Project
About
Controlling, classifying and selecting mobile populations in the era of neoliberalism
In a world of massive inequalities between nations, and where citizenship at birth is the biggest determining factor of anyone's life chances, migration and international mobility are often seen as dramatic mechanisms of change. Yet strict borders and hierarchies between nations persist.
The European Research Council funded MIGMOBS project investigates how and why global inequalities are reproduced through the shifting classification of mobile populations. Building a database with studies across 22 sending and receiving countries, it charts how nations have preserved power through the era of neoliberalism by selectively opening and closing channels of mobility: making immigration and asylum the obsessive target of sovereign control, while rendering invisible and fluid the mass mobilities of tourism, students, business and commuter travel.
Objectives
The objectives of the MIGMOBS ERC AdG project are:
- Explore how from 1970 to the present – across and between a range of states worldwide – the changing categorization of migration, mobilities or minorities, and the population flows and other connections they denote, relate to in- and between-country inequalities.
- Identify how and why these processes vary across world regions in terms of political economy and regional integration in the context of growing economic, electoral, ecological and geo-political crises.
- Investigate how marginal and disadvantaged populations to and from particular European, African, Asian and South American states experience, narrate and resist global inequality, as they struggle within and against the categories, statuses and borders imposed upon them.
- Develop a new paradigm in the study of “political demography” that charts the origins and trajectory of a post-neoliberal “viral liberalism”, moving into a new phase of late capitalism.
Sub-Projects
Sub-Projects of the MIGMOBS ERC AdG project
| Sub-Projects | Main Partners |
|---|---|
| A. Migration, Mobilities and Inequality in a Globalising World 1970-2020 [database] | European University Institute |
| B1. Migration and Mobilities in East Asia: the Chinese in Japan and Korea | University College Cork & Waseda University |
| B2. Syrian Organisations and Transnational Politics in the UK, Italy and Germany | University of Leeds |
| B3. Ukrainian Mobilities from Peripheral Workers to Humanitarian Emergency in Ireland, Italy and Germany | University College Cork |
| B4. Africa-Ireland Migration and Mobilities Systems | University College Cork |
| B5. Indonesian Women in Japan, Singapore and Qatar: Gendered Roles in Asian Migration Systems | Waseda University |
| B6-7. Solidarity and Mobilisation among Mobile Minorities in South America: Venezuelans and Bolivians in Chile and Argentina | University of Buenos Aires |
| C. New Worlds in Motion: A Treatise in Political Demography [book project] | All Partners |
More information about MIGMOBS available on the EU CORDIS website