Research

Richard Black's work focuses on the study of international migration, including forced migration and post-conflict return, and related social, economic and environmental transformations. Together with colleagues at Sussex and elsewhere, he has recently been involved in developing new approaches to the understanding of the consequences of climate change for migration patterns globally, resulting in contributions to Nature in 2011, and Nature Climate Change in 2012.

He is also actively researching and writing on the development of public policy on migration and poverty, especially in poor countries, and on immigrant integration in the UK, particularly relating to recent East European and African migrations. Work on migration and poverty is linked to the Migrating out of Poverty research consortium, which is led from Sussex, and also to an EU-funded project on Migration from Africa to Europe (MAFE), led by INED, Paris from 2009-12.

Richard's latest book, A Continent Moving West?, focused on East European migration since accession, and was published in 2010.

Previous research funded by UK Home Office, ESRC and the European Commission on return to the Balkans, and by DFID on return to West Africa sought to develop a framework to understand how return migration affects different stakeholders in 'sending' and 'receiving' countries, and to promote the sustainability of this return in terms of poverty reduction and post-conflict reconstruction.

Richard has also worked on post-war return to Mozambique and its impact specifically on the natural resource sector, comparing present day policy with colonial forestry interventions, and edited a collection on the Millennium Development Goals which appeared in early 2004.