Author: admin

In response to the 2015 migration ‘crisis’, the European Union intensified the externalisation of its migration policies, in particular through the EU Trust Funds for Syria and Africa, and the Facility for Refugees in Turkey. The legal construction of these financial measures is such that in many projects, normal implementation and public procurement procedures are not applied. This creates opportunities for clientelism. A limited number of actors (Europe’s ‘clients’) has emerged to implement European policies in third countries. This way of implementing externalisation projects will first be analysed in functionalist terms and in terms of path dependency. The paper will conclude by arguing that, in addition to such analyses, this way of implementing externalisation is to be understood as (a) expanding the scope of legitimate action of European states outside their territory; and (b) setting norms for international actors such as non-European states, international organisations and corporations.

Migration Management Clientelism. Europe’s migration funds as a global political project, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48(2022)12, 2892-2907

In the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) the right of States to control migration is firmly established despite strong indications that the effects of migration control are not racially neutral. In this article we attempt to understand how it is possible that the doctrine of sovereign migration control is not considered to breach the prohibition of racial discrimination. We argue that the ECtHR’s approach to migration and racial discrimination fits a pattern in the historical development of migration law whereby the right to travel, and the power of States to restrict this right, have been consistently defined in such a way as to protect the interests of the predominantly white population of today’s global North. Hence, the ease with which the racialised impact of migration control is accepted as normal and compatible with the prohibition of racial discrimination is consistent with migration law’s long history as part of colonial and postcolonial relations.

Race and the regulation of international migration. The ongoing impact of colonialism in the case law of The European Court of Human Rights, Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 39(2021)4, 291-307

This interview, by Lea Espinoza Garrido, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Birgit Spengler and Julia Wewior, focuses on the legal concept of emergency in current European migration law. In its interest in colonial legacies, this conversation overlaps with some of the double issue’s articles – most notably those by Eichinger, Espinoza Garrido, Sarkowsky, Wewior and Wilton. Yet the interview also offers a unique focus on the colonial legacy of European case law. The interviewee, Thomas Spijkerboer, critiques the European legal tradition’s thinking about the state of exception (Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben). He argues that merely building on this tradition runs the risk of erasing the racial specificity which may be hidden, but is, in fact, crucial to the legal concept of emergency, especially in the context of discussing current migrant emergencies. In order to avoid this erasure, Spijkerboer draws on Achille Mbembe, one of the most prominent contemporary thinkers of (and from) the postcolony, to foreground that which is so easily lost in current discussions of European migration law: the role that race plays in the organisation of freedom within liberalism and the insight that modern techniques of legal pluralism are deeply rooted in the history of colonial rule.

Migration Emergencies in the European Postcolony: an Interview with Thomas Spijkerboer, Parallax 2021(27)2, 223-239