In 2023, we received 63 applications for the Maria Ioannis Baganha Distinguished Dissertation Award. After due deliberation, the Award Committee decided to award prizes to two outstanding theses which received the highest scores after two rounds of careful evaluation.
The winners of the 2023 Maria Ioannis Baganha Dissertation Award are Dr. Anton Ahlen and Dr. Kiri Olivia Santer.
Dr. Ahlen’s dissertation entitled “Managing migration in modern welfare states: Essays on the development, causes, and effects of policies regulating family immigration”, was defended at Uppsala University, in October 2022. Alhen’s thesis is an outstanding PhD research. It is a systematic and methodical analysis, with a clear theoretical starting point and a highly varied methodology, of one of the major contemporary policy issues. It examines national policies regulating family migration which although it accounts for the largest category of entries into OECD countries, is an area that is relatively under-researched. This dissertation contributes new comparative insights on the development of family immigration-policies and provides a good basis for drawing general conclusions about the determinants and effects in this area.
Dr. Santer’s dissertation, entitled “Bordering Responsibility: The Unaccountable Politics of Migration Control in the Central Mediterranean”, was defended at the University of Bern, in March 2022. Santer’s thesis is also a truly outstanding and original piece of research. It examines the politics of accountability in the processes of externalisation of control of Europe’s borders. To do so, she has carried out very extensive, consistent and innovative fieldwork using a variety of methods across different sites of influence. In this way she has been able to gather reliable evidence to support her main claims and arguments.