Is Migration Ever Voluntary? Migration Between Agency, Coercion, and Power

About the event

This academic roundtable critically reflects on the shifting meanings of agency, coercion, and solidarity in debates about migration. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, the discussion explores how notions of voluntary migration are produced, contested, and instrumentalized across political, legal, and social contexts. Under conditions shaped by war, inequality, gender relations, climate crisis, restrictive border regimes, and deportation enforcement, voluntariness in migration becomes a deeply unstable category. Rather than reflecting free choice, many migration decisions emerge from constrained agency within coercive structural contexts. Similarly, so-called “voluntary return” is often shaped by legal precarity, fear of enforcement, and limited alternatives. Voluntariness, in this sense, functions less as an empirical reality and more as a political and administrative label that obscures power relations. What role do institutions, states, and international organizations play in shaping these categories? How do migrants themselves understand the boundaries between forced and voluntary (return) migration? How do migrants and volunteers react to the illegalization of migration and support networks?