Lars Kravagna, M.A.
Researcher

Lars Kravagna, M.A.
Researcher

Lars Kravagna studied Political Science and History (B.A.) as well as International Migration and Intercultural Relations (M.A.) at the University of Osnabrück. In his master’s thesis, a primary data collection, he used quantitative methods to analyze the voting behavior and political attitudes of post-Soviet migrants in Germany. During his studies, academic stays took him to Ryerson University and University of Haifa. Concurrently, he held various positions as a research assistant at the University of Osnabrück and volunteered supporting refugees. In 2019, he attended the Transatlantic Policy Symposium at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. As of 2022, he is a PhD student at the Research Center for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna (supervisor: Jannis Panagiotidis) and the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at the University of Osnabrück (supervisor: Jochen Oltmer). His PhD project (cotutelle) is funded by a doctoral scholarship of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation. Since 2022 he is a member of the graduate school „Democracies in Europe – Transformations since 1990“ and the Vienna Doctoral School of Historical and Cultural Studies.

Research interests:

  • Migration History
  • Transnational and Comparative History
  • History of Central and Eastern Europe
  • History of Transformation(s)
  • Transformation Processes
  • Migration Governance
  • Migration Regimes
  • post-Soviet Migration
  • Labor Migration

Current project:

„Migration Regimes and Post-Socialist Transformation. The Negotiation of German-Polish Labor Migration“ 

The fall of the "Iron Curtain", the subsequent far-reaching political and economic transformations within the states of the former "Eastern Bloc“, and the end of the GDR in 1989/90 fundamentally changed migration patterns in Europe and Germany. My dissertation examines these newly emerged migration relations with theoretical recourse to the concept of migration regimes, thus bringing into focus the Shaping, Framing, Influencing and Negotiating of migration processes by institutional actors. In line with this, the dissertation draws on two migration regimes as objects of investigation: One is the German-Polish labor migration regime, which is based on a bilateral agreement (1990), and the other is the European migration regime, which is anchored in the Schengen Agreement (1990). In principle, the analysis of those migration regimes will reflect on negotiations regarding Polish labor migration westwards to Germany. Against the backdrop of the political and economic transformations in Poland and Germany after 1989, the analysis especially aims at documenting the emergence, implementation, functions and interconnections of both migration regimes in their formation phase (1989-2004). This topic, which has been identified as an academic void, is dealt with primarily on the basis of archival sources of (supra-)national actors and the results of expert interviews. The dissertation’s main objective lies in the so far only partly explored interconnection of historical transformation and migration research. Hence, a central concern of the dissertation is to fathom the widely unexplored interrelationship between migration or rather migration regimes and post-socialist transformation, consequently relating approaches, questions and results of transformation and migration research to one another.