30.10.2018

Institutskolloquium: The state as a source of transnational social protection: foreign aid following the European migrant crisis’

Amanda Shriwise & Cecilia Bruzelius on Wednesday, 31. Oktober 2018, 16:00 –18:00 h c.t., Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Raum 124

In the wake of the recent European ‘migrant crisis’, many foreign aid donors have spent increasing amounts of Official Development Assistance (ODA) within their own borders on the social protection of refugees and asylum seekers. This remarkable geographic shift in ODA allocation raises critical questions about the welfare state as a transnational actor and source of social protection. Drawing on theory and research on transnational social protection and the spatial features of the welfare state, this paper examines changes in ODA in response to the European migrant ‘crisis’ through 2015. The paper argues that the protective state becomes a transnational actor when ODA ‘jumps tracks’ (Sassen, 2006) from the foreign to the domestic arena, leading to changes in the boundaries of national welfare provision and to new transnational assemblages of social protection. To explore the implications of these shifts, and in particular their impact on welfare institutions, and the paper examines how these ODA increases have been channeled in four European countries: Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Italy.

Amanda Shriwise is a postdoctoral researcher with the SOCIUM at the University of Bremen working on an ERC-funded project on colonial legacies and social protection with Dr. Carina Schmitt. She was previously a research fellow with the Transnational Studies Initiative at Harvard University, where her research focused on global social protection.

Cecilia Bruzelius is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Political Science at Tübingen University in the Comparative Public Policy research unit. She holds a PhD in Social Policy and research focuses on European integration, migration and social policy.