Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Colonies & Colonization, emigration & immigration, Gender studies, Globalization & Development, Human rights, International Law, International Relations, Philosophy, Political Institutions

Regions:

Africa, Europe

Summary of research interests and expertise:

Profile

Dr Christina Oelgemöller is a Fellow of the RLI, participating in the Working Group on Feminist Theory, Refugees and Displacement. Christina is Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University where she is the Doctoral Programme Lead for International Relations, Politics and History (IRPH) as well as being a member of the Loughborough University for Students and Academics at Risk Group (LUSARG). She is associated with Loughborough’s Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs. She has a multi-disciplinary background, cumulating in a DPhil (University of Sussex, UK). Before returning to academia, Christina worked in migration and refugee policy and practice including at the UNHCR Branch office in Berlin and an INGO in Geneva with consultative status to UN agencies.

Summary of research interests

Christina’s research scrutinises the international governance of mobile people as it is negotiated and implemented internationally and more specifically between Africa and Europe. She is interested in how coexistence is negotiated at points of connection, difference and diversity. The research is discourse theoretical, integrating empirical work and driven by a critical attitude against patriarchal and racialised justifications of hierarchy establishment and maintenance.  Her current work investigates the history of the relationship between the governance of forced migration and development thinking and practice since the 1970s, with a particular focus on the emergence of discourses of ‘(forced) migration and development’. Christina is author of The Evolution of Migration Management in the Global North (Routledge, 2017), and her work has been published in a wide range of academic journals, among them:  Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Int. J. Migration and Border Studies, Millennium: Journal of international studies, Law and Critique, Interventions and Geopolitics. Christina supervises research work across a range of historic, discourse theoretical and practice-based approaches used to understand international mobility, the debilitating effects of discrimination and racialisation as well as civic activism responding to a range of practices of violence.

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
31-Dec-2024	Aide au développement et lutte contre la migration par l’entrepreneuriat. Anatomie d’un modèle d’action publique en Gambie et au Sénégal. Journal articles Based on interviews with development and migration governance actors and a documentary analysis, this article examines the evolution of entrepreneurship in the context of programmes funded by the European Union to reduce migration in Senegal and the Gambia, through job creation and vocational training. Through initiatives like the EU’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, entrepreneurship is presented as an alternative to migration to stabilize local populations. This narrative has imposed itself on development aid institutions as a new “traveler model”, even though entrepreneurship and migration can hardly be set against each other since they are both associated with risk-taking. This article looks at how “developers”—hitherto on the margins of migration management—have (or have not) appropriated this discourse and implemented it in their activities.
24-Apr-2024	‘Beneficiary-ownership’? Redemptive Knowledge and Policy-Making on migration in West Africa Journal articles West Africa sees major activity in the development of migration policies, promoted by international organisations, funded by governments mainly of Europe. Policy development is couched in terms of ‘beneficiary-ownership’, stressing the participation of West African governments. This is problematised as playing down the influence of European and international organisations. We argue that policy-making on migration in West Africa is better understood through the lens of ‘subjectional diplomacy’, a one-sided yet complex relationship between national and international actors that consolidates particular discourses of the ‘problem’ of migration. We find interview and documentary evidence from NGOs and governmental actors across Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea as well as ECOWAS Headquarters and international governmental organisations in Abuja that the logic of beneficiary-ownership is not symmetric. We show how the IOM holds ‘redemptive’ knowledge that turns the civilising mission of old into a professionalising mission embedding neo-colonial relations.
22-Nov-2023	How freedom of movement infringes on the right to leave Journal articles This article contributes to discussions that problematize the recent proliferation of soft law instruments in relation to international migration. The Global Compact for Migration has placed soft norm instruments more formally on the agenda of plausible tools with which to regulate people's movement. I am contributing to these discussions by engaging with the question of how the amalgamation of soft and hard law contributes to and impacts on legal effects, using a postcolonial feminist lens. I do so by focusing on the interaction between freedom of movement and the right to leave in the ECOWAS area, drawing on original research material collected mainly in Abuja, Nigeria, but also in Senegal, Guinea, and The Gambia. It is argued that freedom of movement provisions, as they are promoted by the ECOWAS and largely funded by inter-governmental organizations and European donor countries, end up infringing the right to leave. In a first step, existing norms at international, continental, regional, and national level are discussed to prepare the ground to answer the question how such infringing is done. From this step, I conclude that the triple layers of legal instruments, political instruments, and programming are impairing the intent of the right to leave in the way that a politico-legal landscape is constructed within which programs operationalize freedom of movement. The next step then looks at freedom of movement programming at regional, national, and local levels by asking about the subjectivities that are created—for example the “potential migrant”; by shedding light on practices of resistance—for example in how national governments use diplomacy to disengage; and by highlighting how “home patch” talk renders those potential migrants leaving not just implausible but suspect. It is found that, in the legal and political context of West Africa, soft norms thrive. The GCM constitutes an unhelpful list of random contradictory approaches that orient ideas, policy initiatives, programs, and ultimately people, toward being fixed in place, rather than being able to leave and to move freely should they want to. This happens in-country when people have not yet begun to move.
30-Jun-2017	The Evolution of Migration Management in the Global North Monographs The Evolution of Migration Management in the Global North explores how the radically violent migration management paradigm that dominates today's international migration has been assembled. Drawing on unique archive material, it shows how a forum of diplomats and civil servants constructed the 'transit country' as a site in which the illegal migrant became the main actor to be vilified. Policy-makers are divided between those who oppose migration, and those who support it, so long as it is properly managed. Any other position is generally seen at best as utopian.  This volume advances a new way of conceptualizing policy-making in international migration at the regional and international level. Introducing the concept of 'informal plurilateralism', Oelgemöller explores how the Inter-Governmental Consultations on Asylum, Migration and Refugees (IGC), created the hegemonic paradigm of 'Migration Management', thus enabling today's specific ways the 'migrant' has their juridico-political status violently denied. This raises crucial questions about what democracy is and about the way in which the value of a human being is established, granted or denied.  Inviting debate in a field which is often under-theorized, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Migration Studies and International Relations Theory.

Additional Publications

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