Kjersti G. Berg

Associated researcher

Emily Hume

Coordinator, Norwegian Centre for Humanitarian Studies

Workshop set to bring together academics to examine the humanitarian impacts of Europe’s current approach to immigration.

Scholars from across Europe and internationally will soon come together to discuss the continued externalisation of European borders and the humanitarian consequences of current immigration policies and practices in Europe and beyond in a two-day workshop in Bergen, Norway.

The externalisation of European borders takes many forms. This includes European Union agreements with third states, and support for their border management capacities, such as in Turkey and Libya, to the prevention of rescue efforts in the Mediterranean. It also includes the re-erection of borders inside Europe, leading to large numbers of migrants being stuck on the Greek islands.

The upcoming workshop will involve invited scholars who will seek to generate better scholarship on how to understand the strengthened border control mechanisms, and detention or returns policies and the consequences of these not only for people on the move, but for how scholars think about and conceptualise mobility, camps, borders and humanitarianism.

The workshop will be held from 18 to 19 November and is co-hosted by the University of Bergen (UiB), the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), with funding from the NCHS.

This workshop is convened in association with the ‘SuperCamp: Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East’ project at CMI and the ‘Humanitarianism, Borders, and the Governance of Mobility: The EU and the ‘Refugee Crisis’ at PRIO.

Participation in this workshop is by invitation.