The ‘Muslimification’ of Muslims: why political conflict over Islam makes us blind to transformation towards diversity

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Paul Statham, Professor of Migration, SCMR Director

Muslim man walking past a mural in East Harlem, New York City. Photo, author’s own

Do you think that Islam is a threat to the British way of life? UK Population 30% yes; Conservative Party members 58% yes

Do you think parts of many European cities are under the control of Sharia Law and are ‘no-go’ zones for non-Muslims? UK population 30% yes; Conservative Party members 52% yes 

Source: Opinion poll of 521 Conservative party members from 7-16 February 2024, Hope Not Hate

When you had your breakfast this morning did you feel the British way of life under threat? When you stroll through London, Manchester, or Leeds, do feel pressurised by Sharia law?  Or do you see cities blooming with diversity? People of all types thrown together in the glorious mish-mash of everyday life. Personally, I find it disturbing that 3 out of 10 people say “yes” to questions above, because it does not fit the reality I see around me. It’s less surprising those who gave us Liz Truss as PM say “yes”, but that’s another story.

How can it be ‘normal’ for so many people to see the world in a way depicted by these questions?

There are two stories at play here: The first is the only story in town for dominant politics and mainstream media – the “clash of civilizations”. This is the idea that European societies are basically cleaved in two conflicting camps, with “White Christian” majorities on one side pitched against the alien culture and values of Islam imported by immigration on the other. Even those who morally challenge this view as discriminatory, are dragged onto the same battleground, as the endless multicultural conflicts show.

But there is an alternative story that you won’t read about in the news that finds almost no space in the heat of politics. This is a story of incremental social and demographic change across boundaries and generations – a world transitioning to diversity, in part through ethnic mixing. This is where kids of different colours hang out together in the school yard, their parents work together, and where we increasingly choose partners from different backgrounds than ourselves. This is also a world where girls wearing the niqab in Bradford speak in broad Yorkshire accents. It where the Muslim son of a bus driver can be elected Lord Mayor of London, and another from across the political divide can rise from humble origins to become Home Secretary and Chancellor. This is a story of aspiration, opportunity, and society transforming through diversity. It’s about British Muslims becoming so much a part of British society, that for most social intents and purposes it is of no consequence that they are Muslim at all.

I’m a sociologist, not a politician. I’ve been working on the integration of Islam and Muslims in Europe for more than 25 years. This is from when we were just a few oddballs studying the political accommodation of minority religions, to when these issues move the centre of European consciousness – after 9/11, the so-called ‘War on Terror’, a global renaissance of Islamic beliefs, and seemingly endless multicultural conflicts over headscarves, minarets, and niqabs etc.. Looking back, I’ve been increasingly concerned by the impact of this politicisation in distorting the way we do academic research. I think we have fallen short in the social sciences, often simply mimicking and reinforcing tropes from politics and media. I’ve called this the “Muslimification of Muslims” – not without a slight hint of sarcasm.

At Sussex, we were part of a massive original survey on Muslim minorities of 1st and 2nd generations across six European countries. This was a decade ago, but I’ve recently gone back to re-examine the data. We asked all the hot questions about culture, values, and identities. But the value of this study was that we not only asked about culture as a cleavage, but we also asked the questions about culture as a way of connecting people across boundaries. We asked about shared identities with non-Muslims, such as feeling “British”, “Dutch” or “French”, about having people who are non-Muslims as your friends, neighbours, or within your family network. In short, we wanted to give culture a chance to empirically tell us about social interaction across ethno-religious boundaries, by including the questions that seem to be increasingly omitted for studies on Muslims.

So, what is problematic about the “Muslimification” of Muslims?

First, there is the problem with the category “Muslim”. To state what should be very obvious, people who self-identify as Muslim living in Europe are a highly heterogeneous category: by ethnicity, family country of origin, Islamic faith, immigration history etc… and that’s before we even mention gender, age, or class/status differences. But most research simply mimics political debates and lumps this diverse set of people into a single category “Muslim”, often unquestioningly, and often because the quality of the data is not good enough to do anything else. Unsurprisingly, scholars seldom acknowledge this last point.

Against this, our findings shows very distinctive trajectories of acculturation, opinions, and behaviour by people within this umbrella label of “Muslim”. Family country of origin was especially salient in account for divergence. One size does not fit all.

Second, when academic lump all Muslims together as “Muslims” this automatically emphasises religion and religiosity over other all other identities and social explanations. Religiosity now has a sort of über-explanatory status.

Against this, our research shows that non-religious factors that connect people across boundaries matter much more than religiosity. These push in the opposite direction and demonstrate being part of a shared culture. Especially significant are feeling “British”, “French”, or “Dutch”, consuming “British”, “French”, or “Dutch” media, and having family experiences of intermarriage. Only four out of ten people even practiced their Islamic faith and could be considered religious in a meaningful sense. It really isn’t all about religion because they are Muslims.

The third point is about ideas of democracy. Social scientists often tend to repeat the dogmas from politics and media about supposed conflicts over so-called “liberal democratic values”. Twenty-five years ago, “liberal democratic values” were seen as the civic stuff that would hold national societies together facing the new challenges of globalisation, of which immigration and superdiversity are part. Today, however “liberal democratic values” usually only introduced as a stick to beat Muslims – as a sort of test of ethnocultural “Britishness”, “Frenchness” or “Dutchness” that they can never pass.

Interestingly, our research shows that from the side of Muslims there is little to suggest that acculturation over democratic values is unlikely. However, when we look on the other side of the boundary, it is the non-Muslim majority who see larger and significant gaps between themselves and Muslims. It seems that a sizeable part of the majority population have taken on board the dominant message of politics and media and see Muslims as a threat to the democratic way of life – as we saw in the opening opinion poll. 

