Beyond State Intervention: How do Non-state Actors and International Institutions Contribute to Migration Governance in Tunisia?

The paper relies on a decentralized perspective to understand migration governance within the EU-Tunisian context. It focuses on highlighting how international organizations like IOM, UNHCR, and ICMPD, as well as non-state players like civil society organizations, engage in/with migration governance, especially with regard to the externalization of EU borders. Since 2019, migration from Tunisia to Europe has attracted significant attention, mainly due to the heightened discourses and practices of the Tunisian government against migration. In fact, this has shifted the focus to state intervention while disregarding the role that non-state actors and international institutions play in migration governance. In order to have a holistic understanding of migration governance, it’s important to rely on a decentralized approach to understand how different actors other than the state contribute to the process. Tunisia is an important case to explore due to two main elements. First, Tunisia has been playing an important role in the Euro-Mediterranean migration system as a result of its characteristics as a sending, receiving and “transit” state (Hlioui et al., 2025). Second, the political unpredictability under Said’s regime makes Tunisia an interesting case to investigate. Moving away from a state-centric approach, the paper unpacks the complexity of migration governance in Tunisia through understanding the extent to which non-state actors and international institutions contribute to the process, particularly with regards to the externalization of EU strategies and practices. Determining the kind of interventions these actors have had on Tunisian migration context allows for positioning them at the center of the migration governance process while highlighting the implications of their interventions. Finally, to investigate this topic, the paper employs a qualitative method, mainly an in-depth desk research relying on data published by practitioners, scholars, government, international and local institutions.