Vacancy: 2 PhD positions at JUSTREMIT (Leiden University)

PhD candidates in the field of governance of (I) migration and (II) remittances 

Project description
The Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) at Leiden University seeks to appoint 2 full-time, 4 year, PhD candidates to carry out research (80%) and teaching (20%) activities for the ERC funded research project JUSTREMIT.

JUSTREMIT investigates the governance, practices, and ethics of remittances. The team consists of four members including the PI, an ethnographer, and two PhD candidates. The PhD candidates will take the lead on researching the governance aspects of the research. One PhD candidates will study the governance of migration, the other will study the governance of remittances, preferably focusing on the Europe/West-African corridor.

  • The Governance of Remittances: PhD1 will focus on the governances of money, focusing on remittances and remitters. The governance of remittances is an enormously complex collage of local, national, transnational, international, corporate, technological, and regulatory complications. To understand the political science of remittances in more analytical and normative depth, we need to understand the infrastructure and geography of the networks that connect remitters and receivers.
  • The Governance of Migration: PhD2 will focus on the governance of migration and the geopolitics of remittances. We are interested in understanding how states try, succeed, and fail in governing their migrants. How do states—both receiving and sending—try to control, appropriate, steer, commandeer, or increase remittances? How are remitters and receivers becoming subjects of inter-state conflict? How do remitters and remittances shape or resist state actions? PhD2 will conduct a study of the realpolitik of migration and remittances in their cross-cutting, transnational, and translocal forms; where the global migrant community is conceptualized as an actor, not a patient or a victim. Political scientists have only recently started asking how remittances shape the politics of receiving states. PhD2 is expected to advance these debates by considering how states act to shape remittances flows and how remitters act to shape state local and national politics.

There is a preference for candidates with experience in the European/West-African remittances/migration corridor. JUSTREMIT is an interdisciplinary project, and the PhD candidates are expected to learn from and contribute to the rest of the project. We are not looking for theorists or ethnographers, but we do want candidates who can talk with them while also championing their own topically and methodologically unique study.

Key responsibilities

  • Meet all the official requirements of earning a PhD degree at Leiden University;
  • Conduct research in the political economy of remittances or migration;
  • Support the education activities at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, including lecturing, marking, and providing feedback to students to a maximum of 20% of the appointment;
  • Present work to both academic and professional audiences;
  • Participate in JUSTREMIT’s ongoing activities;
  • Follow PhD courses based on an individual training and supervision plan.

Selection criteria

  • Master’s degree in political science, international relations, security studies, political economy or a related field with relevance to JUSTREMIT;
  • Demonstrable ability and enthusiasm for interdisciplinary research (evidenced by excellent grades, diverse interests, Master’s thesis topic, etc.);
  • The ability to work in an independent, organized, and result-oriented fashion;
  • Excellent command of English.

Information
More information can be found here. Enquiries can be made to Matthew Hoye, email j.m.hoye@fgga.leidenuniv.nl.