Peer-reviewed articles

Borders Start With Numbers: How Migration Data Create “Fake Illegals”

9 January 2024

In this peer-reviewed article, Hélène Thiollet, Filip Savatic and Thibaut Jaulin offer unique quantitative evidence of how migration numbers and labels construct impressions of increased irregular migration while in fact creating “fake illegals.” 

Civil Society and Social Integration of Asylum Seekers: The ‘Strength of Weak Ties’ and the Dynamics of ‘Strategic Action Fields’

11 July 2023

In this peer-reviewed article, Lennart Olsson, Anne Jerneck, Claudia Fry and Anika Binte Habib use Sweden as a critical and extreme case to argue that the rapid shift in asylum politics and public opinion towards migration, following the dramatic increase of asylum seekers entering the EU in 2015, is not profoundly shared in society. Based on a local media analysis of three types of purposively selected rural municipalities followed by the analysis of a survey of civil society organizations sent to all 290 municipalities in Sweden, we find strong civil society support and willingness to both receive migrants and facilitate their integration into society. Despite increasing votes for political parties with anti-migration policies, we also find remarkably positive attitudes towards migrants in civil society organizations and among citizens in the EU27 barometer for Sweden.

Institutional Creation as a Local Governance Response to Syrian Refugees: The Case of Turkish Municipalities

2 July 2023

This paper from Başak Yavçan (Migration Policy Group) and Fulya Memişoğlu (Yildiz Technical University) treats the influx of Syrian refugees into Turkish urban centers as a critical juncture and investigates the changes in the local governance bodies as a result. Based on interviews and focus group discussions with administrative and nongovernmental actors involved in the local response to refugees, we explore the factors that contributed to the emergence of new institutions within municipalities and their institutionalization as bodies able to resist changes of municipal mayors across elections. 

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Deterring Migration in Times of Crises: The Ethics of Behavioral Change in Migration Information Campaigns

2 July 2023

This case study from Nassim Majidi (Samuel Hall) reveals practices in migration information campaigns that go against existing standards in social and behavioral communications campaigns in Ethiopia and Afghanistan, between 2016 and 2019. Building on such standards, the article provides a critical lens through which to assess migration information campaigns, through the prism of three criteria outlined in the paper and used to evaluate the results of the program, and provides a way forward for setting standards in planning and implementating migration information campaigns.

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Constrained to be (im)mobile? Refugees' and Asylum seekers' practices to integrate in restrictive socio-economic urban contexts in Northern Italy

16 March 2023

This article from Maurizio Ambrozini and Iraklis Dimitriadis (UMIL) comparatively examines forms of (im)mobility among refugees and asylum seekers (RAS) in coping with dispersal process, restrictive migration policies and local socio-economic characteristics in three cities of Northern Italy.

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Trust or bust: Growth effects of knowledge, human and social capital revisited

December 2022

This paper from Paula Puskarova identifies the contribution of social capital to differences in total factor productivity among European subnational regions, but, unlike other studies, it focuses on the effects of interregional differences in social capital.

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Gender, radicalization, and patriarchy in Turkey: an analysis of women’s motivations and constraints when confronted with ISIS and the al-Nusra front

December 2022

This article from Basak Yavçan and Gülriz Sen locates Turkey in discussions of gender and violent extremism (VE), probes women’s diverse roles, motivations, and constraints for and against religious radicalization, and discusses the impact of sustainable patriarchy on their agency.

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Mobility Control as State-Making in Civil War: Forcing Exit, Selective Return and Strategic Laissez-Faire

20 October 2022

This paper from Christiane Fröhlich and Lea Müller-Funk addresses the question of how different actors attempt to control mobility during civil war, and how mobility control and processes of state-making interact in such settings. 

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De-Bordering Solidarity: Civil Society Actors Assisting Refused Asylum Seekers in Small Cities

October 2022

This article from Maurizio Ambrozini and Iraklis Dimitriadis (UMIL) elaborates on the activities developed by various actors from the civil society in favour of non-deported refused asylum seekers (NDRAS) through the lens of ‘de-bordering solidarity’. 

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L’accueil des réfugiés ukrainiens et l’universalité du droit d’asile

August 2022

This article from François Gemenne and Hélène Thiollet looks into was justifies European solidarity towards Ukrainian refugees. Their temporary protection leads to question the universality of asylum rights on the European territory.

