The 54th Conference of UACES took place from 1 to 4 September 2024 in the beautiful Italian city of Trento. Apart from joining a range of excellent and thought-provoking panels, and enjoying surreally beautiful receptions, coffee and lunch breaks and the grand conference dinner, I was glad to contribute three presentations:
On Day 1 of the conference, my fellow book series editor Daniel Schade (of the new series ‘Europe under Strain‘, De Gruyter) and I organised a non-traditional panel on ‘Everything You Need To Know But Were Afraid To Ask About Getting Your Book Published’. With the participants, we discussed must-dos, challenges and opportunities at the stages of proposal-writing, peer review and publication, from having an idea and establishing a first contact to the publisher/editor up to promoting the book once it’s out.
On Day 2, I presented a work-in-progress paper on the political construction of forced migrants’ (non-)membership in national welfare states in Germany and Sweden. This paper examines how these two countries’ national governments have adapted welfare-state access for forced migrants under the impression of crises affecting both the respective states’ welfare and incorporation systems. Specifically, the article looks at political reactions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Via a narrative analysis of draft legislation concerning forced migrants’ welfare-state access from the period 2020-2024, this article seeks to answer the question: How did the German and Swedish governments construct and adapt welfare-state membership of forced migrants under the impression of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine? The analysis has revealed an unexpectedly similar political construction of membership in both examined countries, despite their fundamental different welfare and incorporation traditions. This, in turn, produces important insights on how crises, and resulting crisis management, may leave a lasting mark on the regulation of different categories of welfare-state membership.
On Day 3, I took part in a panel on the European Parliament’s (EP) legislative cycle 2019-24, contributing a paper with my co-author Francis Jacobs on the EP’s influence on, and role in, the EU’s political response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses specifically on the EP’s attempts at providing democratic legitimacy to the EU’s crisis governance, and examines both short- and potential long-term effects of Parliament’s pandemic-related activism, including its involvement in EU legislation and its internal adaptations of parliamentary work in order to ensure the EP’s own institutional functioning.