Within the last years, migration trajectories have increasingly expanded as migrants from Afghanistan and other countries have taken the risky and uncertain route to Europe. Prolonged war and life-threatening environments have forced people to leave behind their homes and seek refuge in other countries. On their way, migrants face numerous challenges and hardships that either enable or hinder their movement between borders.

Migrants are confronted with navigating their journey as they try to manage economic interactions and  social relationships in order to facilitate their endeavour despite undocumented migration trajectories. Without the necessary resources - both economic and social networks - undocumented migration is almost impossible and, for many, the reason why they are trapped in their unsafe homes.

Our guest for this episode is Hannah Pool. Together, we talk about the challenges and prospects of refugees and their experiences on their journey to reach Europe and Germany. We follow the routes that people take to seek refuge and how they manage their journey despite everything they encounter. Hannah Pool is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. She received her PhD at the University of Cologne on migration trajectories of people coming from Afghanistan to Western Europe via Iran, Turkey, Greece, and the Balkan route. Previously, she was a doctoral student at the International Max-Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE) from 2017 to 2021. In her dissertation Hannah examined how social relations facilitate economic interactions among migrants, their families, smugglers and various other actors on the route from Afghanistan, Turkey, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Greece to Germany.

Find her on Twitter: @hannahkpool

For feedback or questions we welcome your comments directed at @GCR21 on Twitter under the hashtag #cooperadiopodcast or you can get in touch via e-mail: cooperadio@gcr21.uni-due.de.

Further reading & sources:

Pool, H. (2021). "Doing the Game": The Moral Economy of Coming to Europe. PhD Thesis, University of Cologne, Cologne. http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0009-7681-0

Pool, H. (2021). Herkunft als Weg: Migrationsforschung nimmt zunehmend die Komplexität von Routen in den Blick. WZB-Mitteilungen, (173), 31-33. http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0009-5E64-E