ABSTRACT
Rights-based approaches to development are historically a new phenomenon, and so are the rights of international migrants: as non-citizens, migrants’ rights are still among the most contentious of group rights; as a result, endeavours aimed at the advancement and realisation of migrants’ rights are being met with great resistance around the world, as evident for example from the negotiation and adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (signed 19 December 2018). It is thanks to rising political activism by migrants located in the Global South that innovative thinking about their rights has emerged.
This chapter discusses the topic of an integrated rights-based approach to migration and development through a global justice lens, by engaging with scholarship on global governance and in relation to the proliferation of globalisation studies. Those fields of inquiry all have one central contribution in common: the decentring of the state as the dominant unit of social scientific analysis and the re-centring of the role of non-state or transnational actors (that is, the private sector, civil society, and international organisations). It is argued that an intricate institutional analysis pitched at multi-levels – and the relationship between those levels – constitutes one important, if not the, way forward for future thinking about a rights-based approach to international migration.
