de Groot, Sophie (2026) The Politics and Psychology of Borders – Narratives of Migrants. Bachelor thesis, Global Responsibility & Leadership (GRL).
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Abstract
This thesis explores how borders are experienced, constructed, and given meaning in migrants’ personal narratives of everyday life. At a time of unprecedented global displacement and increasingly exclusionary migration regimes, borders are often discussed as legal or political instruments. This research instead approaches borders as culturally and psychologically meaningful constructs that shape identity, belonging, and lived experience. Drawing on literature from border studies (the Politics of Borders, and the Psychology of Borders) and cultural psychology, borders are understood as phenomena that operate simultaneously at intra-psychological, interpersonal, and societal levels. The study adopts a qualitative, inductive approach, using semi-structured interviews to place migrants’ own stories and reflections at the centre of the analysis. The findings reveal that borders are experienced as privileges that structure mobility, language barriers that shape belonging, security narratives that produce distinctions between “us” and “them”, and temporal attachments to place, home, memory, and imagined futures. By engaging with these narratives, the research has aimed to illuminate how borders can both separate and connect, exclude and enable belonging in everyday life. By integrating political and psychological perspectives, while remaining attentive to ethical considerations, positionality, and epistemic injustice, this thesis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of borders as lived and meaningful realities of migrants.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
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| Name supervisor: | Gul, P. |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Jul 2026 07:21 |
| Last Modified: | 14 Jul 2026 07:21 |
| URI: | https://campus-fryslan.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/890 |
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