Bio
Peo Hansen is James Anderson Adjunct Professor of Migration and Security Studies at SAIS Europe
Professor of Political Science, Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University
Peo Hansen is Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University. He has been senior fellow at New York University’s Remarque Institute; visiting professor at the Max Planck Sciences Po Center in Paris (2018); and Simone Veil Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI, in Florence.
Peo Hansen’s research examines the EU’s migration and asylum policy and the related issues of citizenship, migrant integration and identity. He takes a special interest in the macroeconomics and political economy of migration in the EU, including the debate concerning the fiscal impact of migration.
Hansen’s research expertise also includes a strong focus on the history of the European Union and the significance of colonialism for the birth of postwar European integration. As he has revealed in his research together with Stefan Jonsson, the scale of the original EU in the 1950s was not delimited by the European land mass but corresponded to the geopolitical and colonial constellation that at the time was called Eurafrica. Hansen’s research also attends to the present EU’s “geopolitical turn,” tracing its historical antecedents to the pre-World War I, interwar and postwar debates on the geopolitics of European unity.
His books include
The Politics of European Citizenship: Deepening Contradictions in Social Rights and Migration Policy (co-authored with Sandy B. Hager);
Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (co-authored with Stefan Jonsson) and
A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy. His work has appeared in journals such as
History of the Present, European Political Science, Globalizations, Journal of Common Market Studies, Mediterranean Quarterly, European Societies, European Journal of Social Theory, Interventions, and
Journal of Historical Sociology. In 2016 he was commissioned by the OECD to write a working paper on the EU’s external labour migration policy (OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, 2016).
Courses
- Migration and European Integration
Migration constitutes a hugely important political issue and policy challenge for the European Union. As such, it is the subject of many and various political, social, economic and cultural conflicts in the EU. The challenge, however, is not reducible to an internal affair, confined to the geographical and political space of the EU and its member states. Rather, it also has important external and global ramifications. EU migration governance jockeys for global influence and pursues migration as leverage in both bilateral and multilateral agreements with countries, groups of countries and organizations around the world. The Mediterranean region, Turkey and the African Union are cases in point, as is the EU’s policy efforts within the area of migration and development towards the Global South.
This course seeks to understand these internal and external migration dynamics and logics, both from a contemporary and historical perspective. To do so, we set out from a complex conceptualization of “EU migration policy”, one that bridges the commonly invoked analytical and empirical separation between the external and internal dimensions of EU migration policy. As such, we scrutinize both the external dimension of EU migration policy – as in labor migration from non-EU countries, asylum policy, and policy to prevent “illegal” or irregular immigration – on the one side, and the internal dimension – as in labor migration, or “free movement”, within the EU area and the politics of migrant integration – on the other. By conceiving of these dimensions as analytically inseparable, this, what we may term, integrated approach allows us to get a more complete picture of the causes and consequences of EU migration policy. Equally important, it also enables us to come to grips with the dynamics of the political and economic driving forces that are at work in the formation and execution of oftentimes contradictory migration policies.
