The Global Compacts on Refugees and for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: Introduction to the Special Issue

In December 2018, the UN General Assembly adopted two Global Compacts: The Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). These two compacts, while non‐binding and aspirational in nature, offer the first widely‐accepted new normative frameworks on the movement of people since the ratification of the 1951 refugee convention and its 1967 protocol. This special issue of International Migration aims to analyse the way in which these two compacts were negotiated, examine their potential impact in a number of areas, and compare the way they deal with common themes such as gender, civil society and security. This introductory article describes the background and the process of negotiating the global compacts, provides a short summary of the articles included in this special issue, and highlights gaps in the two compacts that are not elsewhere discussed herein.