This projected is funded within the CIVICA Research Hubs call.
Migration is no longer a temporary shock; it is a structural force reshaping Europe’s security, innovation capacity, and democratic resilience. The arrival of high-skilled Ukrainian forced migrants has exposed the limits of top‑down governance and the inadequacy of low-skill assimilationist integration models — and revealed an untapped asset: transconnectivity — the ability to keep people, firms, ideas, and institutions productively connected across borders, even in wartime and geopolitical uncertainties. For the European Union (EU), there is an urgent need and unexplored potential to turn migration from a vulnerability into a strategic European asset — for host societies and especially for Ukraine, a democratic nation on the accession pathway to the EU and currently facing the challenges of Russia’s full-scale war.
Current EU migration policies over‑prioritise one‑way “integration” and under‑invest in maintaining resilient ties to home countries. That makes integration feel like a zero‑sum game: host countries gain, while Ukraine suffers human‑capital drain and the weakening of innovation ecosystems crucial to resilience, recovery and EU accession. Without a new model, Europe risks lost competitiveness, fragmented governance, and a missed opportunity to align migration with foreign, security, and enlargement strategies.
The transconnectivity approach, a new paradigm for integration governance, reframes integration as a two-way, multi-level process rather than a one-way path into host societies. It recognises that multilevel migration governance must move beyond low-skill, assimilationist models toward dynamic exchange across bureaucratic, corporate, and societal dimensions. This shift is essential to prevent integration from becoming a zero-sum game, where host countries gain while home countries — like Ukraine — suffer devastating human-capital losses. Transconnectivity strengthens both host and home societies through ongoing collaboration, mutual adaptation, and shared innovation. It builds on positive experiences with decentralised, collaborative, and participatory approaches in migration and integration governance, demonstrating that bottom-up, networked solutions can deliver resilience and inclusion more effectively than top-down models.
The EU can turn migration from a vulnerability into a strategic European asset—reinforcing democratic resilience, accelerating Ukraine’s recovery, and enriching European societies through mutual learning and shared innovation. Our research hub responds to these challenges by:
- Mapping the individual and institutional migration and integration governance-related expertise among the project partners;
- Collecting and systematising their rich knowledge, strongly rooted in project and scientific activity and empirical research results, but at the same time scattered and fragmentary;
- Consolidating and mobilising their existing resources.
Our hub will combine methodological review of data landscape, policy design, participatory formats and real‑world lessons learned pilots to reframe migration as two‑way value creation between the EU and home counties (e.g., Ukraine). The hub will function as Europe’s switchboard for bureaucratic, corporate, and societal linkages—as an action‑research hub that codesigns and tests policies that keep people and institutions connected across borders.