Regional Mobility Spaces? Visa Waiver Policies and Regional Integration
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Authors
Visa policies today are a central instrument for filtering wanted and unwanted types of travellers, leading to a hierarchy of mobility rights. While there is evidence of a “global mobility divide”, we still know little about the role of regional integration when it comes to the distribution of mobility rights and the (re)structuring of mobility spaces. Against this background, the article examines the structure of visa relations in different bodies of regional integration (EU, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, ECOWAS, EAC, NAFTA, SADC and SICA). The article compares visa policies in the member states of these institutions in 1969 and 2010 from a social network perspective. While one would generally expect each institution's member states to become more similar with regard to both internal and external mobility regulations, we find that not all regional clusters align their visa policies. Potential explanations for this state of affairs are investigated.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | International Migration |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Pages (from-to) | 164-180 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| ISSN | 0020-7985 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 01.12.2016 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:
This article originates from the research project ‘From Containers to Open States? Border Regime Change and the Mobility of Persons’ (2007-2014) that was funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) as part of the Collaborative Research Centre 597 ‘Transformations of the State’ at the University of Bremen, Germany. The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 The Authors. International Migration © 2016 IOM
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