PROTECT Final Outputs

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Short policy briefs

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The full-length policy briefs may be found here.

Condensed findings

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PROTECT Research Papers

Editor: Pierre-Georges Van Wolleghem

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Theories and Concepts

Legal Studies of Global Compacts and CEAS

Studies of Asylum Institutions and Procedures

Externalization of EU Migration and Asylum Policy

Attitudes and Involvement of Civil Society Organizations

Ethnographic Studies at Migrants’ border entry points

Cross-sectional studies of citizen attitudes

Media studies of frames and discourses

Dissemination and communication

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Journal articles

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The origins of this special issue lie in multiple workshops and panel discussions over the past 5 years between the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of Witwatersrand, the Refugee Law Initiative (RLI) at the University of London, the editorial team, and our two invited experts, Jeff Crisp and Lucy Hovil. Yet the roots of the special issue (and part of its title) can be traced to long before this, with the work of Loren Landau and Roni Amit who in 2014 suggested that the global refugee regime is “something akin to a distant weather pattern with only indirect (and rarely determinative) effects on local actions” in southern Africa. The special issue engages with these ideas almost a decade on, with each author asked to critically reflect on this assertion within their work on the continent. Certainly, the relevance of the global refugee regime in Africa requires renewed investigation. At a time when Africa continues to host a considerable proportion of the world’s refugee population, when global responsibility sharing continues to stall, and when international initiatives remain focused on Western conceptualisations of protection, there is an urgent need to unpack the global regime’s contemporary role in the day-to-day lives of refugees and other forced migrants on the continent.

by Nicholas Maple, Kudakwashe Vanyoro, E. Tendayi Achiume, Jo Vearey, and Achieng Akena

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Between 1952 and 1988, the competence to conduct the refugee status determination process underwent a unique evolution attributable to several ‘tug-of-wars’ between mainly the ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs, and the UNHCR, each time resulting in typical Belgian compromises. Initially, the Belgian state entrusted this responsibility, as practically the only West European country at the time, to the newly created UNHCR. In the 1950s, governments experienced few risks when granting refugee protection. This changed in the 1960s when the profile of the asylum seeker changed and recognition of refugees increasingly conflicted with other interests. Therefore, the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice wanted to influence the recognition policy in an informal manner from the end of the ’60s in order not to burden the alleged Belgian interests. In the 1970s, the issue moved up on the political agenda, partly because asylum became a more important immigration channel. The 1980 aliens act strengthened the legal position of aliens. However UNHCR could not guarantee the right of appeal. This meant the definitive end of UNHCR as the authority entrusted with the recognition of refugees and the transfer of the competence to conduct the refugee status determination process to the Belgian authorities in 1988.

By Eva Ecker and Frank Caestecker (University of Ghent)

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The European Union (EU) has reacted to the migration crises of the last decade with growing externalization of migration management to neighbor countries often accused of not respecting human rights and individual liberties. Focusing on EU cooperation with the Southern neighborhood, as defined within the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) framework, this paper investigates the recent developments in the EU’s external migration policies, demonstrating that there is a gap between EU discourses and policy instruments identified by the EU as strategic tools of the European migration and asylum policy (MAP). The research critically analyzes the EU’s cooperation with SNCs concerning migration, as developed via international agreements, action plans, and mobility partnerships under the umbrella of the ENP. In particular, it explores the incompatibility between the European MAP instruments and international protection.

By Francesca Longo, Stefania Panebianco (University of Catania) and Giuseppe Cannata

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The concentration of the world’s refugees in developing countries calls for international collaboration on the matter. In the face of concerns voiced not only amongst politicians but also the public, we investigate how people trade-off the two most prominent responsibility-sharing mechanism. We conduct a survey experiment in 26 countries asking whether people would rather: (a) admit more asylum seekers and (b) provide financial assistance to the host countries. We find that most respondents prefer admitting asylum seekers over paying. We also establish significant individual-level heterogeneity that sheds new light on people’s attitudes towards asylum seekers. Importantly, we report on the effect of welfare chauvinism and nativism on the willingness to admit rather than to pay.

