This article examines whether seventeenth-century Dutch cities, which experienced large waves of immigration, are adequately referenced in modern discussions about immigration and diversity. In Dutch and international narratives, these cities are often portrayed as open, tolerant, and multicultural, thriving due to inclusive policies toward newcomers. They are thus presented as historical examples supporting openness today. Using specialized research on religious toleration and urban governance, this article reevaluates that view. It argues that peaceful coexistence between natives and newcomers depended not only on openness but also on regulation and institutional inequalities. Immigrants faced restrictions on welfare access, political participation, and civic recognition, while religious minorities were tolerated only under conditions of internal discipline and economic self-sufficiency. Social stability was maintained by protecting established residents from the perceived downsides of immigration. Seventeenth-century Dutch cities thus exemplify conditional toleration rather than open multiculturalism, complicating modern comparisons and indicating how institutional constraints shaped relatively peaceful immigration societies.

This paper develops a spatial formulation of the Jensen–Shannon divergence to measure multigroup compositional dissimilarity between each municipality and its surrounding context. Building on information theory, the index compares local group distributions with neighbourhood‐lagged compositions defined through two distance‐based systems: a Gaussian kernel and a Max–Min sequence of connectivity thresholds. The measure is symmetric, bounded and decomposable into group‐specific contributions, allowing identification of both the magnitude of local divergence and the groups responsible for it. Using data on the 10 largest foreign citizenships across 7887 Italian municipalities in 2024, the analysis reveals that significant local divergence is concentrated in a limited subset of municipalities and exhibits a clear multiscalar structure. South‐Asian and selected North‐African groups consistently account for the highest contributions, while many Eastern‐European groups show patterns of local alignment with surrounding areas. The Gaussian kernel produces smooth spatial gradients, whereas the Max–Min system highlights breakpoints in connectivity and reveals stepwise evolutions in local mismatch. A Monte Carlo spatial randomisation test confirms that the observed patterns deviate systematically from space‐composition independence. Overall, the spatial Jensen–Shannon framework provides a flexible diagnostic tool for identifying enclave‐like configurations and assessing multiscalar socio‐spatial contrasts with potential relevance for integration policies.

Young people are living with their parents for longer. Little is known about how this behaviour, along with the divergent socio‐economic outcomes it entails, affects young adults' homeownership. Using UKHLS data adjusted for panel attrition, this study compares first‐time homeownership transitions between young adults living with parents (home‐stayers) and those who have left home to live independently in the private rental sector (home‐leavers), while accounting for the mediating effects of socio‐economic outcomes via the KHB modelling framework. The results reveal that, although home‐stayers experience higher unemployment, lower income, and residence in more affordable areas, these factors do not significantly affect transitions to homeownership. Instead, their higher likelihood of having savings and more favourable financial situations is associated with an increased probability of homeownership, while lower rates of partnership formation are associated with a substantial reduction. Once partnership formation is accounted for, the difference in homeownership transitions between the two groups disappears.

Telework has become a lasting feature of the U.S. labor market, expanding workers' freedom to live farther from their workplaces. At the same time, climate hazards such as hurricanes, droughts, and floods are growing in severity and frequency, shaping where people feel safe and comfortable living. While both trends are reshaping population movements, it remains unclear how they interact. This paper investigates how climate risk moderates the relationship between telework and interstate migration in the United States. Using a panel of census tracts from 2013 to 2023 that combines American Community Survey data on telework and migration with hazard risk scores from FEMA's National Risk Index, we estimate interaction models between telework prevalence and hazard exposure. We find that telework is generally associated with increased in‐migration into areas facing higher levels of episodic or amenity‐correlated climate risk. Results using the composite hazard risk score show a positive and statistically significant interaction between telework and climate risks, including riverine flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, cold waves, and droughts. In contrast, persistent climatic conditions such as extreme heat exhibit a negative interaction with telework, while winter weather shows no consistent effect. These patterns are strongest for interstate moves and in larger population tracts, indicating that telework most strongly reshapes long‐distance destination choice where infrastructure and amenities allow households to manage environmental risk rather than avoiding risk altogether. Overall, telework alters how climate risk enters migration decisions, with implications for population redistribution, adaptation planning, and the future geography of work.

