emergence and growth of democracy in less developed countries.
