Beyond Borders

PAULINE ADAM

Quantification Devices of Irregular Migration at the European Union Level: Between “Computational Coalitions” and Use in Migration Governance
Université Libre de Bruxelles / École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

Quantification devices of irregular migration at the European Union (EU) level are the product of a social and historical construction. Nowadays, several European institutions and international organizations produce figures on irregular migration at the EU level with different indicators. Sources and methods are diverse. To understand this proliferation, this research aims at analyzing why and how these data have multiplied, considering quantification devices of irregular migration at the EU level as a research topic. The study of these devices enables us to analyze the trajectories and interests of the stakeholders who design and use them, the features of the social space in which they are situated and their use in migration governance.

JOSEPHINE AKINYOSOYE

Black Politics, Activism and Identity in Western Europe: Negotiations, Continuities and Visions
University of Hamburg
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

In many European cities, new Black initiatives, groups, art forms and movements are emerging that explore, center, and celebrate Blackness and Afroeuropeaness. The year 2020 showed the impressive formation of Black resistance cultures and organizations after the death of George Floyd. Despite much excellent work on Black History and Activism in Europe there have been few insights on how Black movements are breaking through, as well as constructing borders through transnational activism. At this very moment in time, it is crucial to research the relationship between Critical Border Studies and Black Studies and how they contribute to one another. I will connect a multiperspectival study of borders to black liberatory politics, theory and resistant identity constructions, to conceptualize them as dismantling, shifting, and constructing new borders.

OSCAR APONTE

The Roads to Rural Colonization: A Regional History of Putumayo, Colombia, 1893-1977
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

My project analyzes the process of state formation and the penetration of capitalism into one of the last indigenous frontiers of modern Latin America - the Amazon rainforest. It examines the interconnection between roadbuilding projects and colonization cycles in the present-day Putumayo Department - located in the northwestern corner of the Colombian portion of the Amazon rainforest - between the arrival of the Capuchin missionaries in the area in 1893 and the departure of U.S. based Texas Petroleum Company (Texaco) from Putumayo in 1977. To address the social, economic, political, and cultural transformation of Putumayo during the twentieth century, my project relies on a combination of archival research, oral history, and ethnographic research in the area.

ERIC ELIKEM ASHIABI

Contested Citizenship and Social Cohesion: A Comparative Study of the Ewe and Mande Cross-Border Ethnic Groups in West Africa
University of Duisburg-Essen
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

Africa’s political borders still have ramifications for the citizens, especially members of cross-border ethnic groups. Several years after these borders were artificially drawn, some states and “one country ethnic groups” persist in contesting the citizenship of cross-border ethnic groups. Thus, I seek to understand how the contestation of the citizenship of cross-border ethnic groups influences the way the affected relate with members of other ethnicities and the state authority in their countries. Does the variety in political regimes matter for this relationship? Using Afrobarometer geocoded data and field interviews in a mixed method research design, the topics of citizenship and social cohesion will be explored amongst the Ewes (a cross border ethnic group in Ghana and Togo) and Mandes (another ethnic group resident across Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso) in West Africa.

PETER AWODI

Politics of Identity: Colonial Border Delineation, Belonging and the Securitization of the
Anglophone People of Cameroon
University of Ibadan
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

My doctoral project critically examines the interface between colonial border delineation of 1961 and the ongoing anglophone crisis of identity, belonging and citizenship in contemporary Cameroon. Physical border delineation by British and French colonial powers have birthed ethno-political and lingual borders in Cameroon which have exacerbated ethnic struggles, citizenship contestations, patronage politics, violence, and conflict. Drawing on historical and exploratory research design, I first seek to interrogate how physical Anglo-French colonial border delineation morphed into the current political, cultural and lingual borders in Cameroon; second, investigate the human security impacts of the anglophone crisis on refugees and displaced persons; and, third, examine the extent to which this crisis has resulted in the securitization of vulnerable trans-border refugees in Nigeria.

LAURA CHARNEY

A Tale of Two Treaties: Adjudicating Canada’s Colonial Borderlands
McGill University
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

My research employs a transsystemic analysis of liberal legal theory and Indigenous legal traditions to examine the role of treaties in establishing Canada’s borders. I suggest that Canada’s historic treaties with Indigenous people offer a constitutional basis upon which First Nations’ land claims can be pursued. Indigenous legal traditions have largely been ignored at the level of the Supreme Court of Canada in landmark constitutional challenges to land entitlement. Yet, centering Indigenous legalities can revitalize historic treaties to produce legally binding effects. I ask: how has Canada utilized the process of treaty-making to coerce the “ceding” of Indigenous land? How can a reading of treaties through Anishinaabe legalities alter our understanding of Canadian citizenship?

DAIGENGNA DUOER

Buddhism Beyond Nations and Empires: Mapping Transnational Buddhist Networks from Early
Twentieth-Century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria
University of California Santa Barbara
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

Focusing on Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, my dissertation explores how transregional and transnational Buddhists from across Asia formed networks and relationships beyond the borders of nations and empires to further their religious and political agendas in the early twentieth century. I will address issues regarding the ways in which Buddhist institutions and individuals, from Tibetan lamas to Japanese missionary monks, engaged
with changing regimes and the instability of borders during World War II, and the consequences of those engagements. Employing diverse primary sources found in multi-lingual archives, this project will implement digital humanities methods such as ArcGIS to digitally map Buddhist sites and activities, and Gephi to conduct network analysis on how transnational Buddhist networks expanded and mattered across Asia.

