Vacancy: 2 PhD researchers for the project “The Circumference of Violence – Tracing the normalisation and brutalisation of violence across Europe’s shifting external borders”
The Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern seeks to appoint
Two Full-time PhD researchers
For the project The Circumference of Violence – Tracing the normalisation and brutalisation of violence across Europe’s shifting external borders, for the duration of four years, starting on 1 September 2024.
Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), and led by Prof. Dr Charles Heller, the project explores the transformations of the modalities of border violence against migrants across the EU’s external borders, and the multi-scalar political and legal processes that have shaped them. Focusing on three key border zones – Greece-Turkey; Hungary-Serbia; Poland-Belarus, while comparing these case to other border areas such as Italy-Libya-Tunisia and SpainMorocco – the research will seek to analyse the practices and interactions between actors directly engaged in perpetrating or contesting border violence in the selected border zones and then trace backwards the multi-scalar (mainly national and EU) political and legal processes shaping these localized practices. The forensic reconstruction of cases of death and violations, developed in collaboration with the Border Forensics agency (borderforensics.org), will play an essential role in our research. On the one hand, these will allow us to offer fine-grained reconstruction of the practices of violence and the actors involved. On the other, by following the presentation of documented cases of violence across different policy and legal forums we will assess the effects their produce. The aim is ultimately to offer a better understanding of the practices and political and legal processes that have shaped border violence across the EU’s external borders over the last years, and for this understanding to open new possibilities of transformation to prevent border violence in the future.
See here for further details on the project and the full call.