Introduction

This publication results from an online conference held at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, in May 2021, which carried the same title—the fragility of global migration. We decided to use the space given to us by the German Sociological Association’s (DGS) section on “Migration and ethnic minorities” to reflect on this unprecedented situation by putting migration fragility into a bigger frame. The large number of submissions and the quality of the presentations convinced us that we should investigate this theme further and collect a part of the papers in this volume. Most of the contributions stem from that conference, while we also invited further scholars of whom we knew that their research resonates with our questions. While we will flesh out our approach to “fragility” in the following chapter, we would like to briefly characterize it here before introducing the contributions to this volume. “Fragility”, in its etymological meaning, is a state of being easily broken, damaged, or destroyed. As an analytical concept, however, our thinking has gradually evolved, and we realized that “fragility” must be looked at differently from different sociological perspectives.