WALID HABBAS

The Political Economy of the West Bank-Israeli Economic Relationship: Class and Sectoral Analysis
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

After the Oslo Accords, Israel upgraded its structure of domination over the West Bank and imposed a rigid segregated structure. Around the same period, Palestinian-Israeli economic relationships intensified. This research investigates this increased integration with a disaggregated approach. By splitting the West Bank economy into class-sector combinations, the project will investigate the agency of Palestinian classes in advancing
their economic interest vis-à-vis the Israeli colonial structures, in particular the border regime. In some Palestinian economic activities, the Israeli colonial policies were constraints; in others it appeared to open opportunities to accumulate profit. I hypothesize that several factors interplay and shape the ability of Palestinian actors to integrate in the Israeli economy: 1) the negotiable nature of the Israeli institutions; 2) the presence of the Palestinian Authority with relationships with both Israeli state institutions and the Palestinian population; 3) the existence of different colonial policies (Areas A,B,C) across the space.

JACQUELIN KATANEKSZA

Running in the Shadows: Fugitive Movements Across and Beyond the Dark City
The New School
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

As Zimbabweans navigate cycles of hyper-inflation, emergent technologies afford new ways to self-sustain and make place, while negotiating precarity and “other side of the border” opportunities. Attentive to the precarity of cross-border mobility, this project foregrounds how mobile phone technologies (re)configure the ways people relate to each other, move through space (including the space of the Zimbabwean diaspora) and challenge pre-existing state-controlled economic institutions. I focus on cross-border running - a process and set of infrastructures wherein members of a new class of Zimbabwean entrepreneurs called runners are sourced online via Facebook or WhatsApp to procure goods from grocery and household stores in South Africa that cannot be sourced locally, on a commission basis for customers in Zimbabwe. I track how these goods are transported illicitly over the border through a network of informal relationships between runners, bus drivers, and border officials and which (in)equalities are made visible in the spaces across which they operate. I draw on anthropological, sociological, and critical geography theories to animate the contestations that this cross-border mobility reveals.

THEA KIRSCH

Care or Control? The Safety/Security Nexus and the Externalization of Europe's Borders
Freie Universität Berlin
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

Since the so-called 'refugee crisis' of 2015, the EU's fight against the 'root causes' of migration has entailed an even stronger emphasis on cooperating with African countries of migration origin and transit. Focusing on the EU Trust Fund for Africa and its funding of digital/biometric border technologies, this doctoral project critically examines the 'off-shoring' and 'outsourcing' of Europe's borders. As the EU increasingly exercises border controls extraterritorially, new coalitions between governmental, non-governmental, and market actors are emerging. Against this backdrop, this project asks how different actors negotiate the workings of multiple border rationalities (security, development, humanitarianism, and human rights discourses) in practice – and with what consequences.

MAGDALENE KLASSEN

Good Work: Jewish Sex Work and Transnational Human Rights Work, 1885 – 1931
Johns Hopkins University
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

My research explores the role of non-governmental organizations in shaping the immigration law and processes by discourses and practices of transnational sex work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Across the borders of eastern Europe, Britain, and Argentina, with a dual focus on women who organized transnational networks to curtail sex work and the women who found work selling sex after migrating, I argue that Jewish sex work and efforts to prevent it were central to the consolidation of borders as moral spaces in era of mass European immigration.

ROMAIN LANNEAU

Respect for the Duty of Care and Data Quality a Guarantee for the Rule of Law in Asylum
Procedure in the European Union
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

Personal data collected stored and exchanged by national administrations and European agencies need to respect data protection principles, including data quality. It implies removing unlawful or incorrect data from the system and investigating when there is a doubt on the matter, in accordance with the duty of care. My research intends to provide a conceptual method to test respect for essential procedural safeguards in dministrative authorities’ decisions to guarantee a harmonized enforcement of EU laws respectful of the individual rights of asylum seekers. What guarantees for individual rights of asylum seekers does offer the duty of care and of data quality in administrative authorities’ composite decisions in the European Union?

ALEXANDER MAIER

Paper-Work: The Political Economy of Migration, Labor, and Documentation in Postsocialist Moscow
Columbia University
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

Employed in Russia’s vast shadow economy, Central Asian migrant workers are caught in a double bind between the demand to become legally legible and the realities of informal labor that make lawful status all but impossible. Alexander’s dissertation research asks how individuals negotiate securing documentation to support their claims in changing political contexts. By following the paper trails and people that crisscross immigration offices, legal aid organizations, administrative courts, and migrant spaces of work and rest in Moscow, his research examines the continuum of documents that support claims of identity and lawfulness in an attempt to move beyond binary characterizations of legal status.

