New Article Published in Global Networks

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A new article, "Mobility Hub or Hollow? Cross-border Travelling in the Mediterranean, 1995-2016" was just published in Global Networks. The paper, co-authored with Ettore Recchi (Sciences Po/EUI) and Federica Bicchi (LSE/EUI) is based on joint work in the Global Mobilities Project at the EUI's Migration Policy Centre. We show that moblity in the Mediterranean is distributed extremely unequally. Mobility is much higher and increasing more strongly along the northern than along the southern shore, thus creating a growing mobility divide (see figure on the left). South‐north and north‐south movements are even scarcer and stagnate or even decline over time. Mobility between France, Spain and Italy constitutes almost 57 percent of all mobility in the Mediterranean althouth these three countries account for little more than one percent of all country pairs in the region.

Community detection algorithms reconfirm that mobility predominantly takes place in disparate clusters around the Mediterranean, not across it. These findings imply that much like the Rio Grande in the U.S., the Mediterranean still constitutes a dividing obstacle to mobility in the 21st century. Multivariate regression models for network data suggest that geographical distance and, to a lesser extent, political visa regulations, explain the unequal mobility structure better than differences in economic well‐being.

The paper is open access and can be read in full here.