Hein de Haas, Associate Professor of Migration Studies and Co-Director of the International Migration Institute (IMI) at ODID, has been awarded a €1.75 million grant by the European Research Council to conduct a five-year research project entitled ‘Migration as Development’.

This project aims to develop new theoretical and empirical approaches for studying the developmental drivers of human mobility in the modern industrial-capitalist era (the 19th and 20th centuries). More specifically, the project will address the following question: how do processes of development and social transformation shape the geographical orientation, timing, composition and volume of internal and international migration?

Professor de Haas will use mixed methods throughout the project. Besides quantitative tests of the developmental drivers of internal and international migration, mixed-methods case-studies involving fieldwork will study the evolution of complex mobility systems in six countries around the world representing different development-migration trajectories.