This book is a revised and updated version of my doctoral dissertation that I defended at Queen Mary University of London in January 2021.
Its origins date back to a sunny afternoon in autumn 2011 when I entered the School of Law building at Queen Mary campus in Mile End. I had arrived in London to meet my then future Ph.D. supervisor, who had expressed an interest in my research proposal. Professor Valsamis Mitsilegas greeted me with an open smile and invited me to take a seat. A few months later, in January 2012, I officially embarked on my Ph.D.
The journey towards completing my thesis, however, has not been easy and has taken much longer than I initially expected. I was doing my Ph.D. in the UK part-time whilst simultaneously working in journalism in Germany. Over the following years, I constantly commuted between Bonn, where I worked for the German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, and London, where I engaged in my research and teaching responsibilities.
Although my mode of research has enabled me to benefit from a truly multicultural and multidisciplinary environment, I was faced with the complex task of sustaining motivation and commitment to my Ph.D. project whilst working in an unrelated field in another country. At Deutsche Welle, I was covering European and world affairs for dw’s Russian Service, with Russian and German as the main working languages. In my Ph.D., I delved into the complex intersection of EU, European human rights, and British domestic law. A further challenge was that before commencing my doctoral studies in the UK, my legal background was rather limited. I started with Latvian master’s degrees in European Studies and Legal Linguistics that covered EU law only briefly, which meant that I needed to work twice as hard as someone holding an llm degree from the UK.
Despite all the challenges, my Ph.D. marathon eventually turned out to be one of the most transformative, enriching, and intellectually stimulating experiences of my life that has profoundly changed the way I look at migration, mobility, and citizenship. It has also taught me resilience and the power of small steps, a strategy that helped me keep going every time I was just about to give up. In January 2021 – exactly nine years after I started – I passed my Ph.D. viva with no corrections, an outcome I did not even dare to dream of. Soon after that, I fully transitioned from journalism to academia where I have since expanded my research into the area of asylum.
I am incredibly thankful to all the people without whom completing this study would have been impossible. First, I would like to express my deepest
This book is a small tribute to all the families separated by borders, immigration laws, and passports and to all the couples whose relationship does not conform to the authorities’ normative perceptions of how a ‘genuine’ marriage should look like. It is partly dedicated to all those whose ability to be together depends on restrictive family reunification rules that – to paraphrase the famous quote by Indian novelist Arundhati Roy – lay down who should be loved by whom, in what way, and how much.
Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of my great-grandfather, Maxím Fyódorovich Yepifánov (Максим Федорович Епифанов, 1875–1925), who lived his entire life in a small village in the north-east of European Russia until he suddenly died of a stroke at the age of 50. His five surviving children, including my grandfather, ended up scattered across different parts of the then Soviet Union, some of which later became independent states. I visited his village back in 2018. It is no longer on the map, yet the monumental red brick church where my great-grandparents were married still stands – a silent witness of the tumultuous century-long history of wars, revolutions, movements, and constantly shifting borders and boundaries. This is the place where my roots are, and this is where my story began.