Jean-Pierre Cassarino

Part-time Professor, Director of the Return migration and Development Platform (RDP)

jpcassarino@eui.eu
Tel. [+39] 055 4685 819
Fax [+39] 055 4685 770
Office: Convento, SD061 3rd floor

Secretary: Aurélie Boursier

Languages: Arabic, French, English, Italian, Spanish

Biographical note

Jean-Pierre Cassarino took his Master’s Degree in Political Science (concentration: Middle Eastern studies) at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Aix-en-Provence. He obtained his Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from the EUI (1998).

He is currently part-time professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS ) of the European University Institute, where he directs the Return migration and Development Platform (RDP), including the MIREM project and the CRIS project . He is also research associate at the Tunis-based Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC ). Previously, he was senior programme officer at the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organisation (ITC-ILO , Turin).

Research interests

His current research interests focus on patterns of international cooperation and state sovereignty as applied to the "management" of international migration and asylum.

He is most interested in analysing policy design and implementation as well as how policy transfers are administered through processes of bilateral and multilateral consultations mobilizing countries of destination, of transit and of origin.

Together with this top-down approach, he has tried to combine a bottom-up analysis based on interviews with policy-makers, migration stakeholders and migrants themselves. He also carried out field surveys explaining whether and how state-led policy reforms, law-enforcement development, and patterns of international cooperation impact on migrants' fundamental rights and existing realities in their broadest sense.

This combination has often structured his approach to policy analyses and state-to-state cooperation while highlighting the gaps that may exist between reciprocal policy commitments in international relations and effective actions, as well as between intentions and contingencies.

Selection of publications

On notions and theory:

Cassarino, Jean-Pierre “Ritorno”, in Graziano Battistella (ed.), Migrazioni: Dizionario, Edizioni San Paolo, Torino, 2010, pp. 919-933.
Cassarino, Jean-Pierre “Theorising Return Migration: The Conceptual Approach to Return Migrants Revisited ” in Steven Vertovec, ed., Migration: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, Vol. II, London: Routledge, 2009. (Originally published in International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 6(2), 2004: 253-279).
Cassarino, Jean-Pierre, ed., Conditions of Modern Return Migrants , International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 10(2), 2008: 95-239.
Cassarino, Jean-Pierre “The Theories of Ethnic Entrepreneurship, and the Alternative Arguments of Social Action and Network Analysis ”, Florence: EUI SPS Working Papers 1997/01.

On policies:

Cassarino, Jean-Pierre “Reversing the Hierarchy of Priorities in Euro-Mediterranean Relations”, in Joel Peters (ed.), The European Union and the Arab Spring: Promoting Democracy and Human Rights in the Middle East , Lexington Books, New York, 2012, pp. 1-16.
Cassarino, Jean-Pierre “Resilient Bilateralism in the Cooperation on Readmission”, in Marise Cremona, Jörg Monar and Sara Poli (eds.), The External Dimension of the European Union's Area of Freedom, Security and Justice , Peter Lang, Brussels, 2011, pp. 191-208.
Cassarino, Jean-Pierre, Readmission Policy in the European Union , Directorate General for Internal Policies, Policy Department C: Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs, Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, Brussels, European Parliament, 2010.
Cassarino, Jean-Pierre, ed., Unbalanced Reciprocities: Cooperation on Readmission in the Euro-Mediterranean Area . Washington, D.C.: Middle-East Institute, 2010.
Cassarino, Jean-Pierre “Return and re-admission in states' migration policies”, Forced Migration Review 32, April 2009.
Cassarino, Jean-Pierre "The Co-operation on Readmission and Enforced Return in the African-European Context", in Marie Trémolières, ed., Regional Challenges of West African Migration: African and European perspectives, Paris: OECD, 2009, pp. 49-72.
Cassarino, Jean-Pierre “Informalising Readmission Agreements in the EU Neighbourhood ”, The International Spectator 42 (2), 2007: 179-196.

On field studies:

Cassarino, Jean-Pierre, ed., Return Migrants to the Maghreb Countries: Reintegration and Development Challenges , MIREM Global Report, Florence: RSCAS, European University Institute, 2008.
Cassarino, Jean-Pierre “Entender los vínculos entre migración de retorno y desarrollo ”, in Gemma Pinyol (ed.), La dimensión exterior de las políticas de inmigración en la Unión Europea, Barcelona: CIDOB, 2008, pp. 63-87.
Guarneri, Antonella & Cassarino, Jean-Pierre “Quando la decisione individuale di tornare nel proprio paese fa la differenza ”, NeoDemos: Popolazione, società e politiche, July 2007.