Externalized migration governance as isomorphic convergence: the mobility of human mobility governance across EUrope

In November 2023, Italy and Albania signed an agreement allowing Italy to use Albanian territory to set up two camps hosting asylum seekers who reached Italian territory irregularly. Few days after, the UK Supreme Court disavowed the deal enabling the British government to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. The two previous decades had already seen the proliferation of agreements enabling the externalization of European border enforcement to Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, and Libya. This paper leverages discursive institutionalism to conceptualized externalized detention and externalized border enforcement protocols as a form of isomorphic convergence enabled by processes of emulation and normative diffusion. To that end, the paper conducts a content analysis of the texts of these agreement and traces the processes underlying their development and implementation. By doing so, the paper sheds new light on the mobility of human mobility governance and the institutional arrangements, practices, and discourses underlying them.