Postdoctoral Fellow: Deporting Foreigners: Contested Norms in International Practice (NORMS)
Job description
Applicants are invited for a position as Postdoctoral Fellow at ARENA Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo. The appointment as a postdoctoral fellow is for 24 months, without duty work (see details under “responsibilities”). The position is available from 1 January 2022 – 31 December 2023.
ARENA is a highly renowned centre for research on the transformation of Europe, in particular on the processes of political change. It aims at theoretically founded and innovative research. ARENA offers a stimulating intellectual environment for cooperation and scholarly debate and has a staff of well-qualified and committed scholars. The centre and its research projects have received excellent evaluations. The working language at ARENA is English.
The fellowship is part of the project “Deporting Foreigners: Contested Norms in International Practice (NORMS)”, which is funded by the UTENRIKS programme of the Research Council of Norway (2021-2024). NORMS is an international research project with partner institutions in Norway, the Netherlands and Ethiopia, led by Senior Researcher Erlend Paasche at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research. The Postdoctoral Fellow’s contact person at ARENA will be Research Professor Helene Sjursen.
Deportation of irregular migrants and rejected asylum seekers is widely known to pit host states against these migrants, but deportation also pits host states against these migrants’ origin states. Conceptualising this as a conflict of interests, legal scholars and political scientists have focused on the incentives and coercion used by the host state to elicit the rational compliance of the origin state. In the NORMS project, we look at how state agents from host and origin states alike seek to legitimise or de-legitimise deportation, promoting competing norms in a contested policy field. We take a practice-oriented and cross-country comparative approach to these norm dynamics. The comparative design includes two host states (Norway and Sweden) with differing policies and policy debates, as well as four distinct states of origin (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Ethiopia). Complementing this analysis, a Postdoctoral Fellow will examine norm dynamics at the supranational level within the EU agency Frontex.
The task for the Postdoctoral Fellow will be to analyse norm dynamics within Frontex based in part on the narratives of Norwegian and Swedish police officers who have participated in return operations carried out by the agency.