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The diplomacy of immigration: migration issues in transnational relations

Final Activity Report Summary - DIPLOMIG (The diplomacy of immigration: migration issues in transnational relations)

Virginie Guiraudon was the holder of a Marie Curie chair of excellence between 2005 and 2006. Her training and research activities broadly focussed on international migration to Europe, the policies that sought to regulate this phenomenon and the politics surrounding 'what comes next' regarding the integration of migrants and their descendants.

The chair holder served as professor at the department of social and political sciences as well as at the Robert Schuman centre for advanced studies, an interdisciplinary policy-oriented centre. Her doctoral seminars and other activities attracted doctoral and postdoctoral researchers from all the European University Institute (EUI) departments including law, history and economics. In fact, two of the main training activities that she organised reached well beyond the EUI, namely the 2006 ten-day intensive summer school on the sociology and politics of immigration in Europe and the web research tool 'http://www.migres.eu' that provided resources for students and scholars of migration.

Besides these two highlights of her training programme, the chair holder taught four doctoral seminars, coordinated an interdisciplinary research working group, organised six workshops and international conferences and presented in various conferences and workshops. By the time of the project completion she was co-supervising eight doctoral theses in sociology, political science and law and was serving as jury member or second reader to a number of other PhDs. The evaluation of her courses and feedback from her supervisees underlined that she was an enthusiastic teacher, available to discuss with students so as to give them constructive comments.

Her research activities focussed on the development of European immigration policies and their integration in the diplomacy of the European Union and Member States. Notably, she sought to explain the outcomes of European Union and United States of America cooperation after 11 September in the areas of justice, liberty and security and to develop a theoretical framework to analyse the outsourcing of immigration control to third states in order to prevent unwanted migrants to reach the European Union territory. She published several pieces and, during her tenure, organised a number of related activities on this theme, such as a conference in March 2005 on the emergence of a European immigration policy and one in November 2006 on its external dimensions, a workshop on the principal agent model that was useful to understand the delegation of certain policy prerogatives to non-state actors and a workshop on the Prüm Convention that sought, inter alia, to fight illegal migration yet in an intergovernmental framework outside the European Union. Two of her doctoral seminars were directly related to this research area, namely 'Immigration, citizenship and the State' and 'Borders and identities'. While holding the Marie Curie chair, she co-edited a special issue of a major field journal, West European Politics, on immigration policy and the politics of control and published several peer-reviewed articles and book contributions related to the subject.

Another aspect of the activities of the chair holder was relevant to the multi-level study and analysis of integration and anti-discrimination policies. She conducted research on article 13 of the Treaty of the European Union and subsequent legislation, as well as their impact at member state level. While at the EUI, she co-organised a conference on anti-discrimination law and practice whose proceedings were to be published as a double special issue of a journal. She also taught a doctoral seminar on 'The politics of difference' and organised a workshop on the study of political mobilisation of migrants, a key aspect of the integration study, while she also published on this topic. Overall, she published a book, 4 peer-reviewed articles, 10 book chapters, a report and 5 other non-peer reviewed pieces.