An important point here is that often integration and acculturation processes are talked about in a way that assumes that the more integration or acculturation advances the less conflict there will be over diversity. Clearly, this is not the case – it is not a zero-sum game. Instead, what we are witnessing today is that the more Muslims adapt and become part of European societies, the more their presence is opposed and made conflictual, by a significant proportion of those who are not Muslim. In other words, we live in a time of factual increasing demographic diversity and hybridity (among Muslims and non-Muslims) on the ground, but the only dominant political story in town is one of conflict between two opposed ethno-religious camps. Populists stoke these divisions that are counterfactual to the social reality around us.

But what about the academy? Surely, we can do better?

Today, the social sciences are polemical, driven by normative critiques and counter-critiques, that at worst ape the “culture wars” outside. But for me, Sociology is not just about being a social justice warrior. It’s not just about being negative and criticising the world. It’s about making the mechanisms visible through which societies transform and change. This is based on the belief that if we understand them, then we may be in a position to consider doing something about it for good. In this sense, we need humility and to take inspiration from something George Orwell said seventy-five years ago: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” The social sciences need to take up this struggle. A better world needs better research.

The research supporting this article is published in:

Statham, Paul. 2024. Challenging the Muslimification of Muslims in research on ‘liberal democratic values’: why culture matters beyond religion. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 50(1), 203–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2023.2268894 Open Access.

For a commentary article, see:

Statham, Paul. 2024. ‘Re-thinking how we study Muslim minorities in Europe—A call for de-Muslimification.’ International Migration, (62): 277–280. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13333

This was presented as a TED-style talk at the “Impossible until it’s Done: a celebration of Sussex research”, 12th, June 2024, 1 Birdcage Walk, Westminster, London. You can see a video of the talk here.

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Posted in Migration Research

What can regret in migration decision-making reveal about policy failures?

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Dr Caterina Mazzilli | ODI Global

When Aida (not her real name) joined her husband in South Africa, she could not believe that that was what she “had come here for”. She said, “the first business we were doing was door-to-door [vending]. We used to sell blankets and curtains door to door and that brought [up] some reasons that made [me] consider returning home.”

Aida was born in Ethiopia and, like many Ethiopians over the past 20 years, migrated to South Africa. In her case it was to reunite with her husband, which is common amongst women and girls, while men and increasingly younger boys tend to set off in pursuit of economic opportunities. Photos and videos of luxury wedding parties in Cape Town, talks of established business ventures, sizeable remittances, and substantial donations to churches in towns of origin convey the message that in South Africa it is possible to “become someone”.

26 December 2013, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia- a strapped luggage stands without its owner at the migrant rehabilitation center. ©UNICEF Ethiopia/2013/Ayene

To a certain extent, these aspirations are possible to meet. As of 2022, South Africa was the third largest economy in Africa after Egypt and Nigeria. The local currency (the Rand) is relatively solid and there are many opportunities for entrepreneurship, with fewer and lower taxes on businesses than in Ethiopia. But the journey to South Africa is 10,000 kilometres long, laden with physical threats and danger of economic extortion. And even when they arrive, Ethiopians are “pushed to the margins” of the South African society, as most of them work as door-to-door vendors or in informal convenience stores (spaza shops).

The interviews our project partners conducted with Ethiopian men and women uncovered the presence of regret among some participants, expressed through the wish of having taken some different decisions. Regret is an incredibly sensitive topic, which risks being misinterpreted and misused, but looking at it can have implications for both research and policy-making.

As a caveat, this is not psychology research, nor was it possible to conduct it under clinical settings. Nonetheless, we hope it is the starting point for a more rigorous examination of the topic.

What the research showed

Everybody feels regret in their daily life both for trivial matters and big decisions, and migrants are no exception. However, in the context of migration, this topic is still underexplored at best, and a taboo at worst. This happens for a few reasons:

  1. Pressure to ‘succeed’. Migration requires considerable material and emotional investment not only for the individual migrant, but often for their own network too. There is extensive research on the fact that the ‘poorest of the poor’ just do not have the means to migrate and very often families rely on the one member who migrates for remittances – but also to increase their social capital. This puts pressure on migrants to tick the boxes of a ‘successful migration’, for instance by owning a house, starting a business, or sending money to cover family healthcare expenses and school fees. These expectations are a weight on their shoulders and constrain them in their conversations with loved ones who have not migrated. The Ethiopian participants narrated of their frustration when communicating with their family, who found it difficult to believe accounts of hardship in South Africa. Those accounts contradict the well-established narrative of easy-access to economic success and personal development that has been reproduced over time. In reality, this narrative only paints a partial picture, as it erases the solitude, violence, and discrimination most of them have experienced in South Africa. The impossibility to communicate lived challenges went together with a longing for loved ones, and the regret for missing important family events. This made regret unspeakable of.
  2. Lack of control over certain decisions. The data collection at the core of this study revealed that regret was mostly associated with those decisions that are a direct result of restrictive migration policies, such as strict border control or ever more stringent requirements to be granted a residence permit. Residence documents are extremely difficult to obtain and renew in South Africa because of both rigid regulations and pervasive corruption. But without them, it is impossible to register a business, use national healthcare, send children to a state school, or send remittances through regular bank transfers. One participant explained the tough impact this had on his life: “Back at home, you are not worried about any possible police raid or forced repatriation. For instance, my wife is living here but without paper; I have a child and [is] still undocumented; this is a huge psychological burden for me.”

While some people might regret the entire decision to migrate, others might regret just part of the process. In addition, some participants who seemed to express regret quite vocally remained in the destination country, while others decided to return even if there was apparently no major problem in their life. And this happens because, even when participants feel and express regret, they might just not have the means and/or the opportunity to act upon it. For instance, some participants in our study mentioned their desire to go back to Ethiopia. Yet some of them were holding back while waiting for a family member to reach South Africa, while others wanted to achieve a specific goal before returning (i.e., saving a certain sum). Mostly, however, they were hesitant to leave South Africa as they knew they would not be permitted to re-enter, unless they crossed the border irregularly once again.

