ABSTRACT
The growing interest in mobility and theoretical approaches that centres on movement and fluidity and less on structure and social order is reflected in current thinking on migration. Migration processes are seen as increasingly fluid, dynamic and unpredictable and are leading to both instability and flexibility in migrant life trajectories, migration corridors, transit countries and nodes, meanings of transnational linkages and roles of diaspora communities. This book focuses on the ‘soft’ side of migration by highlighting migrants’ mobility processes over a shorter or longer period of time with emphasis on their agency. It underscores the flexibility of migrants and migration trajectories, and advocates for seeing migrant decision-making as part and parcel of cognitive and emotionally loaded individual perceptions and collective idioms. It thus seeks to open up new perspectives for migration research. As for policies, the challenge for migration managers, ranging from the government to civil society, is how they can creatively respond to perceptions, expectations and practices of migrants as actors and how they can deal with the multiple scales in which migrant agency is anchored.
