Olivier Crevoisier, Jean-Thomas Arrighi and Sean Mueller

A European Desert? The Territorial Economics and Politics of Emigration in Crisis Regions

In public debates, Europe is widely portrayed as a land of immigration. Rich, democratic and old, or so the argument goes, it has no alternative but to protect its borders against a poor and oppressed youth from the Global South. However, shifting the perspective from the continental or national levels to the regional one, below the state, defies such simplistic narratives and reveals a contradictory trend. That is, a dual movement of some people clustering in economically dynamic regions and cities (‘oases’) and others escaping economically ailing ones (‘deserts’).

Economic crises exacerbate this trend, unleashing a vicious circle of demographic decline, economic downturn, and political contestation across vast stretches of the continent. Yet, with a few exceptions in the fields of demography and geography, the uneven spatial distribution of migration and mobility flows has fallen outside the academic radar. Zooming in on six ‘deserts’ in three European states in the wake of the post- Oil Shock (1973-83) and Global Financial Crisis (2008-18), our project explores the policy responses to and political consequences of protracted emigration in crisis regions.

At the crossroads of comparative politics, political economy, and contemporary history, we shed light on the complex interactions between population movements, territorial inequalities, center-periphery relations, as well as multilevel policy-making.

Intermediate Scientific Poster 2024 (PDF)