JAMES MEADOR

Making Chinese Orthodox
University of Michigan
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

This dissertation project examines two groups of Chinese Orthodox Christians that have been united by the ongoing state-sponsored revival of the Chinese Orthodox Church: a group of Russian-descended Orthodox Manchus whose roots in Beijing stretch back to the seventeenth century, and mixed-race Chinese-Russian descendants of Russian political refugees who fled to Northeast China after the 1917 revolution. Through exploring the genealogies of these two groups, I reconstruct the changing role of Orthodox Christianity across fractured histories of Sino-Russian contact and interaction. Highlighting historical discontinuities helps to throw into relief the complex and contradictory legacies of imperial and socialist eras - legacies that haunt ongoing attempts by both state actors and Chinese Orthodox believers to make sense of the present.

NICHOLAS NYACHEGA

Borderlanders, Contested Sovereignties, and Everyday Life in North-Eastern Zimbabwe, c.1890s to 2021
University of Minnesota
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

Borderlands are both contested spaces and sanctuaries for self-determination. Using case studies of adjacent Honde Valley and Inyanga areas along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border, my dissertation highlights the quotidian experiences of borderlanders since the colonial era. Through a critical analysis of oral histories and archival sources, I examine how borderlanders have historically challenged the power of both the colonial and post-colonial states by exploiting various ill-defined spaces where states sought to control them. I seek to argue that borderlanders have overtime renamed and redefined borders using their indigenous socioeconomic and political systems in ways that contest ideas, and technologies of state sovereignty and power such as borders.

ZORA PISKAČOVÁ

Torn Men in a Torn Town: Municipal Administrators in Cieszyn and Český Těšín, 1918-1938
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 sent East-Central Europe into chaos, with the Polish and Czechoslovak nation-states clashing over the contested region of Teschen Silesia. Seeking to prevent ethnic violence, the Allies split the region along with its multiethnic urban center, the city of Teschen, between the two nation-states in July 1920. Tracing cross-border cooperation on the local level, this dissertation shows how municipal administrators peacefully transformed the imperial city into a Polish city, Cieszyn, and a Czech city, Český Těšín. Despite rising ethno-nationalism, Polish, Czech, German, Silesian, and Jewish local leaders made the surprising choice to prioritize the basic needs of their constituents by maintaining the economic and social benefits of a unified city. In so doing, nationalist rivals stood side by side as they lobbied for the relaxation of border restrictions to stimulate the local economy, preserved cross-border electrical wiring and water pipes to cut costs, and made compromises in official language policies. Analyzing local, regional, and national administrative documents as well as newspapers, this dissertation argues that local leaders chose to be administrators first and nationalists second. Responding to new borders pragmatically, they actively stabilized the nationally contested territory through cross-border cooperation, often in the face of countervailing pressures from centralizing national governments. In so doing, this example reveals that nationalism alone cannot explain political decision-making in interwar East-Central Europe as tensions between the center and the periphery frequently eclipsed national competition on the local level. Enhancing our understanding of imperial structures’ afterlives by probing the role of local governments in post-conflict reconstruction, this dissertation decenters national leaders and international peacekeepers. Instead, it positions municipal administrators as crucial ‘paradiplomatic’ actors and their small towns as vital arenas for peacebuilding.

BURAK SAYIM

Transnational Communist Networks in the Post-WW1 Middle East: Anti-Colonialism,
Internationalism and Itinerant Militancy, 1919-1928
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

Burak Sayım's research examines the communist networks across the borders of the MENA region. The first part discusses various national liberation movements rocking the Middle East from Anatolia to Egypt and from Morocco to Iran in the 1920s as an integral part of a global wave of post-Great War revolutions and upheavals. Using this setting as a backdrop, it contextualizes the uneasy alliances of the Communist International with an array of national liberation movements across the region. Then, it tries to reconstruct the Communist habitus in the post-Great War Middle East and pays particular attention to the daily practices of militancy in an attempt to restore the agency of grassroots militants. The third section locates the Middle Eastern communists in the global radical networks and focuses on the transnational ties they forged and their militancy's cross-border practices. The final part explores the interaction of the Middle Eastern communists with the concepts of nation and religion – Islam in particular – and discusses what it might tell us about the interwar radical politics and the transforming identities in the region.

LUKAS SCHMID

Enforcing Borders and Preventing Immigration: A Normative Appraisal on Two Levels
European University Institute, Florence
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

My doctoral project critically examines and normatively appraises both the principle of sovereign state immigration enforcement as such, and some central strategies and practices employed by contemporary state (or state-like) actors in their quest to preventirregular immigration and enforce their prerogatives of immigration control. I first ask if undivided, sovereign state rule over border enforcement can be reconciled with the moral priority of universal basic human rights respect. Secondly, I investigate which distinct normative issues are posed by common and increasingly salient practices and strategies of immigration enforcement and prevention, namely deportation, border externalization, and border digitalization.

