The European Union and forced migration in the Mediterranean: Foreign policy, security, and refugee rent
Gerasimos Tsourapas is senior lecturer in Middle East politics at the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the politics of migrants, refugees, and diasporas in the broader Middle East. Tsourapas received his Ph.D. in political science from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2016. His thesis, which identified the importance of labor emigration in sustaining authoritarian power in Egypt, received the 2016 Best Dissertation Prize on Migration & Citizenship by the American Political Science Association.
At CES, Tsourapas will focus on the management of migration featured in the European Union’s diplomatic relations with Arab countries across the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean. In particular, he will explore the workings of refugee rentier states across the Middle East and North Africa, namely states seeking to leverage their position as host states of displaced communities for material gain. The project will also shed light on the repercussions of refugee rent-seeking behavior for effective cooperation on migration governance across the Mediterranean.
His first book is entitled The Politics of Migration in Modern Egypt: Strategies for Regime Survival in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Tsourapas currently sits on the Executive Committee of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies Section of the International Studies Association. He is also a founding member of the British International Studies Association (BISA) working group titled “International Politics of Migration, Refugees, and Diasporas.” Tsourapas has published in leading academic journals, including International Studies Quarterly, International Political Science Review, Third World Quarterly, and the Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies.
This information is accurate for the time period that the visiting scholar is affiliated with CES.
The European Union and forced migration in the Mediterranean: Foreign policy, security, and refugee rent
Political Science
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