GAPs - Decentring the Study of Migrant Returns and Readmission Policies in Europe and beyond

Return migration is central to asylum governance at the national and the EU level. Despite its political importance, there is no agreed definition of what ‘return’ means. 

The GAPs consortium will address this by proposing governance and cooperation models for return migration that promote partnerships and uphold the dignity of the migration experience.

We focus on return gaps in three return systems between EU countries and countries of transit or origin, spanning the wider Middle East (including Afghanistan), Africa (northern and western), and eastern Europe. The project treats ‘gaps’ as a heuristic that allows us to zoom in on three dimensions: 1) governance, 2) international cooperation, 3) migrants’ agency.

The three-year project will produce a wide range of outputs, including country dossiers and comparative reports, an interactive data repository on return, a return cooperation index, policy briefs and workshops, stakeholder expert panels, a digital storytelling and video series, a massive open online course (MOOC), open access scholarly publications, and an anthology book of life stories. The project will have  two workshop in Brussels and a final conference targeting policymakers and key stakeholders.