  • Risk of weaponisation. In a world where migration is treated like a top political issue and migrants are described as a threat to citizens and national resources, a delicate topic such as regret is at high risk of being weaponised by those sections of society that are hostile to migration. Politicians and members of the public who openly oppose migration could co-opt notions of regret as a means to accuse migrants of being ungrateful for the opportunities they found in the country of destination. But also, politicians and policy-makers might champion agendas that look caring on the surface while hiding a wider anti-immigration sentiment, such as development funds to countries of origin and transit that are conditional on migration prevention. This ‘liberal’ approach might appeal to many as it does not look openly hostile, but rather adopts the narrative of protecting migrants from the risk of regret.

So, what are the implications of these findings?

Exploring regret can help demystifying mainstream narratives about migration and success. Specifically, it can shed light on the fact that migration alone does not bring success, but rather success stems from structural conditions such as the job market, migration policies, and social cohesion between migrants and natives, to name a few. Shifting the focus from the individual to the structure could first and foremost make regret less of a taboo, thus hopefully alleviating the constraints that migrants feel in their conversations with family and friends.

There is an urgent need for a different narrative on migration, showing migrants under a nuanced light, highlighting their contributions to host societies, but also reckoning with the structural obstacles they face in their search for a better life. Ethiopian spaza shops in South African cities provide a valuable commercial service to the local population: they are located where there are no other minimarkets, such as in townships, stay open beyond usual shop working hours, and sell products at affordable prices. Yet these shops overwhelmingly operate in the informal sector, exposing shopkeepers to precarity and risks to their own safety, but also depriving the government of South Africa of potential revenues from registered businesses. As was the case for Aida, the most common regret amongst our participants stemmed from the clash between pre-departure expectations and reality at destination.

In this research regret did not emerge only as an emotional response to lived experiences, but also as the by-product of structural political and economic dynamics that place migrants in extremely hazardous positions. Direct control measures on migration have become more and more stringent over the last decades, and while this has not stopped migration, it has pushed migrants towards more dangerous and deadly routes. This context may lead to feelings of regret amongst migrants, although not necessarily about the decision to migrate itself as much as about the conditions under which they were forced to migrate. Relaxing the criteria to obtain regular residency status, while ensuring the prompt renewal of expiring permits, would ensure safer journeys, lower reliance on criminal networks, increased material and mental wellbeing of migrants, and better socio-economic integration.

Finally, policies fostering effective integration can weaken misguided hostile rhetoric against migrants and reduce concerns on the side of the local population. And while doing this, it is essential to keep in mind that integration goes both ways, and that its success depends far more on the opportunities generated by policies, structures, and institutions than on individuals’ keenness.

It would be naïve to think that simply avoiding a conversation on regret can protect migrants. As such, we call on scholars and practitioners to analyse regret within migration decision-making ethically, preventing its hijacking for political gains, to improve policies and migrants and host communities’ lives.

* This work is one of the outputs of the Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ) Hub, which is funded by the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) [Grant Reference: ES/S007415/1]. Additional funding has been provided by Irish Aid. More information at www.mideq.org

* The author wishes to thank the members of the MIDEQ South Africa team for conducting the interviews on which this piece is based.

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Posted in Migration Research

Feminist Migration Futures? Reflections on a Feminist Migration Policy

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Toni Cela (Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development (INURED) and University of Miami); Anita Ghimire (Nepal Institute for Social and Environmental Research (NISER);  Meena Poudel (Independent researcher); Sarah Scuzzarello (SCMR, University of Sussex); Mary Setrana (University of Ghana); Marcia Vera Espinoza (Institute for Global Health and Development at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh); Franzisca Zanker (Arnold-Bergstraesser Institute at the University of Freiburg) 

Migratory movements occur in the context of hegemonic postcolonial power relations. These situated relations in turn, adversely affect the overall treatment of migrants on the move. The intersectional migrant experience based on racial, class, gender, sexual, and religious oppressions further compounds the hegemonic power structures. Feminist migration scholars, among others, have long discussed how to best understand and mitigate the effects of these intersections on the lives of migrants. With the newly emerging debates and practices out of the field of feminist foreign policy, we decided to hold a roundtable discussion at the 21st IMISCOE Annual Conference in Lisbon – in a hybrid manner – to consider what a feminist migration policy might look like and whether it is even feasible. This blog summarises our conversations and presents some of the key contributions of global feminist migration research. Drawing on our discussion as well as our own research and political practices, we make a case in favour of transforming migration research and policy through better listening, advocating, and research design. 

A strong foundation for gender in migration research 

In recent decades, gender-specific migration research has gained momentum. Through this research, feminist academic practice has made the many women who migrate in contexts like South Asia, West Africa, and Latin America more visible. This scholarship has developed our understanding of migrants’ situated intersectionality across locations and social contexts. It has also made clear the influences of migration governance and migration categorisations on the lives and mobility of female migrants.  

The feminisation of migration is based on family strategies of economic survival, suggesting complex and collective decision-making processes that take place across time. Power and marginalisation shift depending on the geographical, social, and temporal location in which migrating populations live. This can range more generally from a lack of access to sexual and reproductive health for displaced women, to the effects of gender blind policy implementation for long-term integration. Feminist research has pushed the boundaries of our understanding in debates on smuggling and trafficking, conversations on indentured sex work and  migration and dialogues on the gendered nature of migration governance. Research has uncovered how gendered caretaking responsibilities exacerbate female immobility, as well how states can impose normative practices of motherhood onto migrant mothers. Others have considered what transnational mothering from abroad can look like. To some extent, migration has empowered women and enabled them to renegotiate gendered power structures back home. Yet, these structures have not gone extinct; on the contrary, they persist. The structural realities both at home and in migrant’s host countries reinforce certain types of gender dependency and subject individuals to gender-based forms of prey/oppression.  

A major contribution to the migration literature from feminist research has been the analysis of practices of resistance. We want to emphasise the work by Amarela Varela for example, who has explored what she calls the “sociology of migrant struggles”, or luchas migrantes. Varela analyses migrants’ collective actions that challenge both the State and society at large. While such struggles take different forms and enact diverse aims, they tend to develop a critique of racism and xenophobia while contesting border regimes and redefining the normative frameworks of social recognition. Resistance work is often collective and strongly informed by feminist approaches. 

