Migration Diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa : Power, Mobility, and the State

The first major examination of the interplay between migration and foreign policy in the Middle East, this study analyses how key Arab and non-Arab states instrumentalised cross-border mobility from the mid-1950s until today, and shows how migrants, refugees and diasporas have been subject to power politics considerations across the Global South. -- .

Migration diplomacy provides the first systematic examination of the foreign policy importance of migrants, refugees and diasporas in the Global South. Tsourapas examines how emigration-related processes become embedded in governmental practices of establishing and maintaining power; how states engage with migrant and diasporic communities residing in the West; how oil-rich Arab monarchies have extended their support for a number of sending states’ ruling regimes via cooperation on labour migration; and, finally, how labour and forced migrants may serve as instruments of political leverage. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork and employing a range of case-studies across the Middle East and North Africa, Tsourapas identifies how the management of cross-border mobility in the Middle East is not primarily dictated by legal, moral, or human rights considerations but driven by state actors' key concern – political power. -- .