Founded in 1992, the Sussex European Institute (SEI) is an interdisciplinary research hub that brings together scholars and experts whose work engages with Europe’s political institutions, political economy, and its historical legacies.
SEI facilitates a dialogue between scholars based in various departments across and beyond the University of Sussex, including disciplines such as Anthropology, History, International Relations, Law, Sociology, Politics, Law, and Economics. Our community of scholars also works closely with practitioners, policy makers and the voluntary sector.
Europe is often seen as a realm - or even cradle of - democracy, freedom, and rights. Other times, European integration is viewed as in perpetual crisis. In our understanding, Europe not only takes shape through such projected self-images, but also constitutes itself through European states’ and institutions’ historic and contemporary actions – which have crafted internal power asymmetries and produced global inequalities.
Upcoming Events
Autumn 2024
- Wednesday 2nd October 2024, Ipek Demir, Methodolgical Nationalism or Methodological Amnesia?
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Title: Methodolgical Nationalism or Methodological Amnesia?
Date: Wednesday 2nd Oct 2024
Time: 3-5pm
Venue: Moot Room in Freeman (G06)
Speaker: Ipek Demir Professor of Diaspora Studies, University of Leeds
Abstract: Migration studies has rightly challenged methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), but less so what I have called ‘methodological amnesia’ (Demir 2024). Dominant understandings of migration tend to ignore the proper wider context of many migrations we see today. The decolonial/race turn in migration and diaspora studies has begun to challenge this. My talk will examine this conceptually, positing methodological nationalism vis a vis methodological amnesia, but also empirically by taking diasporas from the Middle East as a case study. I will unpack the spatial and temporal boundaries and consequences of methodological amnesia, including via ‘coloniality of migration’.
- Wednesday 06 November 2024, Prof Karolina Follis, Thinking Europe from the Eastern Border
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Title: Thinking Europe from the Eastern Border
Date: Wednesday 06 Nov 2024
Time: 2-4pm
Venue: Moot Room in Freeman (G06)
Speaker: Professor Karolina Follis
Abstract: Between 2004 and 2013 eleven postsocialist countries joined the European Union. EU enlargement was described at the time the rightful ‘return to Europe’ of countries that remained in the Soviet orbit after World War 2. But as the breaking down of old divides was celebrated, new barriers were being constructed. One of the dimensions of EU enlargement was the shift of the EU’s eastern external border from the boundaries of the ‘old’ EU to the eastern frontiers of the Baltic and Central Eastern European states. Western European states invested in the infrastructure and training of border guards in accession states, representing these interventions as technicalities of the implementation of the ‘area of freedom, security and justice’. New members were keen to demonstrate that they were ready to police the outer perimeter of the EU. The transformation of their border services and practices of control initially went under the radar, with attention focused on the southern maritime borders of Europe and irregular arrivals from North Africa and the Middle East. However, as EU politics and policies of border control changed following the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ of 2015, the trajectories of people on the move changed as well, shifting to new land routes, resulting in new large-scale arrivals on eastern EU borders. This talk reflects on this shift, examining how the racial and postcolonial dimension of the ‘migrant crisis’ plays out in the Eastern European region. Based on research over two decades on the European border regime in the East, I reassess EU enlargement from the perspective of the transformation of the eastern borders. I argue that for the societies of ‘new’ member states, the benefits of enlargement came bundled with the legacy of colonial empires, which they must grapple with as they respond to people arriving at their borders from the Global South.Bio: Professor Karolina Follis teaches in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University in the UK. Her research interests center on the dynamic intersections of border regimes, surveillance technologies and the ideas and practices of human rights. - Wednesday, Date TBC, Migratization- The Ascription of Migration as Performative Practice
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Migratization - The Ascription of Migration as Performative Practice
Alyosxa Tudor (Reader in Gender Studies, SOAS)
Date: Wednesday, (new date to be confirmed)
Venue: tbc
Abstract: To make sense of the overlapping racist, anti-immigration and anti-EU rhetoric that marks the pre- and post-Brexit moment in the UK, in my talk I suggest differentiating between racism/racialization and migratism/migratization in critical scholarship. The conceptualizations foreground a postcolonial understanding of racism and make it possible to analyze both migration-based discrimination and discrimination based on perceived migration in violence and hate crimes connected to the Brexit referendum. I first coined ‘migratization’ in the book chapter ‘Racism and Migratism: The Relevance of a Critical Differentiation’ (Tudor 2010): “Migration and migrants are not at the center of this article, but the power relations that construct migration. I call the process of construction ‘migratization’; the power relation that constructs ‘migratization’ is ‘migratism’’ (Tudor 2010, 396). Racialization and migratization are not symmetrical or oppositional but have a complicated interdependent relationship, are bound to each other and play a crucial role in organizing the Western nation state. To illustrate my arguments that intend to challenge and extend existing scholarship, I discuss exemplary snapshots from news articles, blog posts and social media sources. I suggest conceptualizing migratization (the ascription of migration) as performative practice (Tudor 2018) that repeatedly re-stages a sending-off to an elsewhere and that works in close interaction with racialization. I argue that the proposed differentiation can help us to disentangle the layers of ascriptions of migration and racialization we witness in the examples, without downplaying the role of white supremacy on one hand or ignoring the migration-based discrimination against East Europeans on the other.
- View our previous events