This article examines the gap between the formal recognition of foreign academic credentials and the restoration of academic continuity. It uses the Irish institutional context as an analytical case. Ireland is useful precisely because it has developed procedures for making foreign qualifications readable, while the route from recognised qualification to academic reintegration remains institutionally fragmented. The central question is therefore not whether a foreign qualification can be compared with a national framework, but whether a previous academic trajectory can become institutionally intelligible in a new academic environment.

NARIC Ireland, operated by Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI), provides generic, non-personalised comparability statements, relating foreign qualifications, where possible, to Irish National Framework of Qualifications award-types and levels. These mechanisms make foreign qualifications formally legible. Yet QQI also states that such statements are advisory, are not legal documents, and do not determine recognition for employment, training or educational purposes. Those decisions remain with employers, competent authorities or admissions staff.[1] Formal recognition may therefore clarify the status of a qualification, but it does not by itself restore the conditions under which an academic career can continue.

Academic reintegration differs from general labour-market integration because it concerns the continuation of a recognised scholarly role. For academics, professional continuity depends on access to institutions, research communities, publication channels, teaching opportunities and forms of peer recognition. Drawing on Bourdieu’s account of cultural and social capital, academic capital can be understood as a combination of formal education, embodied scholarly competence, publications, teaching practice, academic titles, administrative responsibilities, durable professional networks and disciplinary norms.[2] Migration does not erase this capital, but it may weaken its recognisability. Academic titles may lack direct equivalents. Publications may have appeared in respected but locally unfamiliar venues, and teaching and administrative work may require contextual explanation.

Ireland’s recognition architecture performs important but limited functions. The National Framework of Qualifications provides a common reference point for education and training levels, while QQI/NARIC helps make foreign credentials readable within that framework.[3] Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) can support entry to programmes, advanced entry, credits towards an award, exemptions from programme modules and, in some higher education institutions, full academic awards.[4] These instruments matter for access and progression. Yet they do not assess research standing, teaching record, disciplinary contribution, publication history or interrupted professional trajectory. Nor do they connect a displaced academic to institutional affiliation, research funding, mentoring, academic English development, publication networks or stable employment.

The difficulty lies in the space between procedures. QQI/NARIC compares qualifications; admissions offices assess entry to programmes; RPL units assess prior learning; departments recruit according to disciplinary fit and available funding; employers assess suitability for particular posts; immigration authorities assess permission to remain and work. Each institution answers a different question. Together, they do not necessarily form a coherent pathway. The system may recognise fragments of the past without restoring the continuity of an academic career.

This gap matters because academic reintegration takes place within already unequal and competitive labour markets. Research on migrant integration in Ireland indicates that foreign-born residents are, on average, highly educated and active in the labour market, while also experiencing lower median incomes, higher rates of poverty and deprivation, and greater housing-cost pressures.[5] For migrant academics, this wider pattern takes a specific form: a qualification may be recognised, while the academic role attached to it remains difficult to restore. Irish higher education institutions are also marked by employment precarity. Pat O’Connor’s analysis of HEA data indicates that 33 per cent of staff in Irish higher education institutions were non-permanent, with precarity mainly concentrated in temporary research positions and related support roles.[6] Reintegration therefore occurs not into a stable field, but into one already shaped by competition, fixed-term contracts and uncertain progression.

Irish employment-permit routes are tied to eligible occupations, remuneration criteria and employer-based applications. The Critical Skills Employment Permit normally requires an eligible occupation, a qualifying remuneration level and a two-year job offer.[7] These issues matter for humanities scholars because part-time teaching, short-term research assistance, tutoring, community education or cultural work may be professionally meaningful but insufficient as a basis for long-term residence.

