ISRH

The history of human species can be viewed as the history of migration. Migration has always touched all human populations, everywhere and in all cultures. Migration is an essential factor in the emergence, formation, and development of regions, but conversely regions (no matter whether understood as natural areas, institutions, or semiotic constructions) may cause and reshape migration as well.

As a temporal phenomenon, migration always entails a change in time and space. To really understand it, we require both history and geography. The departure area changes, the entry area changes, and people change. Regional history is interested in this process at both the general (theoretical) and particular (case) level, the latter focusing on events and places. The drivers of migration can be sought at the individual and community level or they can be investigated through endogenous and exogenous factors.

The interaction between regions and migration can be defined and studied using many frameworks. Migrations and their consequences have always been connected to natural geographical and ecological factors. Climate changes and sudden natural disasters are eternal causes for migration. Today, they are often discussed under the themes of sustainable development and climate migration. In turn, as a political phenomenon, key migration issues include the changing administrative, social, and economic structures and distributive relations in and between the regions and the ideological background of the movement of people(s). Thus, questions of regional development, the distribution of natural and human resources, and political power always require attention. Regions are also experiential and cultural identities with both tangible and intangible manifestations: They are where people feel at home and display a multifaceted sense of belonging. Moreover, there is a connection between migration and a multi-locational lifestyle.

In addition, a growing trend is to view migration as a non-human phenomenon. For example, microbes, plants, and animals migrate along with human beings. Furthermore, flora and fauna are also able to migrate independently. Such non-human mobility reshapes the target region just as human migrations do – for better or worse.

In a world where moving to another place no longer means going “far away” or to the “immeasurable”, we should, instead of migration, perhaps prefer the concept of mobility. The death of distances is not only a spatial phenomenon; it is also temporal: the speed of travel, digital on-line communication, and the many forms of migration (expat, seasonal work, settling in another place more permanently, multi-locality) challenge the old notions of migration and settlement. On the other hand, historians of civilization have speculated for decades about a future where the Earth is just one region from which humankind’s journey continues to other celestial bodies and the regions located there.