About the Project

The DimEAST research project  is aimed to highlight the impact of internal, external and transit migration flows on the (intrinsically) diverse political, ethnic, cultural, gender, class and religious communities in Europe, creating the ground for global strategies that could potentially foster solidarity and dialogue among them.

By framing migration both as a contested site where borders and boundaries are constantly renegotiated and as a testing ground for national, international and transnational approaches to solidarity, securitization and contestation within and beyond the EU, this project critically examines how today in the wider Europe a new spatiality of displacement and movement is taking shape. 

This process involves states directly, but also the “geography” and the self representation of the EU vis-à-vis the one advanced by other competing actors at its borders, resulting in controversies over the interpretation and the meaning of “European spatiality” both in geopolitical and cultural terms. Here the cognitive dimension of migration and border-making in Europe shapes diverging priorities and projections impacting on specific (and not always overlapping) ideas of territory, people, and power.

In this project, by looking in a comparative way at the changes occurring on both internal and external sides of the contested EU’s Eastern borders, on the one hand we will frame EU’s Eastern neighbouring regions as territories anticipating what could be further challenges and opportunities for the EU in the near future. On the other, through the investigation of the new challenges for solidarity and security provoked by recent migration dynamics and the current war in Ukraine, we will aim to better understand the novelty of social and political dynamics occurring at the EU’s Eastern borders following a global perspective.

DimEAST is a 2-year project (2023-2025) funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research ("Bando PRIN 2022").