Postcolonial African migration to the West as a desire for recognition

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• MPC: Migration Policy Centre

Join this MPC seminar to discuss how desire, recognition, and historical legacies shape choices today and to consider what this means for policy, culture, and belonging.

Postcolonial African migration to the West is more than a search for safety or opportunity. This is the core message of Belachew Gebrewold's 2024 book (Postcolonial African Migration to the West. A Mimetic Desire for Being). In this seminar, the author will argue that migration also springs from a mimetic desire for being: aspiring to recognition by imitating the West—its lifestyles, beauty ideals, and soft and hard power—against the long shadow of slavery, colonialism, and ongoing dominance.

Even as the model erects physical and digital fences, migrants strive to cross them; the tighter the fences, the stronger the impulse to scale them. Reading migration through this relational lens helps explain why movement may persist even if poverty, conflict, or climate pressures recede.

Belachew Gebrewold is a professor of International Relations and the Head of Department and Studies of Social Work and Social Policy at MCI, Innsbruck, Austria. His main research areas are European-African relations, African politics and conflicts, and migration. He was also a member of the steering committee for the preparation of the UN Global Compact for Regular, Safe and Orderly Migration preparatory process in 2017, and a Member of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa Informal Advisory Group on Migration, 2017. Moreover, he was a member of the Migration Council of the Austrian Ministry of Internal Affairs from 2014 until 2017.