Intersecting Vulnerabilities in EU’s Return and Reintegration Policy and Programming

After the onset of the so-called European ‘refugee crisis’ in the spring of the 2014, the EU has increasingly sought for new ways to ensure the departure of rejected asylum seekers and to set up frameworks to govern irregular migrants on the move worldwide, to deter the arrival of migrants on European soil and accelerate return procedures. These developments have been heavily criticized by NGOs and scholars, arguing that they contribute to an erosion of human rights and exacerbate vulnerabilities in protracted situations at Europe’s outer borders and within member states. This paper will analyse in how far new EU policy measures on return and reintegration adopted after 2014 and programmes implementing these policies take stock of potential vulnerabilities within the global return regime from an intersectional perspective. The paper will therefore continue critical policy analyses of EU’s asylum and refugee policies and international refugee law, by highlighting how policies on return and readmission are not ‘neutral’, thereby challenging the common assumption that gender+ inequalities are irrelevant in the context of return. Throughout the paper, I argue that intersectionality is a particularly apt analytical tool to analyse policy measures taken in a ‘state of exception’, since it helps us to gain a more nuanced understanding of unique vulnerabilities within and between different groups at the nodes of social categories of inequality.