Reforming the Common European Asylum System: New Paradigms, Discursive Shifts, and Strategic Developments

Abstract

With the New Pact on Migration and Asylum in 2020, the European Commission proposed a “fresh start” for reforming the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). Intended to overcome the deadlock that had stalled negotiations since 2016, the proposal nonetheless gave rise to several further years of contentious and highly politicised negotiations, culminating in an agreement in 2023. This panel examines how this breakthrough became possible and what it reveals about deeper transformations in EU asylum and migration governance. The four papers approach the CEAS reform from complementary perspectives, focusing on strategies of depoliticisation, the strategic use of policy instruments, discursive shifts, and the emergence of new paradigms of control. Taken together, they demonstrate that the reform cannot be understood as the product of procedural bargaining alone. Rather, it was enabled by changes in governance modes and administrative practices, including the expanding role of hybrid and technocratic arrangements at the EU level; by the strategic mobilisation and contestation of humanitarian instruments such as resettlement; and by evolving discursive framings that increasingly fuse humanitarian rationales with logics of security, crisis management, and control. By analysing these dynamics across policy design, legislative negotiations, and administrative implementation, the panel shows how the boundaries of political feasibility in EU asylum policy were progressively redefined. More broadly, it seeks to advance understanding of the substantive, procedural, and discursive transformations shaping EU-level migration policymaking, including the evolving roles of supranational institutions, new administrative agencies, and emerging policy paradigms in contemporary European asylum governance.

Title	Details
The State and the Refugee. A Decision-Theoretic Approach to Asylum Policy in the European Union	View Paper Details
Depoliticisng Migration Governance: The Case of the EU Task Force for Migration Management	View Paper Details
The Strategic Use of Resettlement in the EU and its (Limited) Impact on the Adoption of the EU Resettlement Regulation	View Paper Details
Compromising Asylum. Discursive Shifts and Frame Convergence in the Reform Process of the Common European Asylum System	View Paper Details
“Instrumentalisation” of Migration: An Emerging Paradigm in EU Asylum Policy?	View Paper Details