Professor Monsutti, could you briefly outline the specialisation to us and your curriculum?
Migration and mobility have structured human history since humans are humans, it has shaped the very process of hominisation. More recently, the European colonial expansion since the 15th century has contributed to reconfigure the repartition of the world population. Many Western Europeans settled in the Americas while Russians expanded eastwards to Northern and Central Asia. Africans and later Asians have been forcedly transported from one continent to another as unfree labour. Colonialism, industrialisation and urbanization are among the factors producing various forms of mobility within and across national borders.
We cannot understand the world, past and present, without considering how voluntary, involuntary, enslaved, or coerced, human mobility has formed and reformed societies. And we need to adopt a multi- and transdisciplinary approach to look at the many facets of these dynamics. With its integrated teaching and research agenda, the Geneva Graduate Institute is particularly well equipped to propose a versatile curriculum on mobilities, migrations and boundaries, which includes introductory and advances seminars delivered by lawyers, economists, political scientists, historians, anthropologists and sociologists, but also by practitioners with a long experience with the United Nations and nongovernmental organisations, and at times national governments. Let us mention one of the specificities of our teaching programme, the Research Applied Seminars, where our students work in teams on real projects commissioned by partners from the international, nongovernmental or private sectors. We aim to offer them the opportunity to enter the job market.
Why do you believe this specialisation is important and inspiring to students?
Once again, human history is constituted by individuals and groups traveling across continents and oceans to explore new horizons, in search of a better life or in an effort to escape violence. By contrast, the nation-state, which nowadays structures international relations, is a newcomer. Modern political sovereignty and legitimacy is based on a triad: the state, the nation/the population, the territory. Such a conception privileges cultural and linguistic homogeneity but at the same time hierarchy and a differentiated integration into the national economy and society. As we can see around us, migrants are the target of xenophobic discourses. Making them vulnerable also contributes to transform them into a cheap workforce. In a sense, we are still observing processes that reproduce colonial, racialised power relations. It is necessary to situate current mobility patterns in their continuity in order to also understand how they might differ – or not – from the past. While the circulation of people and goods is said to have drastically increased in the last decades, new borders and bordering practices are emerging both inside and outside territorial nation-states.
The specialisation addresses on the one hand the governance of mobility by states but also international and nongovernmental organizations, civil society associations or private security firms, and on the other hand the everyday experiences of individuals and families who are involved in transnational or translocal lives. It encourages students to think critically about how mobility and border control are crucial factors in today’s world economy, how they may produce and reproduce imbalances of power, xenophobic distrust, discrimination, victimization, and violence.
I consider that the ‘refugee’, more specifically, is the political figure of our time, like the ‘citizen’ was at the time of the French Revolution. With the founding principle of ‘non-refoulement’, stated in international law, the refugee is an exception to the sovereignty of the nation-state and therefore a source of ontological anxiety. As such, and beyond the actual demographic volume of global migration, which remains relatively limited if we compared what is happening today with what occurred in the 19th century for instance, the figure of the ‘refugee’ and the public discourses that it triggers is a signifier of today’s political dynamics.
How have recent developments in mobilities, migration and boundaries globally affected your course, generally and specifically with regard to governance?
At the end of the Cold War, in the early 1990s, discourses on globalisation became dominant. There was a diffuse idea that the importance of the nation-state, as the entity organising the world, was fading, and the liberal order with its emphasis on democracy and economic exchanges will prevail. Today, we are in a post-post-Cold War era, or if you prefer in a post-globalisation era, at least that’s the mood. Renewed tensions between the old blocks, Russia-Ukraine war, Brexit are all symptoms showing that nationalism is not dead. While the Israeli-Palestinian endless crisis demonstrates that colonialism and genocidal temptation are not dead.
Donald Trump’s second tenure as US president, beginning in January 2025, signals a reassertion of the nation-state. His administration has pursued a foreign policy characterized by a preference for transactional, bilateral relationships over collective action, a withdrawal from major international agreements, cutting funding of the United Nations and development agencies, imposition of new tax tariffs. These developments have triggered a significant crisis of multilateralism by systematically undermining the post-1945 international system, which is today less capable than ever of addressing global challenges such as migration. The result is a more fragmented, less cooperative world with long-term implications for global stability and governance.