Renewed interest in rural areas during the COVID‐19 pandemic generated a sense of optimism concerning the fate of declining rural areas, with the notion of a ‘rural revival’ evident in both popular and academic discourse. While many studies have explored urban–rural migration during the pandemic, few have done so from the specific perspective of declining rural areas. This paper responds to this gap, combining analysis of pre‐pandemic population development trends with an exploration of pandemic‐era internal migration patterns in Nordic rural areas. The paper uses sequence analysis to identify the most typical population development trajectories of Nordic rural municipalities in the two decades preceding the pandemic. Following this, a measure of ‘excess migration’ is used to explore which types of rural municipalities were the most likely to experience higher‐than‐expected inflows of internal migrants following the onset of the pandemic. The analysis highlights considerable diversity in the population development trajectories of Nordic rural municipalities—while population decline was the most common experience, it was by no means the only one, with many rural populations stable, and even growing. Further, the paper finds that, while most rural municipalities experienced higher‐than‐expected inflows in the pandemic era, the greatest deviations from expectations were evident in municipalities with the least favourable pre‐pandemic population development trajectories. Further monitoring of migrant flows, along with more detailed analysis of flows among different groups, will be important next steps in clarifying the extent to which these short‐term disruptions have any longer‐term bearing on demographic decline in Nordic rural areas.

Along clandestine journeys, migrants occupy a whole variety of temporary and informal dwellings or ‘makeshift camps’, where they may rest, wait, gather resources and make further attempts at crossing the borders and reaching destinations. Makeshift camps have proliferated across cities and border‐zones around Europe, becoming widely recognised as crucial geographies of contemporary migration, as nodes for migrant strategy and mobilities, solidarities and smuggling, temporary social and political orderings as well as all kinds of violence to which residents are exposed. Yet these spaces are also understood as inherently fleeting and mobile, characterised by constant police evictions and destruction, the abandonment or departure of their residents, the relocation and vanishing of structures formerly occupied – all of which make them difficult to study. Drawing upon extensive multi‐sited ethnographic research across a variety of makeshift camps (past and present) in the border city of Bihać, Bosnia‐Herzegovina, this paper considers methodological questions of how to examine migrants' informal dwellings en route whose upheaval and ephemerality has emerged, not as an aberration, but as a constant thread over the last several years. Within a context of acute transience, shape‐shifting and disappearance, this paper offers methodological reflections on rendering visible the fleeting and subversive geographies of makeshift camps while maintaining a steadfast commitment to not expose the strategies and hiding places of residents in ways that would compromise their safety, privacy or success along their clandestine journeys.

Adult children's geographic proximity to aging parents is a fundamental component of the spatial opportunity structure for intergenerational solidarity. Using nine waves of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2006–2022), this study employs a dynamic panel event study design to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of family relocation following a parent's first diagnosis of chronic illness. We analyze how distinct care trajectories of cancer, cerebrovascular disease, and cardiovascular disease, alongside the gender of adult children, shape these spatial adjustments. The results indicate that health shocks serve as a driver for spatial convergence, suggesting that formal care through the universal Long‐Term Care Insurance (LTCI) complements rather than crowds out family support. However, relocation patterns exhibit significant heterogeneity by disease type. Acute circulatory conditions (cerebrovascular and cardiovascular diseases) prompt an immediate but short‐term spatial response, whereas cancer leads to a delayed and sustained restructuring process. Furthermore, we find a shifting ‘geography of care’ in Korea: contrary to traditional male‐centered norms, daughters have emerged as the primary agents of sustained spatial support. These findings highlight the spatial labor families undertake to compensate for the lack of formal support within the modern welfare system.

