On the occasion of the publication of the book Diaspora engagement in times of severe economic crisis: Greece and beyond (2022, Palgrave Macmillan)

Please join us for drinks and snacks in the Common Room after the presenation. To secure a place in the room and the reception, please register with Eventbrite.

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As co-editors of this recent volume, Othon Anastasakis, Manolis Pratsinakis and Foteini Kalantzi will offer a European comparative perspective on their findings alongside other experts on diaspora engagement.

How does a severe economic crisis impact on diaspora-homeland relations? The present volume addresses this question by exploring diaspora engagement in Greece during the protracted post-2009 eurozone crisis. In so doing, it looks at the crisis as a critical juncture in Greece’s relations with its nationals abroad. The contributors in this book explore aspects of diaspora engagement, including  transnational mobilisation, homeland reform, the role of diasporic institutions, crisis driven migration, as well as, comparisons with other countries in Europe. This book provides a compelling and original interdisciplinary study of contemporary diaspora issues, through the lens of an advanced economy and democracy facing a prolonged crisis, and, as such, it is a significant addition to the literature on European diasporas.

Othon Anastasakis is the Director of the European Studies Centre and South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX); Senior Research Fellow at St Antony’s College; Associate at the Department of Politics and International Relations; Affiliate of the Centre for International Studies; Affiliate of the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA); former Director of the European Studies Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford (July 2012-October 2015). He teaches “South East European politics and European integration” for the OSGA and “EU politics” for the Department of Continuing Education, Oxford. He is currently the Principal Investigator of two research projects: “Greek Diaspora Project at SEESOX”; and the OX/BER funded “Migration Diplomacy and Turkey-EU relations”. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada; Region Head of Europe in Oxford Analytica. He received his BA in Economics from the University of Athens, his MA in Comparative Politics and International Relations from Columbia University, New York and his PhD in Comparative Government from the London School of Economics. He holds additional degrees in French literature and politics from Paris IV and in Spanish literature, history and history of art from the Universidad Internacional Menendez Pelayo.

Foteini Kalantzi is the A.G. Leventis Research Officer at the Diaspora Project in SEESOX, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on the Greek state – diaspora relationship in the context of the economic crisis. Foteini’s work also includes research on securitisation of migration in Europe, with a focus on Greece. She is the coordinator for the development of the Greek Diaspora Digital Map. She is one of researchers in the ‘Migration Diplomacy and Turkish-EU relations’ project of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership. Also, she is the secretary of the ‘International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora’ working group of British International Studies Association. She received her PhD in International Relations from University of Macedonia, Greece and carried out part of her research in Freie Universität Berlin. She holds an MA in International Political Economy from University of Warwick, UK, a BA in International and European Relations from Panteion University, Athens and a BSc in Economics from University of La Verne, California. She has teaching experience in International and European Relations, Economics and Ethics in social media at the Department of International Relations of Université de Strasbourg at City Unity College in Athens. Her research interests include migration, political and media discourse analysis, Greek political affairs and European integration. She has been a research associate at the Hellenic Centre for European Studies (EKEM), and at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP). She has also worked as a freelance journalist at several newspapers and magazines, reporting on financial and political developments in Europe.  

Maria Koinova is a Professor in International Relations at the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick and an Associate Senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg in Germany. She successfully completed as Principal Investigator a large-scale European Research Council Starting Grant Project “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty” (2012-2017). Koinova was on the governing board of the EU Jean Monnet network “Between Europe and Russia” (2018-2022). She held academic positions at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (2001-2004), Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (2004-2005), and Center for European Studies (2011), Cornell’s Government Department (2007-2008), Dartmouth’s Dickey Center for International Understanding (2008-2009), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. (summers 2006, 2007), European University Institute (1999-2005, Ph.D.), Uppsala University (2013), and tenure-track faculty positions at the University of Amsterdam (2009-2012) and American University of Beirut (2005-2006). In 2018 Koinova was a research fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in the USA.

Iryna Lapshyna has a Phd in International Economics. She is a lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv). Previously, Iryna was a Senior Researcher at COMPAS, University of Oxford where she worked on the project ‘Does immigration enforcement matter? Irregular immigrants and control policies in the UK’ funded by the ESRC (2016-2017). She was also a grant holder of the British Academy and completed a project on the Ukrainian Diaspora in the UK and Poland (‘Do Diasporas matter? Exploring the potential role of Diaspora in the reform and post-conflict reconstruction of Ukraine’, 2015-2016). Prior to this, she worked as national expert on an EU-funded FP7 project ‘Imagining Europe from the outside’ (2010-2013). From 2002 to 2014, she was Associate Professor at Lviv Academy of Commerce, Ukraine. Her research focuses on labour migration, irregular migration, individual perceptions and aspirations and diaspora. Since 2022 she is corresponding member of Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (University of Osnabruck, Germany). In 2022 she received a research grant from the Volkswagen Foundation to conduct research of the drivers of forced displacement from Ukraine in Germany.

Manolis Pratsinakis is Assistant Professor in Social Geography at Harokopio University and research affiliate at The Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. He was previously Departmental Lecturer in Migration Studies at the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography (SAME), University of Oxford; SEESOX/Onassis fellow at SAME and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford; Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Macedonia, visiting fellow at the University of Sussex and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. His academic interests broadly concern the study of migration and nationalism. He has done research and published on immigrant-native relations, ethnic boundaries and categorisation, everyday nationhood, diasporas, brain drain, and intra-EU mobility in the post 2008 period. Manolis has studied Geography and Sociology and completed his PhD in 2013 in Anthropology. His MA studies were supported by a Nuffic Huygens Scholarship and his PhD research by an IKY scholarship from the Dutch and Greek state respectively.