South-South Migration

The objective of this paper is to provide an overview and a preliminary discussion of policy and academic works addressing South-South Migration (SSM) in depth. In the first part, three development categorizations used by international agencies to estimate migration flows (provided by the World Bank, UN Population Division and the UNDP) are addressed, discussing differences in definitions, classification criteria and the resulting country groupings of the South and the North. In the second part, the most salient debates and their alleged relation to development are presented, in relation to the main features of South-South Migration so far identified by academic literature. Given that much of SSM research is expected to represent no more than an extension of former international migration research, and given the former neglect of the significance of South-South Migration, this study stresses the opportunity to rethink the relation between inequality and migration, as well as the need to rethink concepts which were developed under assumptions underlying the study of South-North Migration. It concludes that cross fertilization between approaches based on agency and structure can provide more complex and nuanced interpretations in the study of South-South Migration.