Research

Centre members working in this field explore the impact of climate change in (b)ordering and othering processes, including in relation to security, disaster management, “survival migration”, and other adaptation/prevention strategies, scrutinising the role of State and non-State actors and related systems of oppression and contestation.

This research stream evaluates the effects of borders on health and wellbeing, including the use of health systems and governance to enforce borders and exclude foreign/poor populations, while allowing engagement in “health tourism” and surrogacy. Research in this area highlights and assesses the new constraints imposed by global pandemics, including lockdowns, travel restrictions, or “vaccine passports”.

The increasing use of technology requires an appraisal of the risks and opportunities posed by AI, data harvesting, IT documentation, algorithm-controlled selections and similar means for the management of borders and transnational transactions. In this context, law is accorded “border-making” properties in areas including trade, media, and information, the effects of which this work stream investigates. 

This research stream scrutinises the effect of colonial legacies and empire on (b)ordering processes and their prolongation in persisting technologies of control and exclusion of the “other” within legal script, policy narratives, symbolic representations, and public discourse. This involves tracking the (re/de)colonial connotations of borders and their intersection with race / nationality / gender / class.

Illegalised border-crossing has been framed as a threat to public order, cultural cohesion, understandings of belonging/community and national security. This research stream explores the manner in which this takes place and identifies the causes and consequences for the legal and policy systems involved and the rights and realities of affected individuals. It evaluates the uses and abuses of the criminal justice system to enforce borders, the externalisation of controls, the privatisation of enforcement, together with the computerisation of surveillance and similar strategies.

Bilateral Labour Agreements as Migration Governance Instruments: A Gender Analysis of Structures and Outcomes is funded by the UK BEIS via British Academy’s ‘Humanities and Social Sciences Tackling Global Challenges 2020’ funding call. The central purpose of this project is to conduct an investigation of bilateral labour agreements (BLAs), applied to the context of migration corridors in Asia. In light of the feminisation of migration (brought to the fore during Covid-19 pandemic highlighting the fact that many ‘essential’ workers are migrant women) and BLAs being the key mode of facilitating ‘orderly’ labour migration, the aim is to determine to what extent these agreements alleviate or exacerbate gender inequality. This will be done by way of analysing the gendered intent, structures and outcomes of BLAs as tools for migration governance through a detailed study of Sri Lanka.

Professor Nicola Piper is the lead UK Investigator and Professor Kopalapillai Amirthalingam (University of Colombo and director of the Centre for Migration Research and Development) is leading in Sri Lanka. The research team is interdisciplinary and joined by Professor Wasantha Seneviratne, a legal scholar, and Dr Sunethra Perera, a demographer by training.

‘MAPS: Migration and Asylum Policy Systems’ (2019-22) is funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. The research project brings together ten partner universities across Europe to set up a Jean Monnet Network. The project establishes a focal point for research on migration and asylum systems within Europe. It brings together academic institutions, policymakers, and civil society organisations working with migrants and asylum seekers to develop teaching and e-learning activities on key elements of migration and asylum law, conduct comparative research, and explore differences in the asylum and migration laws and policies of several European states. The MAPS project focuses on the European region, looking at the experience of countries both within and bordering the European Union.

The Queen Mary team is coordinated by Professor Violeta Moreno-Lax, with Dr Niovi Vavoula acting as co-coordinator. The research team includes PhD and early career researchers in refugee and migration law: Dr Nicolette Busuttil, Malak Benslama, Marta Minetti, Maja Grundler, Andrew Pitt, Ayesha Riaz, Merna Nasralla, and Ellen Allde. Queen Mary’s contribution focuses on the law of the European Union and its response to contemporary challenges in the migration and asylum field. It assesses these challenges primarily in view of EU fundamental rights obligations and international human rights law to reflect on the impact of these systems on individual rights protection.

Mind the Gap: Exploring Interplay between Gender, Terrorism and Counterterrorism is funded by the British Academy as a 3-year Postdoctoral Fellowship held by PI Dr Leila Ullrich.

The project interrogates gender in counterterrorism strategies. Women have become difficult to ignore in terrorism yet attempts to consider them in counterterrorism are rare and efforts to integrate a gender perspective even rarer. This project addresses two questions: first, how do terrorist and counter-terrorist institutions conceptualise gender relationships and with what effect on the people they engage? Second, how do women make sense of their role vis-à-vis both terrorist and counter-terrorist institutions? Dr Ullrich explores these issues through a comparative case study of the United Kingdom, Kenya and Lebanon, breaking new ground by exploring how gender constructs such as ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ as well as non-binary identifications shape terrorism and counter-terrorism. She problematises the strict separation of terrorism and counterterrorism in the literature by investigating how each feeds off the other’s gender assumptions and how women negotiate their role at their intersection. Employing an interdisciplinary perspective, the project aims to rethink the interplay between gender, terrorism and counter-terrorism through a unique cross-cultural study.

