Rethinking the migrant rights agenda in global migration governance: a decolonized rights-based approach

Hari Kc and Nicola Piper

Chapter 26 in Handbook on Migration and Development, 2024, pp 400-416 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In this chapter, we draw on the transnational migrant rights movements, with a particular focus on the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA) and its engagement with the national context of Nepal. We argue for the need to decolonize the human rights discourse within global migration governance. While doing so, the chapter provides a normative and institutional critique of the human rights discourse and proposes a decolonized rights-based approach which brings to the fore the voices and needs of migrant workers. Through foregrounding the leadership of local and regional migrant rights activists and their collective organizations, migrant rights agendas must be and are in fact being reframed. Applied to the case of temporary labour migration as practised across Asia and the Middle East, this decolonized rights-based approach to migration governance, we argue, focuses on mitigating the drivers of migration so that migration becomes a matter of choice, and not necessity, and on addressing the living and working precarities faced by migrant workers in the destination countries. On a more general level, such a decolonized approach generates a deeper commitment to human and labour rights on the part of both more developed and less developed regions, and migrant origin and destination countries.

Keywords: Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781789907131.00036 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable (https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781789907131.00036 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.elgaronline.com:443/view/book/9781789907131/book-part-9781789907131-36.xml [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.elgaronline.com:443/abstract/book/9781789907131/book-part-9781789907131-36.xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19268_26

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().