Professor Yann Richard
Yann Richard is a professor at the Geography Department of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Director of the Paris 1 - ENS Paris Geopolitics Master's Degree and former Deputy Director of the CNRS Prodig laboratory. In 2012, he was elected director of the Geography Department of the University of Paris 1. His work was first dedicated to Eastern Europe with a thesis on Belarus, then to the European Union. His current research topics are the regionalisation of the world space, regional integration in the world and the geopolitics of the European Union
Keynote Lecture 1: The forgotten regionalization of international migrations?
The number of international migrants in the world continues to grow from 153 million in 1990 to 281 million in 2021, according to the United Nations. Much of the scientific research on international migration pays attention to its globalisation, i.e., to long-distance migration flows, regardless of their direction. The global dimension is also evident in the field of public policy. For example, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (adopted by the UN in 2018) aims to bring together origin, transit, and destination countries around a common vision and to promote greater international cooperation at global level. However, international migration is a regionalized social phenomenon. In this case, regionalization means that international migration flows have increased overtime more strongly within groups of nearby countries than between countries that are far apart. This phenomenon is somewhat underestimated by recent research. In this presentation, we will study several aspects of the regionalization of international migration flows. First, we will describe the phenomenon in itself. What does the regionalization of international migration look like in space? Does it affect all parts of the world and all types of migration flows? What is its relationship with globalization? Secondly, we will see what theoretical frameworks and concepts are used to study this phenomenon. After having made extensive use of the concepts of ‘migratory field’ (concept of ‘champ migratoire’ first introduced by Gildas Simon) and ‘migratory system’ (introduced by Douglas Massey), geographers are increasingly interested in transnational circulation and mobility which give rise to relational formations that reinforce regionalization. Finally, by looking at several examples based on recent research, we will see that there are theoretical and empirical links between the geographical distribution of international migration and so-called regional integration.
Professor Maja Zehfuss
Professor Maja Zehfuss joined the University of Copenhagen in 2020. She has previously taught at the University of Warwick and The University of Manchester, where she is still an Honorary Professor. She received her doctorate from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Maja Zehfuss is the co-founder of the British International Studies Association Poststructural Politics Working Group which she co-convened from 2001 to 2007. She co-edits the successful textbook Global Politics: A New Introduction, now in its third edition, and has published three research monographs with Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Her most recent book, War and the Politics of Ethics received an honourable mention for the BISA Susan Strange Book Prize. Her work examines hierarchies of political subjectivity and their impact on contemporary global politics in the context of migration. She is particularly interested in temporality, memory, and ethics. She has previously also worked on war, the idea of humanity, vulnerability, refusing and the question of the international.
Keynote Lecture 2: Migration Politics: People in Time in a Spatialised World
As ever more people are on the move globally, migration is seen as a key challenge for the 21st century. We seem to be faced with a migration crisis that is only likely to get worse due to climate change adding to pressures from conflicts and global inequality. In response destination states have developed increasingly sophisticated infrastructures for preventing unwanted migration, displacing the issue away from their territory. While critics highlight the human cost of this approach, this line of argument either had limited success or is even absorbed into the justification for enhanced bordering. This keynote starts from the recognition that the problem of migration cannot be resolved within the spatialized imaginary of global politics that produces it. It proposes to think of the problem of migration as a symptom of an imaginary that fails to reckon with time. From this perspective ‘managing migration’ is not a realistic response to the increasing movement of people, but a displacement that works to legitimise and obscure existing power relations. Conceiving ‘migrants’ as people in time and tracing the vital but hidden work of temporality in the apparently spatialized imaginary of global politics reveals that the apparently legitimate exclusion of non-members puts at risk what is supposedly being protected: ‘the people’ and their location politics.
