Global migration movements are currently a major focus of political and media attention, and a growing rallying point for nationalist movements and populist xenophobia in the North and South. To date, most research attention has focused on the movement of migrants to the Global North. However, over 40% of all migrants globally now live in the Global South, including 80 million in Asia, 25 million in Africa and 10 million in Latin America and the Caribbean. There are also an estimated 760 million internal migrants, of whom 282 million are in Asia, 114 million in Africa, and 100 million in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rapidly-growing cities are the destination for the vast majority of migrants and over 50% of the population of the South now lives in cities. Three million people move to urban areas every week and the migrant population makes up over a third in many cities. By 2030, cities in the South will be home to almost 4 billion people, or 80% of the world’s urban population. Combined with non-migrating household members, this means that well over 2 billion people are directly affected by migration in these regions.
While there have been a number of calls for more research on South-South migration, its relative neglect is symptomatic of dominant discourses on South-North migration, which have traditionally attracted widespread attention from scholars and assumed to have greater developmental value relative to other migration flows. South-South migration is only now emerging as a major research and global governance issue in debates about the migration-development nexus.
Hosted by the Hungry Cities Partnership and the International Migration Research Centre (IMRC), this workshop aims to explore new and emerging research directions in the study of South-South migration including the links between food system transformation and migration, migrant precarity, rural-urban linkages, the survival strategies of migrants in rapidly-growing cities, and citizen and state responses to South-South migration.
