MOBSANCT Advisory Board

Bahar Baser – Durham University

Dr. Bahar Baser is an Associate Professor in Middle East Politics. She joined Durham University's School of Government and International Affairs in 2021. Previously, she was Associate Professor at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University where she led the "Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation Research Group". Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Warwick at the Department of Politics and International Studies between 2012 and 2014.

Dr. Baser completed a PhD in Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. During her PhD, she had the opportunity to work as a Visiting Research Fellow at Humboldt University (Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences) in Germany, REMESO (Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society) in Norrkoping, Sweden and the Instituto de Ciencias Sociais (ICS) in Lisbon, Portugal. 

She is an expert in the area of diaspora studies, peacebuilding and conflict transformation, with a regional focus on the Middle East. She has conducted extensive research on diaspora engagement in peace processes, post-conflict reconstruction and state-building in the Global South. She has published extensively on stateless diaspora activism and mobilisation in Europe with a specific focus on host states’ counterterrorism policies, radicalization of diaspora members and transnationalization of homeland conflicts. 

She is the editor of Kurdish Studies Series published by Lexington Books and the co-editor of Diasporas and Transnationalism Series published by Edinburgh University Press. She is also a senior associate research fellow at the Security Institute for Governance and Leadership in Africa (SIGLA), Stellenbosch University, South Africa and visiting professor at Tampere Peace Research Institute, Tampere University, Finland.

For more information on Bahar, please see here.

Ryszard Cholewinski – International Labour Organization

Ryszard Cholewinski is Senior Migration Specialist in the International Labour Organization (ILO) Regional Office for Arab States, based in Beirut, Lebanon, having previously worked at ILO Headquarters in Geneva (2010-2017) and with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) (2005-2010).

He oversees ILO’s labour migration work in the Arab States region relating to policy and technical assistance, research, and development cooperation, in close collaboration with ILO Geneva, field offices in Africa and Asia, as well as ILO’s tripartite constituents comprising governments, employers’ and workers’ organizations, with a view to advancing ILO’s fair migration agenda.

He is a lawyer by training with 13 years of previous experience in an academic setting at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He has published widely on international labour migration, international law relating to migrant workers, and various aspects of European Union migration law and policy.

Andrew Geddes – European University Institute

Andrew Geddes is a Professor of Migration Studies and the Director of the Migration Policy Centre. During his career, he has led and participated in a number of major projects on aspects of international migration working with a wide range of academic and non-academic partners. For the period 2014-19 he was awarded an Advanced Investigator Grant by the European Research Council for a project on the drivers of global migration governance (the MIGPROSP project see www.migrationgovernance.orgfor further details). The MIGPROSP project analysed how ‘actors’ of various types in migration governance systems such as political leaders, officials, international organisations and civil society organisations make sense of the issues and challenges that they face and how these understandings then shape their actions. He has published extensively on global migration, with a particular focus on policy-making and the politics of migration and on regional cooperation and integration. Recent publications include The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe (London: Sage, co-authored with Peter Scholten); The Dynamics of Regional Migration Governance (edited with Marcia Vera Espinoza, Leila Hadj-Abdou and Leiza Brumat) and A Rising Tide? The Salience of Immigration and the Rise of Anti-Immigration Political Parties in Western Europe (Political Quarterly, with James Dennison). A full list of his publications can be found here.

Prior to joining EUI he was a Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK where he served as Head of Department between 2008 and 2011.

For more information on Andrew, see here.

James F. Hollifield – Southern Methodist University

James F. Hollifield is the Ora Nixon Arnold Fellow in International Political Economy, Professor in the Department of Political Science, and Director of the Tower Center at SMU in Dallas, Texas, as well as a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC.

Hollifield has served as an Advisor to various governments in North and South America, Europe, East Asia and the Middle East and Africa, as well as the United Nations, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the OECD, the ILO, the IOM, the EU, and other international organizations.  He currently chairs working groups at the World Bank and the IDB and serves on the International Advisory Board of the National Center for Competence in Research (NCCR for Migration and Mobility) of the Swiss National Science Foundation.   He has been the recipient of grants from private corporations and foundations as well as government agencies, including the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Social Science Research Council, the Sloan Foundation, the Owens Foundation, the Raytheon Company, and the National Science Foundation.

His major books include Immigrants, Markets and States (Harvard), L’Immigration et l’Etat Nation: à la recherche d’un modèle national (L’Harmattan), Pathways to Democracy: The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (with Calvin Jillson, Routledge), Migration, Trade and Development (with Pia Orrenius and Thomas Osang, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas), Herausforderung Migration—Perspektiven der vergleichenden Politikwissenschaft (with Uwe Hunger, Lit Verlag), Migration Theory (with Caroline Brettell, Routledge, now it its third edition), and Controlling Immigration ( with Philip Martin and Pia Orrenius, Stanford, also in its third edition). His current book projects are The Migration State (Harvard)—a study of how states manage international migration for strategic gains—and International Political Economy: History, Theory and Policy (with Thomas Osang, Cambridge). He also has published numerous scientific articles and reports on the political economy of international migration and development.

Hollifield was educated at Wake Forest College (BA with honors in politics and economics), and he studied at Sciences Po Grenoble and Paris (DEA in applied economics) before completing his PhD in political science at Duke University. In addition to SMU he has taught at Brandeis and Auburn, served as a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Center for European Studies and MIT’s Center for International Studies, and was appointed Director of Research at the CNRS and Sciences Po in Paris.  He is a Fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California at San Diego, at the Institut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA) at the University of Bonn, and the Global Migration Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.  During the last academic year (2015-16) he was named as a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and has continued his work there as a Global Fellow.  In 2016 Hollifield received a Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Studies Association.

For more information on James, see here.

