Conference: Unpacking the Challenges and Possibilities for Migration Governance. University of Cambridge

Conference at the University of Cambridge

Mass migration entails multifaceted economic, political, social, and legal challenges and brings together a diversity of actors (e.g. state institutions, international and transnational organizations, non-governmental organisations, host communities and migrants) with unequal power and divergent priorities and interests.

Much of the debate on migration is centred around the notion of ‘crisis’ and around its most visible impacts on the polarization of politics in especially Western countries. Migration as an overall topic has increasingly played a significant role in shaping the present and future of societies and nation states. In the EU, the crisis has foregrounded the vulnerability of European borders, the tenuous jurisdiction of the Schengen system and broad problems with multi-level governance of migration and integration across Member States. In many cases, relatively formal and coherent EU policy like the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) could not be applied in Member States. Instead, state measures and practices appeared to be highly focused on how to strengthen and ‘secure’ borders and prevent entrances, which paradoxically made migrants, particularly forced migrants, more at risk of violence and exploitation and increased the dichotomy between state security and human security.

This conference is part of a Horizon 2020 project, RESPOND: Multilevel Governance of Mass Migration in Europe and Beyond, which aims to study the governance of recent mass migration and its implications for the EU, its Member States and third countries at macro (transnational, national), meso (subnational/local) and micro-levels (refugees/migrants). The conference focuses on the five thematic fields RESPOND is studying:

(1) Border management and security,

(2) Refugee protection regimes,

(3) Reception policies,

(4) Integration policies, and

(5) Conflicting Europeanization and externalisation.

These themes are chosen because of their centrality for understanding migration policies, impacts and responses.