WELCOME to our second quarterly newsletter of 2015, keeping you up-to-date on our migration activities, events and publications at UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance | ||
Khalid Koser Leads New Global Fund vs. Violent Extremism Dr. Khalid Koser has been appointed Executive Director of the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund (GCERF), the first global effort to support local, community-level initiatives aimed at strengthening resilience against violent extremist agendas. Dr. Koser, also extraordinary Professor in Conflict, Peace and Security at Maastricht University, said in Davos in early 2015: “There are lots of communities affected by violence and extremism that don’t have access to money to find responses to this challenge. Our fund is intended to help fill that funding gap and to help communities build resilience against violent extremism.” As a public-private partnership at the nexus of security and development, GCERF works in partnership and consultation with governments, civil society, and the private sector in beneficiary countries to support national strategies to address the local drivers of violent extremism. Read more. |
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NEW RESEARCH |
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Higher Education: A Key Development Need for Refugees In January and February, Ayla Bonfiglio was awarded two research grants by the Foundation for Scientific Education Limburg (SWOL) and the Porticus Foundation, to carry out her doctoral fieldwork on the mobility and education trajectories of refugees pursuing higher education. Ayla's fieldwork will take place in Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa over a period of eight months. The research hopes to reveal different displacement patterns and refugees’ deliberative decision-making. By looking at tertiary education, it also seeks to understand the fuller scope of refugee agency, different types of agency, and the ability of agency to change over the course of refugees’ movements. Lastly, it aims to uncover explanatory mechanisms of how features of agency related to higher education interact with structural constraints related to conflict, geography, or socio-economic crisis. For a more detailed description of this research, please read our blog. |
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Migration as Development Professor Hein de Haas, Co-Director of the International Migration Institute (IMI) at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID), and Extraordinary Professor of Migration and Development at UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance, has been awarded a €1.75 million grant by the European Research Council to conduct a five-year research project entitled ‘Migration as Development’. The project aims to develop new theoretical and empirical approaches for studying the developmental drivers of human mobility in the modern industrial-capitalist era (the 19th and 20th centuries). More specifically, the project will address the following question: How do processes of development and social transformation shape the geographical orientation, timing, composition and volume of internal and international migration? |
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UPCOMING EVENTS |
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12th IMISCOE Conference As a member of the standing committee on Interactions of Migrant Integration and Transnationalism in Europe (IMITE) along with EUR and PRIO, UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance are organising two panels at the 12th IMISCOE Conference, to be held in Geneva on 25-27 June 2015. The panels entitled “Governing Migrant Transnationalism: New Actors of Diaspora Engagement” and “Governing Transnationalism: Focusing on Citizenship” will explore the different scales and sites, as well as different actors, and forms of organisation and structure involved in governing (and resisting governance) in connection to migrant transnationalism. Papers for these sessions primarily focus on citizenship legislation, dual-citizenship discourse and transnational involvement on the one hand, and on the new actors of diaspora engagement on the other hand, by looking at local and urban engagement initiatives for migrant transnationalism and governance of circular migration and short term employment schemes. |
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Migration Seminars In conjunction with MACIMIDE, the Migration and Development Research Cluster at UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance organises a series of migration-related seminars to provide a platform to discuss the research output of researchers at the School and to invite external speakers to share their work. The next scheduled seminar will take place on 8 April 2015, when Dr. Martin Russell, visiting researcher from Diaspora Matters in the Republic of Ireland, will present "Why Diaspora Matters: New Trajectories in Diaspora Engagement and Research”. On 3 June, Ali Chaudhary (International Migration Institute) will speak on “Stigma, Coercive Isomorphism, and Pakistani Migrant Organizations in London, Toronto and New York City”. The seminars are held from 12:30-13:30 in the conference room of UNU-MERIT at Keizer Karelplein 19. A sandwich lunch is provided. To join our mailing list and receive invitations to future seminars please email Michaella Vanore. |
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PAST EVENTS |
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Challenges for International Cooperation & Development Gender, inequalities, security and migration are the guiding themes of the EU ‘Brainstorming on Challenges for International Cooperation and Development’, a conference held in Brussels on 13 March 2015. Part of the European Year for Development, the conference was opened by Neven Mimica, EU Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development. Dr. Melissa Siegel represented UNU-MERIT as a keynote speaker, alongside Prof. Finn Tarp, director of UNU-WIDER, and many other distinguished speakers in the field of development. Questions included: How do developments in the South cause migration to the North (and vice versa)? What is the impact of South-South migration on development? And how should development cooperation address these issues? Check the website for more details including an interview with Dr. Melissa Siegel. |
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Report Launch: Diaspora Engagement in Germany UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance were recently commissioned by GIZ to conduct two complementary studies on the engagement of two African diaspora groups in Germany. The studies apply a methodology developed in an earlier research report conducted in 2013 by researchers at UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance on the Tunisian Diaspora. The team presented the findings of the research in Eschborn on 18 March 2015. The studies investigate the engagement of Kenyan and Nigerian diaspora organisations in Germany and identify areas for potential cooperation between GIZ and migrant organisations in Germany. The publications are now available on our website (Kenya | Nigeria). |