GIRMA DEFERE TEGEGN

Effects of Cross-Border Population Mobility on Environmental Resource Governance and
Sustainability: Case of Ethio-Kenya
Jimma University
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

The international border making or colonial border making in Ethio-Kenya has not considered ethnicity, land use, and topography. Whereas most of the previous studies mainly focused on conflict and peace, this project examines the effects of cross-border population mobility on environmental resource governance and sustainability. In this regard, this study deals with the following questions: How far the international boundary
demarcation has influenced the cross-border pastoral mobility and resource governance? Which attitude do the cross-border pastoral communities have towards environment and environmental sustainability? How do they perceive cross-border mobility, cross-border environmental use, and institutions to govern environmental resources? The study uses both qualitative and quantitative methods and involves surveys, key informants’ interviews, focus group discussions and field observation.

ANRAN WANG

The Model Borderland of Maoist China: Identity Politics and Ideological Contentions in Inner
Mongolia, 1945-1966
Cornell University
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

This project is a historical study that reconstructs the ethnopolitical developments in Inner Mongolia between the end of the Japanese colonization in 1945 and the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. During this period, different ethnonational identities and ideological lines co-existed and were pursued by various parties in the borderland and in the central party-state leadership in Beijing. The study argues that the Inner Mongolian leadership applied sophisticated strategies and careful balancing efforts to attain and defend authentic, though limited, autonomous status. It pursued its identity and ideological agendas through unique policies, shaping living experiences for its residents.

ZAKARIA AL SHMALY

The Local Context of Refugee Political Socialisation: A Mixed-method Analysis of Syrian Refugees in Germany
United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on
Innovation and Technology
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

The issue of asylum policy in Europe presents both a challenge and a test to liberalism: it presents a litmus test for implementing liberal values, while accepting that large numbers of refugees could lead to a rise of right-wing illiberalism. Yet, nation-wide German integration policies oversee the effect of local context on the integration of refugees who will later become full citizens. This research will explore the differences in the political socialisation of Syrian refugees in the German context to explore sub-national / regional / local variations. The research question is “to what extent do local politics affect the political behaviour of refugees in Germany?” Designed to study the effect of the composition of local governments (German state parliaments) on the political socialisation process of Syrian refugees, the research utilises the exogenous allocation of refugees to subnational regions (Länder) within the Königstein quota system. It draws on information from automated WhatsApp surveys specifically planned to target hard-to-reach refugee populations, complemented by insights from qualitative semi-structured interviews. The research has two goals: to investigate the causal chain between local politics and the political behaviour of integrated refugees, and to contributes to the discussion on the importance of local context in national politics.

YAA OPAREBEA AMPOFO

Circuits of Sense-Making: A Study of Youth Experiences of Human-Earth Relations, Ecological
Knowledge, and Environmental Change in Ghana
University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

African youth have been positioned as particularly vulnerable to the consequences of climate change and environmental degradation. In response, there are growing environmental education efforts to support youth in learning about and responding to these changes. Such approaches tend to be grounded in and limited to Eurocentric knowledge systems that reify human-centered, developmentalist earthviews, and translate local actors and ecological contexts into homogenous, universal commodities. This study, therefore, offers a critical exploration of diverse representations of ecological knowledge in Ghana; how they are understood, experienced, and contested by young people; and how these heterogeneous approaches to conceptualizing human-earth relations, well-being, and environmental change impact Ghanaian youth’s abilities to survive and thrive under conditions of rapid environmental deterioration.

SAHAR BOSTOCK

Desert Colonization: Ottoman, British, and Zionist Development in Southern Palestine, 1830-1950
Columbia University in the City of New York,
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

This dissertation project examines the cultural, political, and environmental impact of Ottoman, British, and Zionist developmental plans on the desert of Southern Palestine from the mid-nineteenth century to the establishment of Israel. It argues that Ottoman and British colonial developmental projects in the Palestinian desert laid the material and conceptual infrastructures for the subsequent Zionist colonization of the desert and the
dispossession of its Bedouin inhabitants. The project analyses plans to build cities, railways, canals, irrigation channels, and communication technologies—some realized and others unfulfilled—and shows how they produced knowledge about the desert, shaped the living conditions of its inhabitants, and at the same time contributed to the image of the desert as an empty wasteland available for development.

LUNA CARRASQUER

Women Fight, Women Write: Renegotiating the Borders of the War Canon
Utrecht University, University of Oviedo,
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

This Ph.D. project gives a central place to a new and rising body of literature: 21st-century female-authored literature on the Spanish War (1936-39). Firstly, the project examines how 21st-century female writers renegotiate the borders of the literary War Canon by means of their writing on war. Secondly, it seeks to establish the role that the representation and interpretation of the border in female-authored 21st-century war writings plays in this process of renegotiation. Drawing upon the concepts of Canon, Border and Gender, this project proposes to rethink the Canon from the Borderlands. It focuses on three ways of emphasising the movable character of the border: the borders of making war, viewing war, and writing war. Through these three lenses, the project analyses an international corpus of female-authored fiction on the Spanish War, written and published in the 21st-century.

