The Invention of Safe Countries

Visiting Fellows Panel Trinity Term 2026 Dr Frowin Rausis The Invention of Safe Countries Abstract: Since the 1960s, the notion of safety has become a central tool of asylum governance in European states. Decisions to process asylum applications through accelerated procedures, attempts to transfer asylum seekers to countries with which they have a personal connection, and proposals to outsource the processing, protection, or return of people to countries with which no such link exists are all based on different types of (un)safe country policies. Drawing on archival research, expert interviews, and policy documents, this book retraces the emergence and spread of (un)safe country policies through the lens of policy diffusion theory. Based on global datasets and historical research, it first maps the spread of constitutional asylum provisions, national asylum frameworks, and safe country policies. In doing so, it highlights both the liberal expansion of asylum frameworks and the subsequent illiberal legislative shift that contributed to the diffusion of (un)safe country policies. In a second part, the book examines case studies from Denmark, Switzerland, and South Africa to trace the motives underpinning the emergence of safe country policies. The data show that (un)safe country policies have not only spread widely across states in the Global North but have also become increasingly popular in states of the Global South. This development risks creating new patterns of injustice between states in regions that host the majority of people seeking protection.

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The UK Regulatory Framework Post-Brexit: 'Law Unbound'

Abstract. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of the UK’s post-Brexit regulatory framework and does so against the conceptual frame of the ‘Law Unbo

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“Ser Venezolano es comer Pabellon” To be Venezuelan is to eat Pabellon: Food Systems Collapse and Flavor Displacement

Visiting Fellows Panel Trinity Term 2026 Natasha Bernstein Bunzl “Ser Venezolano es comer Pabellon” To be Venezuelan is to eat Pabellon: Food Systems Collapse and Flavor Displacement Abstract: This talk proposes the idea of flavor displacement to describe the experience of losing access to the taste of home and the consequent disruption of domestic practices. Working with 40 in-depth interviews with Venezuelans living just over the border in Cucuta, Colombia, Natasha explores the way this population has processed the collapse of their national food system and subsequent experience of migration. She explains how expressions of pride in Venezuelan food and culture come to symbolize a connection to a way of being that exists outside of the economic challenges, political conflict and societal dissolution interlocutors associate with the current affairs of their homeland. In spite of their descriptions of a relatively abundant food system, most express a potent disdain for the flavor of food in Colombia. This disdain offers a platform on which interlocutors rehearse an old script of Venezuelan superiority which was forged during their own country’s period of ascendancy and dominance. This paper proposes the idea of “flavor displacement” to describe how Venezuelan migrants living in Colombia articulate and describe the experience of losing access to longed for flavors due to food systems collapse and forced migration. This theory builds on migration scholars who point out that though forced migration and displacement are often used interchangeably, they are distinct phenomena. The displacement theorized in this paper starts before the participants in this study ever left Venezuela and instead began when their home became unrecognizable or unlivable, when the promises of Venezuela’s food system failed to deliver the abundance and wealth the population had been promised and left much of the population unable to access the foods they wanted and needed.

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Strategic Vulnerability? Gendered Migrant Activism in Spain's Exceptional Regularisation

Visiting Fellows Panel Trinity Term 2026 Lauren Beyhaut Strategic Vulnerability? Gendered Migrant Activism in Spain's Exceptional Regularisation Abstract: What does 'vulnerability' mean to the migrant women it is used to describe? The concept is increasingly used in EU migration governance, yet migrants themselves are rarely studied as political interpreters of it. The project followed grassroots collectives of migrant women campaigning for the 2026 Spanish exceptional regularisation process, where they introduced the language of vulnerability and tried to rewrite it on their own terms. This same language, however, raised debates about the reproduction of moral, gendered and racial hierarchies of deservingness, both within the process and within migrant communities.

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Mapping Resistance: Smartphones, In/Visibility, and Migrant Agency along the Balkan Route

Visiting Fellows Panel Trinity Term 2026 Fatmanur Delioglu Mapping Resistance: Smartphones, In/Visibility, and Migrant Agency along the Balkan Route Abstract: Over the past decade, smartphones have become indispensable tools in migrants’ journeys across Europe’s borders. This presentation examines how smartphone use shapes migrants’ experiences of visibility and invisibility along the Balkan Route, focusing on North Macedonia as a key yet understudied transit space. Rather than treating migrants as either passive victims or security threats—a dichotomy that often underpins European border governance—I explore how migrants use digital technologies to exercise agency within increasingly restrictive border regimes. The analysis draws on three months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in North Macedonia, including interviews with migrants residing in transit and reception centers, participant observation through volunteer work with a migrant support NGO, and follow-up online interviews with individuals who crossed the Balkan Route at different moments over the last decade. Bringing these experiences into conversation with critical border studies, I conceptualise in/visibility not as a fixed condition but as a contested terrain through which power is exercised and negotiated. The findings show that smartphones function simultaneously as tools of invisibility and visibility. Migrants use digital networks, messaging applications, and social media platforms to identify safer routes, evade surveillance, and navigate uncertainty. At the same time, smartphones enable strategic forms of visibility by allowing migrants to document abuses, mobilise public attention, and challenge the invisibility of border violence. The presentation also traces how information-sharing practices have evolved from closed, trust-based networks to highly visible digital platforms such as TikTok, fundamentally reshaping knowledge production, smuggling economies, and border-crossing strategies. By foregrounding migrants’ own digital practices, this research contributes to debates on borders, migration, and technology, demonstrating how smartphones have become crucial tools through which migrants negotiate mobility, survival, and resistance along the Balkan Route.

