Development as Freedom

It has been 25 years since Sen’s seminal book “Development as Freedom” was published. A lot has changed since then, also in terms of how we tend to perceive the relationship between migration and development. For one, and to paraphrase Sen, migrants have begun to be perceived as “responsible persons” who “chose to act one way rather than other”. To migrate, or to stay. This reasoning is reflected in the recent work of, among others, Hein de Haas (2021) and Kerilyn Schewel (2020), who perceive migration – or lack thereof – as a result of people’s aspirations both in terms of their right to move (de Haas) and to stay (Schewel). Importantly, as argued by the latter, a systematic neglect of the causes and consequences of immobility – i.e. of people’s staying preferences – obscures any efforts to understand why, when, and how people migrate. By developing the aspirations-capabilities frameworks to explore the determinants of (im)mobility, de Haas and Schewel have contributed a great deal to altering the status quo in migration research, which has often focused on the more easily quantifiable, economic factors underlying migration decision-making. Importantly, unlike most mainstream theories of migration, the aspirations-capabilities framework becomes even more relevant when acknowledging the highly gendered nature of migration.

The symposium brings together four contributions by four distinguished authors. The contributions articulate both the potential and pitfalls of the aspirations/capabilities model of the nexus and highlight particularities when the framing is applied together with other layers (gender, climate crisis, refugees). Two of the contributions discuss their topic using the term “migration” while others look into the issue in the context of “refugees.” Notwithstanding the importance of the distinction between “migrants” and “refugees” in current global frameworks, the purpose here is to stimulate debate that goes beyond this fluid dichotomy. In popular parlance, the term “refugees” is used to connote “migrants” or “non-citizens” in general.