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While once a mainstay of social science, class has lately been eclipsed in much of migration studies by consideration of other forms of social difference, affinity, and allegiance such as ethnicity, gender, generation, and lately religion. This article puts the case for renewing attention on the part class plays in shaping migration – particularly who is able to move and to where. It argues that the form of migration and ultimately its outcomes are shaped by the resources that would-be migrants can muster and that in turn the capacity to mobilize such resources is largely determined by socio-economic background or class. Drawing on Bourdieu, class can be conceived in terms of the disposal of different forms of capital – economic, social, and cultural. Having access to combinations of such capital shapes the routes and channels migrants can follow, the destinations they can reach, and their life chances after migration. The article first reflects briefly on ideas of class in social science and sketches treatment of mobility in the migration literature, before considering the ways in which class, mobility, and immobility shape each other. The article concludes by considering the interplay between migration, class, and collective action among those who move and those who stay, against the background of broader currents of social change and transformation.

Refugee studies are often said to be a product of the policy world, shaped by global power relations and in particular by the interests of the global north. This article attempts to refine this view by exploring the relationship between refugees and forced migration as 'real world' phenomena and refugee or forced migration studies as a field of enquiry. The article takes two upheavals-the collapse of communist regimes in 1989-1991 and the financial and economic crisis of 2008-2011-to mark out or 'bookend' a period of about two decades during which we may track migration crises and upheavals of varying magnitudes and depth, and relate these developments to the unfolding of refugee or forced migration studies. Taking issue with some commentators' views about the relationship between 'real world' forced migration and the development of forced migration studies as an analytical field, the article addresses the relations among three types of thinking: social science understandings of refugees and forced migration; thinking about refugees and forced migration in the world of policy and practice; and popular or everyday thinking about refugees. Concepts travel among these spheres of thinking and are shaped and transformed en route. Subject to power relations like other forms of knowledge, social science research on forced migration may influence both popular and governmental thinking as much as policy categories shape forced migration research. Adapted from the source document.

If, as we may expect, conflict becomes more common as a result of the current economic crisis … diasporas may find themselves increasingly called on to aid their conationals in distress.

Over the last three decades, refugee crises have resulted in the dispersal of substantial numbers of people from the world's trouble spots. While much interest has focused on the effects of their presence in the countries that host them, these 'new diasporas' can also influence profoundly what happens at home.

This article investigates the impact of the involuntary movement to Jordan of about 300,000 Palestinians in the wake of the Gulf crisis of 1990–91. It explores the character of the population that arrived en masse in Jordan and whether their arrival burdened or benefitted that country. Neither migrants as commonly conceived nor a fully settled minority community in Kuwait and other Gulf states, their case throws doubt on the utility of terms like return and repatriation since a substantial proportion of this population had only minimal experience of Jordan, the 'home' to which they 'returned.' The involuntary migration compounded other effects of the Gulf crisis on Jordan and exacerbated the country's already serious economic problems. Integration of the returnees was painful. But contrary to initial expectations, the mass arrival did not result in unmitigated disaster and may have contributed to an economic recovery in Jordan, suggesting that there may be potentially beneficial windfall effects of sudden population influxes, even when they are involuntary and disorderly.