Theoretical / Conceptual

This project seeks to study the Mongol Empire in its full Eurasian context. It combines a world history perspective with close reading in a huge array of primary sources in various languages (mainly Persian, Arabic and Chinese) and different historiographical traditions, and classifies the acquired information into a sophisticated prosopographical database, which records the individuals acting under Mongol rule in the 13th and 14th centuries. On the basis of this unique corpus, the project maps and analyzes mobility patterns, and the far-reaching effects that this mobility generated. More specifically, it aims: (a) to analyze modes of migrations in Mongol Eurasia: why, how, when and into where people- along with their ideas and artefacts - moved across Eurasia, portraying the full spectrum of such populations movements from the coerced to the voluntary. (b) to shed light on the economic and cultural exchange that this mobility engendered, with a stress on the religious, scientific and commercial networks both within and beyond the empire’s frontiers. (c) to reconstruct the new elite of the empire by scrutinizing the personnel of key Mongolian institutions, such as the guard, the judicial and postal systems, the diplomatic corps, and the local administration. These issues will be studied comparatively, in the period of the united Mongol empire (1206-1260) and across its four successor khanates that centred at China, Iran, Central Asia and Russia. The result will be a quantum leap forward in our understanding of the Mongol empire and its impact on world history, and a major contribution to the theoretical study of pre-modern migrations, cross-cultural contacts, nomad-sedentary relations and comparative study of empires. Moreover, the re-conceptualization of the economic and cultural exchange in Mongol Eurasia will lead to a broader and more nuanced understanding of the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern era.

Le projet MOBILISE demande: Quand mécontents avec le situation economique ou politiquoi, pourquoi certains individus protestent tandis que d'autres quittent les frontieres? En reliant les intuitions théoriques de la littérature sur la migration internationale et de celle sur les mobilisations collectives, nous examinons a) Si des facteurs similaires soustentend le choix de migrer et/ou de protester au niveau individuel b) Comment le contexte influence ces mobilisations c) Dans quelle mesure ces choix sont-ils independants l'un de l'autre ou ils se renforcent / se découragent l'un l'autre. MOBILISE utilise une methodologie mixte (des enquêtes quantitatives representatives au niveau national, des enquêtes en ligne auprés des migrants, des enquêtes auprès des protestataires, des focus groups, des entretiens retrospectifs et de l'analyse des réseaux sociaux) ainsi qu'un design multi-situé. Le projet couvre l'Ukraine, la Pologne, le Maroc et le Bresil, qui ont tous récemment connu des protestations de masse ainsi qu'une forte émigration. Nous suivons des emigrés de ces pays en Allemagne, la Grande Bretagne et l'Espagne. Le projet offre quatre innovations clés 1) Il combine les protestations et la migration 2) Il capture tous les groupes pertinents pour la comparaison (des protestataires, des migrants, des migrants protestataires et des individus qui ne font ni l'un ni l'autre) 3) Il suit des individus au fil du temps en utilisant des methodes de panel 4) Il inclut dans l'analyse l'utilisation des réseaux sociaux en fournissant de l'information sur le role des réseaux et des transferts politiques en temps réel. Ces innovations nous permettent d'apporter une contribution importante au développement théorique autant dans l'étude des migrations que des protestations. De plus, le projet fournit des connaissances centrales aux hommes politiques sur les facteurs qui influencent la stabilité politique et économique.

Highly Skilled Migration and International Flows of Talent, Knowledge, and Capital (TKC) is a project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). TKC aims to improve our understanding of whether and how highly skilled migrants activate their social networks and leverage their role as international knowledge gatekeepers, contribute to solve cross-border information problems, and transform the brain drain into brain gain and brain circulation. Highly skilled workers play a key role in today’s knowledge economies, as they introduce and diffuse innovations that encourage economic growth and well-being. Migrants are an essential component of these highly skilled workers worldwide: in 2013, the worldwide stock of migrants stood at 230 million, namely 3.2% of worldwide population (UN-DESA and OECD, 2013). However, important variations emerge across skills’ groups: tertiary educated immigrants living in OECD countries augmented by 70% during the 2000s, with just 10% for low-educated ones. Migration rates for the tertiary educated are higher than for the rest of the population, and generally increase with further education. Thus, differently from the past, highly skilled individuals represent the most dynamic component of international mobility flows. Far from taking place exclusively along a South-North or East-West axis, highly skilled migration occurs also between advanced economies, with the UK, Germany and other European countries as both destinations and origins. Science, technology, and engineering migration contributes heavily to these trends, including to its geographical variation. TKC’s research topic stands at the cross-roads of different disciplinary approaches, ranging from the geography of innovation, the economics of migration, and IB studies. All of them can be re-examined within the general theoretical framework of diaspora economics. Constant and Zimmermann (2016) define diasporas as “well-defined group(s) of migrants and their offspring with a joined cultural identity and ongoing identification with the country or culture of origin”, and propose to put them at centre-stage in all studies concerning migrations. While migration is the necessary precondition for diasporas to exist, not all migrant groups are internally bound by diasporic ties, nor ethnicity is the only source of such ties. In the case of highly skilled migrants, professional ties matter, too, as they both imply different migration channels and cohorts, and allows for specific forms of interaction. TKC is a theoretical and empirical project, whose deliverables will consist in research papers and open access datasets. Its ambition is to enrich the debate on migration on a global scale, but especially in Europe and France, where the dominant focus on low skilled or refugee immigration both obscures the importance of highly skilled flows and contributes to negative stereotyping. TKC will be articulated in six work-packages, taking a complementary approach between the macro (country), meso (firm), and micro (individual) levels of analysis. TKC has a strong engagement towards collecting micro-data concerning specific categories of very highly skilled workers, such as inventors, scientists and executives, with the migrant status to be ascertained by available biographic information and/or name analysis. These data may provide a suitable and interesting alternative to more classic data sources, both because of their detail and for their pointing at homogenous professional groups, rather than generically tertiary educated workers.