By Cornelius Cappelen, Hakan G. Sicakkan and Pierre Georges Van Wolleghem – University of Bergen

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This article provides new empirical insights on the external dimension (ED) of European Union (EU) migration and asylum policies (MAPs) as a case of securitization, by mapping its policy tools across time and space. More specifically, the goal of the article is two-fold. It engages into a new mapping exercise that enables an understanding of how ‘geographically spread’ the ED of EU policies on migration and asylum is, as well as providing insights into ‘where’ and ‘what’ the EU has externalized in the last twenty years. Second, it assesses to what extent the number, type and distribution of ED policy tools reflect dynamics of the securitization of migration and asylum. The article builds upon the literature on securitization and externalization, looking at it afresh by adopting a perspective focused on policy tools. Empirically, the analysis is based upon a new comprehensive database containing data on 153 ED tools according to their characteristics and regions. The article argues not only that policy tools characterize the ED as a further feature of the securitization of migration, but also that externalization through practices of securitization has not been limited to the EU immediate borderlands but has rather spilled over across regions and frontiers.

By Francesca Longo and Iole Pina Fontana – University of Catania

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Studies have sought to explain variation in protection recognition rates between EU member states with, however, limited explanatory power. Surprisingly, few have contemplated the role of the administration, despite it being at the centre of the process through which asylum claims are examined. We posit that recognition rates are significantly affected by administrative capacity, although the administration’s action may be mitigated by political factors. Our findings show that administrative effectiveness and experience in asylum matters yield higher recognition rates. We show that government preferences and the overall political context affect protection recognition, too. Importantly, we also find that the mechanisms at play are different if we consider the different forms of protection.

By Pierre Georges Van Wolleghem and Hakan G. Sicakkan – University of Bergen

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Vulnerability came to be a cardinal term for the humanitarian politics of life. On the one hand, it is naturalised as a shared condition and, at the same time, as it is linked to the recognition of specific needs, it becomes a condition for accessing certain rights. As a concept vulnerability tries to conjugate a theoretical aporia: all human beings are vulnerable, but certain subjects or groups are more so. This dilemma becomes particularly relevant in the field of international protection, where obtaining the label of vulnerable constitutes a crucial stake in accessing the right to stay. Through fieldwork research in eastern Sicily, the article moves from the recognition of certain discontinuities in this field. On the one hand, the margins for declaring vulnerable all actors involved in the field of reception, including so-called natives, have been extended. On the other hand, the possibilities have been reduced, through an attempt to improve the efficiency and quality of assessment procedures, which should include a transcultural sensitivity. The article, therefore, engages in an analysis of vulnerability policies within contemporary asylum governance, considering both those deployed by public service providers and by migrants themselves. Showing that the institutional allocation of the status of “vulnerable” is the result of complex and ambivalent practices, involving different actors, logics and discourses, the article explores the institutional will to both relativise and absolutise its work. Also illuminating the dimensions of political economy and structural vulnerability, the text attempts to articulate three levels that are implicated in the use of the category of vulnerability in immigration policies. The article concludes by offering some considerations regarding the controversial opportunity to continue to involve anthropology within this field of study.

By Giovanna Cavatorta – University of Catania

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This paper examines the “protective potential” of the Global Compacts on Refugees and Migrants vis à vis existing commitments to fundamental rights within the European Union (EU). The relationship between the two normative frameworks is scrutinised to establish the extent to which the two might be mutually supportive or contradictory, since this determines the Compacts’ capacity to inform the interpretation of EU fundamental rights within the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). This paper explores this protective potential through three of the Compacts’ key guiding principles: respect for human rights and the rule of law, the principle of non-regression, and the principle of non-discrimination. The Compacts’ commitments to the first two are presented as sites of coherence where the Compacts concretely express pre-existing protections within EU law and provide a blueprint for implementation in the migration sphere. However, the Compacts’ principle of non-discrimination reveals an area of friction with EU primary law. It is argued that the implementation of this principle can address the inherently discriminatory system underpinning EU law. Within the EU, rather than undermining international and national human rights obligations, the Compacts present an opportunity to refine the implementation of existing EU fundamental rights obligations applicable to migrants and refugees.

