Co-hosted by the University of Bergen (UiB), the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), with funding from the NCHS, the “Conceptualising im/mobility: Humanitarianism, camps and borders” workshop was held in Bergen from 18 to 19 November 2021.

In this two-day workshop, scholars from across Europe and internationally came together to discuss the continued externalisation of European borders and the humanitarian consequences of current immigration policies and practices in Europe and beyond.

The externalisation of European borders takes many forms. This includes European Union agreements with third states, and support for their border management capacities, such as in Turkey and Libya, to the prevention of rescue efforts in the Mediterranean. It also includes the re-erection of borders inside Europe, leading to large numbers of migrants being stuck on the Greek islands.

The workshop involved invited scholars who came together to generate better scholarship on how to understand the strengthened border control mechanisms, and detention or returns policies and the consequences of these not only for people on the move, but for how scholars think about and conceptualise mobility, camps, borders and humanitarianism.

This workshop was convened in association with the ‘SuperCamp: Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East’ project at CMI and the ‘Humanitarianism, Borders, and the Governance of Mobility: The EU and the ‘Refugee Crisis’ at PRIO.

Participation in this workshop was by invitation.