ELERI CONNICK

The Diaspora as Cultural Creative Spaces
University of Amsterdam,
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

Thecomparative diasporic study explores whether diasporas can act as cultural creative spaces to remember, construct, and define notions of identity and heritage. It focuses on five diasporic communities from the Middle East and Global South for whom there are histories of violence. It challenges perceptions that diasporic spaces are steeped in nostalgic discourse in the negative sense. This project seeks to understand how memories of violence in the past intertwine with conceptions and performativity of identity and heritage in the present. Thus, it explores the hypothesis that diasporic cultural creative spaces are spaces to both empower and preserve heritage under threat.

LINA GABRIELA CORTÉS

Artistic Productions of the Brazil-Uruguay Border: Mixed Portuñol
National University of San Martín,
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

Along the border between Brazil and the other countries of South America, there are different geographies, populations, cultures, and a wide linguistic heterogeneity. In the border between Uruguay and Brazil there is a long-standing interaction between Spanish and Portuguese, which results in a mix of languages that is known as Portuñol. My project analyses different artistic productions elaborated in Portuñol, particularly, the work of three artists from the Uruguay-Brazil border who share sensations, ideas and use some metaphors based on their joint experience to refer to their place of speech, their creative processes and their artistic productions.

ARNAB DUTTA

In Search of an Alternative Europe: Germanism in the Bengali Imagination, 1919–1945
University of Groningen
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

Contributing to the burgeoning research-field of globality and entanglements beyond their apparent Euro-American frontiers, Arnab’s Ph.D. project shows how Bengali intellectuals from Interwar British India drew upon, contested and negotiated political ideas from Germany to redefine the boundaries of Bengali nationhood. It also analyses why such intellectual relations created an alternative version of political action and political community within the anticolonial rhetoric of late-colonial British India. Using a plethora of sources available in several South Asian and West-European languages, this research contributes to the global intellectual history of twentieth-century Internationalisms by juxtaposing an ethno-linguistic mode of internationalism of two language-communities (German and Bengali) with parallel processes of diverging political internationalisms such as the Comintern, global fascism or liberal universalism.

KARL HEYER

Ambiguous Policy, Uneven Implementation, Discretionary Practices. A Situated Analysis of Fragmented Spatio-legal Bordering Dynamics in the post-2015 European Border and Migration Regime on Sicily
Universität Osnabrück
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

Employing a situated approach from the perspective of everyday experiences of migrants and their supporters in Palermo, Sicily, my interdisciplinary Ph.D. project traces how legal, practical and localised socio-cultural knowledge about migration is produced and enacted in the nexus of ambiguous policies, their uneven implementation and discretionary practices, and how this shapes contemporary bordering dynamics in Palermo and beyond. Building on ethnographic research and interviews, it contributes to current debates in border studies by analysing the co-constitutive relationship between ambiguity and local discretionary practices and the ongoing spatio-legal fragmentation of the EUropean Migration and Border Regime.

MARQUISAR JEAN-JACQUES

Lines Drawn in the Sand: The Shifting Boundaries of Kali’na Territory at the Mouth of the Maroni River
Université de Guyane,
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

The Kali'na live on both sides of the Maroni River, which is also the Franco-Surinamese border. The effects of colonial and post-colonial border management on this region affected coastal Kali’na settlements and reduced their territory. However, they regularly cross the border and take advantage of its opportunities. This feeds the evolution of a dynamic territoriality, local knowledge of places and of intense cyclic coastal changes.
Through this knowledge Kali’na managed to maintain their culture and coastal position, although they have been subjected to significant assimilation and globalization. Using community mapping, this research will document the network of places and spaces that constitutes Kali’na territory, and articulate how this territory is appropriated to reaffirm their identity and connection to the land.

SUVI LENSU

Cosmopolitanism from the Margins – Embodied Migrations, Beauty and Belonging amongst Rwandan Cross-Border Sex Workers
The University of Edinburgh and Aarhus University
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

This thesis examines Rwandan cross-border sex workers’ embodied migrations in East- and Central Africa. Based on a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in 2019, I study how the female and transwomen sex workers used their access to transnational space, international connections and material goods as a means to construct cosmopolitan identity, thus gaining social and cultural agency at home and abroad. Against the backdrop of geopolitical tensions in the East and Central African borderlands, I demonstrate the sex workers’ skillful navigations through tightening custom regimes and the Ebola outbreak. By employing a feminist epistemological standpoint this study produces gendered and embodied border knowledge from a subaltern perspective.

DAVID MOTZAFI-HALLER

A Nation of Families among the Family of Nations: Upwardly Mobile Israeli Developers and their
Families in the Middle East and Africa, 1926 – 1979
The Geneva Graduate Institute
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

David Motzafi-Haller’s doctoral project is a social history of the transnational non-humanitarian development sector. Focusing on a few Zionist-Israeli families involved with Israeli parastatal contractor Solel Boneh, it traces the upward social mobility of developers during final decades of empire and decolonization across a range of arenas in Israel/Palestine, the broader Middle East, sub–Saharan Africa and Latin America. Privileging the framework of family history, David uses the tools of micro-history to revisit and nuance the material dialectics of world-systems theory by identifying the everyday tactics of accumulation and the strategies of investment which transformed a career in development to lasting upward mobility. In focusing on how the social and physical mobility of men’s careers implicated extended kinship networks, wives and husbands, children and family friends, and led a wide array of household arrangements, he takes a non-androcentric approach to study of experts and a socially anchored approach to the study of expertise.

