Comparative / Comparatif

The profound trauma associated with rape and sexual violence in conflict has been extensively explored within existing scholarship. The fact that many survivors exhibit remarkable post-trauma resilience, however, remains critically under-investigated. CSRS will address this fundamental gap by undertaking a paradigm-shifting empirical study of the underlying conditions for resilience. It will then use this data to pioneer a new, survivor-centred model of transitional justice – the process of redressing the legacy of massive human rights abuses. Using the three comparative case studies of Bosnia-Hercegovina (BiH), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Colombia, and adopting a social-ecological approach that emphasizes the interactions between individuals and their environments, CSRS consists of two inter-linked parts. The first part will involve extensive fieldwork, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, to generate a rich cross-cultural dataset that identifies and explains the key micro, meso and macro factors that foster resilience in survivors of war rape and sexual violence. The second part of CSRS will use this dataset to build an innovative, bottom-up model of transitional justice that prioritizes the long-term needs of survivors, reflecting the project’s hypothesis that a positive correlation exists between fulfilment of needs and resilience. This model will be developed with the input of survivors in BiH, the DRC and Colombia and in consultation with transitional justice scholars and practitioners. CSRS aims to transform transitional justice theory and practice. The project outputs will therefore include both academic publications and policy reports to communicate the model to the governments of the case study countries, the United Nations and a wider international audience with the overall aim of making empowerment and resilience part of a new transitional justice agenda.

The proposed research has two overarching objectives. First, it aims to examine whether it is possible and appropriate to extend a novel way of measuring social class recently devised for the United Kingdom to other post-industrial nations for the purposes of cross-national comparative research. If it is, the project will begin to explore, through secondary and primary analysis of large-scale survey data, the different shapes and trajectories of the class structures – or ‘social spaces’ – of various nation states. This will involve examination of which classes and sub-classes predominate and which have emerged or declined, as well as the different gender and ethnic/nationality constitutions of the classes and the distinct effects these differences have for understanding cultural and political struggles and, ultimately, the distribution of power or ‘recognition’ in each country. Second, the project aims to explore, through both statistical analysis and qualitative interviews, how social class is actually lived, experienced and balanced against other pressures and sources of recognition in everyday life, with a focus on three specific nations: the United States, Germany and Sweden. Of particular interest in this respect is the balancing of desire for recognition through money and education – the two cornerstones of social class in post-industrial capitalist societies – and their associated lifestyles with desires for recognition and love within the family. The comparative analysis included in both research aims will be guided by the hypothesis that national differences depend on the nature of the welfare regime in operation, especially as it relates to the nature and extent of workforce feminisation, though the research will also be alive to the possibility of alternative – or no significant – sources of contrast.

The educational achievement of students from working-class ethnic minority or immigrant back-grounds is vitally important for their integration into the labor market and society. We know from research that their disadvantaged family back-ground, such as low parental education and income, significantly influences these students’ academic achievement. However, as students increasingly spend most of their time in school contexts, school has also become one of the key factors for under-standing educational performance. In this context, interactions of specific school regulations, practices, and structures with the skills, values, and cultures of students can greatly contribute to the development of educational policies for reforming schools in a way that would increase the educational achieve-ment of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This study conceptualizes school-related factors as institutional habitus and seeks to understand how schools’ institutional habitus accommodate students from different ethnic and minority back-grounds for making empirical contributions to the development of inclusive and intercultural school structures. This report is based on a comparative study that investigates the components of the institutional habitus of two different schools, one in Turkey and one in Germany, and how they influence the educa-tional performance of children from working-class Kurdish ethnic minority backgrounds in Turkey and working-class Turkish immigrant backgrounds in Germany. This exploratory, qualitative study included interviews with teachers, students, school principals, and experts in the field of education, as well as participatory observations in the classroom and beyond.

