An Agency Approach to Understanding Marriage Migration

Abstract

The concept of individual agency is increasingly being used as a lens to study migration and the decision-making of migrants and as a challenge to accounts of migrants’ lives that assume their vulnerability and which position them as a victim of circumstance such as poverty, global inequality, criminality or immigration regimes. It is a concept that is often used with little clarity of definition. It is a slippery concept, as it is concerned with an individual’s interior self and with why, faced with similar external circumstances, people act differently. Agency perspectives inform an understanding of the individuality of human subjects but require subjective judgements about motivations, aspirations and intentions. Studies of agency are often studies of the undercurrents behind the observable actions of people and groups and researchers interested in identifying when their subjects have acted with agency are obliged to interpret the meaning of actions and outcomes from scant evidence. In addition, studies of agency are necessarily studies of individual reaction to highly complex events and circumstances that are subject to on-going assessment and re-assessment by those involved.