Andreas Grünewald

desk officer for migration
Photo of Andreas Grünewald
Foto/Bild Credit
Brot für die Welt

Andreas Grünewald holds a PhD in Political Science and has been working as a journalist, scientist and policy advisor on topics like migration, development and  trade for around 25 years.

Since 2021, Andreas is desk officer for migration at Brot für die Welt, a developmental and human rights organisation with around 1.900 parnter organisations in the global south. One of his main concern the externalisation of repressive migration policies in the Global South and the militarisation of borders all around the globe. As a policy advisor for parliamentarians of the Left in the German Bundestag(2014-2021) in the field of development cooperation he wittnessed and fought against the rise of such policies in the aftermath of the "summer of migration" in 2015.

Brot für die Welt is about to release an online tool ( https://t1p.de/8tutf ) that assesss the ambivalent role of smartphones for people on the move. Whereas it is an essential tool for refugees and migrants to communicate, to gather information, to send and receive money and to document violence and injustice, the mobile phone is also a main target for security forces, border guards or immigration services. These authorities use the mobile phones of people on the move to detect them, collect information about them and their routes - or destroy their phones so that no information about the violent oppression against people on the move gets public. There pratices can be detected all over the globe.