dc.description.abstract
In the past decade, the perception of the European Union’s (EU) asylum policy has transformed profoundly. From a minor area of European integration with low stakes, the government of forced mobility became an existential question for the future of the Union’s open borders project. Since the governance crisis that followed the arrival of large numbers of Syrian refugees in 2015-2016, the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) has been under constant reform, but profound wedges divide the European partners, who experience and handle migration and asylum in very different ways. Meanwhile, on EU green borders and coastlines, in makeshift camps and high-tech detention centres, on the streets of European cities and in the waves of the Mediterranean sea, people in search of refuge are routinely neglected, mistreated, or even killed in the exercise of border violence. A growing body of scholarship is dedicated to the poor record of asylum integration, and a genuine boom in academic interest has occurred in recent years, owing to the new salience of migration and asylum. Certainly imperfect and unfinished, the CEAS is nevertheless a complex and highly sophisticated legal regime. Rather than discarding its moral legitimacy or political relevance outright, this dissertation is dedicated to understanding the rationalities and mechanisms of the EU’s government of exile. Mobilising the toolkit of governmentality analysis, based on the late work of Michel Foucault, and further developed e.g. by William Walters and Thomas Lemke, I explore the genealogy of the CEAS, asking the question: Who is the refugee in this system? What are refugees represented to be? What measures were developed in response, and how adequate are these measures to reach the goals set initially?
At the crossroads of political science, political sociology and legal history, this dissertation combines two research methods. Firstly, I conducted a qualitative content analysis of a large corpus of 459 documents produced by EU institutions to identify the categories used to talk about refugees, and mapped the corresponding policy narratives establishing policy diagnoses and formulating policy prognoses. Secondly, I used process tracing to reconstruct the evolution of the relevant legal provisions in the CEAS legislation, in order to identify what was modified, discarded or left untouched in the legislating process, and the narratives based on which each actor justified their position. In answer to “who is the refugee in the CEAS”, I demonstrate that legal subjects were produced in EU asylum policy on the basis of the codification of a language that relies on low-stakes, bureaucratic terms. Further, I trace the construction of hierarchies among the categories of protection and asylum, grounded in narratives on legitimate and illegitimate forms of mobility, as well as forms of contestation and resistance against the transcription of negative representations of refugees into law. To explore the government of exile, I then turned to the question: who gets to be a refugee*. Here, I analyse in detail the four technologies of government – deflection, triage, suspicion and mitigation – that were developed for the conduct of conducts – i.e. to govern the behaviours of refugees and national authorities, in order to bring about the imagined order envisaged in prognostic narratives, as well as the resistance hereto. By documenting in depth the influence of binary narratives about refugees in the genealogy of EU asylum policy, this study contributes to the further development of critical interpretative approaches to EU integration and builds an empirically sound bridge between critical accounts of the early years of EU integration and the crisis-centred literature.
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