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Jan Claudius Völkel is DAAD visiting professor at Cairo University in the Euro-Mediterranean Studies Programme, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, and Regional Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (www.bti-project.org). His research interests deal with the current transformation processes in the Middle East and North Africa region as well as the Mediterranean relations of the European Union. He is member of the advisory board of the “ArabTrans” project at the University of Aberdeen (www.arabtrans.eu) and fellow of the Arab German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (www.agya.info). He has been lecturing at the Universities of Freiburg, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Duhok (Iraqi Kurdistan), al-Quds (Palestine) and the Royal Scientific Society in Amman. He spent visiting research stays at the Universities of Montreal, Istanbul (Bahçeşehir) and Dundee. In 2016, he received the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Commission for his upcoming research project on “The role of national parliaments in the Arab transformation processes.”
Since the mid-2000s, Egypt has developed into a main transit country for irregular migrants, either to Libya or to Israel. Now, as the traditional paths have largely been closed, many migrants and refugees are blocked in Cairo and along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Boarding a boat towards Europe is for many the only option to escape negligence, detention and abuse.
