Background

While migration has accompanied human history since its very beginnings posing the same problems for thousands of years, contemporary movement of people from one place in the world to another has reached scale and speed turning it into a critical issue of global dimension posing challenges not only challenges to humanitarian law and policy but also constitutional politics, geo-strategy, and regional order. To grasp the urgency of the issue it is noteworthy that, according to the 2022 World Migration Report of the International Organization for Migration the number of migrants in 2020 stood at estimated 281 million, with 4,400 migrant deaths worldwide in 2021. This does not include possibly up to 4 million refugees from the Ukraine the European Union expects to leave country because of the war with Russia.

Besides wars, natural disasters linked to climate change destroy the basis of existence of entire populations and force people to leave their countries not to seek a better life, but to secure their bare survival. This puts the global society, regional frameworks and governments under increasing stress to provide adequate responses.

At the same time, the issue of migration affects core questions of the human rights concept and the values by which we might define us as a society. This development is accompanied on the regional and national level by a growing politicization of the debate about how to tackle migration and related challenges. Especially in Europe and America anti-migrant sentiments frequently shape or even dominate political discourses and campaigns, polarizing societies, and deciding outcomes of national elections. In the current presidential campaign in France migration has become a core issue with far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour of the Reconquête party making the “great replacement” – the claim that the native populations of France and other Western countries are being overrun by non-white immigrants – his main campaign issue.

Against this background, CPG’s Migration Academy addresses migration as complex and multifacetedphenomenon from a wide range of legal, political, anthropological, social, and economic perspectives and approaches, imparting a sense of the overwhelming, but underrated magnitude of change and challenge which comes along with the migration crisis.