ABSTRACT
Ever since the dawn of the age of mass migration, well over a century ago, scholars have endeavoured to provide general explanations for the phenomenon of human migration, more or less abstracted from its specifi c occurrence. Economics, sociology and geography have been the most propitious disciplinary grounds, but by no means the only ones. The end results of such efforts have been models, analytical frameworks, conceptual approaches, empirical generalisations, simple notions, and only seldom real theories. A number of these explanations were not originally conceived to explain migration, but rather born to explain other facets of human behaviour and then imported and adapted for the explanation of migration. Efforts at theory building have not been cumulative: the relatively short history of theorising about migration takes the form of a string of separate, generally unconnected theories, models or frameworks, rather than a cumulative sequence of contributions that build upon previous blocks.
