EU instrumentalisation and policy fragmentation under the new Migration and Asylum Pact

Welcome to the Migration Seminar!

Profile:

Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, Associate Professor, GPS, Malmö University

Short bio:

Dr. Martin Lemberg-Pedersen is Associate Professor at GPS, Malmö University. He is also research affiliate with the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) and Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Between 2021-2024 he was Head of Policy and Documentation for Amnesty International Denmark, and earlier Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen. He specializes in EU border policies and infrastructures in Greek, Turkish and Libyan contexts and has explored trajectories between cultural geographies and economies of colonial imperialism, and current migration control politics, with a specific focus on border externalization. His research has also focused on military sector activities and relations to Frontex on EU markets for border security.


Attendance:

This is a hybrid seminar, you are welcome to connect via Zoom or join us at MIM seminar room, floor 9, Niagara, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1. To attend on campus, please gather by the reception area at 13.05.

Zoom
Will be available closer to the seminar date.

This paper focuses on policy actors’ framing of migration as a threat to EU and national security through the emerging discourses concerning the ‘instrumentalisation’ of migration.
It describes how these developments have been researched in relation to four dimensions in European politics on migration: The securitisation of migration, the humanitarianisation of border policing, the externalisation of border and asylum policies and growing markets for border control technology.

The paper argues that European developments bring with them urgent reflexive research questions, including Eurocentrism, postcoloniality and researcher positionality. While these developments are also unfolding in the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, contemporary European developments are undergoing specific and rapid changes in need of targeted analysis so as to provide basis for global comparisons and perspectivisation. To this end, the paper reads the four dimensions of European politics on security and migration across policy processes concerning the EU Migration Pact and its consolidation of restrictive policies on screening, asylum procedures, push backs, and partnerships with third countries, including the consolidation of derogations from safeguards inspired by Greek, Spanish and Polish policies.

The paper in particular focuses on the current 2024-2026 national implementation phase, describing some of the stakeholders and networks at work. An argument is developed to the effect that the Pact´s implementation phase could also reveal another policy implication, namely that it may lead to increasin fragmentation between, firstly, different Member States due to their different policies or geographic locations but also, secondly, between certain Member States and the Commission. This possible development also carries with it the possibility for further acceleration of multilateral and bilateral alliances concerning securitisation, criminalisation, externalisation and militarisation of European migration politics.

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