Collective projects

Migration is a central and common phenomenon in human history. The international migrant population in Europe[1] is expected to increase in the future, due to economic and demographic factors, political unrest, conflicts and climate change. One aspect that has become increasingly clear in recent years is that, if the EU wants to successfully manage immigration flows at home, it needs to strengthen its cooperation with third countries of origin and transit of migrants, by fully addressing the root causes of migration and exploiting the potential of migration as a development enabler.

The European Union's neighbouring regions are, in various ways and for a number of reasons, in turmoil. To the East, the Eastern partnership has been called into question, especially by the long-standing crisis in Ukraine and difficult and uncertain relations with Russia. In the South-East, the EU's relationship with Turkey has increasingly come under strain, while at Turkey's border the conflict in Syria and the ravage of Islamic State armies have created high degrees of instability. In the Western Balkans, the accession processes of several candidate countries remain challenging.

In-spite of its undisputable importance as a region located at a strategic crossroad to the Far East, as a rich reservoir of natural resources and as an area of traditional trade relations with Europe, Central Asia has been rather neglected by the major global players in the post-Soviet era. Only in more recent years, the political and economic developments in the five countries of the region - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - have received more attention.

Specific Challenge

The growing attention given to research and innovation over the past decades has resulted in increased amounts of public funding being channelled to research and innovation, but also to a variety of policies and funding programmes being put in place in Europe, in order to maximise the quality and impact of this funding.

Kule Research Cluster Grants support sustained activities of an interdisciplinary research team in the social sciences, humanities and fine arts that have the potential to be recognized as excellent at the national or international level. Grants are awarded up to $75,000 over three years to build an interdisciplinary research cluster.

Deadline for Letter of Intent (LOI): Friday, November 24, 2023

FET projects often generate new and sometimes unexpected opportunities for commercial or societal application. This topic aims at funding further innovation related work (i.e. activities which were not scheduled to be funded by the original project) to verify and substantiate the innovation potential of ideas arising from FET funded projects and to support the next steps in turning them into a genuine social or economic innovation.

Ongoing research efforts show that the translation of the working principles of the Digital Internet to the routing of freight, thus creating the Physical Internet (PI), has the potential to be a real game-changer. In the PI world freight travels from hub to hub in an open network rather than from origin to destination directly. Each parcel is routed automatically and at each section it is bundled for efficiency. In the PI network of networks many (if not all) transport and logistics services would be accessible on demand to all users.