PROTECT - The Right to International Protection: A Pendulum between Globalisation and Nativisation? is funded by the European Commission under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 framework program. The research project studies the impact of the UN’s Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration on refugees’ right to international protection. The vision of PROTECT is to discover ways of advancing the international protection system within today’s turbulent political context. PROTECT consists of 11 partner universities in Europe, Canada, and South Africa.

Professor Elspeth Guild is part of the Steering Committee for this project. Find out more about the project and their activites on the PROTECT website.

Migration between the countries of the Global South, otherwise known as South-South migration, accounts for nearly half of all international migration, nearly 70% in some places. The potential of South-South migration to contribute to development and delivery of the SDGs is widely acknowledged but remains unrealised, largely due to existing inequalities at the global, national and local levels which determine who is (and is not) able to migrate, where to, and under which terms and conditions. These multidimensional inequalities are associated with a lack of rights for migrants and their families; difficult, expensive and sometimes dangerous journeys; and limited opportunities to access services and protection, which can, in turn, exacerbate inequalities.

Professor Nicola Piper is Co-Investigator on the GCRF South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub project led by Coventry University and funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

This four-year British Academy Global Professorship investigates the global governance of labour migration and the role of global processes and institutions in pursuit of “decent work” for migrant workers from a multi-actor and multi-sited perspective.

Professor Nicola Piper and Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Laura Foley analyse the role, and potential leadership, of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) within global migration governance, given the ILO’s mandate on labour standards and employment conditions. Although the concept of “decent work” emerged in policy circles to address the persistent vulnerabilities of low-skill, low-wage and informal sector workers, its realisation has been a piecemeal process, the ILO’s role in advancing labour rights for migrants has been under threat. In charting two decades of changes (2002-22) in the character of global governance and the regulation of “decent work” for migrants, this project analyses the ILO’s positioning and navigating of the multi-level, multi-actor nature of the global labour migration governance system. The central project aim is to investigate how decent work for migrant workers can best be achieved in global migration governance, a field in which institutional actors, at times, stand in competition with each other in the execution of their mandates. Within this field, we lack insight into how actors working on global labour migration governance interact and relate to one another, what exact role the ILO plays in this migration governance architecture, and how the ILO promotes the “decent work” agenda for migrants. This study seeks to close these knowledge gaps and shed light on an organisation which is highly understudied in global governance and migration governance studies.

The Understanding Humanitarian Crime project is funded by ESRC (LISS DTP postdoctoral Fellowship) and led by Dr Angela Sherwood.

For several decades now, international humanitarian organisations have been evidenced to commit social harms that reinforce forms of structural violence and inevitably generate egregious human rights violations. Often, these harms occur in the context of humanitarian interactions with states and their agents, but increasingly, they are also motivated by the competitive dynamics of the humanitarian marketplace. While this may be the case, the everyday harms committed by humanitarian actors are often dismissed as singular and unintentional events, and are rarely interrogated from criminological perspectives relating to crime, deviance, and institutional violence. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in post-earthquake Haiti, the project examines the responsibilities of state and non-state actors for housing-related harms in Haiti and engages with inter-disciplinary conversations about criminal labelling and non-penal ways of sanctioning state/humanitarian crime. In doing so, the project offers ways of branding deviant organisational acts as criminal.

The SHARED project; a collaborative initiative focused on the concept of shared responsibility within the realm of integrated border management (IBM) at external borders. Academics and stakeholders pooled their expertise to develop guidelines under EU law, aiming to offer practical insights into allocation of duties, and the distribution of responsibilities, particularly concerning the implementation of border management and migration control measures, particularly concerning violations of fundamental rights.

Notable participants in these discussions included the European Commission, Frontex, UNHCR, IOM, European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Amnesty International, Statewatch, Médecins Sans Frontières, European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), EU-LISA, European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), European Ombudsman, UNODC, ASGI Associazione Studi Giuridici Immigrazione, among others.

In September 2023, the final conference of the SHARED Project was jointly hosted by the (B)OrderS Centre of Queen Mary University of London, the Observatori de Dret Public (IDP) Barcelona, in collaboration with DIDUE (Research Group in International and EU Law), and members of the European Parliament. During the conference, discussions and dissemination of the study results focused on the application of 'shared responsibility' to joint interventions by Frontex, EU member states, third countries, and private entities collaborating with them in the implementation of border management and migration control measures, particularly concerning violations of fundamental rights.