Gaps of course exist. Global South based and focused research is still not clearly visible in the literature. Similarly, research on masculinities has a long way to go. An equally important gap in research concerns LGBTQ+ migrants and refugees and the analysis of how border regimes and social boundaries reproduce hetero- and cisnormative power structures is burgeoning. Beyond the research field, heteronormative, cisnormative, racialised, class-based, and post-colonial power structures continue to shape migration governance and the experience of migration. In research and policymaking, gender (if included at all) is a variable instead of an analytical tool. More research needs to be undertaken to change this, but what can we change beyond that? 

Feminist Futures – possibilities and tensions 

Migration policy is at best about regulation and at worst about control. Embedded into the neoliberal capitalist world order that dictates who can move and when, migration and its regulating policies are founded on racialised and postcolonial ideals. An intersectional feminist migration policy has the potential to challenge this. It would shed light on the complex intersecting systems and structures of power that shape mobility opportunities. As such, an intersectional feminist migration policy would be not only transformative, but we believe, it would also encourage a new framing of migration. Its focus would be on human security which would not be pitched against receiving states’ national security, and a key focus would be on the root causes of why people emigrate in the first place. Through a feminist-informed migration policy, mobility would become possible outside of a spectre of violence. Borders would no longer be violently enforced rather they would be enablers of movement and safe passage. Migration would become a choice instead of being imposed as one’s only chance for survival or a better life. Importantly, women who would like to migrate would be able to do so without the fear of stigmatisation and high protection risks. People on the move would be looked after, cared for, and ensured a safe passage rather than an ‘orderly’ one. The needs and desires of migrants would be the focus of a feminist migration praxis, and they would be seen as individuals rather than being defined by a particular legal status. 

Street Art in Santiago, Chile. Photo Cred. Marcia Vera Espinoza

There is, however, a tension between the ‘what it is’ and the ‘what could be’.  We are currently stuck at a crossroads between contemporary policies and feminist transformative principles. How can we transform migration, not just in terms of research, but also practice and policies? We argue we need to better listen, advocate and research. 

1.     We need to listen 

First, we need to make space for, listen actively to, and learn from the voices of refugees and migrants. They need to inform – and be part of – research, policy, and governance infrastructure. Their experiences should be the central force guiding our understanding of migration. Second, we need to become better at listening to those who fear migration and refugees. Listening to see what their fears are actually about (e.g. access to healthcare, school, food, and livelihoods) so that we can foster constructive conversations where possible.

Nepali women who are wives of migrants reflecting the migration of their spouse through paintings. Photo Cred. Anita Ghimire

2.     We need to advocate 

According to Amina Mama, feminist theory is “most relevant when it is rooted in activism.” We need to advocate from a space of “inclusive resistance”, from a collective feminist approach. We advocate for migration policies that aim for transformation rather than a slight improvement to our heteropatriarchal status quo. A starting point for this is calling for a different narrative, one that does not see migration as a problem. To achieve this, we need to advocate for changes to our news outlets to become complicit in creating an atmosphere of solidarity. We additionally advocate for an acceptance that mobility is a fact in human history and part of global change. We need to acknowledge that contemporary migration governance and policies are developed with the socioeconomic interest of the Global North in mind. We need to identify and network our feminist allies in government bureaucracies, agencies and amongst policy-makers. Whilst there is no consensus on whether we seek a borderless world, we are in consensus on the topic of human rights-based pathways for regular migration. We imagine a world where there are consistent and equitable processes for regularization for undocumented migrants (e.g. permanent residence, affordable citizenship pathways, and meaningful participation in civic and political life). We need to advocate for a future where productive and reproductive labour are recognised as equally important. With this, we ultimately envision a feminist-informed version of labour rights that are fundamental to international labour standards, protection, and development. 

3.     And yes, we need to research (better) 

Methodologically speaking, in particular, quantitative survey data still suffers from an androcentric bias – both in terms of variables chosen and how we interpret quantitative findings (i.e. recognizing the gendered structures shaping male and female migrants’ lives rather than attributing outcomes to individual choice).  

A larger question is, however, how we research and produce knowledge: we need to carry out slow research, beyond funders’ restrictions. That is to say, we need to conduct research based on collective action with a careful consideration of the varying privileges that cut across research collectives. There are examples of research collectives based on feminist research principles, including the Narrativas de Fronteras (Border Narratives) a Latin American collective that aims to exercise epistemological self-care while, at the same time, practising ‘sentipensante’ (sensing/thinking) activism, or the group CAMINAR – comparative analysis on migration and displacement in the Americas, who came together during the pandemic. The latter has been trying to work outside, although still rooted within, the boundaries of neoliberal academia conducting research with no funding and publishing in multiple languages. Another small international pilot research project brought together researchers to discuss and draw out how migrant communities in the Global South, namely in Mexico, Nepal, Qatar, and Zimbabwe, were affected by, and reacted to the pandemic.  

Such multi stakeholder collaborations within the Global South have to be strengthened, and their work promoted, in order to create contextual knowledge on the various dimensions of migration such as transformative gender approaches, feminist research methodology relevant to migration research and inform transformative policymaking.   

Posted in Migration Research

Solidarity in Europe two years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine

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Dr Rob Sharp, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex

It has now been well over two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As of February 2024, nearly 6.4 million Ukrainian refugees had been recorded globally. As the war has progressed, the European Union’s support for displaced Ukrainians has generated significant public debate, not least due to the conflict’s heightened and prolonged demands on member states’ public infrastructure and associated economic cost, necessarily of concern and interest to the public. This concern comes after a widespread outpouring of support from private individuals, companies and non-governmental organisations.