This article analyzes Multilingual Dictionary – Living Together in a Refugee Camp , a co‐research project documenting words and expressions created, invented, and circulated among migrant communities in the Moria and Mavrovouni camps on Lesvos Island between 2018 and 2022. As a living archive, the dictionary captures the embodied vocabularies of survival and resistance shaped by displacement and confinement. Situated at the intersection of sovereign‐imposed order and emergent constitutive disorder, the article draws on the concepts of heterotopia and assemblage to examine how the camp operates as both a space of exclusion and a site of political agency. It argues that disorder, expressed through non‐linear, improvised, and accented language, functions as a generative force within the heterotopic space of the camp, enabling the formation of counter‐knowledge and autonomous migrant subjectivities. By situating the dictionary within the broader history of anti‐camp movements, the article explores how practices of minor historiography, accent, and reassembly challenge dominant regimes of categorization, producing alternative ways of living, knowing, and resisting within the camp's dispositifs.

This paper is the editorial introduction to the Special Issue on “Fertility in the context of forced migration, ethnic marginalisation and recent crises.” The Special Issue contains six empirical papers that examine fertility behaviour and intentions in migrant and ethnic minority groups across European countries. The aim of bringing these papers together is to draw attention to similarities between different types of marginalised groups and their demographic responses to crises and disruptive events. The paper collection opens with two papers on international migrants and their fertility behaviours during the migration process and after arrival in European destination countries, with a focus on refugees. A second pair of papers focuses on fertility preferences among international migrants in specific vulnerable situations, namely uncertainty after war and in situations of economic and geopolitical instability. Finally, a third set of articles examines ethnic minority groups in two major countries bordering the European Union, exploring how their fertility outcomes relate to various external factors. In both contexts, minority status and ethnic marginalisation are intensified because these groups face particularly vulnerable situations due to external crises or political measures. This editorial introduction provides an overview of the similarities and differences between migrant and autochthonous ethnic minority groups in Europe, summarises the empirical and theoretical contributions of the Special Issue and concludes with implications and suggestions for future research.

Research on counterurbanization has often emphasized macrolevel structural changes, such as urban expansion and population redistribution, while overlooking the selective nature of migration in relation to individuals' life‐course transitions. Yet, migration between urban and rural areas constitutes a key spatial process mediating major life changes. Drawing on a life‐course perspective, this study examines generational differences in migration determinants and spatial preferences among young and older migrants who relocated from Seoul, South Korea, to rural areas. At the individual level, binary logistic regression identifies factors associated with migration; at the regional level, rural typologies—Creative–Innovation Area, Eco‐Welfare Rural Residential Area, and Remote Agricultural‐Based Area—derived through fuzzy clustering (Fuzzy C‐Means) are incorporated into a multilevel logistic model. The results show that young adults' rural migration is closely associated with life‐course transitions related to family formation and employment conditions, with particularly high mobility observed among non‐employed and career‐interrupted women. In contrast, older adults' migration reflects active‐aging motivations, particularly retirement timing and health status. Regionally, Creative–Innovation Areas attract younger migrants, while Eco‐Welfare and Remote Agricultural‐Based Areas appeal to older migrants. These findings demonstrate that rural areas function as multilayered socio‐spatial arenas that mediate generational life transitions.

Migration is a highly complex and uncertain process that has the potential to have large impacts on societies around the world. One key driver of this complexity and uncertainty is the autonomous agency of the actors involved, particularly the decision‐making processes of potential migrants. Most theories and models rely on simplistic decision rules or a decision‐making process that assumes rational agents. However, a considerable body of research in psychology and behavioural economics raises doubts about such assumptions. To inform the description of migration decision processes, we elicited and compared non‐parametric utility functions for both finance and international migration decisions. This allowed us to directly test, using individual‐level experimental data, whether the aspects of prospect theory that are commonly found in utility functions elicited within a financial context are also present for migration decisions. Across both financial and migration‐related contexts, we found that participants were generally loss‐averse and their utility functions were concave in the domain of gains. However, findings for convexity in the domain of losses were mixed. This evidence of loss aversion, risk aversion, and diminished sensitivity further from the reference point suggests that migration decision‐making is more consistent with the key tenets of prospect theory than with expected utility.

