I am a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research, whose interests have taken me to fieldworks in Syria, Iraq, Kosovo and Nigeria. While I have researched a variety of issues, ranging from selection criteria in refugee resettlement to border control at airports and human trafficking, my core competence lies in the field of return migration and return policies.
In my doctoral research I examined return migration to Iraqi Kurdistan, which also triggered a longstanding interest in the migration-corruption nexus. I have also taken part in a string of evaluations of assisted return from Norway to Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kosovo.
Building on those experiences, I'm now coordinating the project Deporting Foreigners: Contested Norms in International Practice (NORMS, 2021-2024). NORMS cmpoaratively explores the norm dynamics of deportation from both host and origin state perspectives, in Norway, Sweden, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Ethiopia, and moroever within the EU's border agency, Frontex.
Previously, I have been affiliated with the Centre of Excellence in the Study of Civil War (CSCW) and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), as well as the Department of Sociology and Human Geography and the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo, where I taught 'migration control'. I have also been a visiting scholar at the University of Sussex and at the University of Oxford.