CALL FOR PAPERS
The conference will take place from 6 July to 7 July 2026, with the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin as the venue.
Deadline for abstracts: 10 April 2026
A large body of research in the social and political sciences has examined the mobility to and
within the EU of non-EU citizens coming from the Global South, often arriving as “irregular
migrants” or “asylum seekers”. This substantial scholarship has highlighted the growing
complexity of migration and asylum policies, ranging from border regimes and the Dublin
system to the everyday administrative practices through which they are implemented. This workshop aims to bring together contributions from history and the social and po-
litical sciences, focusing either on present-day or historical mobility regimes in Europe. In or-
der to foster comparison and theoretical exchange across disciplines, we invite in particular
case studies that:
1) Focus on populations legally categorized and/or socially labeled as “non-European”.
We do not understand this term as a fixed geographical category but as populations con-
structed as such through legal, administrative, cultural, and social processes in specific histori-
cal and contemporary contexts.
2) Have a strong intra-European dimension. Studying movements within Europe allows us
to move beyond a narrow focus on border control and exclusion and instead examine pro-
cesses of membership, differentiation, and negotiation within European spaces. It shifts atten-
tion from entry at the border to the governance of movement inside the European space.
3) Engage with the meso-level, loosely defined as a focus on intermediate arenas and struc-
tures through which mobility regimes are produced and negotiated.
4) Mobilize the notion of mobility regimes. Despite the heterogeneous uses of the term in
the literature, we understand mobility regimes as sets of formal and informal rules, norms, and
practices that shape who can move, under what conditions, and with what consequences—and
are shaped and negotiated by a large number of actors, including those who move (Rass and
Wolff 2018; Oltmer 2025).
Participants are invited to explore a set of guiding, non-exclusive questions:
- How have European states and institutions categorized populations as “non-Euro-
pean”? How have these classifications evolved over time, and how have they shaped mobility opportunities and constraints? - What institutional, administrative, and bureaucratic mechanisms structure mobility regimes within Europe? To what extent do these mechanisms produce comparable mobility outcomes across different historical and empirical contexts?
- What roles do meso-level actors—such as administrations, NGOs, educational institutions, and regional or municipal authorities—play in shaping, implementing, or mediating mobility regimes?
- How do historical and contemporary mobility regimes compare? What continuities, transformations, or ruptures can be observed across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?
- How is the European space shaped and transformed by the mobility of populations cat-
egorized as non-European? How does such mobility challenge, reproduce, or redefine
boundaries of belonging within Europe? - How can we conceptualize and operationalize the notion of “mobility regime”? What are the analytical advantages and limitations of this concept?
Please send a 250-word abstract accompanied by a 150-word biographical note to Giulia
Scalettaris (giulia [dot] scalettaris [at] univ-lille [dot] fr) by 10 April 2026.
The complete call for papers can be found here.
Organisation:
Giulia Scalettaris (Centre Marc Bloch Berlin / University of Lille)
Lucie Lamy (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam)
The workshop takes place within the framework of the AMORE project. AMORE (Afghan Europeans. The Invention of a Mobility Regime) is a research project funded by the French National Agency for Research that aims to analyze the internal functioning and the evolution of the Afghan mobility regime within the EU.