About this Research Topic

Background

This Research Topic will address the political dimensions of migration and integration governance with a focus on ideations, i.e. the ways ideas emerge and influence political and governance practices. Ideations sometimes receive little attention or are discussed apart from the political process, but they merit deeper study especially in the politically highly sensitive policy fields such as migration and integration. The empirical focus will be on Europe, which in recent decades has been facing several waves of migration and the related needs of integration.

Ideations offer a specific lens to analyse and discuss migration and integration politics, policy and governance. Changing migration and integration regimes and administrative practices, the agendas of various political actors and existing public policies all interact with the discourses and practices of migrants, citizens, and street-level bureaucrats, as well as with the agency of decision-makers (politicians, officials), generating the ideations of policies and regimes.

Policy debates, policy designs and governance practices produce and shape the discourses of policy-making, and in this sense serve as ideational resources. The articles of this Research Topic will discuss selected theoretical and empirical perspectives related to these research areas, thereby advancing the debate on the ideational aspects of migration and integration policy, politics and governance.

The key interest of the Research Topic is to examine the ideational aspects of migration and integration policy, politics and governance through a set of cases highlighting different ways and contexts in which ideations work in practice. Such contexts could be for example construction of target groups in respective political debate or governance practice, the ideational basis for policy design, enactment and implementation, interactions between various levels of public officials and migrants/citizens, ideational aspects of integration, civic agency, citizenship education, historical evolution of discourses on migrants and many more. The articles will be reflected on in the Editorial written by the editors. This way we seek to advance the knowledge about the operation of ideations in contemporary political and governance settings, possibly also with a longer time span.

Keywords: Migration, integration, ideations, policy, politics, governance

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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