Migration, affective geopolitics and European democracy in times of military conflicts (MAGnituDe)

The general objective of MAGnituDe is to enhance citizen participation through preventing polarisation and the fragmentation of identities related to mass displacement in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine by utilizing affect as a tool, tapping into the sensuous, emotional, and corporeal dimensions of human experience. MAGnituDe explores the consequences of mass migration caused by Russia’s invasion for European democracy and provides evidence-based strategies to reinvigorate democratic governance in response to the negative social consequences of the war for European societies. MAGnituDe utilises the feminist concept of affective geopolitics to analyse how geopolitical narratives and imaginations shape everyday human encounters through which social, political, and cultural identities get constructed and contested.

The project explores human encounters on 3 levels:

1) migrant-state (between forcibly displaced people from Ukraine (FDPs) and street-level bureaucrats)

2) migrant-migrant (between FDPs and migrants from Belarus, Russia, and Syria)

3) migrant-host societies (FDPs encounters with the material culture of host societies)

To study the affective dimension of human encounters and identities and to suggest attuned political interventions fostering democratic participation in the sensitive context of the war, MAGnituDe develops and implements an innovative affect-centred methodological framework based on SensArticulate methods, encompassing art-based, experiential, and embodied techniques. MAGnituDe advances an innovative methodology for comprehensive analysis of the interrelations between social, cultural, and political identities, as well as the sense of belonging, and democracies, which will be used to formulate policy recommendations and pilot strategies preventing discrimination, alienation and marginalization and to diffuse antagonistic identities and social norms.