This research project aims to understand the organizational and cognitive consequences of the election of specific national political representatives by citizens living abroad. The proposal is based on a comparative analysis of two expatriate populations with such rights, Italians and French, in two host countries, Belgium and Canada. The focus of the research is the motivations, representations and strategies of politically active emigrants in branches of home political parties abroad. The research will be done through an original multi-methods research design – computer-assisted discourse analysis, qualitative comparative analysis and quantitative questionnaire analysis – to gather rich and sociologically relevant data. The combination of CAQDAS techniques with QCA, as a comparative tool of analysis, will produce robust results and provide good grounds for tentative generalization beyond the considered case studies. The project will originally contribute to the theoretical advancement of many research fields. It will develop the theory of political parties, since the knowledge is weak and fragmentary concerning the role and functioning of political parties abroad, and almost inexistent in non-contentious contexts. The project will also advance the theory of transnational politics, since it will focus on two dimensions underdeveloped in the existing literature: the involvement of emigrants in home politics and the analysis of banal transnational politics. The project will finally contribute to the theory of national identity and citizenship since it will question the reconfiguration of established nation states that might result from giving citizenship rights and representation to nationals living abroad. In a policy perspective the research responds to recurring demands to further investigate the governance of migration as well as the implications of multilevel citizenship in a context of growing mobility of EU citizens from, to and within the EU.

The Swiss Federal Office for Migration (BFM) has commissioned the ICMPD to undertake a comparative study of asylum procedures at seven European airports - Zürich, Brussels, Frankfurt a.M., London-Heathrow, Vienna, Paris-Roissy and Schiphol. Objectives • To provide an overview of the legal and practical framework and methods applied in the selected airports • To enable the BMF to put the Swiss policies into a European perspective • To design better and more rational airport asylum procedures Outcomes Comparative analysis of: • Asylum procedure at the airport • Accommodation of asylum seekers during the procedure in the transit zone • Deportation and securing The study includes elements of field research (qualitative interviews with governmental, non-governmental and international organisations involved as well as visitation of the respective premises at the airport) and desk research (examination of legal texts, literature and relevant statistics).

Know Reset aimed at conducting a systematic inventory of resettlement frameworks and practices in the EU, providing a comparative analysis and assessment of resettlement in the Member States, evaluating their resettlement capacity while addressing policy recommendations to the EU and its Member States in order to enhance cooperation and improve resettlement activities. To better understand Member States’ decision-making and better explore the potential for developing resettlement capacity in the EU, the Project has covered the 27 EU Member States whatever the nature and degree of their involvement in refugee resettlement. Unique field research has also been conducted in three major countries of first asylum (Kenya, Pakistan, Tunisia) by external experts hired for the Project, who dedicated their observation and analysis on EU Member States resettlement practices in the pre-departure phase. The Final Report compiles various deliverables of the Know Reset Project: a series of tables and graphs for quantitative and qualitative country comparison, 27 "Resettlement Country Profiles", 3 Country of First Asylum Reports and 2 EU Comparative Reports.

'Technological advancements in reproductive medicine have introduced the new concept of 'FREEZING'. Nowadays, healthy women are given the possibility to cryopreserve their oocytes in order to prolong their fertility, a procedure known as 'social egg freezing'. There is an ongoing bioethical academic and public debate on the social and ethical implications of this practice. The here proposed socio-empirical research is interested in extending our understanding of the concept of 'freezing' in broader contexts, while analyzing it through the prism of 'sociology of time'. Egg freezing constitutes an extremely fascinating paradigm for studying concepts of time, timing, planning and its social-technological manipulation related to modern life science. In line with the IF work program's focus on creativity, innovation and diversity, this research aims to examine the interplay of culture and bioethics in an interdisciplinary and empirical manner, focusing on and comparing experts' and lay positions and using a cross-cultural German-Israeli comparative research framework. This cross-cultural comparison is especially interesting since the German regulatory and legal framework regarding new reproductive technologies is rather restrictive, while the Israeli regulation has been identified as extremely permissive. Using qualitative in depth interviews with relevant experts as well as users of social egg freeing, this research aims at (a) In-depth empirical analysis of time in the context of reproductive medicine; (b) A cross sectional analysis of social egg freezing by comparing two national contexts as well as experts and ordinary (lay) ethics; and (c) Theorization of the time dimension for the relationship of reproduction, labor and gender. Thus, this innovative research is expected to enhance the researcher academic competence and the transfer of new knowledge.'