This paper explores how new Chinese migrants negotiate Chineseness through their engagement with Chinese voluntary associations (CVAs) in host societies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with new migrants involved in CVAs in Singapore, I conceptualize CVAs as affective spaces that generate (dis)orienting effects, shaping new migrants' negotiation of Chineseness in a context of ‘togetherness‐in‐difference’. Specifically, CVAs function as ‘convivial spaces’ where new migrants rely on a primordial form of Chineseness to gain familiarity, connectivity, and a sense of orientation in a new settlement. At the same time, CVAs serve as contact zones infused with disorienting encounters with local Singaporean Chinese, producing variegated understandings of Chineseness. By highlighting the affective spatialities of CVAs, this paper advances a geographical approach to understanding Chineseness and contributes to the existing literature on migrant (dis)orientation.

The geographies of modern families are increasingly stretched by migration and mobility, raising crucial questions for population geography about the maintenance of intergenerational bonds. This study investigates the frequency of social contact between Polish grandparents and their grandchildren (both minor and adult), explicitly analyzing how these dynamics are contingent upon spatial context. Drawing on a 2019–2020 survey of grandparents ( N = 1,000) and integrating insights from social presence and media niche theories, we employ ordered logit regression to compare face‐to‐face and ICT‐mediated contact across three distinct spatial categories of grandchildren: local (within 25 km), domestically distant (elsewhere in Poland), and transnational (abroad). Findings reveal that geographical distance and the presence of national borders fundamentally shape contact patterns. Results support a mixed, context‐dependent model: remote communication serves a compensatory function for transnational grandchildren, substituting for a lack of physical co‐presence. Conversely, it provides a cumulative function for local grandchildren, supplementing frequent in‐person contact. Domestically distant grandchildren represent an intermediary group. This research contributes to spatial demography by demonstrating how technology and geography intersect to reshape intergenerational solidarity within an ageing population context marked by high rates of mobility and migration.

This study foregrounds digital exclusion as a driver of wilful self‐exclusion among Syrian refugees in Türkiye, challenging the premise that online communication inherently facilitates integration. Guided by a theoretical framework that bridges the contact hypothesis, social capital theory and concepts of digital othering, it analyses how refugees navigate online socialization and economic participation. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with 37 refugees, the research reveals that in response to online hostility and digital ignoring, they strategically retreat into their own ethnic networks. This wilful self‐exclusion gives rise to a digital refugee ghetto—an analytical construct denoting a structural and symbolic enclave that serves as a protective buffer in a hostile socio‐political context. Diverging from Eurocentric studies that predominantly highlight the integrative potential of digital platforms, this research demonstrates that digital environments can actively facilitate introversion rather than social inclusion. The study concludes by calling for targeted digital governance and broader social cohesion policies to address the root causes of systemic digital exclusion.

Peace governance and the rights‐based politics of refugee returns are inseparable, yet in practice they unfold in isolation. Even when peace agreements include return provisions, peace transitions and dignified returns rarely align. This paper draws on the Syrian war as a foundational case to show how these processes, each central to the remaking of political order, have moved along discordant tracks. It distils three lessons from the Syrian war. First, refugee return evolved during the war into a marketplace for transactional conflict management. Second, a stark misalignment has persisted between top‐down initiatives and the bottom‐up practices through which grassroots communities have negotiated political voice. Third, refugees have remained excluded as peace actors despite their centrality to any post‐war order. The Syrian case highlights the need for research on anticipatory peacebuilding defined here as an approach to peace governance that works on the conditions needed for future peace by integrating grassroots communities and refugees as peace actors long before hostilities end.