If we take solidarity to comprise a negotiation between two individuals around shared values, with clear emotional, legal and sociocultural dimensions, then the question of solidarity fatigue in relation to those responding to the war – those in institutions and private individuals offering help with accommodation, integration, language, or financial help – has generated significant press and academic interest. The European Commission’s Ukraine adviser Lodewijk Asscher has suggested its major cause is economic slowdown relating to cost-of-living crisis. One might expect solidarity fatigue to particularly hit Germany and Poland most prominently, given that these two countries have hosted the largest number of Ukrainian refugees since the invasion, around a million in each country respectively, according to some reports.

As a Media and Cultural Studies researcher, I am particularly interested in the discursive and communicative justificatory strategies used when expressions of fatigue are articulated by those at the heart of offering solidarity – small NGOs, self-organised community organisers and employees of cultural institutions. I completed 45 interviews in January through April 2024 with such individuals in Berlin and Warsaw, many of whom were displaced Ukrainians, as part of an ongoing project funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust in order to understand such questions of solidarity further, not least in an effort to critically interrogate successful attempts at maintaining solidarity long-term in respect to such crises.

In May 2024 I organised workshops in Ukrainian run by the Ukrainian artists Dasha Podoltseva and Elena Orap at the centre for urbanism ZK/U in Mitte, Berlin and in Collegium Civitas in central Warsaw. Up to 15 displaced Ukrainian women based in each city attended in each workshop, where a series of object, photographic and map-elicitation activities were used – with strong ethical consideration – to explore specifically the question of recognition or its opposite – not just solidarity, but also legal-rights-based and affective alternatives. Participants explored where, for instance, in each city they felt recognised or otherwise – showing much more of an affinity to Warsaw’s identity as a reconstructed city, as opposed to the post-Soviet architecture of East Berlin. Clearly memories of the city’s railway stations are still raw and being rearticulated in different ways.

Workshop activity, Photo by Dasha Podoltseva/Elena Orap

Via these different methodologies, and as I proceed with writing up my analysis, there have been numerous complex articulations around solidarity fatigue – as the cultural and political climate has shifted, as rights have evolved in both jurisdictions, and as complex affective and emotional responses between people have needed to be renegotiated over time as the full-scale invasion wears on.

In Berlin, multiple interviewees referred in general terms to the changing media and political climate as attitudes towards the crisis have evolved. As you might expect, many NGO employees highlighted a shift from a short-term emergency response targeting health and accommodation to longer-term questions of integration and socioeconomic inclusion, alongside rearticulating a changed understanding of the duration of the war, which was originally widely believed to be temporary but is now perceived by many interviewees to be indefinite. The original positive reception of Ukrainians by institutional media has changed to something more ambivalent. Such media discourses are often used as a justificatory articulation of solidarity fatigue.

In Berlin, it was clear that caveats have been introduced among some independent citizens over time in order to justify their withdrawal in some cases from providing solidarity. This is manifested through what might be called a kind of associative solidarity with particular caveats – whereby solidarity is extended to members of a particular groups but not to others – that reproduce the boundaries around the German liberal nation-state (Straehle, 2020). It is also indicative of selective solidarity(Ortiz, 2022), whereby pre-existing values within a population may be used to justify providing support to some groups but refusing others (Steinhilper et al, in press; Lawlor and Tolley, 2017) – with some racial dimensions, including towards those arriving via the ongoing migration crisis at the Polish-Belarusian border.

In Poland, these discursive changes were more overtly politicised. These partly reflect the populist mediated discourses of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) government which lost power in Poland in October 2023, shortly before data gathering for this paper took place. It also reflected changing media narratives over time in Poland resulting from the war’s domestic effects; most notably, the Polish farmers’ protests in 2024 against the European Green Deal and the import of grain from Ukraine.

The NGO Migration Consortium, in a 2023 report on the aftermath of the full-scale invasion produced with colleagues from the University of Warsaw, spoke of burnout being especially pronounced among Ukrainians now embedded within NGOs in Poland. “Refugees from Refugees from Ukraine proved to be extremely committed workers,” reads the report. “They claimed that work was a way for them to participate in the war – a field where they could make themselves useful. This very personal, strong motivation was admirable, but at the same time it fostered overworking and job burnout.”

As well as being written up for its own ends, my research is also feeding partly into a series of AHRC-funded workshops with cultural institutions across the UK, hosted at a national institution in Manchester and London in June 2024, with representatives, in an attempt to produce guidance or at least share best practices in sustaining ethical participatory best practices with refugees long-term, from an initial perspective of minimizing misrecognition. While this and the aforementioned data is complex, given its quantity and its skeins of competing dimensions, I am looking forward to sharing and discussing this work in greater detail with colleagues in the coming months. If anyone is interested in discussing individually please do get in touch.

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Posted in Migration Research

Bridging Research and Reality: A Glimpse into the Summer of Research Event on Gender, Sexuality, and Migration

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Sarah Scuzzarello (SCMR, Geography); Nuno Ferreira (SCMR, Law); and Moira Dustin (SCMR, Law)

In academia, the rollercoaster of research (and other) administration often takes precedence over considerations about dialogue between researchers, participants and stakeholders and conversations with colleagues across disciplines. We were asked by the University of Sussex to host a hybrid event for the 2024 Summer of Research, and we decided to take the opportunity to organise an event that showcased groundbreaking research done at the University in the fields of gender, sexuality and migration. We also took the opportunity to facilitate a platform for dialogue about the importance, the difficulties, and the challenges of participatory methods in understanding these complex social, political and legal issues. This event, which took place on June 13th, 2024, was a confluence of minds – academics, local stakeholders, postgraduate students and researchers, and other interested participants – all gathered to engage in a dialogue that transcends traditional research boundaries.

Flyer from the Summer of Research

The event commenced with opening remarks from David Ruebain, Pro Vice Chancellor of Culture, Equality, and Inclusion at the University of Sussex. His words set the tone for the day – one of inclusivity, engagement, and a shared commitment to enriching the academic discourse with diverse perspectives.

