Dissertation: The European Union's Migration Co-operation with Its Eastern Neighbours: The Art of EU Governance beyond its Borders
Author: Lyubov Zhyznomirska
The research evaluates the EU’s impact by analyzing the EU-Ukraine and EU-Russia co-operation on irregular migration and the mobility of their citizens through the prism of the domestic discourses and policies on international migration. Personal interviews with government officials, official documents and media analysis uncovered the discourses in the EU and the cases under study. Both Ukraine and Russia have securitized immigration into and through their territories. They are characterized by unique discourses but share similar exclusions of foreigners. The EU’s impact is evident not only in the case studies’ normative (i.e., laws and bureaucratic procedures and rules) and material (i.e., physical infrastructure of the border or construction of detention centres) adjustments to the EU’s demands and policy conditionalities, but also in their discursive negotiations of their own status in the international hierarchy of states concerning international migration. The researcher observes the processes of the Europeanization of migration politics and policies in both countries.
What such migration co-operation does for inter-state relations in Europe comprises a second research focus of the thesis. The dissertation documents how the EU conducts its migration diplomacy and analyzes what kind of international migration governance the EU produces by seeking migration partnerships with non-EU countries. Drawing on critical security studies and the governmentality literature, the dissertation advances an argument that the external dimension of the EU’s “comprehensive migration management” – consolidated under the framework of the EU’s Global Approach to Migration (GAM) – informs and represents the EU’s ambitions to increase its international influence on internal security. The GAM emerges as a political rationality that allows a reordering of the EU’s relations with non-EU countries, specifically those in close vicinity.
The dissertation is available in the For download section.