SHREYA PARIKH

Race and Racialization in North Africa: The Case of Blackness in "Arab" Tunisia
L’Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

Historical studies link presence of Black citizens in North Africa with slavery; migration scholars link increasing presence of Sub-Saharan African migrants to externalization of European borders. Yet, how has the presence of these two populations shaped today’s constructions of race in North Africa? I address this gap in my dissertation through study of Blackness in “Arab” Tunisia. More specifically, I study how race becomes a border dividing and categorizing populations as “national” versus “foreign” in a society that sees itself as ethnically and racially homogenous. I examine two linked processes: first, the racialization of both darker-skinned Tunisians and Sub-Saharan migrants as ‘Black’, and, second, the negotiation and contestation of this racialization by the ‘Black’ populations. I employ a multi-sited multi-method research design (interviews and observation) to understand micro-narratives and macro-discourses that place dark-skinned Tunisians and Sub-Saharan Africans in racial category of ‘Black.’

NAMA'A QUDAH

Paths of Displacement and Refuge: Tracing the Movement in Al Wehdat Camp in Amman, Jordan
Delft University of Technology
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

The notion of being “At once inside and outside our world” as expressed by Edward Said in his book After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986:6) is the lens through which the socio-spatiality of Wehdat Camp in Amman investigated, particularly in relation to a number of everyday boundaries that are produced and transformed through flows of movement and activity, along paths of displacement and refuge, shaped by gender and notions of identity. By tracing the movement of bodies in the camp, the everyday spaces of the camp will be spatially investigated in relation to five components: the paths of displacement, the institutional grid and layout, the terrain and camp-scape, the streets and activity corridors, and the walls and thresholds.

ANDREAS STOIBER

The Social Life of Satellite Images – A Qualitative Research Project into the Work of Space-Eye and the Application of Artificial Intelligence for Supporting Sea Rescue Missions
University of Amsterdam
Bucerius Strat Up Scholarship

My project engages with the work of the Regensburg-based NGO Space-Eye and their goal to combine artificial intelligence and satellite images to support civil sea-rescue missions. I combine approaches from the Anthropology of Technology, Science-Technology-Society-Studies, Actor-Network Theory, and the Anthropology of Borders to engage with the socio-technological network by looking at three technological approaches its members utilise to analyse the possibilities and restrictions resulting from these practices. Furthermore, I will look at the socio-technological side by engaging with collaborations with other organisations and frictions emerging due to Space-Eye´s positionality at the interface of scientific knowledge production and humanitarian action. Additionally, I embed the Space-Eye project within the wider socio-technological network/assemblage active within the Mediterranean frontier zone. Finally, I formulate ethical considerations resulting from my empirical engagement with the project.

SIMON TRUNK

Negotiating Life in between Empires: Debates on the Position, Possibilities and Belonging of Bosnian and Cypriot Muslims in Relation to the Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungarian and British Rule
Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

When in 1878 the Ottoman Empire had to cede control over their region to Austria-Hungary and the British Empire respectively, the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina and on Cyprus had to face difficult questions: How could Muslim life under Christian rule be organized, were they obliged to emigrate and which role could the Ottoman Empire play for them? Studying how these questions were addressed and discussed by local Muslims, emigrants, imperial administrators, and the Ottoman government and press is the main objective of my project. Thoroughly investigating the diverse views on these issues promises to shed new light on Muslim life under non-Muslim rule in former Ottoman territories and the factors which influenced both intellectual discussions on

LIN YI-HUI

Untangling China: Everyday Lives and Nation-Making
Utrecht University
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

To better understand the current trajectory of Chinese nationalist thinking in the era of Xi Jinping, this project develops insights into how the behaviours of everyday Chinese actors actively sustain, reproduce, and co-constitute Chinese sovereignty. Building on the concept of the ‘everyday’, this project focuses in particular on taken-for-granted expressions of sovereign identity as reproduced within a set of conventions, cultural practices, and intimate relations, through which societies produce citizens aligned with the interests of the state. In so doing, it highlights the importance of taking into account digital media, popular culture, and national festivities as factors that go into the making of contemporary Chinese nationalism and social identities.

EMINA ZOLETIC

Intergenerational Transmission of the Memory of the War: The Cases of Families in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Bosnian Diaspora in Europe
University of Warsaw
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

This research project deals with the intergenerational transmission of memory, with a focus on the first generation of Bosnians who experienced the 1992–1995 war and their children, born after the war in Sarajevo and currently living in the EU countries, the UK and the U.S. The study of wartime memory transmission has great social and political significance. The principal aim of this project is to explore the dynamics of intergenerational transmission of the memory of war among families living in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the EU Bosnian diaspora, with a particular focus on how the past is remembered. The study will provide detailed accounts of the Bosnian war from multiple perspectives, along with competing explanations of the cause, resolution, and outcome.