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Challenges Ahead: Integration of Migrants in the European Labour Market On 11-13 March 2015 the second International conference of the Research and Information Centre on Immigrant Integration (CDCDI) project was held in Bucharest, Romania. UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance were represented by Özge Bilgili and Victor Cebotari. Dr. Özge Bilgili moderated two conference sessions on the EU migrants which addressed a wide variety of issues related to integration challenges of understudied new immigrant groups in the EU. She alsooffered concluding remarks during a discussion of relevant issues in relation to immigrant integration policies with reference to the Migrant Integration Policy Index. Dr. Victor Cebotari presented his work on national integration, discrimination, poverty and the social status of ethnic and immigrant minorities in Europe based on the World Values Survey. |
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TRAINING PROGRAMMES |
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Migration Management Diploma Programme On 30 March 2015, we welcomed our third cohort of students to the Migration Management Diploma Programme (MMDP). The MMDP, which is supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MinBUZA), engages government officials and civil society representatives from 42 developing countries with experience in the field of migration management. Scholarships for students in this programme are provided to government officials with three or more years of working experience on a migration management topic by MinBuza, the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC), the International Center for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). If you are interested in receiving further information about the programme please email or visit our website. |
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Online Courses For those who are interested but do not have the time to take a full time course, UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance offer specially designed a number of online courses to suit the needs of busy professionals interested in pursuing migration studies. Currently we offer three courses that can be started at any time: 1) Introduction to Migration Studies; 2) Migration and Remittance Effects; and 3) Comparative Migration Policy. Keep an eye on our website for the launch of two new online courses later in 2015 on Forced Migration by Prof. Khalid Koser and on Internal Migration by Prof. Ronald Skeldon. |
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PUBLICATIONS |
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The Dynamics between Integration Policies and Outcomes: A Synthesis of the Literature This paper, by Dr. Özge Bilgili et al., reviews the comparative multi-level quantitative research on the links between integration policies, the integration situation of immigrants and a wide range of individual and contextual factors. Twenty-one reviewed studies and additional supporting articles indicate that a number of individual and contextual variables explain most of the variation between countries in terms of immigrants’ labour market integration, educational attainment, naturalisation and political participation. This review indicates that future research needs to pay greater attention to linking a specific integration policy with its actual target group and target outcomes. International surveys can improve their measurement of integration policy outcomes in terms of long-term residence, family reunification, anti-discrimination, language learning, and, to some extent, political participation. |
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Supporting immigrant integration in Europe: A role for origin countries' subnational authorities? This MPI Europe report, by Dr. Özge Bilgili and Dr. Ilire Agimi, represents the first attempt to investigate how the activities of origin countries' regional and local institutions may improve the lives of emigrants to Member States of the European Union. It discusses relevant obstacles as well as opportunities for sending-country cities, regional political entities, and federated states in the design and implementation of policy measures to improve the trajectories of migrants. The report also underscores the importance of international cooperation at the subnational level—specifically city-to-city partnerships—focusing on well-established migration corridors in Europe with the assumption that historical links or geographic proximity can make cooperation easier. |
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Forced Up or Down? The Impact of Forced Migration on Social Status In this paper, Dr. Melissa Siegel et al. use a dataset on Burundian refugee returnees to explore their perceptions of the overall impact of migration on their community and household level social status. Focusing on the roles of gender and duration of migration, the article finds that gender does not seem to affect the perceived impact of migration on alienation from the community or the relative position of the returnee in the household. Results suggest that those returnees who spent longer periods of time abroad have a greater tendency to perceive migration as having a positive impact on their social status. The article discusses the policy implications of the results for return migration in a post-conflict context. |
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Comparative Research on the Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration of Migrants Building on extensive fieldwork in a number of countries, this report explores the factors influencing the decision of migrants to return, including the role played by return policy interventions. The report aims to enhance understanding of the concept of sustainable return, how to define it, and how to measure it. The study, by Prof. Khalid Koser and Dr. Katie Kuschminder, was conceived and commissioned as part of the Australian Government Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s Irregular Migration Research Programme and supported by the IOM. The study is intended to be a preliminary research project testing a new methodology that requires further expansion and testing. |
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Photo Credits: H. Pijpers, H. Hudson, S. Brodin, [7] UN Photo T McKulka | ||
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