A system-thinking approach for migration studies: an introduction

Migration studies first took up a systems perspective in the 1970s to explain migration flows and their dynamics over time. Over the last decades, the dominant discourse and analysis in migration studies have remained constrained within the limits of the ‘migration system’. While the influence of the ‘wider environment’ on the migration system has been recognized, what the elements of the wider environment are and their mechanisms of influence remain poorly articulated. Through eight innovative contributions, this Special Issue seeks to contribute firstly, to unpacking the elements (i.e. the other systems) that constitute the ‘wider environment’ with which the components of the migration system (e.g. migrants, sending and receiving communities, institutions, policies, etc.) interact, and secondly, to disentangling the mutual influences between the migration system and this wider environment. This Special Issue as a whole suggests that the growing complexity of migration governance demands a complexity-based approach that acknowledges the multiple relations among systems. In this respect, the wider environment and its linkages with the migration system need to be better captured through an analytical approach based on system thinking.