Trust, integration and institutional encounters in Europe

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

Join this event featuring two presentations that tackle how institutional contexts and lived experiences shape diverse pathways of belonging and participation in Europe.

This session of the Migration Working Group will explore how immigrants and their descendants build, negotiate, and experience trust in institutions and integration processes across European societies. The first paper to be presented, by Gabriella Agyei and Asya Pisarevskaya, examines the determinants of institutional trust among African second-generation individuals in the Netherlands. Adopting a transnational lens, it traces how perceptions of political instability in countries of origin intersect with everyday encounters in Dutch institutions, shedding light on the experiential foundations of trust and distrust. The second paper by Abd Alkader Alhag Fteah will compare socio-economic integration experiences of Middle Eastern and North African immigrants and refugees in Spain and Germany. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews and using Ager and Strang's integration model as a reference framework, the paper argues that labor and social integration are deeply intertwined.

The Migration Working Group (MWG) is a researcher-led research group, whose aim is to foster exchange on the latest, cutting-edge migration research and give the opportunity to early career scholars and PhD researchers to present their research.