TIMOFEY BALIN

User-conceived Algorithmized Platform Interaction and the Production of Confidence and Trust on Telegram
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

This research project focuses on the intersection of two major themes. First, against the backdrop of alienation, polarization and misinformation effects that characterize social media algorithms today, its asks whether and how online interactions can emphasize pro-social qualities such as mutual trust and cooperation. As a starting point, some examples of Telegram chatbots are particularly interesting as they open up channels for online-to-offline interaction aimed at civil action. Secondly, given the recent proliferation of digital applications designed for meditation, combating procrastination and other mindfulness techniques, it is attempted to envisage the feasibility of online digital platforms that would lead to direct interpersonal exchanges facilitated by the use of game mechanisms and creative/artistic techniques.

LYDIA BARRETT

Sacred Songs from the Kitchen: Women's Participatory Performance and Bricolage Percussion in Trans-Saharan Perspective
University of California, Santa Cruz
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

Music is a powerful tool for examining evidence of women’s cultural exchange in the Sahara desert, where national and cultural borders remain especially flexible, but where the afterlife of colonization renders women largely disempowered from overt expressions of border resistance. In this multi-sited project, Lydia examines similarities in organology and musical form which connect participatory women’s song traditions. This project focuses on communities which have historically considered the Sahara not a wall, but a space of life and movement, though the imposition of national borders forces them to reconstitute their identities within the borders of these imagined communities. By exploring musical and organological connections among women’s participatory song traditions at the northern and southern gates of the Sahara, this project complicates the political and national borders which use this expansive territory to erroneously cleave the African continent.

MARIA BELÉN LÓPEZ

Environment and Care: Perceptions and Practices of Rural Migrant Women from the Reconquista Basin of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM)
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

This anthropological research examines how rural migrant women living in marginalized and ecologically degraded residential neighborhoods of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, Argentina, perceive and engage with environmental issues in their daily lives, and how these definitions relate to political and cultural borders in the urban context. The study focuses on migrant women's experiences towards environmental concerns and explores the borders that influence their experiences, including gender, socio-economic, cultural and migratory relations. The research uses ethnographic techniques and is part of a participatory action research project with feminist horizons that took place between 2019-2022.

MARIA BOWLING

Borderlands as the Nation's Margins: Decolonization, State-building and Language in Angola’s Forgotten South (1950s-2010s)
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

In theory, the southern borderlands of Angola separate Portuguese-speaking Angolans and English-speaking Namibians and Zambians. However, reality proves it to be a site of complex transnational and multilingual identity formation, as well as continued (re)negotiation of colonial legacies and post-independence nation- and state-building projects. The project follows the evolution of language use, policy and attitudes in Angola’s southernmost provinces: Namibe, Cunene, Cuando Cubango and Huíla; between the 1950s and the 2010s. It investigates the role language has played in the lives of border populations and makes a case for using language as a heuristic tool, through which we understand the socio-historical underpinnings of present-day marginalization.

SEBASTIAN CARLOTTI

Mobility or Immobility? The Complex Implementation of Legal Migration Channels between Europe and West Africa
Università di Pisa & University of Amsterdam
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

The unequal distribution of mobility rights has become a major concern for scholars and policymakers. In the last two decades, the EU actively promoted the creation of new legal mobility channels with West African countries by stimulating circular migration for study, employment, and training. Defined by the idea of a triple-win scenario, frameworks in Europe like the Global Approach to Migration encourage temporary migration channels for study and employment. In this direction the EU increasingly focused on West Africa as strategic area of origin to implement new migration channels. This project aims to investigate Member State’s visa policy to examine whether a security-oriented agenda has prevailed and if highly selective access systems dominate the relationship between Europe and West Africa.

NABIL FERDAOUSSI

Border Hauntology: An Ethnography of Border Death and Disappearance at the EU-Moroccan Borders
University of Cape Town
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

This dissertation project examines the entangled forms of (dis)engagement with border death and disappearance by different state and non-state actors at the EU-Moroccan borders. It explores ways in which the EU’s anti-migration policies externalize not only border control, but also death and disappearance to countries of the Global South. The EU mobilizes an armor of logistical, financial and political infrastructures to extend its externalization strategies to the realm of the dead and the disappeared. The net result is a total disengagement with death and disappearance as structural technologies of border deterrence. In light and shadow of this disengagement, this study examines counter-forensic practices of families and activists to search and identify missing and dead migrants at the EU-Moroccan borders. It explores residual forms of solidarity and activism led by families and borderland activists alike to establish truth and justice about the dead and the disappeared, while also mobilize shame against deadly regimes of border control. Conceptually grounded in spectrality, my project seeks to extend the spatiality and temporality dyads hitherto dominating scholarship in migration and border studies.

YUN JUNG KIM

Bases and Borders of the Pacific: Migrant Labor, Medical Humanitarianism, and Asian Refugees
University of Minnesota
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

Guam/Guåhan and Busan both have a long history of hosting military bases and migrant workers throughout the 20th century due to their proximity to the ocean. This dissertation project examines the medical screenings coded in the US immigration laws and the hygiene and environmental controls practiced by the local governments and military units. Through oral history interviews and archival evidence that centers the experiences of Vietnam War evacuees and local residents, this project explores how the US and South Korean governments sought to limit the permeability of their borders and expand their claims over territories and subjects.