These conditions can produce a liminal period between previous academic belonging and possible future reintegration. The scholar may be formally educated but institutionally unaffiliated, professionally experienced but locally unrecognised, academically trained but economically dependent on work outside the field. Such work should not be morally devalued. The issue is the structural effect of prolonged disconnection from academic life: weakened networks, older publications, loss of recent academic activity and a CV that becomes harder to translate back into academic terms. Akkad conceptualises academic displacement as a non-linear form of mobility shaped by epistemic exclusion, resource deprivation, weakened professional networks, legal and institutional precarity, and struggles for recognition.[8]

There are initiatives that acknowledge parts of this problem. Scholars at Risk Europe, hosted at Maynooth University, is the European office of the global Scholars at Risk network. Maynooth University also describes its Scholars at Risk Fellowship as a fully funded one-year research fellowship for researchers facing threats to life, liberty or research career. At European level, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Guidelines for the Inclusion of Researchers at Risk recommend measures concerning recruitment, pre-arrival and post-arrival support, mentoring, career guidance and training.[9] These initiatives show that academic displacement is recognised as an institutional concern. Yet protection, temporary placement and recommended good practice are not the same as a stable pathway of academic reintegration.

The problem is especially visible in the case of historians and humanities scholars. Their academic capital is often embedded in languages, archives, national historiographies, regional debates, local journals, edited volumes, conferences and institutional communities. Such capital is not less scholarly; it circulates through different circuits of recognition. Bibliometric research reinforces this point. Mongeon and Paul-Hus show that Web of Science and Scopus have uneven journal coverage by field, country and language. Their analysis indicates that Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities are underrepresented in both databases compared with their share in Ulrich’s periodical directory, while English-language journals are consistently overrepresented. Their findings do not refer specifically to Belarusian historical scholarship, but they help explain why regionally embedded and multilingual humanities research may become less visible within dominant international bibliometric systems.[10]  

The Belarusian case should be understood not as evidence of an established Belarusian historical-academic community in Ireland, but as an analytical point of reference. Its significance lies in the trajectory it brings into view: a scholar formed in a smaller, regionally embedded and multilingual academic field who must make qualifications, publications, teaching experience and disciplinary contribution intelligible within an Anglophone receiving system. The relevance of this case is also connected to the post-2020 institutional rupture of Belarusian academic life, which recent Belarus-focused research describes in terms of repression, state control, ideological pressure, international isolation and loss of human capital.[11]

In this context, the Belarusian case serves less as an object of political-historical analysis than as a perspective on how academic capital formed under conditions of institutional rupture may be rendered intelligible, or fail to become intelligible, within the Irish receiving system. The risk is that academic capital is redirected into separate strategies of survival, such as legal status, income, further study, temporary work or professional reorientation, rather than sustained as part of a collective scholarly field.

For Belarusian historical scholarship in exile, the issue is therefore not only individual career adaptation. It concerns the conditions under which scholarly continuity can be preserved outside national institutions. If academic capital is redirected into separate strategies of survival, the field risks becoming dispersed across individual trajectories rather than sustained as a collective intellectual continuity. Publications and research activity may continue, but without stable affiliation, peer engagement, mentorship and institutional memory, the long-term reproduction of the field becomes more fragile.

Irish research and internationalisation policy contains language that could support a broader understanding of scholarly continuity. Impact 2030 identifies talent as a key element of Ireland’s research and innovation ecosystem. Global Citizens 2030 presents Ireland as a first-choice destination for international learners, researchers and innovators. In turn, Research Ireland’s 2026–2030 strategy refers to building national capability across the breadth of disciplines.[12] These are important policy signals. However, they do not by themselves explain how a displaced humanities scholar moves from recognised qualification to academic continuity.

Recognition can make a qualification visible, but it cannot by itself restore the conditions under which an academic career may continue. If academic reintegration is understood through the problem of institutional intelligibility, the central issue is not simply the comparison of credentials, but the conditions under which academic trajectories become legible, usable and institutionally sustained. Without such conditions, academic displacement may become academic discontinuity: academic capital may survive migration while losing part of its institutional recognisability.

About this publication

This analytical paper was prepared within the project Belarusian Historical Scholarship in Exile: Current State and Challenges, implemented with the financial support of the EU4Belarus: Support to Advanced Learning and Training (SALT II) programme, funded by the European Union.

The paper forms part of a series of analytical publications examining the current state, key challenges and future perspectives of Belarusian historical scholarship in exile. While informed by discussions held during a closed expert seminar, it reflects the analysis and conclusions of the author(s).

The views and opinions expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Union, the EU4Belarus: Support to Advanced Learning and Training (SALT II) programme, the International Centre for Ethnic and Linguistic Diversity Studies (ICELDS), or the Belarusian Institute in Prague.