The Migration Turn and Eastern Europe

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Provides a comprehensive overview of the global and regional development of migration since the 1980s Analyzes policy documents, academic texts and discursive materials on population development since the 1980s Shows how the reification of migration discourses led to the rise of anti-migrant nationalist blocs in Eastern Europe

Auteur

Attila Melegh is Associate Professor at the Institute of Communication and Sociology, Corvinus University of Budapest, UK, and Senior Researcher at the Demographic Research Institute, Budapest, Hungary. He has been the founding director of Karl Polanyi Research Center and editor of Demográfia English Edition and Eszmélet Journal. He is the author of the renowned book On the East/West Slope. Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discourses on Central and Eastern Europe (2006)

Texte du rabat

Using Marxist and Polanyian frameworks, this book examines the structural and discursive transformation that can explain the polarization of migration debates and within the rise of nationalist anti-migrant discourses in Europe with a special attention to Eastern Europe and Hungary. It goes beyond the mainstream explanations of these phenomena that uses nationalist propaganda as causal factors and instead argues that the rise of anti-immigration currents cannot be understood without a dialectical and historical analysis of the material and discursive transformations, most importantly marketization and related reification. Drawing from thinkers such as Lukács, Polanyi, and Gramsci as well as diverse empirical sources including demographic studies, historical modelling, and discourse analyses, Migration Turn and Eastern Europe is a unique and rigorous study of one of the most pressing and puzzling political and sociological questions of ourtime.

Contenu

1. Introduction: Trillion Dollar Bill or a Nightmare?.- 2. The Migration Turn and the Demographic Discourses in the 1980s.- 3. Historical Material Structures and Processes- 4. Discursive Changes.- 5. Conclusion.