Student Assistants:
Marja Vormann (BICC),
Magdalena Fackler (CHREN),
NN (DIE),
NN (IMIS)
About the project
Forced Migration and Refugee Studies: Networking and Knowledge Transfer (FFVT)
Forced migration and refugee studies deal with the background,
conditions, forms, infrastructures and consequences as well as
the legal dimensions, protection regimes, gaps in protection
and political control options of spatial movements induced by
violence, conflicts, social conditions and environmental disasters.
While forced migration studies have been pursued internationally
since the 1980s at the very latest, academia in Germany only
began to focus more on global contexts of forced migration as a
consequence of the significant increase in the number of
refugees in 2014/15.
Increasingly, already established fields of research in Germany (such as migration studies, peace and conflict research) developed approaches to a new line of studies on refugees and forced migration that resulted in remarkable findings within just a few years.
However, this field of research is characterised by little exchange and a largely missing institutional foundation (institute, professorships, degree programmes, etc.). This is why refugee and forced migration studies in Germany have not yet been able to fully develop their potential as a field of research.
The overall aim of the cooperation project is to link the academic activities in this research field and thus to establish excellent interdisciplinary research on refugees and forced migration with international appeal in Germany.
The four institutes that work together in this FFVT-project aim to interlink more closely existing research activities in Germany by cooperating with other German research facilities.
The objectives of these networking activities are to
initiate new collaborative research,
establish attractive courses of study,
achieve international visibility and
promote the dialogue between academia, practitioners, the media and politics.
The cooperation project is based on five, closely linked, modules:
Module 1 – Networking within the research fields
To establish an interdisciplinary network of refugee and forced
migration research in Germany, taking into account all relevant
research fields and actors as well as the promotion of excellent
research and innovative reflective thinking is the main task.
Module 2 – Teaching and promotion of young researchers
Since refugee and forced migration studies can not yet be taken
on as a field of study at German universities, it is necessary
to develop the foundations for (translocal) Master’s programmes
in refugee and forced migration studies. Furthermore, it is
planned to enhance cooperation between different graduate
programmes and to establish a research training group. The
aim is to create structures that facilitate the education of
students and doctoral candidates in coordinated programmes at
different locations and that foster the international exchange
among junior academics.
Module 3 – Internationalisation
Research conducted in Germany is not adequately linked to
international refugee and forced migration studies. The
project FFVT will facilitate sustainable networking and
increase the visibility of German research in the international
academic landscape. To this end, it will initiate cooperation
with international researchers, thus establishing sustainable
partnerships with strategically relevant institutions in the
medium term.
Module 4 – Information infrastructure
An integral element of networking is the establishment of an
online portal through which information on researchers,
research projects and research outcomes, on transfer activities
as well as on methodological and theoretical perspectives can
be shared. A database that collects information on projects and
researchers also offers the opportunity to analyse specific
developments in the research field.
Module 5 –
Research in refugee and forced migration studies is concerned
with matters of outstanding foreign-, domestic and
social-political relevance. This is why the dialogue with and
the knowledge transfer into politics, practice and the public
are of pivotal importance. The project will, among other things,
identify the need for dialogue and transfer as well as prepare
research findings for policymakers, experts, the media and the
public and pass them on to the respective target group.
Informationen about the previous project
Please also visit the pages of the forerunner project
"Flucht: Forschung und Transfer".
In addition to a review of the current state of forced migration refugee and
refugee studies in Germany, you will find further interesting
State-of-Research Papers (SoR) and Policy Briefs (PB) on specific
sub-themes of refugee and forced migration research.
(Website and publications in German only).
