Pace
PACE investigates how non-State actors react to, and feed, the politics of the European crisis. It does so by first exploring how the press, expert and militant networks, IOs, city networks, CSOs and among those, MLOs, contribute to understanding and shaping the current crisis in their interactions with policies and policymakers. Secondly, it investigates the changes in the configuration (Norbert Elias) of organisations and mobilisations during and after the crisis. PACE therefore studies both the social construction and genealogy of the various cognitive frameworks of the crisis and their consequences in state and non-State actors’ practices and institutional set-ups.
PACE adopts a broad understanding of non-state actors, including media, experts, militant networks, international organisations (IOs), cities, civil society organisations (CSOs) mobilised pro or against migrants, and migrant-led organisations (MLOs) and more ad hoc informal mobilisations (sit-ins, ephemeral civilian based mobilisations); this therefore involves considering multiple levels through which the crisis is constructed, above and below the state, ranging from local micro-contexts to multilateral initiatives. In all cases, the project analyses both how specific “crisis” situations have constrained non-state actors’ perceptions, tactics and rationalities (Dobry 1986) and how these actors have made sense of migration developments and responded to policies of “crisis management”.
The main objective therefore is to explain how various non-state actors like migrant associations and international organisations perceive and construct the crisis, to generate understandings of how they behave and change in the crisis at the individual, collective and organisational level.
The project will use a pluralist set of methods including ethnographic surveys and in-depth interviews, discourse and frame analysis, textometric explorations, archival research and critical cartographies of migrations, networks and power. Pluralism is grounded in the various disciplines and expertise of the consortium members (political science, geography, anthropology, sociology, history). The objects of study, the processes, actors and institutions under scrutiny will be investigated using both quantitative and qualitative methods, both complementing each other. The originality of the research lies in the connection of the political sociology of organisations and social mobilisations, using multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with qualitative and quantitative (computerised) analysis of discourses and policy documents.
The originality of the project is through its investigation of first how a number of non-state actors frame migration and asylum related events and processes during the crisis putting their discourses in a historical perspective and second, the impact of the crisis and its construction on them.
The projet is organised around two axis that are often left out of public policy analysis:
- the framing of and reaction to the crisis ‘from above’. Revisiting crises: comparative perspectives on the framing and organisational dynamics of migration and asylum crises
- the civil society reactions to the crisis ‘from below’. Whose crisis? Transnational contestation of European policies in Europe and beyond
These two dimensions broadly structure the scientific programme although concerns for both framing and its impact on social change/mobilisation intersect into all fields of investigation throughout the project.