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Self-governing from below: Kurdish refugees on the periphery of European societies

15 June 2022

This study from Veysi Dag (SOAS) looks at how ordinary Kurdish refugees and asylum seekers set up self-governing formations to organise their life in border cities on the periphery of European societies.

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Humanitarian Help and Refugees: De-Bordering Solidarity as a Contentious Issue

15 April 2022

This article from Maurizio Ambrozini (UMIL) aims at discussing the involvement of “humanitarian” actors, stemming from civil society, in treatment of the issue of refugees’ reception. It suggests the concept of “de-bordering solidarity,” to express the political meaning of such mobilizations.

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Migrants and Undeclared Employment within the European Construction Sector: Challenging Dichotomous Approaches to Workers’ Agency

March 2022

Drawing upon qualitative data on Albanians residing in Italy and Greece, this article from Iraklis Dimitriadis furnishes new insights into the topic of undeclared migrant construction workers’ agency. It analyses different types of undeclared work through Katz’s theoretical framework that suggests a disaggregated conceptualisation of agency.

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Actions speak louder than claims: humanitarian corridors, civil society and asylum policies

17 March 2022

This paper from Maurizio Ambrozini (UNIMI) analyses a case of civil society's sponsorship, which has been developed in recent years by religious (Christian) institutions, first in Italy, then in other European countries (France, Belgium, Andorra, San Marino and recently Germany), in agreement with governments: what have been called ‘humanitarian corridors’. 

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EU Engagement with Contested Refugee Returns in Lebanon: The Aftermath of Resilience

5 February 2022

While much literature has concentrated on the EU’s policy to return people from within its borders, this article by Tamirace Fakhoury and Nora Stel seeks to understand how the EU cooperates with refugee-hosting states beyond its borders, in its ‘Southern Neighbourhood’, to uphold conditions for voluntary, safe and dignified returns.

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Global Security Entanglement and the Mobility Paradox

January 2022

This essay by Fiona Adamson and Kelly Greenhill presents the concept of security entanglement, illustrates how it operates, and explores some of its theoretical and practical implications.

 

Mobility Control as State-Making in Civil War: Forcing Exit, Selective Return and Strategic Laissez-Faire

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What explains immigrant-native gaps in European labor markets: The role of institutions

8 December 2021

Co-written by Martin Guzi, Martin Kahanec and Lucia Mýtna Kureková (EUBA), this paper looks at immigrant–native gaps in labor force participation, unemployment, low-skilled employment, and temporary employment and measures the contribution of institutional and policy contexts to the part of these gaps that cannot be explained by immigrant–native differences in characteristics. 

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The Syrian refugee crisis through the lenses of Turkish political discourses: An analysis of deliberations in the Turkish Parliament

27 November 2021

Migration has become highly contentious. Turkey is no exception. Turkey faces even further challenges as the host to the world's largest refugee population, with Syrians as the majority. Fear about loss of control over borders, and its subsequent political, economic, social and cultural repercussions lies at the heart of migration debates. Parliamentary deliberations provide a public venue for airing these concerns. The paper co-written by Samet Apaydın and Meltem Müftüler-Baç (Sabanci University) focuses on Turkish Parliamentary deliberations on the Syrians to assess its issue salience.

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The external dimension of EU migration policy as region-building? Refugee cooperation as contentious politics

16 November 2021

Building on the case of displacement from Syria, this article by Tamirace Fakhoury targets the EU’s refugee approach in its ‘neighborhood’ as a site of contention whereby states, rather than being policy borrowers, dispute the EU’s attempt to regulate regions

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The perils of refugee rentierism in the post‐2011 Middle East

18 October 2021

In this paper, Gerasimos Tsourapas discusses how Middle East states across the Mediterranean have attempted, in some form or another, to secure material and nonmaterial concessions from the European Union (EU) and its member‐states by tying the management of forced migration to their diplomatic issue‐linkage strategies.

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Echoing and re-echoing refugee policies in the international system: The Lebanese state and its political imaginary

9 September 2021

This article by Tamirace Fakhoury sets out to contribute to the debate on how Arab refugee hosting states, generally regarded as norm recipients and recalcitrant implementers of refugee law, have sought to shape, localize, and reconfigure understandings and practices of asylum.

