Do refugee policies change depending on where the refugees come from? Evidence from the United Nations and the European Union

Recent decades have seen increasing politicisation of refugee flows, with growing tension between commitments to international law and refugee protection on one hand, and trends of securitisation and externalisation of migration management on the other. While much scholarship has examined the European Union (EU) and its responses to refugee flows, there is limited comparative work linking EU positions to the broader global debate. This paper investigates how governments present refugee issues in a global forum, the United Nations (UN), and asks whether policy proposals vary depending on the origin of the refugees. We situate EU member states’ discursive strategies within this global arena to explore how EU positions converge with or diverge from broader patterns. Focusing on the annual sessions of the UN General Assembly from 2000 to 2020, we employ Discourse Network Analysis (DNA), a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative content analysis with quantitative social network analysis, on 630 speeches. Our findings show that actor networks and policy framing shift according to the geographical origin of refugees. The results shed light on how the EU negotiates its normative commitments within global migration governance and how refugee policies are shaped not only by legal obligations but also by the geopolitics of origin and regional coalitions. The study contributes to understanding the interplay between EU migration policy, global discourse, and the politics of framing in international refugee governance.