It is unquestionably the case, as the editors of these two outstanding volumes observe, that the study of human migration and the study of international relations have been marked by a mutual neglect, to the detriment of both. The editors' laudable aim is to do something about this state of affairs, both by bringing the arena of migration into the study of IR and by taking key perspectives from IR to the study of migration.

The first volume edited by Alexander Betts, Global Migration Governance, pursues this aim specifically around the theme of the governance of contemporary international migration, aspiring to develop an “IR-based approach” to the exploration and and understanding the institutional, political, and normative underpinnings of global migration governance—an area undoubtedly neglected in the voluminous literatures on global governance. The chapters are organized by “type” of migration, ranging across those types that are more commonly treated (low- and high-skilled migration, irregular migration, and refugee migration, to name a few) and some that are less frequently found in the literatures (such as lifestyle migration, internal displacement, and environmental migration).

The second volume, Refugees in International Relations, edited by Betts and Gil Loescher, takes refugee migration as its central subject matter, aspiring to rectify the inattention to refugees and forced migration in IR and to “mainstream” the study of refugees across the field. Here, the first group of chapters is organized around particular approaches within IR, and the second around a clutch of themes relevant to the study of forced and refugee migration.

As a prospectus for both these volumes and future scholarship, it is an immediately appealing one and, I happily discovered, one that is developed well in these collections of extremely fresh, rich, insightful, and important contributions. The editors indicate in both cases that they can aim only to advance the case for a greater integration of their twin areas of migration/forced migration studies and IR and take first steps toward acting on it, and in this they succeed admirably. I must also concede that, given the available word count for this review, I cannot hope to do justice to the richness of the chapters or to engage with all of the points of fascinating debate that they prompt, individually and as collections. I will, therefore, focus on three themes or issues that emerged most forcefully in my reading of the two books together, and which will serve as entry points for an appreciative critical engagement with their substance and arguments.

The first theme concerns the consequences of the kind of IR focus that animates the volumes and, indeed, on which much of their contribution rests. This welcome focus is nevertheless one that, to my mind, presents some limitations. In the first instance, it should be said the IR focus is much clearer and more developed in Refugees in International Relations, in its explicit engagements with IR theory, approaches, and questions. In Global Migration Governance, conversely, the place of IR is ambiguous. The editor leans heavily on IR perspectives and debates in the Introduction to the volume, lamenting the “analytical gap” that arises in understanding global migration governance due to the fact that IR has generally neglected the international politics of migration, and setting out an IR-based approach for what follows. But then, confusingly, he indicates that the background of the authors is not predominantly in IR but in a wide range of the social sciences, knitted together by expertise on international migration. Indeed, with the exception of Betts's own chapter and the conclusion, the sorts of IR perspectives and debates that are signaled at the start do not make any real appearance in the rest of the volume. This does not detract from the high quality of the contributions, but it does leave the reader somewhat confused about the project of developing an IR perspective on global migration governance. That complaint aside, it is clearly the case that the volume succeeds admirably in bringing migration empirically into debates about global governance (and the international politics of global governance), and for this it should be widely welcomed.

To my mind, however, the main issue associated with the IR focus developed here is that it lends itself to a strikingly statist approach to understanding the politics and governance of international migration. This is perhaps not surprising, being a function of the principal preoccupations of IR as a field. But it is, I would suggest, a rather narrow and limiting perspective on the subject matter of the two volumes. In Global Migration Governance in particular, the perspective on global governance that is developed in the Introduction draws on only a small part of the relevant literatures on this theme in IR and the cognate field of international political economy (IPE), parts of which together call for a much wider perspective than the traditional focus on international politics and multilateral institutions. While the role of nonstate actors is noted in the Introduction and does feature in some of the chapters (notably those by Anna Lindley and Alan Gamlen), and it could fairly be noted that you can do only so much in a volume, it seems to me that there is something of a missed opportunity in the overriding focus on international organizations and national governments.

