Refugees and other migrants continue to arrive in new places all across the world. Their reception, long-term prospects and lives in their new homes continues to be one of the most pressing socio-political issues of our times. What about the migrant in all of this? Surprisingly, we know little about their political responses. Migration research has thus far under-conceptualised and under-researched political migrant agency, especially from a Global South perspective and in interaction with states and non-state actors. PolMig aims to redress this gap and combine it with a commitment to tackle global inequalities in knowledge production.

Focusing on Africa, PolMig considers how migrants define political agency, enabled or disabled by politicisation processes of belonging in postcolonial state contexts. Drawing on this research, PolMig advances an Afrocentric understanding of political migrant agency with global relevance. The research will consider the effects of different migrant trajectories (refugee or other migrant; transregional or intraregional; in country of destination, transit or return to origin) on the self-defined understanding of political agency, along intersectional principles of gender, class and race. PolMig uses pioneering research methods to do so including migrant agency diaries and theatre workshops, while bridging the literature on migrant agency and migration states. At the heart of the project lies the contribution of an Afrocentric perspective to these fields through a process of collaboration and exchange, centring the continent empirically and epistemologically.

Within this framework, PolMig aims to answer the following research questions

1. How do migrants define political agency and in what ways do specific conceptualisations change over time?
2. How do politicisation processes of belonging enable or disable political migrant agency?
3. In which ways does the (constructed) type of state (origin, transit, and destination) and ‘spaces’ of migration trajectory influence political migrant agency?
4. How do different conceptualisations of migrant political agency inform the theorization of an Afrocentric perspective on the political lives of migrants?