This project has received funding via the CIVICA Research call 2024, which is funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the CIVICA Research project. Additionally, CIVICA research projects receive financing from national funding sources and partners' own resources.
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to the European Union's second significant influx of refugees and forced migrants. As of March 2024, over 4.2 million non-EU citizens who fled Ukraine are under temporary protection status, with their legal status in the EU extended until March 2025. Managing these and similar forced migration inflows to the equal benefit of both hosting and home societies as well as to the benefit of refugees and forced migrants themselves belongs to the main policy issues on the EU agenda and is specifically relevant for EU efforts to support Ukraine’s recovery. Addressing these issues requires innovative approaches to integration, beyond traditional labour market employment.
Our project explores refugee entrepreneurship as a means to integrate refugees and forced migrants into host countries, while maintaining their ties to home countries and empowering their agency in economic and civic domains. Refugee entrepreneurs can benefit from the structural politico-economic conditions in their host societies and be incubated within refugee and migrant civil society networks. In turn, they can strengthen diasporic and migrant civil societies and contribute to the development and connectivity of both their host and home countries. Refugee entrepreneurs are both beneficiaries of civil society organizations and catalysts for local innovation, civic mobilization, and bridges between host and home communities.
We aim to answer the central question: Under what conditions does refugee entrepreneurship result in grassroots economic innovation, civic empowerment, and increased transnational connectivity between host and home societies? Our analysis of the conditions will focus on three levels:
- Micro-level individual factors;
- Meso-level influences of local diasporic and migrant networks as well as local NGOs;
- Macro-level structural, institutional, and politico-economic contexts of host countries on the level of national and local authorities.
We will examine the individual and combined explanatory powers as well as interconnected causal mechanisms of different factors that promote modernizing, mobilizing, and bridging effects of refugee entrepreneurship. Our research will extend beyond the traditional scope of (forced) migration studies on socio-economic and socio-ethnic domains of integration, offering valuable insights on innovative, civic, and transnational potentials of refugee entrepreneurship for migration policymaking at the EU and national levels.