In 2018, the EU finds itself on the crossroads of migration management. On the one hand, there is an impression that the so-called refugee crisis is over, on the other hand, the dramatic images in the (social) media present a different reality. Although the local and national authorities have emphasized the need for a coordinated, centralized governance on supranational level, many Member States are unwilling to share the burden of asylum protection defined by the European Commission. The EU migration agenda is increasingly externalizing its responses to the growing migration flow and pushing the responsibilities of Member States outside of the Schengen borders.
The aim of this conference is two-fold; firstly, to critically reflect on different aspects of the ‘so-called refugee crisis’ in the last three years from an international, multidisciplinary perspective, secondly to share theoretical and empirical knowledge on different issues in migration process. What can we learn from the discrepancies between the policies and realities, on the one hand, and from the positive initiatives and best practices on the other hand?
The conference provides a forum to address the following (but not limited to) issues: public and private actors in managing migration flows, legal frameworks, criminalization of migration, human smuggling and/or human solidarity, the social consequences of refugee flows in the host societies in terms of labour exploitation, media representation, the role of social media to facilitate migration, gender and sexuality in migration trajectories, the tension between human rights and security, geopolitical challenges in the aftermath of EU-Turkey deal, policing.
Keynote speakers
Demetrios Papademetriou (Migration Policy Institute (MPI), Washington,USA);
Evthymios Papataxiarchis (University of the Aegean, Greece);
Peter R. Rodrigues (Institute of Immigration Law, Leiden University, Netherlands).