National states unquestionably retain primacy in governing migration—somewhat curiously and problematically, according to Andrew Hurrell in his thought-provoking contribution to Refugees in International Relations, given the “post-Westphalian” nature of the contemporary global order—and the “global governance” of migration is strikingly underdeveloped (in part as a consequence of the preeminence of state power). But it is also the case that a huge range of nonstate actors are central to the global governance of migration, if one favors this wider definition, from nongovernmental organizations or hometown associations to banks, financial institutions, or, possibly, criminal smuggling and trafficking networks. By extension, levels of governance “below” the nation-state are critical to the global governance of migration and, on a national and international policy level, it is not only through migration policy that structures of governance are put in place but also through such areas as labor law, corporate regulation, and so on. Global governance is also constituted as much by informal actors, structures, and practices as by the formal ones that are the primary focus of these two volumes; it is also, as Gamlen notes, as much transnational as international. My point is simply that a study of global migration governance might valuably reach beyond a focus on formal governance associated with international organizations and national governments; indeed, doing so would open up a valuable perspective on the forms of transnational and international politics (and political economy) that surround the movement of people across the world.

My second point of appreciative engagement is captured in a remark made by Chris Brown in his stimulating essay in Refugees in International Relations, which is that the debate between communitarian and cosmopolitan thought on the “problem” of refugees is set up in ways that “reflect that aspect of the problem which most concerns us, the inhabitants of the rich liberal democracies—and … draw[s] attention away from what is, in terms of numbers affected, the real issue” (p. 159). I would suggest that this critique applies directly to the broader debates in which we are engaging. It is a point that has been made frequently about the nature of the scholarly communities that we inhabit, and the resulting approaches we deploy to understand what we deem to be of interest, and there is a sense in which it is inescapable, or at least not surprising. However, in these two volumes I was frequently aware of a focus on the rich liberal democracies to which Brown refers, the issues encountered in them, and the international organizations that could be said to reflect associated sets of interests and perspectives. As he and others note, well over two-thirds of the people of concern to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees are in Asia, Africa, or Latin America; patterns of international migration that do not involve the rich liberal democracies as destinations are overwhelmingly greater in scale and numbers of people than those that do, involving myriad accompanying types of formal and informal governance, above, below and beyond the national state.

Once again, this is not intended to detract from the huge richness of the essays collected here, which have gone a long way to putting these debates on the map, as it were, for both IR and migration studies. Indeed, a wider focus is in evidence at points in both of the volumes, particularly in the chapters by James Milner and Dominic Zaum (in Refugees) and others. Yet I think it is fair to say that the focus in both volumes rests overall with the rich liberal democracies and actors attached to that particular context, alongside international organizations, and that forms of governance or patterns of international interaction outside that context are more neglected. The question, then, is whether and how a wider geographical, political, institutional, and social focus would change what we have to say about the global governance of migration or the international politics surrounding global refugee migration. How would the debates need to be set up in order to take better account of the realities of international migration and its governance from a more “global” perspective?

This feeds, somewhat obliquely, into the fascinating questions raised in a number of contributions to the Betts and Loescher volume, in particular, about power and agency. Michael Barnett touches on these issues in his engaging discussion of paternalism in thinking about refugees; Brown raises them as a question about who the “we” are who possess the agency and power in figuring out what to “do” about the refugee problem (pp. 163–64). And this, indeed, brings me briefly to my third point of engagement. It relates to the assumption, which runs throughout the volumes, sometimes explicitly, at other times implicitly, that more and more robust global governance of migration is desirable and actively to be sought. This was particularly evident in Global Migration Governance, where the starting point in the Introduction and many of the chapters was explicitly the lack of formal global governance in this arena, relative to many other arenas, and the consequences of this state of affairs. As Betts indicates in the Introduction, the form of migration governance “matters significantly for the international politics of migration, and this in turn has implications for both migrants and non-migratory communities … because it affects individuals' and communities' access to human rights, human development and security” (p. 9). There is no question that he is correct, and he rightly goes on to refer to the importance of identifying and understanding the forms of governance that prevail as a necessary prelude to arguing about how to achieve “better” governance. For many of the authors, that involves a strengthening of top-down forms of governance and a normative case for “more” governance to fill in the myriad governance “gaps” that the authors of all of the chapters observe.

I would suggest, though, that without an equally clear normative analysis of the implications and consequences of particular types of governance—that is, of the forms and distributions of power and agency that different forms of governance imply—some of these arguments risk assuming that governance is in itself good, notwithstanding Betts's comment in the conclusion that we need to move beyond the idea that “more cooperation is good” and consider who gains and who loses as a result of different types of “institutional design” (Global, pp. 318–19). To my mind, it is precisely this critical normative question—governance for whom, by whom, and for what purpose? (to coin a familiar expression)—that should underpin the further development of these new debates, which both volumes have so usefully spurred.