5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

In today’s world, many people are on the move and they have lives that cross national borders due to necessity, choice, or a combination of the two. They earn their living, care for their children and elderly, make investments, participate politically, save for retirement, etc. in multiple countries. Although the literature on these transnational aspects of migrants’ lives is expanding, we still do not know much about how and to what extent mobile individuals receive social protection especially outside the framework of the nation state. Traditionally, social protections provided to individuals especially under social risk situations have been analyzed by taking the nation state as the unit of analysis. However, as Levitt et al. (2017) emphasize, it is important for scholars to move beyond state-based approaches to see that many individuals are embedded in transnational social fields and several state and non-state actors provide social protection to them. Gray and Levitt (2022: 2721) define transnational social protection (TSP) as “those policies, programmes, people, organisations, and institutions that provide for and protect individuals in a transnational manner as well as those resources that migrants transnationally assemble to protect themselves”. In this regime, state is not the main responsible actor for providing social support. Multiple actors and resources from both the countries of origin and destination are involved in TSP. This session aims to include the presentations of those researchers who focus on different actors in transnational social protection in different contexts of international migration.