Doctoral Lecture: “Missing, Manipulated, or Meaningful? What Data (Doesn’t) Tell Us in Mediterranean Migration Politics”

Date: 4 Dec 2025
Hour: 14:30–16:00
Place: UPF Ciutadella Campus, Room 24.112 & Online
Speaker: Prof. Gerasimos Tsourapas (University of Birmingham)
Chair: Stefania Panebianco (UNICT)

Synopsis

Across the Mediterranean and the wider Global South, migration researchers have long encountered the challenges of limited, inconsistent, or politically mediated data. From Egypt and the Maghreb to Türkiye and the Levant, the governance of migration often unfolds in environments where population figures are inflated, registration systems suspended, or migration categories blurred. These constraints are commonly treated as technical problems to be solved or bypassed.

This lecture proposes a different approach: that the ambiguities, absences, and calibrations of migration data are themselves politically productive and analytically significant. Focusing on the Mediterranean as a regional field of practice, Prof. Tsourapas explores how states construct migration statistics to shape international perceptions, institutional recognition, and material outcomes. Rather than treating data limitations as obstacles, these dynamics can reveal underlying structures of power, conditionality, and governance.

For early-career researchers, the lecture offers a framework for engaging critically with the knowledge infrastructures that underpin migration studies in settings where data serves both evidentiary and performative functions. In this light, the Mediterranean should not be approached merely as a zone of transit or containment, but as a region that exposes how knowledge about human mobility is constructed, circulated, and contested.

Bio

Gerasimos Tsourapas is 125th Anniversary Chair and Professor of International Relations at the University of Birmingham, and 2025–26 Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute. He is Editor-in-Chief of Migration Studies (Oxford University Press) and leads the ERC-funded project Migration Diplomacy in World Politics (MOBSANCT), examining the intersections of human mobility and international politics. His research spans the international relations of the Middle East and the broader Global South, with a focus on migrants, refugees, and diasporas. He has developed the concepts of migration diplomacy, migration interdependence, and refugee rentierism to theorise the political economy and foreign policy dimensions of cross-border mobility.

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