Johns Hopkins UniversityEst. 1876
America’s First Research University
Peo Hansen
Adjunct Professor
About
Peo Hansen is Adjunct Professor at SAIS Europe. He is also Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University. He has been senior fellow at New York University’s Remarque Institute; visiting professor at the Max Planck Sciences Po Center in Paris (2018); and Simone Veil Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI, in Florence.
Peo Hansen’s research examines the EU’s migration and asylum policy and the related issues of citizenship, migrant integration and identity. He takes a special interest in the macroeconomics and political economy of migration in the EU, including the debate concerning the fiscal impact of migration.
Hansen’s research expertise also includes a strong focus on the history of the European Union and the significance of colonialism for the birth of postwar European integration. As he has revealed in his research together with Stefan Jonsson, the scale of the original EU in the 1950s was not delimited by the European land mass but corresponded to the geopolitical and colonial constellation that at the time was called Eurafrica. Hansen’s research also attends to the present EU’s “geopolitical turn,” tracing its historical antecedents to the pre-World War I, interwar and postwar debates on the geopolitics of European unity.
His books include The Politics of European Citizenship: Deepening Contradictions in Social Rights and Migration Policy (co-authored with Sandy B. Hager); Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (co-authored with Stefan Jonsson) and A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy. His work has appeared in journals such as History of the Present, European Political Science, Globalizations, Journal of Common Market Studies, Mediterranean Quarterly, European Societies, European Journal of Social Theory, Interventions, and Journal of Historical Sociology. In 2016 he was commissioned by the OECD to write a working paper on the EU’s external labour migration policy (OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, 2016).
Peo Hansen’s research examines the EU’s migration and asylum policy and the related issues of citizenship, migrant integration and identity. He takes a special interest in the macroeconomics and political economy of migration in the EU, including the debate concerning the fiscal impact of migration.
Hansen’s research expertise also includes a strong focus on the history of the European Union and the significance of colonialism for the birth of postwar European integration. As he has revealed in his research together with Stefan Jonsson, the scale of the original EU in the 1950s was not delimited by the European land mass but corresponded to the geopolitical and colonial constellation that at the time was called Eurafrica. Hansen’s research also attends to the present EU’s “geopolitical turn,” tracing its historical antecedents to the pre-World War I, interwar and postwar debates on the geopolitics of European unity.
His books include The Politics of European Citizenship: Deepening Contradictions in Social Rights and Migration Policy (co-authored with Sandy B. Hager); Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (co-authored with Stefan Jonsson) and A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy. His work has appeared in journals such as History of the Present, European Political Science, Globalizations, Journal of Common Market Studies, Mediterranean Quarterly, European Societies, European Journal of Social Theory, Interventions, and Journal of Historical Sociology. In 2016 he was commissioned by the OECD to write a working paper on the EU’s external labour migration policy (OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, 2016).
- Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of a New Refugee Realism , in The Question of Solidarity in Law and Politics, E. Karageorgiou and N. Gregor (editors), Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)
- The Return of the Repressed: The Colonial History of the EU's Geopolitical Turn , in Journal of Common Market Studies (2025)
- Decolonization and the Spectre of the Nation-state, in British Journal of Sociology 73:1 (2022)
- A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy, Agenda Publishing and Columbia University Press (2021)
- Eurafrica Incognita: The Colonial Roots of the European Union, with S. Jonsson, in History of the Present 7:1 (2017)
- Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism, with S. Jonsson, Bloomsbury (2014). In French: Eurafrique: Aux origines coloniales de l'Union Européenne, Éditions La Découvert; with Preface by Étienne Balibar (2022)