Several U.S. states expanded vote-by-mail in 2020, while other states made no changes. This uneven expansion occurred in a highly racialized policy context. We explore how the United States’ history of race-based disenfranchisement, racialized elite rhetoric, and the uneven policy expansion interact to shape voting methods and trust in government across racial groups. Using data from three national surveys and coarsened exact matching, we compare the behavior of voters across adopting and non-adopting states. We find that adopting no-excuse absentee voting and universal vote-by-mail in 2020 is associated with increased mail voting across racial groups, despite Black Americans’ historically rooted mistrust in new forms of voting. We also find that expanding mail voting was associated with increases in government trust in some cases. While prior work finds modest short-term increases in turnout, vote-by-mail may also affect perceptions of government, which can help close racial turnout gaps in the long term.

Racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented at all levels of U.S. politics. Yet, the 2020 Census reports that people of color constitute the majority of Americans under 18, and could thus serve as a pool of descriptive candidates in the near future. We study how race and age intersect in the first of multiple steps that may lead to election: interest in running for office. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Postelection Survey, we first show that Black and Latino Americans are more interested in running for office than are White and Asian Americans. This observed ambition gap cannot be accounted for by standard explanations like socioeconomic disparities, ideology, political interest, and broad civic engagement. Rather, it is explained by differences among age cohorts: younger Black and Latino Americans are more interested in running for office, due to having been disproportionately engaged in recent movements advocating racial justice. We conclude that differences in political ambition between racial and ethnic groups do not explain the underrepresentation of Black and Latino Americans; rather, by drawing on the untapped ambition found among younger, more diverse cohorts, future recruitment efforts for the next generation of politicians can help translate this potential into representational parity in U.S. politics.

The European Union stands at a crossroads. Its founding promises of peace, convergence, and multilateralism are increasingly strained by debt, migration, sovereignty, and militarization. The introduction to this Special Issue begins with the question: who is the EU for? To stretch this question analytically we move beyond conventional debates on globalization and sovereignty foregrounding the colonial and racialized conditions that shape European integration. Colonialism, we argue, remains operative, structuring the production of race, racism, and anti-Blackness within and beyond Europe. Drawing on radical traditions of thought on colonialism and anti-Blackness, critical political economy, postcolonial theory, and institutional analysis, the introduction reframes the analytic of who the EU is for by showing how the Union’s commitment to universal values coexists with practices that reproduce hierarchies of life and death. We argue that the EU operates as a form of global power that mobilizes race and racism as constitutive mechanisms of legitimacy, authority, mobility, and value. Contemporary militarization, through defense integration, rearmament, and strategic autonomy, intensifies these dynamics by recoding racial hierarchies as security imperatives. Competing responses, from right-wing sovereign internationalism to left critiques of neoliberalism, rarely confront Europe’s colonial and racialized constitutive role in sustaining global inequalities. These unresolved contradictions and failures open up urgent questions about how Europe’s political and economic order continues to reproduce global hierarchies of power. It is precisely this tension that the special issue takes up, responding by engaging the intertwined colonial and racist projects in the EU. The contributors collectively frame crisis as a key site through which colonial violence is reconfigured, displaced, and normalized in contemporary EU governance. In so doing, they reposition the EU not as a neutral arbiter of order, but as an active geopolitical site where racialized and imperial forms of power are continuously produced, contested, and reimagined.

This essay critically examines the relationship between antiracism, public policy, and liberal democratic accountability standards. Drawing on a set of standards derived from the political philosophies and constitutional structures of liberal democracies, the gap between these ideals and the realities of racial injustice are examined in light of Frederick Douglass’ position on the U.S. Constitution as an anti-slavery document, the persistence of a “racial contract,” and recent conceptualization of antiracism. By grounding antiracist policies in democratic accountability standards and recognizing the gap between the ideal and the real, the essay then examines the contemporary efforts of an “antiwoke” movement to purge policies and practices that focus on social equity and antiracism from government operations and assesses the efficacy of such efforts in light of core democratic standards and American ideals.