My research explores European integration's historical and contemporary development, focusing on geopolitics, colonialism, and the EU’s migration policy.
EU, Geopolitics, Migration and Economics
Peo Hansen is professor of political science at REMESO. At REMESO he is the director of the PhD Programme in Ethnic and Migration Studies and the Swedish Research Council’s Graduate School in Migration and Integration.
He has been senior fellow at New York University’s Remarque Institute (2006); visiting professor at the Max Planck Sciences Po Center in Paris (2018); and Simone Veil Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, in Florence (2023, 2025).
He has writte several books (see below) and his work has appeared in journals such as British Journal of Sociology; History of the Present; European Political Science; Globalizations; Journal of Common Market Studies; Mediterranean Quarterly; European Societies; European Journal of Social Theory; Interventions; Race & Class; SAIS Europe Journal of Global Affairs; and Journal of Historical Sociology. In 2016 he was commissioned by the OECD to write a paper on the EU’s external labour migration policy (OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, 2016).
Research
Migration and Economics
He has written extensively on the EU’s migration policy and the related issues of citizenship, migrant integration and identity. This includes a particular focus on the economics and political economy of migration in the EU. Here, he develops an alternative to the dominant orthodox economics approach and its focus on the fiscal impact of migration and refugee reception. By examining migration through the macroeconomic lens offered by modern monetary theory (MMT), Hansen not only demonstrate orthodoxy’s detrimental impact on migration policy and research.
His work also shows why MMT offers the tools with which both migration research and migration policy could be modernized and put on a realistic footing. Such a realism would include an appreciation of migrants’ significant real resource contributions to societies in the EU, in general, and low-paid migrants’ over-representation in essential work and other important welfare state functions, in particular. Real resource realism, as Hansen’s recent award-winning book, A Modern Migration Theory, argues, thus challenges the prevalent orthodox assumption that there is a trade-off between refugee and low-skilled migration and the fiscal sustainability of the welfare state.
Eurafrica
Hansen’s research expertise also includes a strong focus on European geopolitics and the significance of colonialism for the birth of postwar European integration. As he has revealed in his research together with Stefan Jonsson and their book Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism, 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.
As they annexed France’s and Belgium’s African colonies into the Rome Treaty’s colonial association regime, the EU’s founders stressed the community’s huge extra-European scope and natural sphere of influence. In their work, Hansen and Jonsson show that practically all the visions and concrete institutional arrangements working towards European integration in the first two postwar decades placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective.
EU’s “Geopolitical Turn”
Currently, Hansen’s research focuses on 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”. These debates all grappled with various integration strategies, many of them colonial, to stem Europe’s declining global power in the face of rising competitors and adversaries to the east and the west.
As Hansen’s research aims to show, the EU’s current geopolitical turn – its quest for “strategic autonomy” and its attempts to balance China, Russia and the U.S. – points to the fact that “Europe” remains stuck in what has proven to be a very long twentieth century.
Film clips
Om migration och välfärd
How modern monetary theory could be a catalyst for modern migration theory
The truth about mass migration
Crazy or Laughable? Why The EU (Still) Thinks It Rules The World
A Modern Migration Theory
The US Is MILITARIZING Scandinavia Like There Is No Tomorrow. What Are They Planning?
