Brussels, March 26 – The MORE research project, coordinated by the University of Barcelona and funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Program, will present its preliminary results at the European Parliament.
MORE explores return and readmission policies, analysing the logic that legitimises them as a tool for migration governance and their consequences on the rights and lives of migrants. The study highlights how this approach has progressively eroded rights guarantees, restricted regularisation pathways, and reinforced increasingly punitive and restrictive control mechanisms, without providing structural solutions for mobility management or effectively reducing irregularity.
The project conducts committed research from a critical and genealogical approach to the analysis of return policies, examining their legacies, contexts, and motivations. At the same time, it adopts a predominantly ethnographic approach to explore the everyday meanings of these policies, revealing both the experiences, perceptions, and practices of the agents implementing them and the experiences of the individuals subject to their control, who face the constant threat of expulsion and detention.
This invitation to the European Parliament reaffirms the relevance of the research at a decisive moment, as the Return Directive is once again in the spotlight due to the proposed reform, which not only consolidates but also expands its restrictive approach.
The presentation at the Parliament will be given by Social Anthropology Professor Olga Jubany, principal investigator and international coordinator of the project.
