Warm congratulations to Hassan Ould Moctar who has been awarded an NUI Travelling Scholarship this year to pursue his PhD research at SOAS, University of London.
Hassan will receive his scholarship at an awards ceremony in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham on the 9th of November. For more on the awards ceremony see the announcement on the NUI website - http://www.nui.ie/news/2016/Awards_2016_Announcement.asp
Hassan graduated from the Department of Sociology with a first class degree in Politics in 2012, and more recently taught European Studies in the Department and worked with the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies. His research focuses on the effects of EU-instigated migration policies upon ethnic and social dynamics in Mauritania.
In response to our congratulations Hassan wrote "SOAS is an institution that I have admired for a long time for various reasons so I am very much looking forward to getting started. Thank you also for the numerous types of support that I have received both in a student capacity during my undergraduate degree and more recently in a professional capacity as a member of staff at Maynooth. I'd also like to thank John O'Brennan in particular, whose support and advice over the years has been utterly invaluable, not least regarding the Travelling Studentship application and interview process itself. So it's no exaggeration to say that I wouldn't have succeeded were it not for the encouragement of the Maynooth Sociology Department."
These awards are competed for annually by students and graduates of NUI constituent universities (i.e. UCD, UCC, NUI Galway and Maynooth University) and other NUI member institutions including RCSI and NCAD. The awards honour and support scholars of distinction at every stage of their academic studies, from undergraduates to senior scholars well established in their fields of expertise.
Description of Project
This project will examine the social effects in Mauritania of migration policy cooperation between that country and the European Union. This regime of cooperation began in 2006 when the northern coastal city of Nouadhibou in Mauritania became a departure point for Sub-Saharan Africans attempting to reach the Canary Islands. The immediate response to this development on the part of the Spanish Civil Guard and FRONTEX (the European border agency) consisted of a range of security measures taken in coordination with Mauritanian authorities in order to halt these unwanted migration flows.
In the longer term, these measures set the stage for the formalisation of migration management in Mauritania in a manner that would depart radically from the sparse legislative references that had hitherto been made to the issues of migration and asylum. Furthermore, throughout much of the history of the Mauritanian state, this legislation was rarely enforced in practice, with immigration for the most part being left to regulate itself informally. However this informal system has come under persistent challenge since Mauritanian migration management has been aligned with EU priorities.
The substance of this legal and social shift, the mechanisms by which it has occurred, the manner in which it departs from prior established patterns of social and ethnic stratification in Mauritania, and – chiefly – its practical implications for the lives of those whom it affects, will constitute the subject of this project. In carrying out this research, I will lay emphasis upon Mauritania’s regional migratory role in West Africa and, in doing so, interrogate the all too common assumption that migration flows only exist when they are oriented toward Europe or the Global North more generally.