About

Contesting Migration brings together anthropologists and political scientists to study a major social and humanitarian challenge, that of forced displacement. Crossing international borders by refugees who flee has, in the last decade, become more intense, more difficult, more organised, and more deadly. It has also spurred wholesale policy changes globally and in Europe in the forms of the Global Compact on Refugees and the European Migration Pact. These grand policy shifts have largely been elicited by emergencies in specific refugee reception sites. In the Mediterranean, Lesvos, Ceuta and Lampedusa have attracted much attention during this time. These sites distil but also magnify the broader socio-political dynamics that refugee flows set in motion. Such dynamics play out primarily between pro- and anti-refugee actors. The project studies the governance of migration through the lens of refugee reception sites with a focus on political contestation.

Sites and Approach

We mobilise political ethnography approaches to understand refugee politics and policy from the bottom-up. That is, from the point of view of activists at key reception sites in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus. Contesting Migration enfolds and incorporates findings from two earlier projects: the MedReceptions project, which compared activist mobilisations around reception centres in Greece and Cyprus, and an earlier project that developed the analytic tools used in this cross-disciplinary study.

The project studies pro- and anti-migrant campaigns in Ceuta and Melilla (Spain), Lampedusa and Trieste (Italy), and Lesvos, Chios, Samos, and Evros (Greece) as well as Kokkinotrimithia in Cyprus. It analyses how these contestations over migration and refugee reception are amplified in public debate and local governance across the different sites with a view to understanding how mobilization dynamics relate to wider migration politics.

We are interested in three forms of action in particular:

(i) conventional, comprising initiatives like activist litigation and electoral mobilization;

(ii) contentious, comprising a spectrum of activities from search and rescue operations, counter-forensics, beach patrols, and protests;

(iii) cultural-artistic, comprising exhibitions, performances, staged events, and use of heritage materials.

Contesting Migration is a collaboration between researchers based at Durham University and the University of Cyprus. It also partners with the University of Granada in research and engagement on the ground. This includes collaborating in field activities and the design of public outputs. We also work with legal experts and artists to produce materials of relevance to those concerned.

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