Biography
Gerasimos Tsourapas is a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (2025–26) and 125th Anniversary Chair & Professor of International Relations at the University of Birmingham. At the Migration Policy Centre, his research examines how governments use migration not only as a practical policy tool but also as a symbolic resource: shaping international image, signalling alliances or rivalries, and performing state power through migration diplomacy.
He is Editor-in-Chief of Migration Studies (Oxford University Press) and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant Migration Diplomacy in International Politics (MIGDIPLO, 2022–27), which investigates how states deploy restrictions and incentives on cross-border mobility as instruments of foreign policy. He served as elected Chair of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, & Migration Studies Section of the International Studies Association. His books include The Politics of Migration in Modern Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Migration Diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa (Manchester University Press, 2021).
Previously, he served as Professor of International Relations at the University of Glasgow, and has held visiting positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, the American University in Cairo, and Koç University. He has contributed expertise to a wide range of institutions, including the European Commission on policy approaches to migration diplomacy (2024) and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on transnational repression and the rule of law (2023). His commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, and the Greek daily Ta Nea.