The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre’s Post

My new article on the value of Moldovan transnational parcel-sending practices is available online, published by Economy and Sociology!

📢 Just published in PSRM: My first single-authored article examines the effects of the announcement of the European–Turkey statement on closing the Balkan route during the 2015/16 European refugee crisis. I test the announcement's immediate and enduring impact on German public sentiment, asylum attitudes, and policy preferences. The study reveals the significant, albeit temporary, influence of political communication on public opinion, enhancing our understanding of communication effects in real-world scenarios and introducing a methodologically sound approach for future research. Available in Open Access! #PoliticalScience #CommunicationEffects #RefugeeCrisis #PublicOpinion #OpenAccess

Southern European countries continue to inspire the EU's repressive migration control strategies, replacing the former 'teachers' of Central and Northern Europe. On 10 October 2024, in search of 'innovative solutions,' the interior ministries looked south, to the ‘return hubs’ that Italy has already established in Albania, although these seem unpromising in terms of effectiveness and respect for asylum rights. This development further confirms the 'Southernisation of migration models' proposed in the volume 'Migration Control Logics and Strategies in Europe: A North-South Comparison', edited by Claudia Finotelli and myself. https://lnkd.in/d-bFrp4d

"Migration and Domestic Space: Ethnographies of Home in the Making" For those of you in the migration/human mobility space, this #Free2DownloadAndRead book might be of interest. https://lnkd.in/eUk9jt7x

Why does migration research have little impact on policy? 🧐 Migration researchers, policy makers, advocates, do read this article published in the International Migration Review. We need to keep this conversation going. Let us know your thoughts!

I have always recommended using participatory Systems-based approaches to explore mental models of communities under study. One o the approaches wehve used is #fuzzycognitivemapping that relies on #fuzzylogic, #neuralnetworks, and #networkgraphs. In this manuscript, co-athored with Rana Dajani published in Frontiers of Sociology, we examine the mental models of Syrian refugee women and Jordanian women and what empowerment means to them. While I highly recommend reading this paper, we have also developed this one-minute video for a quick comprehension of what #fuzzycognitivemapping is and how we used it in this context of empowerment. I hope the video helps. I welcome questions and feedback on #fuzzycognitivemapping or network analysis, primarily how it responds to the growing importance of Systems Sciences. https://lnkd.in/e_pXQCpu https://lnkd.in/emxAYfgZ #socialecologicalsystems UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency Rana Dajani WEI ZHANG Ruth Meinzen-Dick International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Claudia Ringler M S Swaminathan Research Foundation

It gives me immense pleasure to share the news that our research work titled, "The Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Bangladesh: Assessing the Impact on Land Use Patterns and Land Surface Temperature Using Machine Learning" has been published online in the esteemed journal "Environmental Monitoring and Assessment" by Springer Nature which possesses an Impact Factor (IF) of 3.1 (Q2). The success of this work wouldn't have been possible without the continuous support of my teammates Faishal Ahmed, Ovi Ranjan Saha, and Afeefa Rahman ma'am. We have been working on this project since the middle of 2022 and came out with some interesting outcomes regarding the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh. We tried to assess the possibilities of a probable environmental crisis as a result of this humanitarian crisis. We drew a relationship between the change in land use patterns and the land surface temperature for the Teknaf and Ukhiya Upazilas after the Rohingya influx. We also tried to predict the future of this region using the Machine Learning algorithm called Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Hope that this research will contribute to the research community in the future. The full paper can be accessed through the link below. Happy Reading! #research #LULC #LST #ML #ANN

Sie Long Cheung, PhD, and I have just published our paper: « Navigating tomorrow’s horizons: exploring the interplay of environmental factors in mobility decision-making of migrants among migrants living in the Lowlands » in Environmental Sociology 🥳 https://lnkd.in/eUN4AUP8

Interesting article by Katharina Natter: Why does migration research have so little impact? (1) Policy makers often make selective and symbolic use of knowledge to legitimize their position as decision makers or to support their pre-existing policy preferences; (2) Institutional or individual self-preservation mechanisms determine how knowledge is used (or not) by policy makers; (3) Whether knowledge is used or not is influenced by how salient or politicized it is. As a result, policy makers often stick to migration policies and measures that are known not to work. For example: (a) Criminalization of migrant smuggling (while we know that the absence of regular migration routes creates the conditions in which smuggling can flourish); (b) Restriction of social services for migrants to reduce the alleged pull factors (while there is little evidence that the level of social services determine where migrants go to); (c) Development programmes to address the root causes of migration (while several studies show that development in low-income countries tends to increase rather than reduce emigration); (d) Visa requirements to reduce migration (despite the fact that such restrictions have been shown to often reduce circular movements and encourage people to settle rather than return). https://lnkd.in/e_SAjNKn

You are cordially invited to participate in the seminar 'Decentering and decolonizing migration research' featuring Dr. Beste İşleyen and Dr. Joris Schapendonk and moderated by Dr. Nora Stel. Please find a short introduction below. The seminar will be held on 4 June 2024 at 15:30-17:00 at EOS 01.110 and is organized as part of the ‘Revisiting Interdisciplinary Migration Studies’ seminar series created in the context of the NWO-Veni project ‘The Power of Inaction and Ambivalence in Transnational Refugee Governance,’ in collaboration with the Horizon-Europe GAPs project. We are looking forward to seeing you all there. PLEASE REGISTER HERE: https://lnkd.in/e-RPkhP9   As most other fields and disciplines in contemporary academia, migration studies has struggled with ambitions to decenter its knowledge production and decolonize its epistemologies. In a field engaging with borders, sovereignty, and mobility as central concepts much is at stake in these endeavors. Fundamental questions, however, remain to be broadly taken up: What could or should decolonizing migration studies mean? How to practically realize it? What can be done to ensure such efforts are not merely rhetorical or cosmetic? The aim of the seminar is to explicate and reflect on the political, institutional, and methodological dimensions of various approaches to decolonizing and decentering migration studies. Political scientist Beste Isleyen discusses the inspiration that migration scholars may draw from critical security studies and postcolonial theory when it comes to revisiting the study of borders and mobility. Human Geographer Joris Schapendonk reflects on the ways in which research infrastructures and methodological reflexivity might contribute to decentering our understanding of migration.