Notwithstanding its size and importance in a globalized world, there is little systematic information about the volume and direction of human travel that considers both migration and other kinds of mobility. This article introduces new estimates of the volume of migratory and non-migratory human travel across country borders worldwide between 1995 and 2022. Building on pioneering work by Recchi et al. (2019, Estimating Transnational Human Mobility on a Global Scale), the estimates integrate information from three major sources: tourism data, air passenger data, and migration data. Our estimates reveal that total transnational mobility increased from 5.29 billion trips in 1995 to 10.66 billion in 2019, largely outpacing global population growth and telling a story of continued globalization in that period—or, more precisely, of regional integration, since four out of five cross-border travels occur within the same world region. Across the board, migration (i.e., travel followed by residence change) constitutes a tiny and decreasing fraction of international travel; less than 1% worldwide and as low as .12% in Europe. Amidst the sustained growth in volume, the global network of human cross-border mobility has experienced slow “tectonic shifts” in some of its major clusters, while maintaining a stable configuration in others.

This Article investigates how law conceptualizes the temporality of migration, exposing a mismatch between the legal framework and migrants’ lived experiences. It shows that the dominant mode, which views migration as a sequential process, fails to capture the realities of migration. The Article argues that both epistemic and human rights arguments call for remedying this mismatch. In response, it introduces migration as simultaneity, which better reflects migrants’ experiences and the interplay between space, place, and time in migration and belonging.

The argument proceeds in three stages. First, it examines migration as a sequence, the prevailing concept embedded in international, European, and domestic migration and citizenship laws. This sequential framework operates through linearity and temporariness, which function as primary mechanisms for governing inclusion and exclusion. Second, drawing on migration studies and anthropology, it critiques this model, showing its inability to account for how migrants perceive and experience migration and belonging. Finally, it argues that strong power asymmetries shaping the regulation of migration demand a temporal conception that better aligns with migrants’ lived experiences. To this end, it advances migration as simultaneity and suggests that this concept can inform legal frameworks regulating migration and belonging.

This article addresses the term “Afro-Asianism” and its uses for scholars of Africa. Drawing on Pan-Africanism as an initial point of orientation, three aspects of Afro-Asianism are discussed: first, its emergence as a political concept during the period of global decolonization after the Second World War; second, its use as an analytic framework for situating historical and presentist trends across the Indian Ocean; and third, its role and function for rethinking African identities. Taken together, Afro-Asianism holds the potential for reconsidering the contours of African studies and Asian studies, thus decolonizing area studies more generally in new and productive ways.

Throughout the 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), particularly Fatah, cultivated a global network of solidarity rooted in worldwide anti-imperialism and advocacy for the Palestinian cause. Among its allies was the People’s Mujahidin Organization of Iran (MEK), which dispatched dozens of fighters to Fatah training camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq from 1970 to 1979 and emerged as one of the leading opposition groups to the Iranian shah. Examining the individual trajectories of MEK members who established ties and trained with the PLO provides insight into both organizations. For the MEK, this relationship not only embedded the group into a global revolutionary network centered on Palestine but also shaped its organizational trajectory by influencing its conception and practice of armed struggle. Further, the informality through which their ties emerged—and the central role played by rank and file MEK members in forging them—exemplifies a distinctive mode of transnational alliance-building for the PLO, one that complemented its formal diplomatic efforts. Finally, after the Iranian Revolution, this relationship positioned the MEK, the primary Iranian opposition in the early 1980s, to contest the Islamic Republic’s claim to the Palestinian cause.

This paper examines how Vietnamese international undergraduate seniors in the US make sense of their trajectories abroad and, in doing so, challenge the dominant discourses on international education in US-Vietnam relations. While the US frames international students as instruments of soft power, Vietnam regards students abroad as agents of national development who should return to “globalize” the domestic workforce. Drawing from life history interviews with eleven participants, the study identifies six transnational mobility narratives: family trailblazing narrative, mobility optimizing narrative, narrative of idealism, negotiating narrative, homeward strategizing narrative, and narrative of transnational elitism. Findings reveal that transnational mobility is not a linear journey of patriotic return or ideological assimilation but a dynamic process of meaning-making shaped by classed pathways into mobility, uneven institutional opportunities, lived experiences, and aspirations. The paper calls for more human-centered approaches to US-Vietnam educational exchanges, ones that honor the complexity of cross-border belonging and student agency.