The first roundtable was a dialogue between fields of research that often intersect yet remain distinct. The discussion revolved around three focal points: conceptual (gender, sexual orientation, trans* identities), empirical (asylum seekers and “voluntary” migrants), and institutional (migration governance and social work). The speakers, including Moira Dustin (LPS), Nuno Ferreira (LPS), Sarah Scuzzarello (GS), Rachel Larkin (ESW), and Leila Zadeh (Rainbow Migration), delved into the blurred boundaries of migrant categories, the application of intersectional analysis, and the significance of social spaces in shaping the experiences of research participants. Importantly, speakers emphasised the need for knowledge co-production in the field to move away from “extractivist” approaches in research, while also being mindful of what “participatory research” means and its limitations. There was a clear agreement that we ought to be clear about who should be involved in co-producing knowledge – charities or research participants – and that different types of knowledge are “co-produced” depending on how collaboration is structured. Equally important is the recognition of the potential goal- and timing misalignment between academia, third sector, and funding bodies that can make knowledge co-production difficult. Those involved in a project will have different roles and capabilities, and we need to acknowledge the existence of diverse priorities and of different rhythms in our respective institutions, be those higher education, research institutes, or charitable organizations. An open dialogue and a call to identify the most appropriate stages in a research project to involve other non-academic actors seems one possible pathway towards meaningful knowledge co-production.

Lunch: A Feast for Thought and Collaboration The lunch was more than just a culinary break, offered by local caterer Jessie Kwong at Vegan Peace Food. It was a feast of thought and collaboration. As attendees mingled and exchanged ideas, they were offered a preview of Mehran Rezaei Toroghi’s new documentary film with queer Iranian refugees and migrants living in Turkey, the UK, and Canada (part of the NQIfFM – Negotiating Queer Identities following Forced Migration project), and a small selection of the collages  that were part of the Queer(ing) Home and Belonging exhibition, illustrating the use of participatory visual methods in the speakers’ respective research projects.

Thumbnail from the documentary The Other Place

During the second roundtable we looked at participatory research methods, focussing on the value and challenges of participatory research in gender and LGBTQI+ migration studies. This session brought together academics and research participants to discuss the benefits of participatory and arts-based methods. The conversation, with Manjot Kaur Dhaliwal (LPS), Mehran Rezaei-Toroghi (LPS), Magadaline Moyo (Right to Remain campaign organiser), Pierre Monnerville (photographer), and Oner Ozdamar (Head of Department, secondary school), highlighted the need for a shift in research approaches to make them more meaningful to participants and stakeholders. The academic panellists talked about the benefits of art-based methods as a “way in” to build trust and establish a more open channel of communication between researchers and the research participants. The process is messy however, and requires a high degree of flexibility that the rigid parameters of academia do not always account for. On the side of the participants, they all emphasised that taking part in the research project had both a public and a personal function. Publicly, they were driven by a desire to seek change in how migrants are perceived in the UK and how asylum seekers, and especially those seeking protection on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, are “stripped of their dignity by the Home Office”, as one participant said. To make their experiences visible and public, participants hoped to help others who are emigrating in navigating similar challenges to the ones they once faced. On a personal level, they talked about the importance of finding a respectful space where they could be themselves and reflect on their journey on their own terms – something they seldom have had the time to do.

A Step Towards Meaningful Research

The hybrid event at the University of Sussex was a testament to the evolving landscape of academic research. It underscored the necessity of bridging the gap between theoretical research and the lived experiences of individuals. By incorporating participatory visual methods, the event not only enriched the academic dialogue but also paved the way for more inclusive and impactful research practices.

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New migration research in Pakistan

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A collaborative blogpost by Dr Ayub Jan and Professor Shahida Aman of the University of Peshawar, Pakistan, with Dr Ceri Oeppen, Dr Tahir Zaman and Professor Michael Collyer of SCMR.

One of the largest protracted displacement populations in the world; significant internal and international labour migration; historic displacement from partition; forced migration due to floods and other climate-related hazards…  These are just some of the reasons why Pakistan is such an important location for migration research.    

SCMR co-directors Ceri Oeppen and Tahir Zaman, and SCMR member Mike Collyer, recently returned from a visit to Pakistan where they spent time with PDE Project co-investigators at the University of Peshawar, the oldest university in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (north-west Pakistan).  Their visit included an international conference, Displacement Crises in Pakistan, and the launch of the newly established ‘Migration Research Cell’.  Based in the Department of Political Science, the Migration Research Cell is a stepping stone to a full Migration Research Centre at the University of Peshawar.

L-R: PhD researcher Waseem Murad, Dr Ayub Jan, Dr Tahir Zaman, Prof. Abdul Rauf, Prof. Mike Collyer, Dr Ceri Oeppen, and Prof. Shahida Aman, PhD researcher Hafeez Ullah, after the Protracted Displacement in Pakistan conference, held at the University of Peshawar, 8th of May 2024.

The SCMR team spoke to Dr Ayub Jan, Director of the Migration Research Cell, about the importance of migration studies in Pakistan, and his and Professor Shahida Aman’s (Chairperson of the Department of Political Science’s) plans for future migration research.

Thanks so much for hosting our visit to Pakistan, it’s so exciting to see all the migration studies activities you’re working on!  Why do you think it’s important to research migration in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa?

We at the Department of Political Science have created a Migration Research Cell, which is the first of its kind in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The reason why we feel it is important to research migration in the province is that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is home to more than four million registered and unregistered Afghan refugees. The issue of displacement is a protracted one as Pakistan generally and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa specifically has been home to Afghan refugees for four decades and more. More than 70 % of the Afghan refugees in Pakistan live in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. These protracted refugee crises have led to the growth of ‘Protracted Displacement Communities,’ where the hosts and refugees are now intertwined in economic and socio-cultural links of mutual support and friendships. This is besides the millions of internally displaced people who have also suffered forced displacements because of the war and conflict in the borderland and the climatic disasters that have struck the province quite severely in the last few years. We feel that such aspects of protracted displacement crises are quite under-researched and therefore need to be academically and rigorously investigated.