Many UN agencies and international nongovernmental organisations had to reduce their activities. The social and political landscape of Geneva, which the Institute is part, has been impacted. The courses of the specialisation “Mobilities, Migration and Boundaries” are addressing these rapid developments and their social, political legal and economic, consequences for human mobilities and migration government.
How do you structure your classes and are there specific ways you approach the teaching framework and material?
As a scholar, the cornerstone of my teaching philosophy is to enable students broaden their horizons, and develop their conceptual and analytical tools. My main goal is to encourage intellectual curiosity and critical thinking.
My teaching technique tends to be based on the interplay between theoretical debates and empirical material. I consider that pedagogy involves not simply seeking answers to difficult questions, but rather insisting on asking challenging and intriguing questions that open novel perspectives. The learning process is best understood as a collaborative endeavour. Students learn from me and from each other, just I too learn from them, especially in a place such as the Geneva Graduate Institute with its cosmopolitan student body. The ultimate goal is to teach students to think out of the box in order to be able to act differently.
Having lived in Europe and North America, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, and travelled extensively, I have been able to observe various social and cultural environments. For me, classroom courses should, as far as possible, be grounded in personal experience, to which end I endeavour to supplement my teaching with relevant narratives, documentaries and movies. I teach using small anecdotes of everyday life that try to arouse a sense of curiosity among the students and inspire them to be independent learners. But social theory for me is far from a luxury; it is necessary in order to distance oneself from dominant forms of knowledge, still shaped in part by colonialism, to rethink the epistemology of our way of seeing the world.
How has your engagement with students and the material changed over the years since you’ve started teaching this specialisation?
I love teaching and my passion is not fading over the years. As head of the specialisation, I am open to all the discipline present at the Institute. For a complex and multifaceted object such as migration, they are all necessary. How can we talk about migration and borders without integrating a perspective on the state as well as the international and nongovernmental organisations, on national and international legal frameworks, on the economy and labour market, on colonialism and imperialism, on the Cold War, on grassroot organisations and migrant mobilisation as well as xenophobia… So political science, international law, international and development economics, international history and last but not least anthropology and sociology need to be integrated.
I remain nevertheless an anthropologist in my heart and mind. For me, anthropology is a twofold, intertwined movement. First, it consists in a broad critique of the dominant categories, those that we believe to be granted. But when something seems obvious, it probably hides power relations. It is crucial to address, critically but constructively, the mainstream ideas floating around us. Second, but there is no priority order here, it is done spending time with people, whoever they might be, a UN staff or human right activist, a government official or an asylum seeker, listen to what they say and observing what they do more than asking them a series of direct questions. This is crucial to distance ourselves from our received ideas, to unlearn what we have learned and be able to operate the critique of dominant categories that I am promoting. Knowledge, in my conception, has an emotional dimension: the critique of categories, a highly abstract endeavour, is combined with the capacity to connect to people who have a different trajectory than me, a highly emotional venture.
The development of Artificial Intelligence inevitably leads us to reassess our assignments and evaluation methods. I conceive my assignments in way that encourages different abilities. Rather than the traditional essay written at home, I ask students to produce little videos for instance, interviewing migrants, staff of international organisations but also family members to retrace their own migration history, to work in group on a poster they present in class, or to write brief pieces addressing any theme in connection with migration as they are unfolded in the media.
My teaching philosophy is based on my conviction that universities should also train citizens, global citizens. My goal is to encourage the students to use the concepts discussed in class in order to critique the dominant public discourses. Being passionate about doing research and teaching, I know that I can at times be intense and provocative. I believe to be deeply respectful of the opinions of students, but I know that my fervour is sometimes misunderstood for imperiousness. Over the years, I have learned to be less assertive and more suggestive. But that’s still work in progress!
