Research and Partnerships
The EUI is negotiating new partnerships with African stakeholders, to foster joint research and mobility among students, academic and administrative staff. In June 2020, these negotiations led to the signature of the Partnership Agreement with the Uganda Council on Foreign Relations.
Since its creation in 2012, the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) has worked on several research projects on Africa, with support from or in collaboration with African partners, European Institutions, international organisations and national governments and universities. The MPC is one of three partner institutions of the Mercator Dialogue on Asylum and Migration (MEDAM), funded by the Mercator Foundation and led by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. MEDAM conducts new research on how to reform asylum and migration policies in Europe, it includes extensive engagement with European and African policymakers and stakeholders throughout the research process and its team includes European and African researchers and policy experts.
The MPC’s Observatory of Public Attitudes to Migration (OPAM) works in partnership with the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) to provide global analyses of the connection between the salience of migration issues, public attitudes and electoral behaviour across the Euro-Mediterranean region.
Participants at the Migration Policy Centre's Annual Conference 2019
An important event at the EUI called the FSR Global Forum took place in March 2019, where several topic sessions were focused on Africa. The School signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Indian Ocean Commission to work with energy sector personnel from the islands of Mauritius, Madagascar, Comoros and the Seychelles, that started to be effective as of November 2017.
In 2018 FSR Global was involved in the High-Level Platform for Sustainable Energy Investments (SEI Platform) , which was launched at the African Investment Forum in Johannesburg, serving as of the Task Force Energy under the Africa-Europe Alliance for Sustainable Investments and Jobs. The platform addresses the call from the AU-EU Summit of 2017 for greater efforts to establish the right business framework to attract responsible and sustainable investments and to accelerate the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. Watch the video.
Ignacio Perez-Arriaga, Part-time Professor and Director of Energy Training at the Florence School of Regulation is co-leader of the research team for the Global Commission to End Energy Poverty, launched by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The MEDirections Programme has worked in several research projects focusing on North Africa. It is currently conducting research on EU and the growing activism of rising powers in North Africa in the framework of the Horizon2020-funded EU-LISTCO project. In particular research on Libya has been ongoing since 2014. It has focused on processes of mediation and reconciliation, the political economy of conflicts, political and security dynamics in Libya, as well as their impact on Libya’s neighborhood (essentially Tunisia and the Sahel). The Programme also hosts a small mentorship programme for junior Libyan analysts based in Libya. Funding for these projects has come from EU-funded projects such as MENARA (Horizon2020), the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), the German Federal Foreign Office.
MEDirections has also started working with Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA) on a new joint research agenda focusing on transnational governance in East Africa. It will study governance transformations in the region, with a specific focus on migration/mobility and climate change/resource management. It will produce policy-relevant knowledge to policy-makers in Europe and Italy, and partners in the region will involve research institutions in Ethiopia and Kenya.
Within the Global Governance Programme we are currently hosting PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins), a research project which aims to learn from the ways that pastoralists respond to uncertainty, applying such ‘lessons from the margins’ to global challenges. The aim is to foster a conversation with other policy domains where uncertainty is pervasive, including financial and commodity systems, critical infrastructure management, disease outbreak response, migration policy, climate change and conflict and security governance. The project focuses on six case studies in different continents, including three cases in Africa, Quinghai, China (Sichuan and Quinghai) and Sardinia, Italy.The project is funded by an ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grant co-hosted with the ESRC STEPS Centre at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Forthcoming fieldwork activities in Africa are ongoing with local researchers from Kenya, Ethiopia, Tunisia and local research agencies such as the University of Sousse in Tunisia and the Department of Social Sciences at the Technical University of Mombasa.
The Radicalisation, Secularism and the Governance of Religion (GREASE) project within the Global Governance Programme has developed a set of socio-political indicators for assessing how religious diversity is governed in different parts of the world. The State-Religion Governance indicators for Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and others can be found here. Additionally, in collaboration with Ryerson and Bristol universities, GREASE is currently in the process of organizing a webinar to reflect on the 10 year anniversary of the Arab Spring, that will take place on March 25th (more details to follow soon), and will be accompanied by a series of blogs posted on openDemocracy's Global Extremes.
Another important area of work within the Global Governance Programme on Africa is linked to Jean Monnet Fellow Nick Dines’ research on diversity politics, international migration and urban development in African cities, with a particular focus on Rabat, Morocco and Cape Town, South Africa. This research has been conducted as part of the ‘Global Cities in Asia and Africa: Urban Configurations of (Trans)nationalism’ in the Cultural Pluralism Research Area of the Global Governance Programme.
The African agenda of the Global Economics research area in the same programme covers a broad set of topics: international trade, trade policy reform, trade in services, regional integration, economic development, and Sustainable Development Goals. The team in Global Economics works on independent research tracks as well as on policy-oriented projects commissioned by leading international organisations including the International Trade Centre, UNCTAD, and the World Trade Organisation as well as institutions in the African continent such as the African Economic Research Consortium. Current flagship projects include the study of trade and infrastructural reforms in Ethiopia and the works on the Africa-EU trade and economic relationships.
Page last updated on 10 February 2021