Interview with CFD Advisory Board Member Ahmet İçduygu

The Newsletter Team sat down with CFD Advisory Board Member, Ahmet İçduygu, for a brief interview about his research and work. The transcript of our interview is below.

CFD Team: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What led you to do the work you are doing today?

I grew up with atlases and globes — my parents gave them to me as toys— and, I think, that early exposure quietly shaped a curiosity about migration long before I learned the word for it. I trained in sociology and demography, completed a PhD in social and political demography in Australia, and later worked across political science and international relations. Studying Australia’s migration history and the rise of multicultural policies in the 1970s deeply influenced my work on migration, citizenship, identity, and conflict resolution. Over the past three decades, living and working in Turkey and the region —places profoundly affected by ongoing conflicts and forced migration — and in my environment, listening to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of migrants and refugees has continually taught me about the lived realities behind the theories.

CFD Team: What do you hope to gain or accomplish during your sabbatical at CFD?

I already collaborate with CFD colleagues — over the past two years we’ve run joint workshops and panels. Two concrete projects we’re developing here are an edited volume on “migration corridors” (from our Boston 2024 workshop), to be published by Liverpool University Press and co-edited with Muhammad Zaman, and a summer school in Istanbul in September 2027, “Crossing Regions, Shaping Lives: African Migration Corridors in Global Perspective,” co-organized by CFD and MiReKoc (my research center). Beyond these, my main goal is to deepen intellectual exchange with CFD colleagues and build lasting collaborative projects.

CFD Team: You have published and taught extensively on the topics of migration, citizenship, nationalism and ethnicity, and civil society. How do you see this work shaping both intellectual discourse and broadening understanding of the challenges facing forcibly displaced persons?

What I observe is the following: around the world, the past decade’s democratic backsliding and the global rise of authoritarian and populist politics make it urgent to revisit migration, citizenship, nationalism, and ethnicity with renewed critical attention. We’re witnessing not only erosion of migrants’ rights but also of citizenship and civil-society rights more broadly. That erosion both produces and compounds forced displacement, creating cycles of human suffering. I emphasize how human rights and citizenship rights interlock—that insight matters both theoretically and in practice.

CFD Team: What are your hopes for the future of forced displacement in academia? Overall? Given the myriad challenges we face today, from the Middle East to North Africa and to the US, how can the academy play a more prominent role?

Honestly, it’s hard to be optimistic while forced displacement is rising across many regions. What I find particularly alarming is how the very basic norm of non‑refoulement has been weakened in practice in parts of the Western world, as deportation and restrictive policies gain ground. Asylum seekers face fences and walls instead of protection. Academia should respond with robust, evidence‑based research, close partnerships with civil society, and active efforts to inform policymakers. We must also help ensure media and public debate are fed with reliable information to correct misinformation. While advocacy isn’t academia’s primary role, the humanitarian urgency of forced displacement makes some engagement and public-facing work necessary.

CFD Team: Broadly speaking, what else should people know about your research and work?

Early on, interestingly, C. Wright Mills’s well-known book “The Sociological Imagination” shaped how I think — its insistence on linking personal questions to broader social and historical forces frames my work. What guides me in my work is imagination. Then what helps to imagination in our work:  two points I keep returning to. First, historical and comparative approaches are essential in migration studies — looking back and across geographies gives us more useful, objective knowledge (for instance, I’m currently working on the history and bureaucracy of borders and border crossings in different geographies). Second, I frequently encourage people around me for openness to other disciplines and methods — cross- and multidisciplinary perspectives enrich our questions and tools. On a personal note, in this context, for example, I’ve most recently started reading about bird migration and primate mobility to broaden how I think about human movement.

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