New MPIfG Book by Sandhya A.S.: Agents of Migration

Palgrave Macmillan has recently published Agents of Migration: Institutional Embeddedness of Labour Brokerage in Nepal (Singapore, 2026) by Sandhya A.S. Based on the author’s dissertation at the MPIfG, the book centers on the agents and intermediaries that play a growing role in facilitating labor migration. In her view, the presence of these “middle elements” is not an organic development of neoliberal capitalism, nor is migrant precarity solely attributable to their mediation; instead, she understands brokerage as an institutionally constituted and contested market for migration services. This perspective delivers new insights into why migration agents consolidate into an industry, how intermediation serves the interests of states that depend on emigration and remittances, such as Nepal, and why intermediaries persist even after migrant networks stabilize and the state establishes its own mechanisms to replicate or replace commercial brokerage. In her examination of market organization, the establishment of its practices, and struggles over legitimacy, the author shows how brokerage changes the relationship between state and market, governance structures, and migrant labor processes. Sandhya A.S. completed her doctorate at the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE), the MPIfG’s graduate school, and the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) between 2018 and 2023. She subsequently worked as a postdoc at the UDE and since 2024 has been a member of the Research Training Group “Cross-Border Labour Markets” (GRK 2951) at the University of Bielefeld.