Karolína Augustová

Karolína Augustová completed her PhD in Sociology and International Relations at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) with a thesis on border violence against refugees along the European Union’s border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2019, she held a visiting fellowship at the Institute for Migration Studies, Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon.

Her previous research, MA (Aston University, UK) and BA (Charles University, Czech Republic), focused on micropolitics in the post-Soviet and Southeastern European contexts: the risks of female homelessness in the Czech Republic, human rights of youth with disabilities in Ukrainian institutional care, and the unauthorized border crossings of male refugees along the “Balkan Route.”

Project: “Impacts of the EU's Externalization Politics on Migrants’ Mobility at the Turkey-Iran border”

This interdisciplinary research project at the nexus of international relations and sociology will explore how Turkey’s asylum and border practices, as negotiated within the European Union’s external border management, impact migrants’ everyday mobilities in Eastern Turkey. Previous scholarly findings show that Turkey, as a non-EU member country, is not only affecting but is also directly affected by bordering processes of migrants and refugees within the EU. For this reason, Turkey has been placed within the research focus of various studies investigating the EU’s externalization politics in the context of migration along its western borders with Greece. Yet, scholarly research has failed to assess how the core instruments and effects of the EU’s external border management impact migrants’ everyday decisions, practices, and relations while navigating their journeys through Turkey’s eastern borders. To address this research lacunae, this study will map how EU-Turkey cooperation impacts migration and border management along the Turkey-Iran border as well as examine migrants’ everyday mobility there. To do so, qualitative research methods will be used, including participant observation in Van and semi-structured interviews with migrants, NGOs, and EU and Turkish state authoritities.