Crossing Borders and Traversing Boundaries: Closing the "Gap' between Internal and International Migration in Asia

Within migration studies, the division or gap' between internal and international migration research has grown over the past few decades despite growing calls to bring these literatures back into conversation. While distinctions between internal and international migration remain relevant in a world in which states retain the power to shape human movements across scales, this division within migration studies is problematic in light of the increasing complexity of human mobility. Scholars seeking to close the gap' highlight the common structural drivers of international and internal migration, and note an increasingly myopic focus on international migration overlooking the important economic and social contributions of internal migrants. While in basic alignment with these arguments, the contributions to this special issue focus instead on critically interrogating the relationship between internal and international migration research with the aim of provoking new insights across disciplinary and categorical boundaries. Each of the papers examines migration phenomena occupying the intellectual and empirical space between normative definitions of internal' and international' migration in order to relink them methodologically and empirically in contemporary migration research. The contributions included here draw on these migration phenomena that do not fit neatly into normative definitions of internal' and international' migration with the aim of not only narrowing or closing the gap', but of retheorising the relationship between them. The collective focus of this special issue, therefore, is to challenge ontological assumptions of migration' as a definable object of study and to theorise migration as a co-constituted and relational process. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.