Freyberg Place in Auckland’s central business district has emerged as a focal site for youth cultural gatherings. Within this space, university students have localised transnational popular culture, generating new cultural meanings, identities, and affiliations. Over the past decade, Hallyu, and K-pop in particular, has expanded significantly in Aotearoa, New Zealand. This study draws on personal accounts from university student K-pop fans of diverse backgrounds, with attention to their involvement in Auckland’s K-festival, random play dances, and the University of Auckland K-pop Planet club and its Konstellation dance crew. These narratives demonstrate how participation in K-pop activities facilitated adaptation to the residential, social, and academic challenges of university life, while simultaneously fostering peer networks and community belonging. Engagement in these events also enabled students to acquire leadership experience and transferable skills relevant to future employment. Face-to-face fan practices and embodied participation through dance provided an avenue for affective immersion, reinforcing identification with global fan networks. For these students, K-pop constituted both an alternative to Western popular music and a medium through which they articulated transnational identities, positioning themselves as globally connected cultural consumers.

This commentary for the Signs and Society special issue, “Localizing hallyu: The semiotics of the Korean wave in media and discourse,” considers how the contributions reveal the tensions underlying the way signs of the Korean wave are recontextualized through the material and embodied engagement of participants along pathways of its global circulation. It suggests that a transnational analysis of the Korean wave can serve as a useful laboratory for understanding the socially transformative power of semiotic practice.

While Jamaican émigré, New Negro author Claude McKay’s desired reading public by the mid-1920s became and remained the general American readership, at various moments during the (Long) Harlem Renaissance he enjoyed a diverse if limited reception. After early attention in Jamaica as the British Crown Colony’s first Black poet to publish a collection of verse, McKay eventually gained a measure of notice among North American politically progressive poetry enthusiasts, and then at various stages of his career gathered interest among British, French, Pan-African, and even Russian readerships. In the late 1920s, when McKay’s novel Home to Harlem became a bestseller, the New Negro author believed his star was finally rising with the broad spectrum of US readers, but the novel’s popularity was momentary, and the author’s glory transpired to be fleeting. In his lifetime, McKay never again realized the level of popular American readership he sought. During the early 1920s, the concept of an emergent, transnational American identity forged McKay’s aesthetic and accordingly his ambition to reach a US public. By the late 1930s, however, McKay rejected the idea that organized leftist politics was invested in aiding the struggling Black masses. Around the same period, he abandoned his former unique vision of a transnational America.

This paper focuses on what from a global perspective must be seen as one of the most significant social movements during the post-war era: the transnational anti-apartheid movement. This movement lasted for more than three decades, from late 1950s to 1994, had a presence on all continents, and can be seen to be part of the construction of a global political culture during the Cold War. The paper argues that the history of the anti-apartheid struggle provides an important historical case for the analysis of present-day global politics—especially in so far that movement organizations, action forms, and networks that were formed and developed in the anti-apartheid struggle are present in the contemporary context of the mobilization of a global civil society in relation to neoliberal globalization and supra-national political institutions such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank.

Based on 44 qualitative interviews with transnationally mobile people engaged in 28 different associations in Switzerland, this article tries to understand the motives behind the choice to volunteer, i.e. to actively and regularly engage in associations. These interviews reveal the great importance of associations in fostering inclusion in both the new living place and the place of origin. They further reveal that mobile people, no matter where they come from or why they are on the move, turn to associations for similar motives. In order of importance, they turn to associations to secure material advantages, to find ways of defining their identity in a manner that is both coherent and compatible with the host society and to socialize with people who are thought of as trustworthy.

Despite a growing evidence of transmigrants’ political activism, empirical research is still in its infancy. This paper examined how migrants’ political agency was constructed by their emotions, identities and transnational contexts. Data were collected from in-depth interviews with 11 Korean migrants who were residing in Brisbane, the third largest city of Australia, and engaging in home-country politics through self-organized activities. The study found that participants developed a human rights frame to suit their identities and contexts and in turn, the frame shaped their identities and political agency around human rights. The concepts of ‘framing’ and ‘small group development’ assisted in understanding interview participants’ experiences of negotiating differences in conceptualization and strategization of social issues.