Seeing the person behind the number

It did not take long after the fall of the Assad regime for an asylum debate to gain traction in Europe. Asylum applications were no longer processed, and the status of those who had been granted asylum was reviewed. All Syrians who came to Austria less than five years ago have received a letter from the Federal Office for Immigration and Asylum, which constitutes the first step in a process to withdraw asylum. In the letter, they are instructed to report to the authorities once again to explain why they believe that they are still eligible for protection despite the changed circumstances. “This debate is so detrimental to the feeling of belonging to our society that those who fled to us have finally developed in the past few years,” says Müller-Funk.

In the project SYREALITY, which is funded by the FWF, the migration researcher from the University for Continuing Education Krems has investigated since 2022 how war and having to flee one’s country have impacted refugees’ life plans and how those changes influence migration flows. On the one hand, having to flee deals a serious blow to existing life plans, but on the other hand, refugees develop strategies to cope with such changes and the traumas experienced. In her research, Müller-Funk focuses on people who have been forced to flee Syria and have come to Europe since the beginning of the civil war in 2011.

A political scientist herself, she explores how people’s life goals and social class impact their migration decisions based on research in the fields of sociology, migration and refugee research, and psychology. She also investigates how legal status and the way refugees are received in various European countries shape the affected people’s aspirations and well-being.

SYREALITY is innovative in two ways: For one thing, there are very few studies to date in which researchers connect insights from psychology with sociological research to better understand how traumas, aspirations in life, and mobility are connected. For another thing, it has not yet been systematically explored how social class affects people who become refugees and whose resources were destroyed by war and further depleted by their flight. Müller-Funk seeks to close this gap by investigating the changes in life plans and in social class, tracing the stories of forced migrants and refugees in a participatory, transnational, cross-country, and longitudinal approach.

The research team engages in field research in four European cities (Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Athens), a process during which refugees themselves have been assigned an active role in data collection. The project involves a quantitative survey, life story interviews, and the drawing of cognitive maps featuring places and events that are central to a subject’s life to better visualize how challenges, opportunities, and life stories change in the course of time.

... building on research done in Turkey and Lebanon

The current project builds on the SYRMAGINE project, in which Müller-Funk explored the migratory decisions of Syrian refugees in Turkey and Lebanon and their imaginations of Europe between 2017 and 2019. Turkey is the country that has accepted the largest number of Syrian refugees. The researcher shares that for many people who had to flee, Lebanon “was a logical first choice” as, due to the two countries’ shared history, their families, economies, and cultures interweave in many ways.

The core findings of the project spell out, among other facts, that the majority of refugees were extremely hesitant about their decision where to flee, did not have a clear picture of what Europe would be like, and did not even want to come to Europe in the first place. “My results seriously question the narrative of all refugees longing for Europe,” the researcher says. A further key finding is that people manage to develop new visions for rebuilding their life even under the most taxing and volatile of conditions. “This refutes the major misunderstanding that people come to our country to take advantage of the welfare system. The widespread belief that they would prefer to do nothing is ludicrous,” Müller-Funk explains.

The current SYREALITY project builds on these findings. The aim is to investigate how life plans are changed by war, persecution, and displacement as well as the role of the socio-economic background and social class in all of this. There is also a dedicated focus on how content people feel. How do changes in mental health or traumatic experiences impact refugees’ stories? And how is this affected by their legal status?

An online survey, which received about 2,000 responses, and 100 life story interviews were carried out in the respective capitals of Greece, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. The qualitative interviews were all completed by 2024, i.e., before the fall of the Assad regime. The project also pursues a participatory approach, which means that people who have first-hand experience as refugees are involved in the research design, data collection, and also analysis. 

Relative contentment

“Many people were relatively content with their lives despite the extremely difficult experiences they had been through, and they could envision staying in the country,” the research reports about an outcome she did not expect. The exception was Greece, “which is not surprising considering the conditions in the reception camps,” she adds.

Anything for the children’s education

The study clearly shows how important education is for Syrians who have had to flee. Many young people had to interrupt their studies in Syria when schools and universities were shut down, and when they came to Europe, they also carried with them the hope of being able to continue their education. “It was a central narrative in interviews conducted with parents that although they felt they did not have a future themselves, they put all their hopes in their children and the education they would receive,” Müller-Funk says.

“Many report that their life was on halt already during the conflict, before they fled Syria. This is also why the renewed stagnation, being forced to do nothing and just wait until the asylum proceedings end, is so difficult for many of them. They came here to be able to live their life again,” Müller-Funk says. She adds that it’s also very challenging to be reduced to being a refugee. “A young man shared that he was glad to be enrolled in university again because it enabled him to say that he was a student,” Müller-Funk shares.

