Migration researcher Zeynep Şahin Mencütek from the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC) presented her current research on the dimension of international cooperation in connection with the “forced” return of unauthorized migrants and refugees to the Fellows and other interested guests of the Academy at Coffee & Cake.

This is part of the Horizon Europe project “Decentring the Study of Migrant Returns and Readmission Policies in Europe and Beyond” (GAPs), which she is leading together with colleagues from the University of Glasgow (Gerasimos Tsourapas and Samet Apaydın). The group is in the process of developing the research design, including the selection of case pairs and the definition of macro-conditions (e.g. incentives, costs, norms, symbolic gains, bargaining process, type of regime), their measurement and piloting. The research will also include in-depth case analysis at different levels.

Zeynep presented the typology of “return governance” developed by the research group and distinguished the formal policy instruments from the informal implementation practices in each of the three types she identified. She also explained the configuration of the explanatory factors that were applied to the various case studies using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QLA). In the ensuing discussion, there was a lively debate about the conditions that lead migrants’ destination countries to seek readmission/return agreements. Another topic was the conditions that explain the cooperation or lack of cooperation of destination countries in the return process.

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