From the Migration–Development Nexus to Mobility Justice: A Plea for Recognizing Double Embeddedness

ABSTRACT This virtual issue takes stock of articles previously published in Development and Change to aid our understanding of migration and development processes and to situate these contributions in the broader migration–development debate. The introductory article provides an overview of all migration‐related articles that have appeared in this journal since the late 1970s, highlighting their bottom‐up approach to migration and their acknowledgement of diverse mobility experiences. The discussion then turns to their more specific contribution to an understanding of migration and development as multi‐dimensional, translocal and intrinsic to social transformation. Through an emphasis on the importance of context and attention to the exploitative character of dominant migration–development thinking, these contributions facilitate the recognition of the ‘double embeddedness’ of migrant agency and migration. The remainder of the article discusses the notion of double embeddness and, on this basis, argues for the adoption of a mobility justice perspective in order to move beyond migrant/non‐migrant binaries, to think more critically about the notion of development and to address the historically produced uneven (im)mobilities of our time.