Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Sustaining Borders and Displacement Through Refugee Entrepreneurship Ph.D. Studentship, Maastricht University, Netherlands. Deadline: 31 August 2025.

The Department of Society Studies is looking for a PhD candidate to undertake in-depth ethnographic research on the bordering practices in entrepreneurship and other life-sustaining programs for refugees in protracted situations in the Global South. You will be part of the Globalisation, Transnational, and Development research group at Maastricht University.

For many refugees, sustaining life is a catch-22. On one hand, refugees living indefinite periods of displacement are often perceived as a burden to their countries of asylum. On the other hand, they are restricted from and can be punished for obtaining employment or other sources of livelihood that would allow them to become self-reliant. ‘Durable solutions’ to manage refugees’ return, local integration, or resettlement continue to be unattainable for the majority of the world’s refugee population. Institutions such as UNHCR and other state and non-state actors have turned towards more ‘comprehensive solutions’ that promote refugees’ self-reliance and economic inclusion in the society in which they live. This research aims to critically investigate how such programmes, in the form of entrepreneurship training and other youth employment initiatives designed to help refugees autonomously navigate the informal urban economies in the ‘Global South’, may also entail bordering practices that shape refugees’ continued experiences of displacement.

The PhD candidate will investigate entrepreneurship programmes and other initiatives that promote refugees’ self-reliance while living indefinite periods of displacement. These initiatives often target young refugees, which make up the majority of refugees, and are promoted as opportunities for refugees to learn new skills, widen networks, and improve future prospects after resettlement, despite declining opportunities for resettlement. The PhD candidate will get an opportunity to develop and undergo in-depth ethnographic research in a refugee asylum country in the Global South, preferably in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. The research will engage with the following critical perspectives:

1. A youth-centric perspective to understand how refugee entrepreneurship and other self-reliance programmes shape the experiences of young refugees, surviving and thriving amidst the fraught realities they face during displacement.
2. An urban-refugee perspective to understand how refugee entrepreneurship and other self-reliance programmes are designed and implemented by state and non-state actors that support refugees in finding opportunities in the underregulated informal urban economies where they live.
3. A border-making perspective to understand how refugee entrepreneurship and other self-reliance programmes are potentially used as border governing structures by state and non-state actors to keep refugees in protracted situations while not according them status.

The research project will be based on multi-scalar ethnographic research comparing different types of entrepreneurship and other self-reliance programmes in the PhD candidate’s chosen case study country. It will explore how these programmes are experienced by the refugees that participate in them, the trainers that are involved in designing and delivering the programmes, and the international organisations that fund them.