The current pandemic, the climate crisis and concerns over new technologies like Artificial Intelligence demand an open and clear dialogue between science and society. As we move forward to address these types of challenges, facts and scientific research need to feed community knowledge and play an important role in public decision-making. For this, effective research communication is key! Kendra Valck at the School of Business and Economics recently spoke about this topic with UNU-MERIT’s...
In the 1970s, international organisations began to implement short-term diaspora return programmes to formalise and promote diaspora knowledge transfer for development. The first of these programmes was the Transfer of Knowledge through Expatriate Nationals (TOKTEN), established by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1977. In the early 2000s, however, this type of programmes really took flight and by 2009 close to 10 different diaspora return programmes were operating in Afghanist...
UNU-MERIT Migration Group Annual Report 2019 “I am proud to share with you the 2019 Annual Report of the Migration Group at UNU-MERIT. We enjoyed a successful year; it was a time for growth and change, with new strategic hires and an expansion of our capacity building and executive education programmes.” Prof. Dr. Melissa Siegel Enter keywords...
On 17 March 2020, the Mayor of Amsterdam announced new measures to contain the coronavirus, including the closure of schools, restaurants, and cultural venues. In July 2020, researchers from the Migration, Transformation and Sustainability (MISTY) project sent an online survey to members of the Amsterdam City Research Panel asking them what impact the coronavirus crisis was having on their lives, set against the broader backdrop of sustainability (understood here in terms of social, economic, an...
I was eight years old when I learned that ‘we’ are guests in Syria, the country where I spent 34 years of my life before I moved to Europe and became a recognised citizen of the Netherlands. The story traces back to the year 1948, when both my grandparents were forcibly eradicated from their home in Wadi Salib, a neighbourhood in the heart of Haifa city in Palestine, my country of origin. At the time, my grandparents, like other Palestinians, were told that it was a temporary situation, and that...
Dr Katie Kuschminder has won a ‘Starting Grant’ from the European Research Council. Designed for postdocs with between two and seven years’ experience, the 1.5 million euro grant will enable Katie to form her own research team, which will focus on reintegration governance for migrants. Katie summed up her ‘Reintegrate’ project as follows: “Increasing numbers of people are returning to their origin countries after they migrate. This can be voluntary return or a...
Ongoing war and conflict, starting in the late 1970s, have made Afghanistan a major emigrant country. For more than four decades, most Afghan families, including my own, have migrated either internally or externally, mainly for safety....
Amid profound instability unleashed with the Libyan civil war and rival factions vying for power, conditions facing the roughly 650,000 migrants who remain in Libya have been dire. Those living in the community are vulnerable to extortion, violence, and slave-like work conditions, while migrants held in detention centres may experience overcrowding, sexual abuse, forced labour, torture, and deprivation of food, sunlight, and water. Amid entrenched fighting around Tripoli, including a deadly airs...
I am one of the latest people in a long line of around 130 years of continuous migration in my family – a privilege to which I owe many of my accomplishments. My mother is Iranian and my father is German. Although I was born in Germany, I was still a baby when my parents decided to migrate to Paraguay, where I grew up until the age of 11. After that, we moved to England, followed by another move to Zimbabwe, where we stayed for four years. Finally, we moved back to England, where I finished my h...
An enduring goal of Migration Studies is to explain why people migrate: why some move and others do not. While the reasons to explain the migration of an individual are going to be different from those to explain an aggregate flow of many hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals, no individual is totally isolated from the broader context of the group within which he or she lives and moves....