The book you are holding, or reading on your screen, is the first in a new series with Bristol University Press, entitled Global Migration and Social Change. The series aims to open up new interdisciplinary terrain and to develop new scholarship in migration and refugee studies that is theoretically insightful and innovative, empirically rich, and policy engaged. We envisage commissioning at least 15 books over a period of 5 years, with the expectation that a higher proportion will emerge towards the end of this period, as the series gains momentum.

The idea for this new book series took shape in early 2016, as a refugee crisis – within a wider European crisis – was vividly revealing the intimate nexus between migration, citizenship and social change around the world. At that time, the EU's struggle to offer an answer to the arrival of a million forced migrants over a relatively short period of time ignited the interests of researchers from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds.

Against that background, we envisaged several broad questions informing the series. How does the refugee crisis fit into the broader and longer term unfolding pattern of global migration? For example, how do the current flows to Europe interact with and alter flows of migrants and refugees in other regions? How are these interactions on the global scale mediated by the politics and policies emanating from Europe? Are the current population movements in and around Europe, and the crises of cooperation surrounding them, fundamentally changing broader global patterns of people on the move?

We set out to showcase research that looks beyond Europe to understand the continent's current crisis of cooperation within the broader dynamics of global migration, exile and social change writ large. We wanted to attract manuscripts that could reveal global trends and analyse the role of the European situation within them, and research findings that could explore how these wider trends figure within the migration goals and projects, and the upended everyday habits, of refugees and migrants themselves. A core aim of the series, as we initially conceived it, would be to analyze where these macro- and micro-patterns meet, in the interplay of migration and asylum politics, policies, and everyday practices and experiences.