Publications

Since 2014, there has been an increase in non-governmental Search and Rescue activities (SAR) on the Central Mediterranean Route (CMR). Scholarly attention has focused on refugees’ and migrants’ lived experiences on the route. When engaging with non-governmental SAR ships, recent migration scholarship mostly concentrated on their function to rescue and to be a symbol for political activism. What is currently missing is a thorough exploration of rescue ships exceeding their function to rescue through the lens of humanitarian action.

This article aims to analyse the difficulties Central American refugee women face when applying for refugee protection in Mexico and how they negotiate survival during this process. Claiming refugee protection is an important legal mechanism to ensure survival, but managing this process successfully is difficult, not only because of the bureaucratic complexities but also because of structural and political constraints.

In this article, we explore the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a case of “Contingent
Power Extension” (CPE) towards the European Union (EU), assessing its
implications for regional (dis)integration in the latter. CPE is a conceptual prism
that interprets the BRI as a polymorphous, dynamic, and context-specific mechanism
through which Chinese foreign policy elites intend to convey, amplify, and
legitimize the regime’s power-reach into other regions, including the EU. Along two

In 2019, the tiny West African country of the Gambia imposed a moratorium on all deportation flights from the EU. Though West African countries are notoriously reluctant to cooperate on forced returns, such a moratorium was unheard of and caused an uproar within diplomatic circles in Europe. In the age of deportability, why is deporting ‘unwanted’ migrants an illustration of a nation’s sovereign rights, yet refusing to accept deportees is not?

Die Perzeption afrikanischer Migration nach Europa ist von vielen Mythen geprägt. Ursächlich für diese Migration ist ein komplexes Zusammenspiel von gesellschaftlichen Normen, restriktiven Migrationspolitiken, kolonialem Erbe und innerstaatlichen Konflikten.

Since 2017, more than one million Rohingya have been forcibly displaced from their country of birth, Myanmar. While most of the displaced Rohingya are currently living in refugee camps along the Myanmar–Bangladesh border, thousands have continued their journeys in search of safety across the Andaman Sea, especially to Malaysia, but also Thailand and Indonesia. During these journeys, many endured prolonged stays at sea. Smugglers who organised these passages tried to extort higher payments from their clients’ families before proceeding with the passage.

In river deltas, human interference with regional and global socio-ecological systems has led to a plethora of gradual and more abrupt environmental changes that result in inundation, coastal and river bank erosion, land loss and, ultimately, displaced people. Often apolitically framed as protective, state-led transfer of people to new housing grounds, resettlement has become a common response to such displacements.

Uganda is well known as a strong refugee protector, but faces a number of socio-economic and governing challenges, as well as complex political priorities and relationships. Based on our research on the political stakes of refugee protection in Uganda we found:

Despite the explosion of migration literature in recent years, there remains a bias in aca-demic literature to focus on Europe or other areas in the Global North. Migration studiestend to follow the political interests of curbing access for refugees and other migrants in the Global North, divorced from the fact that most displacement and indeed much mobil-ity takes place in the Global South (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020).