Research Questions Where do Chinese migrant entrepreneurs come from and why do they migrate? Where do they settle, and how do they organize their economic and social activities? How are they perceived by local and migrant African entrepreneurs in their host country? Does this perception correspond to the discourse of cooperation propagated by the Chinese and African governments? How does the Chinese presence influence the development of African host societies? Contribution to International Research This comparative study on the Chinese migration into two West African countries explores the economic and political processes triggered by the Chinese migration. It analyses the interactions of the local population with the Chinese migrant entrepreneurs as well as the former’s innovative reactions toward the strategies and practices of the latter. The combination of the different regional research capacities at the GIGA within one research team allows us to address this multidimensional research problem with adequate regional and multidisciplinary competences and research strategies. Research Design and Methods Our research field is characterized by high degrees of informality, especially regarding migratory paths, residence status, economic activities, social organization and the political action of all actors involved. In view of this, existing quantitative data on the micro- and meso-levels could not be taken as a reliable basis for our analyses. Moreover, the economic interests that characterize our field had the effect of reduced acceptance on the part of our informants of standardized instruments such as questionnaires. For these reasons, our research concentrates on coordinated qualitative comparative case studies within and across Ghana and Senegal in order to produce reliable research findings. In accordance with our research questions, qualitative data collection was conducted on a micro-level, drawing on the method of actor-centred participant observation and its adaptations in narrative interviews. Additional semi-structured interviews were conducted to ensure comparability across cases. In addition, visual ethnographic methods were applied (photo essays, network-mapping) as a basis for joint interpretation in the overarching research context. Preliminary Results We had assumed that networks formed the dominant model of social organization for both the African and the Chinese actors and groups we studied, and that networks were the key factors to understanding the interaction between these two groups. In the field, however, we were unable to establish any empirical evidence that the Chinese individual economic sojourners (or small groups forming family-owned businesses), whose business models tend to be highly speculative, are engaging in any form of meaningful social and economic interaction with their African counterparts beyond primarily functional and opportunistic buyer–seller or employer–employee relationships. African traders also did not reveal any stronger motivation to open their networks to their Chinese counterparts. Based on our observations, we conclude that a wide range of African actors engages in innovative practices not through social exchange and mutually beneficial cooperation with the Chinese newcomers but by creatively appropriating the unintended opportunities that Chinese actors provide in the local African settings through their distinct social and economic practices. However, the significations that are inscribed into the diverse Chinese social and economic practices and the stimuli they represent are contested between diverse African actors, since their social and economic positioning, their interests and interpretations, and their capacities for adaptation differ greatly. The Chinese business strategy of large-scale wholesale trading in combination with the low cost of the commodities they sell has facilitated the engagement of larger social strata with limited financial means in trading activities. These changes in market access, not least, have had a profound impact on Senegalese and Ghanaian market orders. Not surprisingly, many of the new traders whose access to this profession has directly benefited from the Chinese presence also closely observe the latter’s business strategies. All interviewed Chinese traders, for instance, unanimously employed the logic of high turnovers at small profit rates, aspiring to maximize incomes through sheer volume. Once the African traders have realized that trading in Chinese goods provides solid opportunities for capital accumulation and growth, they have turned their gaze toward China as source for their commodities.

Building on two pilot studies conducted in 2010, the proposed research will explore the gender dimensions of anti-immigration social movements in contemporary Europe. This will be done through a comparative analysis of activism in two populist radical right parties: an ethnographic and documentary study of activism in the social and cultural associations linked to the Northern League party (NL) in Italy and to the National Front party (NF) in France. During the applicant’s earlier research on the NL, it became clear that the themes of women’s rights and gender equality are increasingly mobilised in instrumental ways by this party, seeking to attract women’s votes. This corresponds to a recent radicalisation of the NL’s discourse, which in the past decade has increasingly targeted migrants coming from Muslim countries: in this discourse, immigration is associated with sexual violence and gender conservatism. The research will mobilise these earlier studies while expanding their focus through a comparative perspective. In examining current developments in the ideology and politics of the NL and the NF, and their attempt to modernise their public image, the proposed comparative research will contribute to ongoing theoretical debates about the articulation of racism and gender as well as about the role played by gender in collective action. The proposed research is ground-breaking in two ways. First, only a minority of ethnographic studies exist which focus on activism in radical right organisations, as sociologists have tended to focus on left-wing social movements. More specifically, very few studies have investigated the role played by women in radical right social movements. Second, the few existing qualitative studies of women’s activism in these organisations fail to compare systematically the practices women and men. As opposed to these existing studies, the proposed research will examine both women’s and men’s involvement in these organisations.