Critical transitions in migration studies: Comparative Migration Studies’ 10thanniversary issue

In the past decade, dynamic geopolitical events have led to major migration movements worldwide.The launching of Comparative Migration Studies (CMS) in 2013 to promote comparative research in the field of migration studies (Saharso and Scholten, 2013) coincided with some of these major migration developments.The journal emerged at a time when the field was undergoing rapid transformation, incorporating newer methods, geographies and theories to study migration.The comparative approach was becoming increasingly more prominent, outgrowing the national paradigms that had been the norm in the field (Thrnhardt and Bommes, 2010;Favell, 2001).As the academic field of migration studies broadened to reflect the emergent diversities, CMS also underwent a rapid expansion during this period, becoming not only more international but also more interdisciplinary and multi-method in its orientation (see Pisarevskaya et al., 2020;Levy et al. 2020).The field of migration studies has experienced and reacted to many critical developments and transitions, some of which have been addressed in CMS' publications on the theme.These include the disaggregation of the taken for granted categories used in the field (Dahinden and Pott, 2025); the internationalization and diversification of the field itself, decolonization of knowledge production within the field (Raghuram and Sondhi, 2025), the relation between the field and its broader political and societal environment (Geddes and Scholten 2020), and developing a more reflexive relationship between knowledge production and the field of migration studies (Scholten, 2020;Dahinden et al., 2021).On the one hand, transitional periods like these show that migration studies constitute a field in full swing, sometimes struggling while simultaneously trying to innovate and respond to new challenges.On the other hand, such transitions suggest that migration studies benefit from its interdisciplinary character.