The global compacts, mixed migration and the transformation of protection

Two new Global Compacts – on migration and refugees – were agreed by the UN General Assembly in 2018. The articles in this special issue ask questions about the provision and transformation of protection as these Compacts change migration and refugee governance. They are inspired from legal, geographical and international relations perspectives, and demonstrate how the Compacts constitute and situate protection in deeply conservative ways. For example, the Compacts represent migrants and refugees as starkly differentiated and thus fix their juridico-political status in place without sufficiently taking into account that, empirically, such differentiation is problematic. Overall, the articles in this special issue intervene in the debate about the two Global Compacts not only by exposing the richness of different disciplinary registers and languages, but also by thinking critically about the idea of protection and taking seriously the messiness of ‘mixed mobility’.