Why IMRU? Addressing the Migration Knowledge Problem in a Polarised Environment

Back in 1993, Castles and Miller argued that we are living in an Age of Migration. Thirty years on, migration has become one of the defining and dividing issues of our time. In Europe, the 2015–2016 events still echo and drive present-day public debates and political processes. In the United States, the second Trump administration has elevated migration management into the central fault line of domestic politics. And across the global north, migration dominates public discourse and shapes electoral outcomes in ways that were difficult to anticipate twenty years ago.

However, the way migration is discussed in parliaments, in the media, and in everyday conversations, rarely reflects the complexity of a phenomenon that researchers and scholars have spent decades analysing. Research demonstrates that policy decisions in one domain have spillover effects in other domains: decisions on border control affect integration outcomes, while asylum policy spills into labour markets and local communities. Yet migration is increasingly portrayed solely in terms of security: framed as a threat to be dealt with, a border to be secured, no matter the cost, a flow to be stopped, no matter the human casualties. Political parties across much of the political spectrum have found this framing electorally productive, leading to a public debate that is loud, polarised, dominated by simple solutions, and, importantly, disconnected from solid evidence.

This is not simply a political problem. It is also a knowledge problem. And it is one that the academic community has a responsibility to address.

At the same time, the academic world has its own limitations. Migration research in Greece, as elsewhere, tends to be conducted within disciplinary boundaries. Sociologists examine social dynamics, legal scholars focus on legal frameworks, political scientists analyse policy, and geographers map spatial patterns. Each of these perspectives is valuable in its own right, and each is undoubtedly necessary. But each discipline sees only the part of reality its own lens and tools allow. The result is not unlike the ancient Indian parable of the sage blind men who examine the elephant: each touches a different part and reaches a confident conclusion about the whole animal, grounded in genuine expertise; none, however, sees the elephant for what it is. Migration research carried out within disciplinary silos risks the same fate.

IMRU was established to address these challenges.

The Interdisciplinary Migration Research Unit was established at the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE) in 2025, building on EKKE’s decades-long engagement with migration as a field of inquiry. This institutional history provides a solid foundation. However, we recognise that research and knowledge production on its own is no longer sufficient; knowledge should travel, across disciplines, across institutions and certainly beyond the academic world, in order to have meaningful impact. 

IMRU’s approach rests on two principles. The first is interdisciplinarity. We believe that migration can only be fully understood by drawing on multiple analytical traditions: sociology, political science, social anthropology, geography, economics, law, international relations, and beyond. To this end, IMRU will organise a regular series of interdisciplinary conferences, open to researchers working across all relevant fields. These conferences will not just be disciplinary gatherings that happen to share a common theme. Instead, they will be spaces for genuine interdisciplinary exchange, designed to put different frameworks in conversation with one another and produce knowledge that none of them could generate alone. Selected contributions from these conferences will feed into peer-reviewed collective volumes, published by EKKE.

The second principle is accessibility. Academic knowledge about migration exists in abundance. What is missing is a sustained and dedicated platform to make this knowledge available to the media and the general public in a way that is clear, relevant, responsive to timely questions, and free from the distortions of political priorities and agendas. To this end, IMRU will maintain a blog through which researchers and experts will be invited to write on key migration issues in an accessible format that is grounded in evidence, attentive to complexity and nuance, and directed at a broad readership beyond the academic world.

We want to be clear about what IMRU is not. Based at EKKE, Greece’s National Centre for Social Research, IMRU is not a political project, nor a party-affiliated think tank. IMRU promotes no political position, is not informed by ideological considerations, and does not advocate for, or lend legitimacy to, specific policy outcomes and priorities. Its work is directed at enriching public debate on migration regardless of the views of its audience. Its role is to produce and disseminate rigorous, evidence-based knowledge, and to create the conditions in which that knowledge can inform media, public, and policy debates.

Greece has been at the front line of European migration governance for over a decade, with a research community that has accumulated significant expertise. However, the country’s public and policy debates on migration are in acute need of grounding in solid evidence. IMRU was established with all of this in mind.

This blog is where that work begins.

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