Biography

Gerasimos Tsourapas is a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (2025–26) and 125th Anniversary Chair and Professor of International Relations at the University of Birmingham. At the Migration Policy Centre, his research examines how states use cross-border mobility as an instrument of international power, with a particular focus on coercion, cooperation, and legitimation in world politics.

He is Editor-in-Chief of Migration Studies (Oxford University Press) and leads a project on migration diplomacy, originally awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and now funded in the UK through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which investigates how states deploy restrictions and incentives on cross-border mobility as instruments of foreign policy. During his fellowship, he is convening an international research programme on migration power, developed at the European University Institute. He served as elected Chair of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, & Migration Studies Section of the International Studies Association. His books include The Politics of Migration in Modern Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018), awarded the 2020 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award by the International Studies Association, and Migration Diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa (Manchester University Press, 2021).

Previously, he served as Professor of International Relations at the University of Glasgow, and has held visiting positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, the American University in Cairo, and Koç University. He has contributed expertise to a wide range of institutions, including the European Commission on policy approaches to migration diplomacy (2024) and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on transnational repression and the rule of law (2023). His commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, and the Greek daily Ta Nea.