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.