Contextualizing immigrant inter-wave dynamics and the consequences for migration processes

What drives international migration? Theories of migration networks, migration culture, migration systems and cumulative causation suggest that once a critical threshold level of migrants have settled, migration tends to stimulate the creation of social and economic structures that make the process of migration self-perpetuating (cf. Massey et al. 1987; de Haas 2010). One important aspect of the theory is that the more migrants from a particular locality settle in one place, their presence, assistance and established structures in the destination country act as incentives for others to follow in their footsteps, which emphasizes the instrumental role of pioneers’ agency in influencing others to follow suit. A historical perspective on the migration from Ukraine to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands challenges this assumption. While substantial numbers of migrants have settled in those destinations, migration, especially in the last 20 years, has not developed into large, self-sustaining migration systems (in comparison to the dynamic migration linkages between Ukraine and Southern European countries such as Portugal, Italy and Greece). Trying to understand why migration has not taken off, we argue that the role of settled pioneer migrants and their community structures in assisting others to follow in their footsteps should not be taken for granted. We argue that the role of pioneers is much more ambiguous and complex, and the relevant question about ‘bridgeheads’ and ‘gatekeepers’ (cf. Böcker 1994) should not be that of ‘either/or’ but ‘how much’, ‘to what extent’ or ‘under what conditions’.migration system, cumulative causation, Ukrainian migration, pioneer migrants, migration waves, United Kingdom, Netherlands

Dissenting Consciousness: A Socio-Legal Analysis of Russian Migration Cases before the European Court of Human Rights

This paper conceptualizes dissenting consciousness based on a qualitative case study of migrants’ and human rights lawyers’ everyday experiences of pursuing claims before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from Russia. Dissent as a theoretical concept is traced to judicial literature and modern social conflict theories. Dissenting consciousness heuristically captures a degree of agency rooted in the critique of law as illegitimate, yet short of active resistance. Drawing on recent developments around ‘under the law’ legal consciousness, disempowerment, and legal alienation, this perspective comes useful to unpack the ‘negative diagonal’ between ‘isolation/fatalism and the dissenting collectivism’, as core to this orientation of legality. Dissenting consciousness of migrants-litigants airs voices of challenge to the mainstream just as the subversive stories told by the past applicants and lawyers before the Strasbourg Court inject subtle heterodoxy into the legal process

The lawyers as guardians of the case file: on human-material encounters in immigration law in Russia

This paper looks at the human rights and immigration lawyers in Russia inspired by the approach that embraces both human and non-human objects in shaping the everyday experiences of the law. Drawing on five months ethnographic fieldwork in Russian legal aid NGOs that represent asylum seekers and interviews with the immigration lawyers who worked there, this paper casts more light on the file-based model of delivering justice, whereby refugees and their stories cannot be constructed differently than through the materiality of the case file. This paper argues that the specific relationship between the immigration lawyers and their clients’ case files has not developed in a vacuum, but can be traced back to the traditions of the legal profession in Russia. It is also illustrative of three specific traits of the broader Russian legal culture: legal formalism, the inconsistency of the legal process and the hyperbolic reality-mediating function attached to documentary evidence

Can statelessness be legally productive? The struggle for the rights of noncitizens in Russia

Nearly 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, there are still people who have never in their lives held any passport other than that of the Soviet Union. They are de jure stateless. However, their statelessness can also be legally productive if strategically challenged. This legal productivity arises from the mobilization of human rights protections embedded in de jure statelessness by local legal actors in a given, national immigration context, and extending them to secure the rights of de facto stateless: undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. I illustrate this using a case study of the recent litigation for the rights of Mr Mskhiladze – a stateless person born in the Georgian USSR – before the Russian Constitutional Court (2017) and the European Court of Human Rights (2018). Conceptually, my paper testifies to a productive relationship between a de jure and de facto statelessness in the post-Soviet context

The Women’s Complaint: sociolegal mobilization against authoritarian backsliding following the 2020 abortion law in Poland

The decision of the Constitutional Tribunal in October 2020 has severely curtailed women’s reproductive rights in Poland. Mass protests ensued. This article focuses on the untold story of a productive rupture that channelled the protesters’ efforts into a mass legal mobilization against the tribunal’s judgement to the European Court of Human Rights. These applications, known as the “Women’s Complaint,” were filed by over one thousand Polish women. Triangulating between analysis of interviews with human rights lawyers and feminist activists, and the legal reasoning of the petition, this article’s original contribution traces the evolution of the Women’s Complaint from a reproductive rights dispute to a challenge to the government’s authoritarian backsliding to better understand the relationship between social conflicts and legal mobilization. Reproductive rights and democratic values are inextricable; threats to one reinforce threats to the other. The Women’s Complaint is about women standing up for their reproductive rights and – in effect – spearheading a much broader rights-based litigation against authoritarianism

Efficiency of WLAN 802.11xx in the multi-hop topology

The article presents the research results of the performance of wireless multi-hop networks. The analysis of the decrease in performance of such networks depending on the number of hops was performed for three popular transmission techniques used in mesh networks: Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (default routing protocol for 802.11s), Optimized Link State Routing Protocol and Wireless Distribution System. Based on the measurements results, mathematical models for the decreasing of network transmission parameters depending on the number of hops were developed

Migration systems, pioneers and the role of agency

The notion of a migration system is often invoked but it is rarely clearly defined or conceptualized. De Haas has recently provided a powerful critique of the current literature highlighting some important flaws that recur through it. In particular, migration systems tend to be identified as fully formed entities, and there is no theorization as to how they come into being. Moreover, there is no explanation of how they change in time, in particular how they come to decline. The inner workings – the mechanics – which drive such changes are not examined. Such critiques of migration systems relate to wider critiques of the concept of systems in the broader social science literature, where they are often presented as black boxes in which human agency is largely excluded. The challenge is how to theorize the mechanics by which the actions of people at one time contribute to the emergence of systemic linkages at a later time. This paper focuses on the genesis of migration systems and the notion of pioneer migration. It draws attention both to the role of particular individuals, the pioneers, and also the more general activity of pioneering which is undertaken by many migrants. By disentangling different aspects of agency, it is possible to develop hypotheses about how the emergence of migrations systems is related to the nature of the agency exercised by different pioneers or pioneering activities in different contexts.migration systems, agency, emergence, pioneer migrants, migrant networks, social capital