International migration in an era of neoliberal social transformation

Migration has been a fact of human life throughout history, yet recent decades have seen the development of new types of migration flow across the globe amid a broader process of neoliberal globalization. In the first chapter of this book, Stephen Castles argued that Karl Polanyi’s study of the ‘Great Transformation’ of European societies, resulting from the ideological dominance of nineteenth-century market liberalism, provided a way of understanding the crises of modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Attention was also drawn to the way in which influential social scientists have updated and broadened Polanyi’s approach to provide a conceptual framework for understanding twenty-first-century neoliberalism and its impact on societies around the world. In this book, most of the authors apply a social transformation analysis in order to understand processes of international migration.