Project description
The right to give rights to sustain human dignity in migration
Across Europe, undocumented migrants face growing barriers to even the most basic rights. Governments have increasingly delegated border control to ordinary institutions (schools, hospitals, and welfare offices), forcing professionals to navigate the tension between care and control. Yet many of these workers have collectively resisted, refusing to act as agents of enforcement and, in doing so, helping to protect the dignity and rights of undocumented people. With this in mind, the ERC-funded GIVE RIGHTS project examines this vital but overlooked dynamic. Drawing on philosophy, social theory, and comparative fieldwork in Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK, it explores how migrants’ claims and welfare professionals’ ethical choices interact. Its aim is to rethink human rights as something relational, lived, and defended in everyday practice and through collective struggles.
Objective
Undocumented migrants’ rights are under pressure in Europe today and migration control is increasingly deputized across different societal actors. Several decades ago, Hannah Arendt pointed out that universalistic understandings of human rights have little to offer noncitizens. Inspired by her, researchers have suggested that the foundation for undocumented migrants’ human rights instead can be found in the right-claims and contestations of migrants themselves. However, little attention has been paid to the role of welfare professionals in these processes.
Across Europe, welfare professionals have resisted proposals that they should have a duty to report undocumented migrants to the police. This has been pivotal for protecting migrants’ rights. Consequently, GIVE RIGHTS will develop new conceptual tools for an interdisciplinary understanding of undocumented migrants’ rights as rooted in an interplay between migrants’ rights-claims and welfare professionals’ attitudes, practices, and collective contestations – highlighting the underexamined relational character of rights. The project investigates the politics of undocumented migrants’ rights as an interplay between different actors with converging interests: Undocumented migrants want access to their human rights – in Arendt’s words they want to have a “right to have rights” – and welfare professionals do not want to act as extended border guards but have a “right to GIVE RIGHTS”.
GIVE RIGHTS will compare Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK where the protection of undocumented migrants’ access to rights are, or have recently been, undergoing intense negotiations. Through its novel theoretical framework and by innovatively combining survey data with policy mapping, qualitative media analysis, participant observation, focus groups and expert interviews, GIVE RIGHTS provides a new research agenda for theoretical and political debates on the future of human rights in Europe.
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Keywords
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
205 06 MALMOE
Sweden
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