From the anti-migrant riot in Moscow to the refugee crisis in Budapest, migration in post-communist countries significantly influences the politics and society in this region. This course aims to provide paths to understanding this phenomenon based on political science, history, and sociology. The course examines how post-communist countries are responding to, and being transformed by, migration. The central questions that this course addresses are as follows: What are the scales and trends of migration in post-communist states? What consequences does migration have for the societies and politics of the region? What factors determine anti-immigrant sentiment? What explains the immigration policies of post-communist countries? The course covers the history of migration in Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe, as well as investigates the migration policies of post-communist states, focusing on labor migration in Eurasia and the refugee crisis in Eastern Europe.
Song Ha Joo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Zhejiang University, China. She received a PhD in Politics from Princeton University in 2019. In 2016-2017, she was a visiting researcher at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia and the Academy of Public Administration in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan. Her research focuses on authoritarian politics and migration with a regional emphasis on post-communist Europe and Eurasia. Currently, she is working on a project that analyzes the impact of electoral politics on immigration policies in Russia and Kazakhstan at the federal and regional level. In other projects, she investigates the causes of closed refugee policies and open labor immigration policies in Eastern Europe and the role of the state in shaping civil society under the Putin regime.
