Migration Solidarity and Acts of Citizenship along the Balkan Route

Celine Cantat, Research Fellow at the Center for Policy Studies and Academic Program Manager at the OLIve-Open Learning Initiative, has been awarded a European Commission Marie-Curie Fellowship for research on refugee solidarity and acts of citizenship along the Balkan Route.

The Migration Solidarity and Acts of Citizenship along the Balkan Route (MigSol) is a two-year research project hosted by the Center for Policy Studies, exploring how refugees and refugee solidarity groups along the “Balkan route” relate to and enact European citizenship. The project of European citizenship is often presented as an unprecedented political development, yet it has institutionally been modelled upon and reproduces national conceptualizations of citizenship, rights and identity. MigSol will undertake a comparative analysis of discourses and practices of refugees and pro-refugee volunteers in both EU and non-EU sites, and of the way in which they challenge concepts and institutions of European citizenship derived from national models of membership. It will pay particular attention to the relationship between “movement” and the constitution of new European political subjectivities. The project runs from August 2017 - August 2019.