Political remittances and the diffusion of a rights-based approach to migration governance: the case of the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA)

This paper aims to address a rarely researched dimension of political remittances by moving from the (trans)national to the regional level, and from the individual to the institutional level of collective action. We base our analyses of the regional and institutional aspects on the case of the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA), a regional network comprising migrants’ rights organisations that span across Asia (from West to East). Over the past two decades, this network has been instrumental in creating and expanding political spaces at various levels (national, transnational, regional and global) in which political advocacy in the form of organising strategies and the framing of political issues has ‘travelled’. We argue that this is done via the diffusion of political remittances within advocacy networks and that such diffusion generates counter-hegemonic knowledge to state-led interpretations of the governance of migration. This paper uses the notion of ‘political remittances’ not only to highlight the multiplying effect of the flow of ideas and practices in relation to membership of organisations involved in collective advocacy; but also in terms of multiplication of targets of the advocacy. We differentiate between a horizontal dimension, where remittances are being circulated between the (national) members of the network and the vertical dimension, where ideas also circulate as remittances back and forth between the national members of the network and the global level.