How will your migration research work feed into your teaching in the Department of Political Science?

We have been thinking of incorporating migration- related courses since the start of our migration research projects. Recently, we succeeded in getting approval from the Board of Studies in Political Science at the University of Peshawar to start teaching a mandatory course on Migration Studies at the undergraduate level. We have also included five new specialized courses on Migration at the MPhil and PhD. level, mostly drawing from our diverse research work undertaken over the last three years, much of it with our SCMR colleagues. The draft has already been shared with the University’s relevant academic bodies for approval. The Fall 2024 session will open with these new courses taught at the BS and MPhil/ PhD., levels.

What do you think are the key issues for migration researchers in Pakistan?  

The key issues for migration researchers are manifold:

  • Conflict areas are difficult to access, especially the borderland areas where the security situation is still precarious.
  • There is a plethora of government organizations, whose NOC (No Objection Certificate) are a must for carrying out research in conflict and camp settings and among refugees. So, this entails going through several official channels and planning beforehand.
  • It can be a challenge to gain the trust of the refugee and displaced communities for conducting interviews among them. For this, it is important to first gain the trust of the intermediaries, especially the local leaders called maliks, shura members or masharan (elders).
  • Cultural sensitivities around women mean that only men can collect data from men and women can collect data from women. Also, accessing women and allowing them to express themselves freely often become challenging because of their restricted mobility and patriarchal norms regulating the lives of women migrants.
  • Another issue is the availability of statistical data related to refugees living in Pakistan. Particularly, Afghans who live as registered and unregistered refugees in diverse settings of camps and cities. In bigger camps such as the Pannia camp in Haripur, despite being closely regulated, multiple data are produced by authorities, community mobilizers, and community leaders (maliks) about the number of households and individuals living in the camp. This creates a problem of selecting samples for researchers.

What are your plans for the Migration Research Cell at the University of Peshawar?  

We are planning to turn the Migration Research Cell into a full-fledged Migration Research Centre with the capacity to enrol students in different programmes at the Undergraduate, MPhil and PhD., levels and give specialized degrees in Migration Studies. We also plan to link the Migration Research Cell with migration centres around the world including the Sussex Centre for Migration Research. We hope to undertake various further collaborative academic exercises under a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the University of Sussex. This includes the exchange of faculty and students as well as academic collaboration through joint research projects, organizing conferences and summer schools, and developing courses on migration studies. 

Epilogue

SCMR Co-Directors are currently working with Dr Jan and Professor Aman to propose a Memorandum of Understanding between the University of Sussex and the University of Peshawar to facilitate future collaborative research and teaching – Watch This Space!

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Migration Research and ‘The Other’ Europe

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Florian Bieber (University of Graz, Austria), Kathy Burrell (University of Liverpool UK) and Ruxandra Trandafoiu (Edge Hill University, UK)

Migration scholars should pay greater attention to migration research that focuses on Eastern Europe as a site of diverse but also singular migration-related phenomena.

While East-West mobility is well represented in migration scholarship, especially in the UK, where it has seeped into relevant research on Brexit and populism, many other migration-related phenomena taking place in Eastern Europe, have largely been ignored. This diverse region, which has incurred mass labour emigration and significant war induced population displacement, has to become a key site for researching other aspects of migration, such as potentially challenging post-COVID and post-Brexit migration return, divergent diaspora policies especially in relation to homeland political engagement, contradictory refugee discourses and initiatives, new dynamics between national minorities and immigrant groups, and a significant demographic shift from emigration to immigration. Eastern Europe lends itself to comparative regional perspectives, which can reveal diverse nuances and rich experiences, thus negating any attempt to treat Eastern Europe as a homogeneous area, which occasionally, can be a strong temptation. As migration, in its various incarnations, begins to spoil any claims of racial and religious homogeneity in Eastern Europe and jeopardizes those long-entrenched dreams of national uniqueness, comparative and multi-sited research can better capture the dynamism and unique historical and social moment Eastern Europe is going through. In the remainder of the article, we detail where, in our view, the rich research potential of the region lies.

Eastern European societies are transitioning from emigrant to immigrant societies. This pivotal moment remains largely ignored by researchers and politicians. Governments are either blindsided by the long-term economic and social problems caused by mass emigration (labour gaps, child abandonment and depopulation, among others) or fall too easily into populist temptations to use war refugees as pawns in a game of power grabbing. Hence, despite similar traumatic shifts experienced by Italy, Spain or Greece, which can offer a glimpse into the future, this key impending change at the level of collective psychology is ignored, while the needs of the new immigrants and refugees in Eastern Europe, are left undealt with. In the academic world, conferences and papers on this subject are beginning to emerge, but much of this terrain remains unexplored.

While immigration to the region is by no means a new phenomenon, once we accept that the post-socialist period has brought new migrant groups into Eastern Europe, the question emerges: when do migrant groups become a minority? What rights can they claim vis-à-vis ‘historical’ minorities? Many Eastern European countries have spent a lot of time and resources over the past few decades dealing with minority rights issues, from border mobility and citizenship rights for co-nationals residing in neighbouring countries, to placating the vociferous claims of national minorities left traumatised by border changes. And yet there is little vision for the Chinese migrants who moved to Hungary in the 1990s, or the Vietnamese communities settled in Czechia and Slovakia. If the ‘ethnic problem’ wasn’t complicated enough in Eastern Europe, the new layers of communities emerging after the fall of communism, from transnational diasporic ones to new immigrants, who inhabit multiple spaces simultaneously, are not just symbolically stretching Eastern Europe beyond its geographic location but is playing havoc with the already illusive aspiration for a neat overlap between state and nation. So, the questions that naturally follow are: is it possible to join the majority nation in Eastern European countries? Is it conceivable and practical to rethink the nation as a multicultural or, indeed, transnational one?

