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Lilian Tsourdi Receives ERC Starting Grant

Research

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Lilian Tsourdi, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, a prestigious ERC Starting Grant for her project SoftEn (Soft Enforcement of EU Migration Law). With this funding, Tsourdi is supported to conduct cutting-edge research in the field of migration law and governance together with a team of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers. 

This project introduces soft enforcement of EU migration law as a new area of ​​research in which both legal and political scientists will be active. Migration is a salient issue for the EU and major changes are visible in how EU migration law is implemented and enforced. Traditional methods, such as legal actions by the European Commission against Member States, are reaching their limits. Soft enforcement is becoming a flexible and politically attractive alternative. For example, human rights offices have already been established within EU migration agencies using new Ombudsman-like processes for administrative accountability.

Tsourdi’s project brings together theoretical insights from legal and political science on governance, enforcement, and accountability, and combines legal analysis with empirical qualitative research.

ERC Starting Grant

The ERC Starting Grant supports research in a wide range of field, from life sciences and physical sciences to social sciences and humanities. The funding is part of the EU Horizon Europe programme.

Peer review panels of internationally renowned researchers evaluated more than three thousand proposals in this round. Almost five hundred were selected for funding, making this a call with a 14,2% success rate.

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