Hi Pinar! Can you tell us about your trip to Pakistan and what you are doing there?
We are travelling to Islamabad to conduct the first of three field studies within the project. During our stay, we will collect empirical material through interviews with governmental actors, international organisations and relevant NGO's.
This includes conversations with government officials working on migration governance and legal pathways, organisations that meet and inform potential migrants about regular migration pathways, and civil society actors who support individuals considering migration in various ways. This work is crucial because it helps creating realistic expectations and ensures that potential migrants receive accurate and relevant information about destination countries.
At the same time, there are both opportunities and challenges shaping how the provision of information is formed and executed. The field study therefore provides an important opportunity to examine which aspects function well and which may need to be strengthened for information efforts on legal pathways to become more effective and meaningful.
Which parts of the trip do you think will be the most interesting or surprising?
What will likely be most interesting is gaining a concrete understanding of how information activities actually operate in practice, and how different actors navigate complex regulations, organisational frameworks and the needs of individuals. It will also be valuable to see how advisers and other professionals interpret their mandate, and how their room for manoeuvre is shaped by political and institutional conditions. Overall, I expect the trip to generate many important and insightful contributions to the study.
The field study therefore provides an important opportunity to examine which aspects function well and which may need to be strengthened for information efforts on legal pathways to become more effective and meaningful.
What are the next steps in the project?
The next step is to conduct field studies in Baghdad and Erbil at the end of January, followed by fieldwork in Tashkent in early March. Once all material has been collected, we will begin the analysis, systematically reviewing interviews and other data to identify recurring themes and patterns, as well as important differences linked to political, institutional and social or cultural contexts in the respective countries. The results will be published next autumn, and we look forward to sharing the study’s findings with others who are interested in these issues.
