Interdisciplinary Fellow Group on ‘Migration, Mobility and Forced Displacement’

While migration research, in the past decades, has increasingly highlighted the transnational dimension of migration as a bottom-up process, policy responses have so far mostly been framed as an issue of control or management from the top down. However, the migration experience is shaped not only by nation-states but rather by a multitude of actors which also directly and indirectly influence the politics of migration and how it is governed. The aim of this fellowship group is to bring together a group of renowned scholars from a variety of disciplines to develop a multi-level, multi-stakeholder perspective of migration, mobility and forced displacement. The main focus is on migration within and from Africa, but some fellows will also contribute a comparative perspective with regards to other regional migration processes in other regions of the Global South. We base our research project on a very broad notion of governance that encompasses governance by, with and in some instances also without governments, including both formal and informal structures. Theoretically, we draw from the different disciplines represented by the fellows, which are sociology, political science, geography, anthropology and development studies. We believe that the different backgrounds of the fellows will enable us adopt a multidisciplinary approach to analyze topical migration related issues.