By Elspeth Guild, Kathryn Allinson and Nicolette Busuttil – Queen Mary University of London

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Local integration has long been seen as the “forgotten” durable solution to refugee displacement evidenced by the reluctance of governments across the world to accord refugees a new citizenship. This article goes further. It argues that local integration as a durable solution has not been merely forgotten, but deliberately avoided at a national, regional and international level. As a result, its veracity as a realistic durable solution for the majority of refugees is now in question.

By Lucy Hovil and Nicholas Maple, University of Witwatersrand

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The European Union’s common public sphere project dates back to the 1960s and relies on Europeanisation through the gradual eradication of communication boundaries between its member countries. However, it is evident by now that Europeanisation of national public spheres is hard to achieve by increasing overlaps between national public spheres, synchronisation of news reporting across national boundaries, or diffusion of Europeanist norms into national politics. The European Union’s common public sphere project may hence be in danger. This calls for explorations of other imaginable models of the public sphere for Europe. Are there traces of other modes of transnational public sphere emerging in Europe? In this article, we explore a models of the transnational public sphere which is based on an alternative concept of Europeanisation derived from the cleavage theory. By drawing on social media data and employing tools of social network analysis, we demonstrate the empirical possibility of a cleavage model of the European public sphere.

By Hakan G. Sicakkan, University of Bergen and Raphael H. Heiberger, University of Stuttgart

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This article explores how temporal disruptions at international borders shape immobile bodies’ experiences and modes of waiting by focusing on irregular Zimbabwean migrant men at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border who have arrived in South Africa but are restricted in moving further into the interior. It argues that waiting is a component of both governing these migrants as well as them seeking agency through the relationship between time, space and humanitarianism in this border regime. This shows how immobilities at ‘carceral junctions’ can be conceptualised as in time as much as in space. The article is based upon four months of ethnographic field research at the ‘I Believe in Jesus Church’ men’s shelter in the border town of Musina. The intersections of immobility and temporal agency in this article contribute to a growing body of work that shows that the relationship between resistance and domination in waiting is ambivalent. This article also troubles assumptions about immobility as an experience that leads the inhabitants of humanitarian camps as well as carceral time-spaces to realise the status of ‘bare life’. While imposed forces make assumptions about the future precarious, the precariousness of the future also creates multiple and new possibilities.

By Kudakwashe Vanyoro, African Centre for Migration & Society – University of Witwatersrand

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Situated on the EU’s Mediterranean borders, Italy provides the setting for a case study aimed at understanding Mediterranean migration governance in the 2010s. We adopt an actor-centred approach to explore how the Italian coast guard’s humanitarian agency was constrained and reshaped in a changed environment. We draw upon the sense-making of Italy’s political leaders and its impact on the humanitarian practices of the Italian coast guard. Migration politics is marked by political discourses framing interests and priorities according to the sense-making of the political leadership. In the last decade, Italian political leaders have constructed and reconstructed discourses on migration, providing a different understanding of the technical capacity to respond to crisis situations. In a few years, the Mare Nostrum operation was dismantled and replaced by a restrictive ‘closed-ports’ strategy to guarantee border control. Humanitarian operations at sea, a pillar of migration governance in the mid-2010s, were de facto constrained. Focusing on the pivotal role of the Italian coast guard in conducting maritime operations, we explain why its role of vanguard in developing humanitarian practices was marginalized over time.

By Stefania Panebianco, the University of Catania

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In the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, the EU discourse on migration has acquired a humanitarian dimension that deserves investigation. The European Commission in particular has provided a discursive conceptualisation of the European human and humane approach to migration, promoting a change in the EU migration frame. Qualitative discourse analysis suggests that the European Commission’s programmatic discourse is not just a coordinative discourse among policy actors, it rather aims to shape the preferences of EU policy-makers emphasising strategic ideas and principles enshrined in EU Treaties. The Covid-19 crisis could thus be a window of opportunity for the European Union to embark on a new migration governance framed within a humane approach.

By Stefania Panebianco, the University of Catania

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Special issues

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Chapters in books

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