Areas of Expertise

European asylum and migration policies
Migration management
Categorization and border processing
Cooperation with countries of origin and transit
Human rights issues

Short Bio

Dr. Marie Walter-Franke is an associate fellow in DGAP’s Migration Program where she previously served as a research fellow. Her work focuses on the external dimension of German and EU migration policies. Previously, Walter-Franke was an affiliate policy fellow at the Jacques Delors Centre where she worked on EU migration and asylum policy, particularly the harmonization of asylum processing at the EU level, cooperation with countries of transit, and human rights issues. As a fellow of the Charlemagne Prize Academy 2019/2020, she developed reform proposals for the EU asylum system.

Walter-Franke completed her doctoral dissertation at Freie Universität Berlin on EU asylum governance in 2023. She was part of the graduate program “Human Rights Under Pressure – Ethics, Law, and Politics,” a cooperation with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she was a visiting research fellow in 2016. She holds a master’s degree in European studies from Sciences Po Paris and in politics and government in the EU from the London School of Economics. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked at the European Commission, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).