Migratory movements in and around the Mediterranean are, with no doubts, one of the major challenges for the Euro-Mediterranean community. The Mediterranean migration crisis, as it has been defined by the International Organization of Migration, heavily affected the region by determining social and political crisis, media misrepresentation of migration dynamics and mostly important the death of thousands of migrants so that Europe’s Mediterranean shore has been defined as “the world’s most lethal border”. In this sense, as underlined by the European Commission, “migration management is a shared responsibility, not only among EU Member States, but also vis-à-vis non-EU countries of transit and origin of migrants”.
Based on these considerations, UNIMED proposed the creation of the UNIMED SubNetwork on Migration in order to facilitate and ease the commitment of the Higher Education Communities in playing their fundamental role for mitigating the migratory crisis in the region, knowing that by only promoting shared research on this topic and by only enhancing common research projects between the two shores of the Mediterranean, it is possible to:
• promote academic synergies which are necessaries in order to produce high level researches;
• encourage knowledge-exchange in order to deconstruct stereotypes;
• strengthen stakeholders consultation in order to design recommendations for policy makers;
• coordinate ongoing academic efforts in order to improve the regional impact of academic research;
• stimulate academic environment in order to define, together, new research lines of common interest;
• share academic research results with the society at large in order to influence it towards a positive agenda.
Based on this vision and starting from this awareness, we would like the Mediterranean academic community to play a most visible, effective and practical role in addressing the crisis.
SubNetwork Objectives
– Design two ways capacity building actions for the benefit of academic research and by exploiting opportunities provided by Erasmus Plus Capacity Building in the Field of Higher Education for the forthcoming years;
– Encourage common research projects focused on the Migration topic in all its dimensions;
– Promote joint participation at international conferences and organize joint events (workshops, seminars, summers schools and courses for PhD students);
– Incentive academic mobility in the region by exploiting opportunities foreseen in the International Credit Mobility Scheme.
– Produce joint publications in peer-reviewed journals;
– Coordinate ongoing academic efforts in this field in order to avoid any fragmentation and benefiting from experience sharing.
The aim of UNIMED is to create a solid and sustainable community which is able to have an impact on Migration issues in the region by promoting a coordinated action among all its academic members: a permanent forum where to be actively engaged and provide institutional as well as personal contribution by guaranteeing regular commitment.
UNIMED – Mediterranean Universities Union is a not-for-profit association with its headquarters in Rome, Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 244, Italy