New Visiting Researcher at MOBILE - Zvezda Vankova
Dr Zvezda Vankova is an associate professor in EU Migration Law at the Law Faculty of Lund University and the principal investigator of the project ‘Refugee protection or cherry picking? Assessing new admission policies for refugees in Europe’ (2023-2027) funded by the Swedish Research Council. She holds a PhD in EU migration law from Maastricht University. The overarching aim of her research is to examine how the interaction of laws pertaining to human mobility and their implementation in practice influence the rights and trajectories of people on the move. She conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersection of EU law, public international law and empirical legal studies with a focus on human rights, migration, integration and complementary pathways for refugees.
Dr Zvezda Vankova is the author of the Open Access book Circular Migration and the Rights of Migrant Workers in Central and Eastern Europe (2020), and her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as European Journal for Migration law, Refugee Survey Quarterly, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies. She is the co-founder and Steering Committee Member of the Øresund Migration Law Initiative (OMiLI) which brings together scholars of migration law and migration studies from the region to identify research synergies and share research findings, and one of the co-conveners of the working group ‘Active Refugee Admission Policies (ARAP)’ within the German Network of Forced Migration Studies (Netzwerk Fluchtforschung, NWFF).
Before joining academia, Dr Vankova worked at the Migration Policy Group in Brussels and Open Society Institute in Sofia. She has acted as a consultant on migrant and refugee rights matters to the European Parliament, the Council of Europe’s Special Representative of the Secretary General on Migration and Refugees, and the UNHCR, and is also one of the co-founders of the association Multi Kulti Collective, which aims to support the integration of foreigners into Bulgarian society.