Migration
News
From Victims to Workers: The Politics of Deservingness in Europe’s Support for Displaced Ukrainians
Europe’s ‘extraordinary solidarity’ with displaced Ukrainians in 2022 – rooted in images of vulnerability and cultural proximity – is increasingly being replaced by a politics of conditionality. Across Czechia, Germany, and Poland, benefits are shrinking, and public debates frame refugees less as victims of war than as workers expected to prove their worth through employment. This shift reveals how European governments, spurred on by far-right politicians who question displaced people’s right to stay, are reshaping solidarity around labour market deservingness, with troubling implications for the future of refugee protection in Europe.
10.09.2025
Interviews
Envisioning Stability: Peace, Gender, and Climate in Nepal
In an insightful conversation with our Assistant Editor Vatsala Tyagi, Dr. Prakash Bhattarai, Executive Director of the Centre for Social Change (CSC), Kathmandu and a leading researcher in peace and conflict studies, shared his perspectives on sustaining peace, addressing migration, and tackling climate change in Nepal and South Asia.
1.07.2025
News
Beyond the Statistics: Against the Concept of Bare Life in Cinema and Graphic Novels
The journeys of African migrants striving to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea have dominated the headlines for more than a decade. On one hand, the nationalist and right-wing populists, such as Meloni’s government, have exploited this tragedy to create anxieties about immigration, while humanitarian groups have blamed economic failures and human rights abuses as key factors resulting in the deaths of thousands. In this heated debate between populists and human rights activists, cultural products aim to humanize the migrant experience. Matteo Garrone’s movie Io Capitano (2023) as well as Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin’s graphic novel Illegal (2017), illustrated by Giovanni Rigano, tackle the tragedy of young teenagers seeking a better future in Europe, particularly in Italy, by riskily crossing both the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Dea. One of the primary aims of both cultural products is to go beyond the mere statistics. When interviewed by E. Nina Rothe in [...]
21.11.2024
Racialized Labor — Eastern Europeans on The Western Market
In this conversation with RevDem editor Kasia Krzyzanowska, Aleksandra Lewicki discusses her recently published article “East-west inequalities and the ambiguous racialization of ‘Eastern Europeans’”. Lewicki elaborates on the racialized imaginary of the Western European discourses on migration, talks about how the stereotype of hard-working Eastern Europeans negatively impacts their labor conditions, and ponders on the influence of neoliberal policies on the precarization of labor.
19.04.2023
How to Best Manage the Unfolding Crisis of Everything: Gaia Vince on Key Implications of the Climate Crisis
In conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Gaia Vince – author of the new book "Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval" – sketches the transformations climate change and the accompanying rise in global average temperature are likely to bring in the coming decades; reflects on the most promising innovations when it comes to mitigating temperature rise and moving towards a circular economy; discusses ways to plan for lawful and safe mass migration at a time when large parts of the Earth are becoming uninhabitable; and addresses the key political questions of how to set the right priorities at the global level and how to act to enforce them.
6.10.2022
