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STREAMS OF ANALYSIS
Refugee Return, Agency, and the Gendered Border
How is national identity transferred in times of displacement and conflict? This stream examines how Syrian women navigate the impossible calculus of return migration — where gendered expectations, familial obligations, and cultural preservation collide with the realities of a homeland transformed beyond recognition. Their constrained agency reveals a fundamental tension at the heart of liberal democracies: the human rights frameworks designed to protect the most vulnerable are built on assumptions about freedom, choice, and autonomy that displacement systematically dismantles.
Governing the Corridor: Externalizing Compassion in EU's waiting rooms
What happens to citizenship when a state governs populations it refuses to recognize? Serbia functions as a laboratory for EU migration externalization — absorbing the contradictions of European governance while transit populations inhabit an administrative and existential void where legal categories fail and sovereign authority withdraws. This stream investigates how states bureaucratize the absence of status, producing systems that govern precisely by refusing to recognize — redefining the meaning of citizenship, the limits of state duty, and the mechanisms through which population control operates not through exclusion but through indefinite suspension.
Compassionate Abandonment
Can a democracy claim to uphold human rights while systematically failing those who need protection most? A new form of governmental rationality is emerging: one that rules not through presence but through structured withdrawal. When states retreat from their protection obligations in EU buffer zones, humanitarian organizations are compelled to fill the void, thereby paradoxically sustaining the very systems of exclusion they seek to ameliorate. This stream introduces the concept of compassionate abandonment to theorize how NGO service provision creates the illusion of a functioning protection system while political abandonment intensifies beneath it — trapping humanitarian actors between the ethical imperative to relieve suffering and the recognition that their relief enables the structural reproduction of that suffering.
Displacement as Political Currency
How does hosting four million refugees reshape a nation's democratic identity? This stream examines how transit countries have transformed displacement into a tool of domestic politics and international leverage — commodifying refugee populations in EU negotiations while the presence of millions of displaced people reconfigures electoral dynamics, national identity narratives, and the boundaries of belonging in those countries. What emerges is evidence that the treatment of those who arrive does not only define their fate — it fundamentally alters how receiving societies understand themselves, who they believe they are, and who they are willing to become.