Political Institutions and Identities
While these forces are global in scope, they take different forms and have uneven consequences across regions, countries, and social groups.
The group is theoretically and methodologically pluralist. We study how political institutions, identities, and practices respond to — and help order — these transformations, and how this shapes patterns of membership and inequality, regime dynamics, conflict and contestation.
Based in Amsterdam, the group is attentive to its Dutch and European context while maintaining a genuinely global reach. Members bring in-depth expertise on politics across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, as well as on global processes and institutions. PII is primarily oriented toward contemporary politics, while also examining how earlier institutional settlements shape present-day political challenges.
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Protect and Repress: The Logic of Government Responses to Internal Displacement (GRID)
Of the 120 million people displaced by violence today, most remain within their own countries. These internally displaced people (IDPs) hold citizenship-based rights, and states often pledge to protect them with aid, security and services. Yet governments frequently fail to uphold these commitments and even repress IDPs, confining them to camps or displacing them again.
While we know much about how governments treat refugees, we know far less about how they treat their own displaced citizens. GRID addresses this gap through a new global dataset on government protection and repression of IDPs, an original theory of state responses as strategic political choices, and multi-method case studies of Burundi, Colombia and Iraq.
GRID’s findings will illuminate links between internal displacement, refugee flows, political cleavages and the ways states exercise power.
Funded by: ERC Consolidator Grant
Project period: Sept 2026 - Aug 2031
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CitizenGap: Legal Identity for All?
Although we often think of undocumented persons as migrants or non-citizens, about one in seven people across the globe lack documents such as birth certificates, ID cards or passports to prove their legal identity, and thus their status as citizens in their own country. This gap between citizens with and without state-recognized documents can be just as consequential as the distinction between citizens and non-citizens. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals express the commitment to “by 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration” (Target 16.9).
The CitizenGap project – funded by the European Research Council – pursues two main questions: (1) How and why do states invest in civil registration? (2) How and why do citizens decide to obtain documents? To understand why millions of citizens are undocumented, it is crucial to remember that citizenship is not only a legal status, but first and foremost a political relationship between states and the populations they govern. CitizenGap advances a strategic theory that seriously considers the incentives of states and citizens in the politics of civil registration. The project analyzes the origins and nature of the citizenship gap through cross-national and in-depth country studies. To learn more about the project, please visit the CitizenGap website.
Funded by: ERC Starting Grant
Project period: 1 Sept 2021 - 31 Aug 2027