Repertoires of migration governance in the EU

Abstract

What factors shape European and EU responses to potential Afghan displacement and refugee movement towards the EU? In this presentation, it will be argued that these responses form part of a repertoire of migration governance that is grounded in how European and EU governance systems as organisational processes make sense of international migration. Rather than international migration in its various forms being something that simply happens to governance systems – an external challenge – to which they respond, governance systems are shown to be powerfully constitutive of international migration through their actions and inactions and through the categories and classifications that are developed at borders and boundaries (typically of states). These repertoires, it is argued, are grounded in understandings of the normality of migration to Europe that prefigure responses to crisis.