Introduction

Whether or not it is possible to define our age as ‘the age of migration’ (Castles and Miller, 1993), it is a matter of fact that migration poses fundamental challenges to our age. This is true across diverse geographical areas, be it internal migration in China, international migration to the Gulf States or across Latin America and Africa. To get a hint of the global scale of contemporary migratory movements, we have to leave behind early mappings of migration that were basically Eurocentric. In the twentieth century, not least after 1989 and the re-ordering of regional, national and international relations, the reckoning with local, national and transnational powers has reached an historically unmatched degree and thus the various tensions and conflicts between socio-cultural localization and globalization came into view. Increasing mobility, the endless motion of migration, the dynamics of displacement, the expanding circulation of cultural traits, commodities, goods and services in ‘postcolonial’ and ‘post-national constellations’ (Habermas, 1998) pervade most aspects of contemporary societies. These processes have significantly altered the various articulations of the global, the national and the local spheres and urged a critical scrutiny of accustomed notions such as freedom, democracy, justice and their respective social and political locations