ABSTRACT
What makes the age in The Age of Migration, famously co-authored by Stephen Castles and his colleagues? This chapter throws light on the significance of this question by pointing out the colonial and postcolonial origins of current migration and refugee flows. The chapter argues that the postcolonial features of massive and mixed population flows are the marks of our age. While the treatise The Age of Migration presents a structural explanation of the global migration scenario, this chapter pleads for a different method of inquiry. Such an inquiry will revolve around three pillars: temporality, spatiality, and agency. Temporality introduces historical intelligibility about migration patterns, refugee flows, and governmental controls. Spatiality tells us of the place the migrant leaves, the place the migrant arrives at, and perhaps leaves again to move on to a different place, as well as the place the migrant occupies – camps, cities, borders and borderlands, markets, and finally the deserts, deadly snowfields, and waters where the migrant body lies. Finally, agency introduces into the analysis of migration and refugee movements the notion of autonomy of migration. The chapter argues that an analytical framework for migration and forced migration studies must take migrant autonomy, however relative it may be, as an integral element of analysis. Governance of migration is caused and propelled by the relative autonomy of the migrants. All three pillars tell us of the colonial and postcolonial imprint on present population flows. They make this age the global age of migration.
