The Game: New MPIfG Book by Hannah Pool

June sees the publication by Oxford University Press of The Game: The Economy of Undocumented Migration from Afghanistan to Europe by Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the MPIfG. Based on her award-winning dissertation, the book offers an in-depth ethnographic insight into the experiences of Afghan refugees en route to Europe. For her longitudinal study, Pool accompanied Afghan refugees for over ten months on their perilous and costly journey from Iran via Turkey and the Balkan route. “The game” is how the refugees themselves refer to their attempt to cross borders and seek asylum. In her book, Pool analyzes what she calls the “moral economy” of migration — the social norms, expectations, and mutual obligations that shape the refugees’ actions. She shows that migration is not solely a matter of individual decisions but is fundamentally determined by collective practices, mutual aid, and solidarity, yet it is also fraught with uncertainty and exploitation. The dissertation on which the book is based, “Doing the Game: The Moral Economy of Coming to Europe,” won the German Sociological Association’s dissertation prize, the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society, and the Maria Ioannis Baganha Prize for Migration Studies of the International Migration Research Network (IMISCOE), among other accolades.

Hannah Pool has been a senior researcher in the Economic Sociology Research Area at the MPIfG since 2022. Her research lies at the intersection of migration, mobility, money, and borders, with a particular focus on undocumented and climate migration. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford and Columbia University and volunteered as a translator for refugees along the Balkan route.