PhD

The focus of my PhD is European visa policy. Today, the majority of the world's citizens have to apply for a Schengen visa to legally enter the European Union for a short stay. This visa regime has not escaped public and academic attention. The policy is often argued to be exclusionary, and an example of the new restrictive border policies of liberal democracies.

The aim of my research project is to investigate how the member states apply the common policy in practice, and identify what factors and dynamics explain the balance struck between open and closed borders.

Specifically, the project aims to:

• Discuss the ethical basis for restricting the mobility of travellers using visa requirements
• Develop an indicator capturing the restrictiveness of visa regimes
• Construct a dataset enabling us to compare the EU/Schengen members visa practice
• Test the relative explanatory power of different theoretical accounts of variation in the restrictiveness of visa regimes

The project is jointly supervised by Eiko Thielemann and Jennifer Jackson-Preece.

If you are interested in learning more about the project please contact me.