A roller-coaster ride of hope and uncertainty

As a return to Syria was only possible for many interview partners in the event of a regime change, many of them ruled out this option categorically until late 2024. “People did not expect the Assad regime to be overthrown,” Müller-Funk shares. Now they feel both hopeful and uncertain because nobody knows what the future holds for the country. People can now reunite with family members who had been left behind. “Many go back for a short time to see their parents, who either did not want to come along when their children fled or had been unable to because the resources did not suffice for everybody to flee.”

Following decades during which the country was ruled by a terror regime, Syria now faces the monumental task of having to investigate the crimes of the Assad regime. Far more than 100,000 people are still missing, and it is feared that many of them are dead and have been buried in mass graves. Novel DNA analysis methods will be used to help identify the bodies. But it will be a long time until all murders have been investigated and families feel that justice has been done.

The expert perceives the current asylum debate as very destructive. “Many people were told that they should forget everything they had to leave behind and become part of the receiving culture instead, and now they are basically expected to pack their bags and go back over night.” This debate has caused a lot of anxiety among people. Müller-Funk’s research has clearly shown that particularly the legal status plays a big part for people who want to stay, as a residence permit allows them to make plans for the future again. “When it’s only about survival, the future goes to die,” says Müller-Funk about a core finding from the life story interviews through which she learned about people’s lives during the time of the conflict in Syria.

The political scientist is often unsure how relevant her work is for society. “There is a clear commitment to empirical migration research by the funding body, but what happens with the results is a different story. We strive to understand reality in an empirical way, but at the same time we know how narrow the political scope is for putting this knowledge to use.”

Bringing migration research into schools

It was this frustration and her wish to make migration research accessible to groups in society apart from political decision-makers that brought forth TIES, a two-year project funded by the National Geographic she completed in 2023. The aim was to bring migration research into schools to provide a counterpoint to popular myths. To this end, the researchers involved developed modules in six languages for teachers to impart migration research to teenagers aged 14 to 18. Depending on the subject – geography, history, or social studies –, the modules had a different focus. “The teachers really appreciated the modules. But the resources available to us were a problem. It was a very tightly funded project with an immense workload,” Müller-Funk shares.

Müller-Funk, who is 39, originally wanted to become a journalist. She grew up in the Waldviertel region of Austria and studied political science and Arabic studies in Vienna and Paris. As part of the language courses she took every year, she also travelled to the Middle East, including Syria. Her first post-doc position in Oxford was decisive for her academic career, which eventually led her to focus on migration and refugee research. She still draws on a large academic network from this time. “Oxford is very international; it is a place where people pass through and where you can get to know many people in a short period of time,” she recounts. A Marie Curie fellowship led her to Amsterdam, where she joined Hein de Haas’ research group. Particularly “the way things were discussed there, totally disregarding hierarchies” was inspiring for her.

This destination not only shaped her academic career to follow but also her personal life. She met her partner, a sociologist with a focus on education, in the Netherlands. The couple share two daughters today. There is one phenomenon she knows well from her personal life she often hears about when she does life story interviews: the impressive power of coincidence to shape the future. Being in the right place at the right time and meeting the right people.

In 2022, the researcher joined the Department for Migration and Globalisation at the University for Continuing Education Krems. In September 2025, she will start a project titled “Refugees – Political Participation and State-(Re)Making in Displacement” (RESTATE), which is funded by the European Research Council (ERC). In the course of this five-year project, she will investigate how people who had to flee perceive the state and its power during and after their flight, and how this affects their willingness to participate in political processes. The focus will be on refugees from Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Syria in the four important receiving countries of Iran, Turkey, Uganda, and Germany. The project will be guided by the hypothesis “that refugees respond to the experience of state power by re-defining the state and adapting their interactions accordingly.”

Sometimes the migration researcher is reluctant to talk to journalists about her work. “It is such a sensitive topic that you always have to make sure to explain the context when you present results so that they cannot be misinterpreted. The people I interview put so much trust in me when they share their stories with me. It’s important to me not to give a lopsided or incomplete picture as a result of a sentence being taken out of context.”

Through her work, Müller-Funk strives to depict the manifold experiences of people who had to flee from their home countries. Asked about the single most important and central finding in her research, she says, “people often perceive their life as worth living when they feel that they can make decisions and determine their own fate and are financially independent. So the myth that people come here to take advantage of our welfare system is ludicrous.”