EUMAGINE
Imagining Europe from the Outside
A collaborative European research project aimed at investigating the impact of perceptions of human rights and democracy on migration aspirations and decisions.
The EUMAGINE project involved more than thirty researchers in seven countries who work to understand how people in Morocco, Senegal, Turkey and Ukraine relate to the possibility of migration.
EUMAGINE studied how Europe is perceived from outside the EU, and how these perceptions affect migration aspirations and decisions. The project focuses on how people’s perceptions on democracy and human rights – in relation to their regions and countries of origin as well as places abroad – affect their perceptions on and attitudes to migration. It also investigated how perceptions on human rights and democracy interact with other determinants of migration aspirations, to what extent migration is perceived as a valuable life project, and how potential migrants compare Europe to other migration destinations. EUMAGINE studied migration-related perceptions among people aged 18-39 in four countries of origin and transit: Morocco, Senegal, Turkey and Ukraine.
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Methodology and approach
Duration: 2010-2013
The study was based on a cross-national and cross-regional mixed-method design. With the help of local partners, data was collected from four major source and transit countries:
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Morocco
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Senegal
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Turkey
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Ukraine
In each of these four country surveys, ethnographic fieldwork and subsequent in-depth interviews were conducted in four research areas with different characteristics:
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an area that is characterised by high emigration rates;
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a comparable socio-economic area with low emigration;
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a comparable area with a strong immigration history; and
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an area with a specific human rights situation.
The aim was to gain a representative sample within each of the 16 research areas. The cooperation with local partners facilitated data collection and provide invaluable local expertise, and will also ensure a non-Eurocentric perspective which will improve the data quality.
By adopting a case-study approach that compared several emigration countries and various types of areas within these countries, the project shed more light on how perceptions, aspirations and decisions are formed, and on how they relate to each other.
Research questions
Why do people want to migrate? What influences their choice of migration destination? The EUMAGINE project addressed these questions from an innovative angle. It looked not only at the role of factors such as socio-economic status and social networks, but also at the impact of perceptions of human rights and democracy. ‘Human rights’ is understood to include both negative (e.g. democracy, individual liberties, freedom from discrimination) and positive (a right to e.g. social security, healthcare, education) rights. Special attention was paid to the role of gender.
The core idea of the project was that macro- and meso-level discourses on human rights and democracy influence micro-level perceptions on these themes in countries of origin, which in turn influence migratory aspirations and decisions.
Funding
EUMAGINE was funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research. At the time, IMI was a member of the Oxford Martin School, which provided additional funding to match the IMI portion of the grant from the European Commission.
Partners
EUMAGINE involves more than thirty researchers from a consortium of eight institutions and lead by the University of Antwerp.
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Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies (CEMIS), University of Antwerp, Belgium
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Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford, UK
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International Migration Institute (IMI), University of Oxford, UK
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International Peace Research Institute (PRIO), Oslo, Norway
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MiReKoc, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey
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Equipe de Recherche sur la Région et la Régionalisation (E3R), Université Mohamed V Agdal, Rabat, Morocco
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Institut fondamental d’Afrique noire, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal
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Centre for Sociological Research (CSR), Ternopil, Ukraine