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When “Safe” Stops Meaning Safe: Language, Protection and Contemporary Asylum Governance

Visiting Fellows Panel Trinity Term 2026 Professor Michelle Pace When “Safe” Stops Meaning Safe: Language, Protection and Contemporary Asylum Governance Abstract: Building on her recent monograph Unwelcome to Denmark (2025) and her broader research on the politics of language in migration governance, Michelle Pace's presentation examines how key concepts associated with refugee protection are being transformed in contemporary Europe. During her Visiting Fellowship at the Refugee Studies Centre, she explored how political language functions as a technology of governance and how seemingly humanitarian concepts can acquire new meanings as asylum systems undergo reform and externalization. In this presentation Michelle focuses on the growing prominence of “safety” within contemporary asylum governance. Terms such as “safe third country” are often treated as technical legal categories, yet they also perform important political work. Drawing on research on asylum externalization, migration governance and critical rhetorical geographies, she examines how the designation of countries as “safe” helps legitimize the relocation of protection responsibilities beyond state borders. She argues that safety may be undergoing a transformation similar to concepts such as temporary protection, integration and sustainability: retaining a positive normative appeal while becoming increasingly detached from its original substantive content. Historically associated with protection from persecution, access to asylum procedures and rights guarantees, safety is increasingly articulated through the language of migration management, deterrence and responsibility-sharing. By tracing these shifts, the presentation contributes to broader debates about how changing understandings of protection are reshaping refugee governance, international protection norms and the future of durable solutions in Europe.

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Translocal livelihoods under pressure - Climate, mobility and the erosion of adaptive infrastructures in West Africa (Burkina Fa

Visiting Fellows Panel Trinity Term 2026 Cécile Damas Artigaud Translocal livelihoods under pressure - Climate, mobility and the erosion of adaptive infrastructures in West Africa (Burkina Faso/Côte d’Ivoire/Ghana) Abstract: This paper provides a historical analysis of mobility patterns from Burkina Faso to Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, focusing on how these patterns have continuously reconfigured in the context of multiple crises. While the climate mobility turn has reframed migration as an integral component of climate-dependent livelihood systems, little attention has been devoted to the infrastructures that sustain mobility as an adaptive practice. This paper addresses this gap by examining the legal, institutional, and ecological conditions that enable people to inhabit spaces simultaneously, namely the 1979 ECOWAS Free Movement Protocol, the complementarities between Sahelian subsistence agriculture and the coastal cash-crop economy, and open-land tenure systems in host areas. It then asks, "What happens when these conditions begin to fail?" Drawing on 56 life-history interviews conducted between 2024 and 2026 in northern Côte d'Ivoire (Korhogo, Ouangolodougou) and central Ghana (Techiman, Nsuta), the paper adopts a translocal approach, tracing three historical sequences that show how, over time, these infrastructures have eroded due to agrarian neoliberal interventions, the ivoirité crisis, climate change, the spread of jihadist insurgencies, and the recent ECOWAS-AES rupture. These findings raise broader questions about protection frameworks that remain organised around categories rather than the regional infrastructures that have made mobility-based adaptation possible.

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Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom – book talk

Speaker: Emeritus Professor Peter Gatrell (University of Manchester) RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity Term, 10 June 2026 Series convened by Associate Professor Catherine Briddick and Dr Uttara Shahani About this talk Peter Gatrell discusses the approach that he and fellow authors adopted in their book, Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom. After briefly highlighting some of their key findings, including a justification for the concept of 'refugeedom', Profesor Gatrell outlines his ongoing research which addresses UNHCR’s engagement with refugees in and beyond Europe in the years 1951 to 1975. This research draws on the extensive confidential individual case files held by UNHCR Records and Archives, Geneva. Like his contribution to the book, this current project analyses the content and tone of letters that refugees wrote to UNHCR from different parts of the world and the responses they elicited. Professor Gatrell discusses the expectation that the refugees vouchsafe intimate details of their lives as a condition of being 'recognised' by UNHCR and thus eligible for its assistance and protection. But recognition was not a one-way process: refugees reflected on their relationship with its officials and sought to hold them to account. Gatrell's approach is contextualised; deliberately reflexive; and interdisciplinary, being informed by classic and ongoing scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. About the speaker Peter Gatrell is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Manchester where he taught, inter alia, Russian economic and social history, the cultural history of modern war, and refugee history. His latest book, co-authored with Katarzyna Nowak, Lauren Banko and Anindita Ghoshal, is Refugee Voices in Modern Global History (OUP, 2025). He is currently working on a book provisionally titled “Appointment in Geneva: Refugees’ Encounters with UNHCR, 1951-1975”, some of which is anticipated in articles in History Workshop Journal (2021; 2026 forthcoming, the latter co-authored with Giuliano Fleri). Some of his previous books include: The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (Penguin, 2019); The Making of the Modern Refugee (OUP, 2013); Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956-1963 (CUP, 2011); and A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during the First World War (Indiana UP, 1999). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He now lives in Bradford-on-Avon.

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The politics of safety in Europe’s asylum regime

Assumptions of ‘safety’ are central to the EU’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum. Much of the debate focuses on whether countries designated as ‘safe’ are truly safe. Visiting Fellows Michelle Pace and Frowin Rausis argue that while this is an important question, it risks overlooking a more fundamental one: what political work does the label ‘safe’ perform in contemporary asylum governance?

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