Borders, migration governance and people on the move

Description: In Cameroon, international migration is coupled with specific socio-cultural expectations regarding an increase of wealth and sharing of resources. However, it remains unclear how this community expectations influence the everyday experiences of Cameroonian migrants who return to their country. This project addresses three main goals, (1) by investigating the concrete community expectations towards returnees and (2° by mapping the governmental support structures that are available for returnees; (3) this research aims to reveal how community expectations and formal support structures influence the return experience. As such, the research project contributes to knowledge on how differences in post-return wellbeing emerge.
Promoter(s): Ilse Derluyn , Ine Lietaert
Researcher(s): Presca Esseh Wanki Kang
Department / Research group: Social Work and Social Pedagogy
Faculty: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences

Description: Across Europe, numerous grassroots groups have emerged in solidarity with migrants that are illegalised by state policies. Some of these groups combine humanitarian support (e.g. material aid) with an explicit desire to effectuate broader social and political change (e.g. by mobilizing citizens into protests). Through ethnographic fieldwork in grassroots groups that are active in Brussels, Flanders, Dunkirk and across Europe, this project examines what distinguishes these groups from both professional humanitarian NGOs and radical social movements, which dilemmas they are faced with, and how they deal with these.
Promoter(s): Robin Vandevoordt
Researcher(s): Robin Vandevoordt
Faculty / Faculties: Faculty of Political and Social Sciences
Period of time: 2019 - 2022

Description: PROTECT The Right to International Protection. A Pendulum between Globalization and Nativization? is an EU-funded research project launched on 1 February 2020. We study the impacts of the UN's Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration, which are two non-binding frameworks promoting international cooperation and responsibility-sharing as key solutions to handle global refugee flows. By studying how the Compacts are received and implemented in different countries, and how they interact with existing legal frameworks and governance architectures, we investigate the Compacts' impact on refugees' right to international protection.
Promoter(s): Frank Caestecker
Researcher(s): Eva Ecker
Faculty / Faculties: Faculty of Economics and Business Administration
Period of time: 2020 - 2023

Description: The study aims at examining the return and reintegration of Ethiopian forced returnees from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its impacts on the recipient households and communities in North Wollo, where a considerable number of returnees are living. It also explores the determinants of success of reintegration and returnees' strategies to cope the challenges and problems that they have faced in the course of the reintegration process. Survey, interviews, focus group discussions and life history methods will be employed to gather the necessary data. The survey data to be collected will be analized through descriptive statistics and multiple regressions. In doing so, the study intends to contribute to the literature on return and reintegration.
Promoter(s): Ilse Derluyn, Lietaert Ine
Researcher(s): Tizazu Ashenafi Tirfie
Department / Research group: Social Work and Social Pedagogy
Faculty: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences

Description: Drawing from history, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, political science and heritage studies, and focussing on the lived experience of those attempting to build or rebuild communities in conflict affected places of central Africa, this research contributes to a better understanding of how conflict-affected societies constitute or re-constitute themselves. It examines three overlapping categories of returnees: refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and ex-combatants in the borderland regions of Central African Republic (CAR), Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Sudan and Uganda. The research explores returnees relationships with each other, with the ‘stayee’ populations and their engagement with national governments, external organisations and actors. It wants to understand how standardised liberal peacebuilding approaches to return are relevant to people on the ground who negotiate conflict realities and their legacies on a daily basis.
Promoter(s): Koen Vlassenroot
Researcher(s): Koen Vlassenroot
Department / Research group: Conflict and Development Studies
Faculty: Faculty of Political and Social Sciences

Description: The EU increasingly seeks to outsource or 'externalise' its international responsibility for the protection of refugees and other migrants to third countries, such as Morocco. This PhD research examines, from a multidisciplinary perspective, what legal and actual protection exists for forced migrants in Morocco. The research evaluates the extraterritorial responsibility of states under international refugee and human rights law (doctrinal law perspective), examines what migrants themselves seek and understand to be protection, or 'protection consciousness' (socio-legal perspective), and looks at Morocco’s Africa diplomacy regarding asylum and migrants’ rights (critical policy perspective).
Promoter(s): Ellen Desmet
Researcher(s): Ruben Wissing
Faculty / Faculties: Faculty of Law and Criminology
Period of time: 2018 - 2022

Description: This PhD research project examines the European Union's migration cooperation with third countries of origin and transit and the nexus between the EU's migration governance and development cooperation. It focuses on the emergence of the so-called migration-development nexus in EU foreign policy, the narrative and policy connections between development policy and migration governance, and the various approaches of EU institutions towards this nexus. Theoretically, the project applies the advocacy coalition framework to examine the migration-development policy field in the European Union.
Promoter(s): Christof Roos
Researcher(s): Jan Orbie
Faculty / Faculties: Faculty of Political and Social Sciences
Period of time: 2018 - 2023

Description: This research project deals with the translation of the return migration regime in Europe in The Gambia. It first assesses the discursive underpinnings of such regime, by addressing particularly the legitimisation of the policy objective of sustainable reintegration. It then explores the various configurations of assisted return and reintegration in selected European states. Furthermore, it studies the incorporation of different non-state actors and particularly locally owned CSOs in the externalisation of EUrope's border to The Gambia. It also looks at the ambivalent involvement of returnees in the communication practices of international organisations as well as the practices and discourses of self-organised returnee groups.
Promoter(s): Ine Lietaert , Joris Schapendonk
Researcher(s): Rossella Marino
Faculty / Faculties: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
Period of time: 2019 - 2023