TIMOR LANDHERR

Border Politics Beyond Limits: Spatializing Externalization and the Production of Transit States
Queen Mary University of London
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

Timor Landherr studies border externalization as a spatial intervention that absorbs contingent migrant flows into transit “migration” states. Drawing from international political sociology and historical-geographic materialism, his project argues that these states become the managers of a new mobility-fixity arrangement that negotiates the economic interests of labor mobility and the defensive desires of ethnonationalism. Building on qualitative interview data with humanitarian, securitarian, and migrant actors that produce the transit space, the thesis studies this spatial intervention by focusing on two similar yet distinct cases: Turkey, which has become a key site of externalization since the “EU-Turkey Agreement” of 2016; and Mexico, where a series of externalization policies since 2014 resulted in a significant reshaping of transit migration.

TESS MEGGINSON

Re-Imagining Europe’s Borders: The Mapping of Czechoslovakia, 1915–1920
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship

This Ph.D. project researches spatial history in 20th century Europe, looking at border changes after the First World War. It also examines the process of map production from the First World War through the Paris Peace Conference, focusing on the creation of the Czechoslovak border with Germany and Austria, as well as the mapmakers from those states who worked to delimit the borders. This dissertation argues that the end of the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference marked a paradigm shift in the importance of maps and mapmakers in the creation of European borders, and that maps became essential to the legitimization of mental and physical borders in this period.

NICHOLAS NYACHEGA

Seeing like Borderlanders”: Border(lands) Controls, Mobilities, Contestations and Everyday Life in
North-Eastern Zimbabwe, c.1890s to the Present
University of Minnesota
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

This dissertation critically uses oral and family histories, contemporary ethnographic materials, and archival sources to underscore indigenous systems of map-making, territorial controls, and mobilities which defied narrow colonial representations of space, borderlands, and state controls. I adopt a “history from bellow” approach that emphasizes indigenous mobilities, local ideas of space, and power contestations across the Zimbabwe-Mozambique borders. I define and approach borderlands as contested spaces and places of contradictions, to foreground how and why states’ efforts to “maintain law and order” across the unfortified colonial border were meaningfully undermined and tested by borderlanders such as chiefs, farmers, traders, and healers whose daily needs included access to farms, trading centers, and shrines required them to regularly cross the border.

GABRIELLE ROBINSON-TILLENBURG

Border Crossing: Island Artists Defying US Military Occupation
University of Maryland College Park
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

In 2001, the US Navy ceased forty years of weapons testing on Vieques, a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico, and shuttered what had been the largest US military base in the world. Artists protested through creative work and on the front lines during the occupation. Contemporary artists have continued to produce an imperative record of this experience, its aftereffects, and the afterlives of the base’s borders. This dissertation comprises a transnational study of islands where similar impacts have been felt and articulated by artists. Photograph, video, and performance-based artworks from Hawai'i, Guam, Cuba, the Philipines, and Okinawa are considered through cross-border analysis, joined together in a greater resounding critique of US occupation’s local and global impacts.

LEON JONAS SCHLÜTER

Visions of the Border: Political Theory and the Displacement of Border Struggles
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Bucerius Start Up Scholarship

Interweaving political theory with historical research, the dissertation project investigates how a particular way of seeing the border became hegemonic within political thought. This is a political vision that identifies borders with the territorial demarcation lines of nation-states, treats them as a necessary fact of social life, and in doing so, brackets the violent histories of border formation. The project traces the implications of such an understanding for political theorizing, both in terms of the questions that are being asked and the kind of answers that are deemed acceptable. It argues that the resulting vision is as much a way of seeing the border as of unseeing it, a ‘form of ignorance’ that contributes to the displacement of border struggles.

LOUISE THATCHER

Spaces of Bordering along the Shipping Routes between Bremen and Australia across the late 19th and early 20th Centuries
Universität Potsdam
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

This dissertation project explores the history of immigration control practices between the turn of the twentieth century and the interwar period. Louise Thatcher examines the techniques that officials used to sort desirable migrants from the undesirable, identify and track individual travellers, detect, and deter clandestine mobility and channel the mobile labour of maritime workers. This project also looks at how these everyday practices were contested by people who continued to cross borders. It follows in the path of work that historicises the modern border regime, tracing its emergence in a global history grounded in colonialism and the construction of racial boundaries.

SAMUEL TSEGAI

Mapping Ethiopia: Sovereignty, Territoriality and Nationalism, 1855-1941
Queen's University
Bucerius Dissertation Completion Scholarship

This dissertation project engages with the historical question of how Ethiopia, as a recognizable, bounded, and fixed geo-body, with its discrete ethno-geographic homelands, was cartographically created between the 19th and 20th century. It examines the transition from the conception of Ethiopia as a floating geographic signifier denoting unbounded space to a cartographically girded and relatively ontologically stable geo-body in the crucible of European scramble for Africa and Ethiopia’s increasing articulation to the global capitalist order. This project aims at examining the representational and discursive strategies, mapping tools, and spatial conceptions which facilitated and manifested in this transition.

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