Sciences Po's Migration and Diversity (MiDi) interdisciplinary collective is pleased to announce the winners of its 2025 MiDi Research Prize. This prize, launched in 2023 for the first time, aims to reward the outstanding efforts of young researchers at the master’s and PhD levels across all Sciences Po schools and departments, and raises the profile of rigorous and innovative research on issues related to international migration and ethno-cultural diversity.

MiDi was created in 2020 as a collective interdisciplinary initiative with the aim of strengthening interactions between researchers from different Sciences Po research centres around issues of international migration and ethno-cultural diversity. It brings together researchers from the Centre for International Studies (CERI), the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE), the Centre for Research on Social Inequalities (CRIS), the Law School, the Department of History, the Department of Economics, the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po (CEVIPOF), the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP), and Médialab. The research produced at Sciences Po on these issues covers a wide range of themes, such as asylum and migration flows, the right of asylum, borders, the integration of migrants, ethno-racial discrimination and inequalities in the European and global contexts.

The steering committee, composed of Martin ARANGUREN (CRIS), Mohamed ELSAYEH (Law School), Mathilde EMERIAU (Médialab), Virginie GUIRAUDON (CEE), Hélène LE BAIL (CERI), Marie MERCAT-BRUNS (Law School), Christophe POULY (Law School), Hélène THIOLLET (CERI), and Katharina TITTEL (CRIS/Médialab), congratulates the excellent applications received. After deliberation, the jury decided to award one doctoral candidate and two master’s students as follows:

DOCTORAL LEVEL

Louis IMBERT (Sciences Po Law School) for his article Endorsing Migration Policies in Constitutional Terms: The Case of the French Constitutional Council. This article investigates the French Constitutional Council’s approach to immigration, examining how its case law has generally upheld legislative policies in this domain. It highlights the Council’s recognition of extensive police powers while striking down only the most excessive provisions. The study demonstrates that the Council’s ostensibly neutral methods of reasoning operate as politically oriented instruments, reinforcing restrictive immigration policy preferences. It further illuminates how the Council has endorsed recent trends toward stricter immigration control, deliberately eschewing a rights-based approach. 

Louis Imbert, who earned his doctorate from the Sciences Po Law School (2025), is currently a lecturer in public law at the University of Orléans (2025-26). He is the author of a thesis on the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion at play in constitutional judges’ decisions on immigration in Colombia, the United States, and France. He has published the book Immigration: fabrique d’un discours de crise (10/18, 2022), as well as various articles and book chapters on immigration and asylum law and policy in France and Europe. He served as a Teaching Fellow in law at the Sciences Po Reims campus (2023-25) and as a temporary lecturer and research assistant in public law at CY Cergy Paris University (2020-22). A recipient of a doctoral fellowship from the National Foundation for Political Science (2017-20), he was also a tutor and then assistant at the Sciences Po Law School’s Migration Clinic (2016-20).

MASTER’S LEVEL

Niklas AYRIS (Master in Sociology, School of Research) for his master’s dissertation The ‘Immigrant Bargain’ Revisited: Exploring the Subjective Social Mobility of Immigrants in France. This dissertation examines social mobility among migrants by distinguishing between their subjective perceptions of mobility and their intergenerational occupational and educational mobility. Using data from Trajectoires et Origines 2 (TeO2), the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), and the Life in Transition Survey IV (LITS IV), the study first focuses on the immigrant population in France before adopting a comparative international perspective. The analysis shows that migrants are more likely to perceive themselves as socially mobile, even when their objective mobility is downward, and that their subjective mobility is less closely aligned with objective trajectories, particularly in education. These results highlight a gap between migrants’ perceptions and objective measures of mobility, emphasizing that migration itself constitutes a form of social success. 

Niklas Ayris is a doctoral candidate at the Centre pour la recherche sur les inégalités sociales (CRIS) at Sciences Po. Before entering higher education, he spent a decade working in the hospitality industry. Building on his master’s thesis, The Immigrant Bargain Revisited, his research examines the conceptual overlap and interactions between social and spatial mobility. His doctoral project adopts a multi-method approach - combining computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods - to investigate how professional trajectories evolve both within low-status professions and between occupations, how these paths are shaped by geographical movement, and how these factors together shape individuals’ perceptions of their own social mobility.

Léo MUGNERET-LA GRAVIERE (Master in Political Science - Major in Comparative Politics, School of Research) for his dissertation Being ‘Overseas Chinese’ in the French Overseas: Diaspora Politics and Entangled Claims of Loyalty within the Chinese (Descent) Community of French Polynesia. This dissertation examines the Chinese-origin Polynesian community that migrated between 1865 and 1949 from Guangdong to South Pacific islands integrated into the French colonial empire. It analyzes the community’s diasporic configuration through the political and social histories of China and French Polynesia. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, including 39 interviews and 13 observations conducted in France and French Polynesia, the dissertation expands the classical analytical framework of diasporic studies. It highlights the complex loyalties imposed on the community by Chinese authorities, Polynesian elites, French authorities, and local organizations. Finally, it challenges the notion of “overseas Chinese” as passive instruments of Chinese foreign policy, revealing their political contributions to a (post-)colonial Polynesian society and the local realities of China’s growing involvement in the Pacific.

Léo Mugneret-La Gravière is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Sciences Po’s Center for International Studies under the joint supervision of Professors Françoise Mengin and Jérôme Doyon. His PhD research focuses on the relations between the Chinese Party State and the Chinese (descent) diasporic communities in the Pacific. As part of his MPhil in Political Science from Sciences Po’s School of Research, he conducted his master’s thesis research on the diaspora politics of the Chinese (descent) community in French Polynesia, based on archival research and a two-month fieldwork in Tahiti.