Finanziamento UE – NextGenerationEU PRIN 2022 PNRR - The Perpetual Refugee Crisis in Italy and beyond: Humanitarian Emergencies, Prejudice, and Social Capital amongHost Communities - PNRR M4C2 investimento 1.1 Avviso 1409/2022

Started almost 10 years ago, the European refugee crisis is still not over, as the Ukraine war pushed millions of peopleto cross the European Union (EU)’s Eastern border and new routes through the Mediterranean endanger migrants thatattempt crossing the sea borders from Libya, Tunisia, and Turkey. The re-intensification of crossings in Europe occursat a time of increasing global migration, with precarious economic conditions, food deprivation and climate changeacting as push factors in poorer countries. From 2009, approximately 4.2 million people were detected crossing theborders of Europe (Figure 1). These crossings entail fatal risks: at least 40 thousand migrants died or have gonemissing in the same timeframe – a certain underestimate. Italy remains at the frontline of this crisis as one of thedestination countries for people crossing the Mediterranean, with almost 90 thousand people reaching the country’sshores between January and November 2022. In this context, events that display the dangers and suffering that migrants encounter while on the move have becomea recurring phenomenon and a focus point of public attention. Such events include the 2013 shipwreck in Lampedusa,the death of Ālān Kurdî, the 3-year-old Syrian toddler washed out on a Turkish shore in September 2015, or that of theteenage boy from Mali, unnamed, whose body was found in April 2015 in the depths of the Mediterranean, with hisonly belonging, a school report sewed into the pocket of his trousers. Recurring tragic events have acted as catalystsfor policy change. However, the extent to which permanent exposure to the death and suffering of migrants andasylum seekers affects the views and the behaviours of people living in communities at the receiving end of thesecrossings, remains largely unexplored to date. This gap becomes ever more relevant today, at a time when bordersare again politicised and public debates polarise on the issue, with governments in Europe arguing over thedistribution of refugees and the responsibilities for the safety of migrants stranded at sea. Our Project sets out to examine how exposure to the suffering of migrants have affected host community’s attitudestowards the incoming populations as well as the social relations within host communities. We will combineobservational studies, surveys and qualitative interviews to tease out the relative effects of exposure and contact.Answering these questions will help to understand the impact of the crisis on Europe’s societies and to build moreinclusive and cohesive communities. The Project brings together two units at Bocconi and Torino university, in a teamwith expertise that spans issues of intergroup relations, migration, cooperation and, methodologically, oncomputational social sciences, survey experiments as well as qualitative research methods.