Migration Governance and Diplomacy

Professor Fiona B. Adamson leads the SOAS team of the ‘Migration Governance and Asylum Crises (MAGYC)’ project, funded by a 5-year European Union 2020 grant.

MAGYC is a consortium of 12 institutions investigating how migration governance has been influenced by “refugee crises” and how crises at large shape policy responses on migration. At SOAS, the project team has been led by Prof. Adamson and includes Postdoctoral Fellow Veysi Dag and Project Coordinator Dr Catherine R. Craven. The SOAS team collected data on the migration and integration experiences of Kurdish asylum-seekers and refugees across seven countries in Europe, and has undertaken research on migration diplomacy, migration governance in Turkey and the relationship between migration governance and conflict dynamics.

Together with Professor Kelly M. Greenhill, Professor Adamson also leads the project ‘Diplomacy of Forced Migration’, initially funded through a 2-year British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant. Organised population transfers, expulsions and exchanges have been a surprisingly common feature of international politics, but little is known about the state-level diplomacy that has accompanied such processes.

This project is developing a comprehensive dataset of incidents of organised forced migration, from 1900-present, and their relationship to bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. The first publication from the project is the article “Deal-making, diplomacy and transactional forced migration” which appeared in International Affairs in February 2023.