Ahmet İçduygu – Koç University

Ahmet İçduygu is the former Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. He currently holds a dual appointment as a full professor at Koç, one is in the Department of International Relations and the other is in the Department of Sociology. He is also the Director of the Migration Research Center at Koc (MiReKoc). He holds a PhD in Demography from the Australian National University. He held visiting professor or fellow positions at Stockholm University, the University of Warwick, the University of Manchester, the European University Institute in Florence, the University of Pennsylvania, Malmö University, and the University of Amsterdam. He is an elected member of the Science Academy in Turkey. In addition to his own individual research projects, Prof. İçduygu has conducted various research projects for the international organizations such as IOM, UNHCR, EU, OECD and ILO. He teaches on migration studies, theories and practices of citizenship, international organizations, civil society, nationalism and ethnicity, and research methods. In addition to his numerous articles in scholarly journals, such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Citizenship Studies, European Review, International Migration, International Labor and Working Class History, Population, Space and Place, and British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, his most recent books include:  Migration and Transformation: Multi-Level Analysis of Migrant Transnationalism, co-edited with P. Pitkänen and D. Sert (Springer, 2011), Countries of Migrants, Cities of Migrants – Italy, Spain, Turkey, co-edited with M. Balbo and J.P. Serrano (ISI Press, 2013), and Critical Reflections in Migration Research: Views from the South and the East, co-edited with Ayşem Biriz Karaçay (Koç University Press, 2014).

For more information on Ahmet, see here.

 

Noora Lori – Boston University

Noora Lori is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. Her research focuses on citizenship, statelessness, temporary migration schemes and racial hierarchies in comparative perspective with a focus on the Middle East. Her book, Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf (Cambridge University Press 2019) received the best book prize from the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association (2020), the Distinguished Book Award from the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies section of the International Studies Association (2021), the Best Book in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Politics from the APSA-MENA politics section of the American Political Science Association, and an honorable mention for the Best Book Award of the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS) (2021).

She has published in the International Migration Review, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Global Security Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Relations, the Oxford Handbook on Citizenship, The Shifting Border, among other journals and edited volumes.  Her work has been funded by the ACLS/Mellon foundation, Ziet-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computer Engineering (BU), the Initiative on Cities (BU) (2016; 2019), as well as other grants. She is the co-director (with Kaija Schilde) of the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking.

At BU, she received the Gitner Family Prize for Faculty Excellence (2014) and the CAS Templeton Award for Excellence in Student Advising (2015). She was previously an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, a fellow at the International Security Program of the Harvard Kennedy School, and a visiting scholar at the Dubai School of Government. She received her PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University’s (2013) and her dissertation received the Best Dissertation Award from the Migration and Citizenship Section of the American Political Science Association in 2014.

For more information, see here.

Katharina Natter – Leiden University

Katharina Natter is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University. She holds a Research Master in Comparative Politics from SciencesPo (2012, honors). In 2019 she obtained her PhD (Cum Laude) at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focusses on the politics of migration in North Africa and Europe and on connecting migration policy theory with broader social science research on states and political transformations. Between 2012 and 2015, Katharina worked at the International Migration Institute (Oxford University), the European Commission and the International Center for Migration Policy Development. Since 2011 she is also involved in Asylos, an NGO providing research for lawyers representing asylum seekers. She speaks German, French, English and intermediate Arabic.

For more information on Katharina, see here.

Kamal Sadiq – University of California, Irvine

Kamal Sadiq (PhD, University of Chicago) is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on the processes of political inclusion and legal membership of immigrants, refugees, and the urban poor in developing countries, specifically in South Asia (India, Bangladesh) and South-East Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia). He is the author of Paper Citizens: How Illegal Immigrants Acquire Citizenship in Developing Countries (Oxford University Press 2009, reprint 2010) and co-editor of Interpreting Politics: Situated Knowledge, India, and the Rudolph Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles appear in the European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Asian Perspectives, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, PS: Political Science & Politics, the Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, and select edited books. He has chaired the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies (ENMISA) section of the International Studies Association and the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Citizenship Studies and the Advisory Board of the journal Migration Politics.

For more information on Kamal, see here.

Hélène Thiollet – Sciences Po

Hélène Thiollet is a CNRS permanent researcher. Her research deals with the politics of migration and asylum in the Global South, and she focuses her empirical work on the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. She also works on crises and political transformations linked to migration and asylum. She teaches international relations, comparative politics and migration studies at Sciences Po and EHESS.

She is a graduate of Ecole normale supérieure (Ulm A/L98), holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po and Master degrees in Geography of development (University of Paris 1 La Sorbonne) and Classics (University of Paris 4 La Sorbonne). In 2002-2003 she was a Visiting Student at the Harvard University Department of Government, with a fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She was a Post Doctoral Fellow at Oxford University in 2009-2010 with the OxPo Research grant. She is a board member of Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, de Migration Politics et de PARISS (Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences) and member of the advisory board of Journal of Refugee Studies.

Hélène is involved in the following projects:

• as PI for “PACE” “The Politics of Asylum Crises in Europe” funded by the French National Agency for Research €352,000 (2019-2023)
• as PI for the CERI Sciences Po team for the “MAGYC” project “Migration Governance and AsYlum Crises” funded by the H2020 (Grant Agreement: 822806) €400,000 (2018-2022).
• as co-PI with Catherine Wihtol de Wenden for MOBGLOB “Global Governance of Mobility” funded by the French National Agency for Research €247,000 (2012-2015)
• as member of the program "Villes-mondes: approches comparées du cosmopolitisme et des migrations" financé par l'USPC "Sociétés plurielles"
• as member of SYSREMO "Géographies de la mondialisation: Emergence d’un système régional au Moyen-Orient" funded by the French National Agency for Research PI: Leila Vignal.

 For more information on Hélène, see here.