Ahmad Wali Ahmad-Yar

Dr. Ahmad Wali Ahmad Yar is a migration scholar specialising in migration governance, irregular migration, and migration data. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the University for Continuing Education Krems and an Associate Researcher at the Brussels Institute for Social and Population Studies (BRISPO) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

His research examines how migration policies, legal categories, and data infrastructures shape migration governance and the lived experiences of migrants and refugees. His work engages with international migration statistics, regularisation policies, migrant participation, and the use of innovative and non traditional data sources in migration research. He has contributed to several large European research projects, including the Horizon 2020 projects HumMingBird and MIrreM, which focus on improving migration measurement and advancing the study of irregular migration in Europe.

Alongside his academic work, Dr. Ahmad Yar is actively engaged in refugee led and diaspora initiatives in Europe, with a focus on migrant participation, community based knowledge production, and diaspora mobilisation. He is President of the Umbrella Refugee Committee in Belgium and Secretary General of the Network of Afghanistan Diaspora Organisations in Europe. Being originally from Afghanistan, he maintains a strong scholarly interest in the history, politics, and migration dynamics of Afghanistan and the broader Central and South Asian region. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a master’s degree in Political Science from Université libre de Bruxelles.

Research keywords:

International migration, integration of migrants, migration data, theoretical and data gaps in migration research, EU policies on migration, integration policies at the local level, EU actorness & effectiveness