Best Graduate Paper 2017

The winner of the EISA´s Best Graduate Paper 2017 award is Nele Kortendiek  for her paper “How professional knowledge generates governing practices across the boundaries of global migration organizations”.

The abstract of the paper:

Global migration governance differs from other policy fields. Since no single intergovernmental organisation is tasked to govern migration at the global level and state-led multilateralism is often blocked, global migration governance happens at the intersection of a plethora of public and private international organisations. This paper argues that in order to understand how these global migration organisations work, they should not be conceived of as separate organisational entities but as a community of practice – linked through professional practice and knowledge. Since formal forms of governance are extensively limited in the area of migration, global border and migration professionals, affiliated with different organisations such as UNHCR, Frontex, EASO, IOM and humanitarian NGOs, step in and manage migration through their everyday professional routines and practices. Professional knowledge and competence hence determines how global migration organisations respond to global challenges and emergencies to an important extent. This paper suggests that we should therefore study professional training, learning and capacity-building rather than organisational mandates in order to understand how global migration organisations work. It draws on qualitative data from the European external border in Greece as well as from the training and capacity-building units in international migration organisations.