A special issue “Governing Transit and Irregular Migration: Beyond Formal Policies and Informal Practices,” edited by Prof. Maria Koinova, has been recently published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (i.f. 2.8.). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2371204 Informality has attracted significant attention in migration studies, yet a fresh look is needed given the succession of world crises over the past 15 years and the increasing use of informality to deal with them. Why and how has migration governance experienced informality’s expansion in policies and practices? What are the drivers, sites, temporalities, and implications of such an expansion? How do power relations among different stakeholders affect such governance compared to normative and institutional logics? This collection sheds light on little explored socio-spatial and temporal aspects of informality’s use in such governance, on world politics and political regimes, governing polycentrically and using specific mechanisms of power. Building on extensive fieldwork and data-driven secondary research, this collection covers Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe, including Belarus and Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Turkey and Iraq in the Middle East, and Albania in the Balkans, as well as Thailand and Myanmar in Asia. Prof. Maria Koinova expresses her gratitude to PAIS colleagues who have provided excellent comments on her own article “Power and Informality in the Polycentric Governance of Transit and Irregular Migration on EU’s Eastern Border with Belarus”: Michael Saward, Simon Caney, Tom Long, and Yahor Azarkevich, as well as Germany’s Centre for Global Cooperation Research, the BEAR EU Jean Monnet Network, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies for providing various lines of support to work on this special issue. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2371214