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The globalized civil society in migration governance
Focussing on the multi-faceted role of civil society in migration governance, this chapter traces the major developments and depicts the state of the art in this field addressing some of the important research lacunas. The chapter identifies three analytically distinct, albeit often inseparable in practice, dimensions of third sector actors’ roles in migration governance explored in the literature: governance issues and governance frames; levels of engagement; formats of engagement. It argues that the way civil society actors engage with - mostly overlapping, often conflicting and always interdependent - levels of migration governance beyond the state deserve particular attention. The chapter shows that, against the backdrop of vanishing ‘global migration governance optimism’, uneven developments across top-down regional migration governance initiatives, as well as sustained criticism of various intergovernmental institutions, civil society actors have been steadily moving to the centre-stage of migration governance and related research.