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HEIndividual fellowship2023–2025

JANUSHOPE · Two-Faced Hopes: Football, Migration, and Religion Between West Africa and Europe

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2023-10-01 → 2025-12-31
EU contribution
€203,464
Participants
3
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

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Results in brief

Two-Faced Hopes: Football, Migration, and Religion Between West Africa and Europe

The MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship project "JANUSHOPE: Football, Migration, and Religion Between West Africa and Europe" was situated at the intersection of social anthropology and human geography and addressed pressing questions concerning migration, inequality, and future-making. Football has become a major driver of migration aspirations among young Africans, while religion increasingly shapes how migrants interpret risk, hardship, and the possibility of success. At the same time, European policy debates on migration, labor exploitation, and human trafficking often struggle to account for migrants’ affective orientations and subjective motivations. JANUSHOPE investigated the intersection of football, migration, and religion among West African migrants in Europe through the analytical lens of hope, defined as a belief that something desired may occur in the future. While interdisciplinary research often treats hope as abstract, depoliticized, or inherently positive, the project examined its “two-faced” nature by analyzing how hope can both sustain agency and reproduce inequality and exploitation. By focusing on African football migrants with irregular migration trajectories, the project explored how faith-based narratives of hope may simultaneously critique and reinforce unequal global structures. The overall objective was to understand how hopes for social mobility through football are formed, maintained, contested, and embodied, and how religion mediates these processes. By foregrounding lived experiences often absent from official statistics and policy frameworks, the project aimed to generate knowledge relevant to academic debates, public discourse, and EU policy priorities related to migration governance, labor exploitation, and trafficking.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Since the 1990s and the commercialization of global football, an increasing number of young people in countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon have aspired to play football as a career, a strategy to migrate abroad (ideally Europe), and an opportunity for social and class mobility. For the majority, however, the dream does not come true. International media and human rights organizations regularly report about thousands of young West Africans victimized by deceitful agents, stranded as undocumented migrants, and playing for clubs under exploitative conditions. And yet, young people continue to train to migrate and play. Scholars have studied these football-related migrations, but they have overlooked the fact that religions, especially Pentecostal Christianity and Islam, play a central role in migrants’ hopeful journeys. This project investigates the intersection of football, migration, and religion among African migrants in Europe in order to study hope, conceptualized as a belief that something desired may occur in the future. It makes a crucial critical intervention: while many interdisciplinary studies assume a depoliticized notion of hope and romanticize its positive and constructive qualities, JANUSHOPE also examines the dark side of hope that perpetuates inequality and exploitation. It turns to African “irregular” football migrants in Europe to understand how a critique of the global industry’s dark side of hope might co-exist with hopes for “making it” in the industry. It investigates how their faith-based narratives of hope might both critique and reproduce inequalities of global capitalism and transnational migration. The key research methods are semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with “irregular” African football migrants in Europe. The results will be disseminated through refereed articles and communicated to a wide global audience interested in football and to key European policy makers in fields of migration and human rights.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN · GroningenCoordinatorNetherlands
  • LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY · LoughboroughUnited Kingdom
  • THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD · OxfordUnited Kingdom

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union