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The governance of Syrian refugees in the Middle East: Lessons from the Jordan and Lebanon Compacts

8 September 2021

Relative to their own populations, neighboring Jordan and Lebanon have hosted the most Syrians per capita. While both are small, middle-income, and resource-poor countries, the perception of their respective governance of Syrian refugees has been diametrically different. The main objective of this short intervention by André Bank and Christiane Fröhlich (GIGA)  is to evaluate both the 2016 Jordan Compact and the Lebanon Compact 5 years after their signing and to outline a more reflective potential EU policy approach.

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Refugee commodification: the diffusion of refugee rent-seeking in the Global South

13 August 2021

With the West’s approach to vulnerable Afghans driven by a fixation on stopping migration at all costs, Luisa F. Freier (Universidad del Pacífico), Nicholas R. Micinski (University of Maine), and MAGYC’s Gerasimos Tsourapas (University of Glasgow) identify the threatening global rise of refugee commodification.

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Identity, Belonging and Strategic Citizenship. Considerations About Naturalisation Among Italians and Spaniards Living in the EU

27 July 2021

Drawing on 68 in-depth interviews conducted with Italians and Spaniards living in London and Berlin, Iraklis Dimitriadis and Fabio Quassoli argue that an individual’s understanding of naturalisation within the EU context is based on two aspects: on one hand, a strictly pragmatic evaluation of the pros and cons of the new status; on the other, a new sense of belonging as well as new cultural and territorial identifications that intra-EU migrants are not often willing to experience.

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Externalization of migration governance, Turkey’s migration regime, and the protection of the European Union’s external borders

27 June 2021

This article written by Meltem Müftüler-Baç aims to tackle the following questions: whether the externalization of European migration governance played a significant role in the redesign of Turkish migration governance, and whether this externalization uncovered new collaboration strategies for Turkey and the EU.

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As Lockdown Restrictions Start to Ease, It’s Time to Think About Mobility Justice

25 June 2021

In the frame of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fiona Adamson (SOAS) and Christiane Fröhlich (GIGA) promote in this article a greater level of mobility justice in the world.

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A PROMETHEE MCDM Application in Social Inclusion: The Case of Foreign-Born Population in the EU

15 June 2021

This paper by Anastasia Blouchoutzi,  Dimitra Manou, and Jason Papathanasiou suggests the integration of a multiple criteria decision analysis method, namely PROMETHEE, for policy making with regard to migrant social exclusion. The authors argue that the method proposed could help policy makers to evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented policies, spot the discrepancies between policies and policy outcomes, and motivate knowledge sharing among the EU member states. The findings include a ten-year comparative list of the EU member states (2010–2019) driven by social inclusion indicators for the foreign-born (non-EU-born) population. The results are rather sensitive to changes in the data utilized but they provide an overall comparative picture of social inclusion policy effectiveness in the EU during the past decade.

 

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Leveraging the European Refugee Crisis: Forced Displacement and Bargaining in Greece's Bailout Negotiations

June 2021

In this article, Gerasimos Tsourapas provides the first detailed analysis of Greece's foreign policy response to the European migrant crisis, demonstrating the importance of forced displacement in the international politics of EU member states.

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Local “Battlegrounds”. Relocating Multi-Level and Multi-Actor Governance of Immigration

June 2021

Moving beyond the MLG (multi-level governance) approach, this literature review by Iraklis Dimitriadis, Minke Hajer, Elena Fontanari and Maurizio Ambrosini focuses on studies regarding the local level in immigration governance. It considers local policies and administrative practices on the one hand, and the role of multiple civil society actors engaged in the reception of asylum seekers on the other.

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Horizontal Local Governance and Social Inclusion: The Case of Municipality-Civil Society Engagement During Refugee Reception in Malmö, Sweden

9 April 2021

This study by Claudia Fry and Mine Islar from LUCSUS takes an in-depth look of Malmö, a city in Sweden which in 2015 became the centre for the Swedish refugee reception and solidarity initiatives and identifies challenges and opportunities of horizontal collaborations to develop the social dimension of city resilience.

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Networks do not float freely: (Dis)entangling the politics of Tamil diaspora inclusion in development governance

24 February 2021

This paper from Catherine Craven builds on the idea that diaspora engagement is contextually embedded but complicates the understanding of this context, by moving beyond structuralist or state-centric models.

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The battleground of asylum and immigration policies: a conceptual inquiry 

11 January 2021 

In this article published on Ethnic and Racial Studies, Maurizio Ambrosini (Università degli Studi di Milano) contributes to the debate on asylum and immigration policies by elaborating the concept of “battleground” of asylum (and immigration) policies.

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