FABRIC

Funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council, FABRIC develops a new ethics of migration by understanding and utilizing the moral insights and the moral ideas that faith-based refugee relief organizations develop in practice for the cross-disciplinary debate about the ethics of forced migration in Europe. 

Globally, forced migration is one of the most pressing and one of the most pervasive challenges. Europe has been pushed to a social and political breaking point over migration. The fallout is a death toll that puts the border around the continent among the deadliest borders in the world. 

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) have been at the forefront of this challenge, preventing the collapse of infrastructures of care, combatting racist discourse and religious discrimination. Yet there is very little knowledge about the refugee relief of these FBOs so their significance for the ethics of migration has been neither analyzed nor assessed. Led by Professor Ulrich Schmiedel, FABRIC addresses this lack of research by conducting a comprehensive and comparative empirical exploration of FBOs. FABRIC covers activities by FBOs from different religions, different regions, and different migration regimes in mono- and multi-religious settings. The concentration on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim FBOs is complemented by research on minorities and minoritizations across Europe.

Countering the lack of interaction between empirical and evaluative approaches so characteristic of the study of forced migration, FABRIC enquires into the conditions, constraints, and consequences of practicing justice. It aims to offer a concrete account of faith-based refugee relief in order to formulate a concept of mobility justice that considers cross-connections between social, racial, and climate justice on regional, national, and global scales.