The Transnational Social Contract in the Global South

How does labor emigration affect state–society relations across postcolonial states? We argue that the opportunity to pursue employment abroad alters a fundamental component of postcolonial states—the post-independence social contract. Such states’ inability to sustain post-independence levels of welfare provision first leads to the development of “emigration management institutions,” which seek to encourage and regulate citizens’ labor emigration, and second, to the widening of the “remittance-welfare gap,” where labor emigration and remittances outpace state-sponsored welfare provision. These mark the emergence of a “transnational social contract,” as states leverage access to employment abroad in exchange for social and political acquiescence. This de-territorialization of the postcolonial social contract leads to de jure and de facto forms of state coercion toward its citizens/migrants, who are commodified by the market-based logic of transnational neo-patrimonialism. We test this argument through a paired comparison and within-case analysis across two postcolonial states in South Asia and the Middle East: Nepal and Jordan. We offer an interregional, South–South migration analysis and a novel framework of understanding the politics of mobility across non-Western states as “migration from below,” which acts as a corrective to the dominance of South–North migration research in international studies.