Discursively, the stretching of traditional concepts (like kin state or kin minority) and the layering of communities translate into a parallel: on the one hand migration-related phenomena are pathologized, on the other hand, migration and multicultural encounters are accepted as an everyday occurrence managed through lived experience. The pathological aspect derives from overwhelming fears of national extinction which continue to permeate Eastern European public discourses. Past and present colonial encounters and legacies, such as the perceived Islamic threat to majority Christian cultures, and the legacy of both distant and more recent wars, mean that national annihilation anxieties are counteracted through the allure of monosited lives, the positive framing of immobility and the clinging on to traditional notions of nationhood and belonging. A hierarchy of treatment that states apply to different groups is emerging in Eastern Europe. To what extent this will contribute to a racialization of Eastern Europe, this time from inside the region itself and no longer imposed by the Western gaze, is an interesting matter, worth pursuing through research.

The seesaw of EU accession currently shaping Western Balkan politics but also one day (hopefully soon) post-war Ukraine and Moldova, adds another ingredient to the Eastern European political cake. Its shapeshifting layers should continue to add to the reservoir of political phenomena worthy of investigation. In research, we are as guilty as those journalists who always look for the hottest spot, the breaking news, unable to recognize slower burning developments elsewhere. As the EU remains preoccupied by the war in Ukraine and securitizing its external borders, EU accession for several countries in Eastern Europe has seemed to have slowed down, with possibly significant consequences.

Elsewhere, while the focus shifts from people fleeing Ukraine to people fleeing Russia, will the new humanitarian crises redefine who is a refugee and who isn’t, and will they add to concerns about mobility becoming immobility, trapping refugees indeterminately? These migration crises are political crises, and they bring, to some extent, Western and Eastern Europe closer together. And yet this happens at the cost of targeted and racialized exclusion, of withholding human rights and reframing citizenship as special entitlement. This is where, once again, comparative research, which considers Eastern Europe to be a site of valuable emerging policies and new ways of thinking about war induced displacement and refugee rights, will test its value.

Migration has impacted almost every aspect of social life in Eastern Europe over the last three decades, highlighting the need for concerted social support policies and a reconsideration of the impact of skills and labour supply in economic growth. We need to see migration as an economic issue. As remittances dwindle in crisis hit Europe, how will migrant return be encouraged to maximize specialist skills and reinvestment? Will importing foreign, currently Asian labour, be a viable long-term option? How will racial diversity be accommodated by overwhelmingly white, often ethnically homogenous societies? How will the wellbeing of new migrants be ensured when nationalism, religious conservatism and populism have been defining characteristics of many countries in the region? The key link between economic policy and migration outcomes is the occasional blind spot of migration research, and we advocate for a renewed focus on seeing practices of mobility and settlement in an economic development context.

More historical work needs to take place too, to capture the diversity of Eastern Europe’s historical experiences and the huge range of postcolonial phenomena at play. This would help uncover Eastern Europe as a region where ethnic, racial and religious diversity is probably more pronounced than that currently recognized and accepted. Lip service historians and politicians have perpetuated for far too long the myth of cultural homogeneity in Eastern Europe and rejecting it might help regroup academic research to face current realities and future challenges.

Ultimately, what emerging research interests but also absences in research do, is to highlight how important Eastern Europe is to the migration and diaspora academic field, how much richness the region can yield in terms of theories, methodologies and practices and how unfair lingering disparities between our attention to migration in Eastern versus Western Europe is. This richness, this multiplicity, also highlights how problematic the Eastern Europe label is. Although we have used it ourselves to conveniently situate our claim for relevance and visibility in the political geography of the region, we also accept that instrumentalizing the term feeds into Europe’s colonial imaginary and its inescapably unethical hierarchies. Maybe this issue too, could inspire a new debate over what we mean by ‘Eastern’ Europe.

The points raised in this article were first crafted during a webinar, hosted by the Institute for Creative Enterprise at Edge Hill University.

Florian Bieber is a Professor of Southeast European History and Politics and Director of the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. He held a Jean Monnet Chair in the Europeanisation of Southeastern Europe from 2019 to 2023. He is the coordinator of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG) and has been providing policy advice to international organisations, foreign ministries, donors and private investors. He studied Political Science and History at Trinity College (USA), the University of Vienna, and Central European University (Budapest). He has worked for the European Centre for Minority Issues and taught at Kent University (UK). He is also a Visiting Professor at the Nationalism Studies Program at CEU. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the LSE and New York University and held the Luigi Einaudi Chair at Cornell University. Recent publications include Debating Nationalism (Bloomsbury 2020) and The Rise of Authoritarianism in the Western Balkans (Palgrave 2020) and Negotiating Unity and Diversity in the European Union (Palgrave 2021, with Roland Bieber). His forthcoming monograph is Hvar in the Modern Age. Identity and Change in Southeastern Europe, published by Bloomsbury in 2024.

Kathy Burrell is Professor of Migration Geographies at the University of Liverpool UK, with interests in migration governance, mobility, material culture and home, and is a specialist in Polish migration particularly. She is currently writing up work from three different projects – research on the UK’s ‘Homes for Ukraine’ hosting scheme, recently published in Antipode; British Academy funded research on UK Poles’ navigations of the post-Brexit Settled Status schemes; and an AHRC funded project ‘Stay Home Stories’, investigating the impact of Covid-19 on experiences of ‘home’ among people with diverse migration and faith backgrounds in the UK.

Ruxandra Trandafoiu is Professor of Politics, Communications and Diaspora at Edge Hill University, UK. She uses digital, ethnographic, and participatory research to study the way media and technology shape transnational lives and aid the political engagement and self-advocacy of diasporic/minority communities. She is the author of Diaspora Online: Identity Politics and Romanian Migrants (Berghahn) and The Politics of Migration and Diaspora in Eastern Europe: Media, Public Discourse and Policy (Routledge), as well as several edited collections and numerous articles exploring the relationship between media and mobility. Her forthcoming book Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen is published by Berghahn in July 2024.

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The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the individual authors and do not represent the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR).