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Exporting Institutional Ambiguity in Refugee Governance: How Lebanon’s Politics of Uncertainty Mirrors Europe’s Politics of Abandonment and Exhaustion
Abstract
Lebanon is one of the main host countries in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, now sheltering the highest per capita number of refugees in the world. Its response to the arrival of some 1.5 million Syrian refugees was initially characterized by a ‘no-policy-policy’ that revolved around the prohibition of formal refugee camps and the discouragement of official refugee registration. The resultant institutional ambiguity – characterized by pervasive informality, liminality, and exceptionalism – is routinely assumed to be a manifestation of the state fragility and ‘bad governance’ that allegedly epitomize the Middle East. Questioning this premise, the paper draws out the empirical parallels between the formal policies and informal practices that govern refugees in Lebanon and the governance of ‘irregular’ migrants in Europe. The paper establishes that Lebanon’s manufacturing of refugees’ vulnerability is not merely contingent on capacity and resource deficits associated with state fragility but is partly a strategic approach to control and exploit refugees and to enforce their return. As such, it mirrors rather than contrasts with European countries’ de facto policies of abandonment and exhaustion that similarly aim to discourage migrants from coming to Europe and ‘encourage’ those that are there to leave.
... They condone and encourage the type of regional refugee governance that is the object of study in this book in their ruthless attempt to outsource migration management and safeguard their own countries from the predicaments they think hosting refugees entails. Clearly, governance of forced migration in the 'Global North' prefigures and parallels the maleficent inaction and ambiguity here explored for the Lebanese case (Stel, 2018). ...
This article explores how time interacts forcefully with the experience of living within toxic spaces. Through ethnographic research and interviews with residents of a contaminated town in Louisiana, the article unpacks the uncertain temporalities of industrial pollution and potential means of resistance. Putting Mbembe's (2003) postcolonial treatise on necropolitics in conversation with Nixon's (2011) work on slow violence, the article examines the racialized, uneven, and attritional experience of petrochemical pollution in a former plantation landscape. By exploring the necropolitics of place, the article reveals how unjust exposure to toxic chemicals creates contemporary “death-worlds” that are experienced in temporally uncertain and constricting ways. The oppressive nature of uncertain temporality makes the material assemblages of petrochemical infrastructure daily environmental concerns. Yet by focusing on the lived experience of communities inhabiting this toxic geography, the article notes how witnessing gradual changes to the local environment has become a barometer for perceiving chronic pollution. The idea of “slow observation” is posited as a useful counterpoint to slow violence and the permanent wounding of toxic pollution. Slow observation is an important aspect of living with sustained environmental brutality and offers a potential means of political resistance and doing undone environmental justice.
While the fact that the implementation of migration policies fails to perfectly manage migration is well known, the actual dynamics of policy implementation have received little attention to date. A serious engagement with this phenomenon requires a move beyond policy texts and political intentions, and towards a ‘migration regime’ perspective that pays attention to the inherent contradictions, conflicts of interest and competing logics within migration control practices. This collection posits a multi-actor perspective that includes state agents, migrants and non-state actors alike and proposes three key factors that require a closer examination: competing institutional logics, discretionary practices and migrants’ agency. Based on original empirical research, the contributions of this collection ‘zoom in’ on specific asymmetrical negotiations over the right to enter or remain in Europe, and focus on the institutional logics and interplay between the different actors involved.
On October 15, 2015, the EU Migration Commissioner, Dimitris Avramopoulos, inaugurated the hotspot in Lesvos. Along with the Commissioner were the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Luxembourg (the state then holding the EU Presidency) and the Greek Alternate Minister of Immigration Policy. The presence of the three officials during the inauguration, and the declared operational support of EU agencies (EASO, Frontex, Europol, and Eurojust) to the Greek authorities in running the hotspot, reflected the mixed national and supra-state character of the new border control structure.
A significant outcome of the global crisis for refugees has been the abandonment of forced migrants to live in makeshift camps inside the EU. This paper details how state authorities have prevented refugees from surviving with formal provision, leading directly to thousands having to live in hazardous spaces such as the informal camp in Calais, the site of this study. We then explore the violent consequences of this abandonment. By bringing together thus far poorly integrated literatures on bio/necropolitics (Michel Foucault; Achille Mbembe) and structural violence (Johan Galtung), we retheorize the connections between deliberate political indifference towards refugees and the physiological violence they suffer. In framing the management of refugees as a series of violent inactions, we demonstrate how the biopolitics of migrant control has given way to necropolitical brutality. Advancing geographies of violence and migration, the paper argues that political inaction, as well as action, can be used as a means of control.
This article examines the relationship between the state security apparatus and local security initiatives in Gulu District, northern Uganda. It draws from more than 200 interviews and seven months of qualitative field research from February 2014 to December 2015. Although the central Ugandan state is believed to be weak or absent in the post-conflict north, the article finds that in the area of security, the state is ever-present in citizens' imaginations. This study makes two interrelated arguments. First, perceived state presence is a result of seemingly arbitrary and harsh interventions on the part of central government, which the author terms institutionalized arbitrariness. Second, in Gulu District, institutionalized arbitrariness is an effective and efficient mode of governance. This is due to civilian imaginations of state violence, shaped by the two-decade long conflict, as well as the power of the central state, reinforced administratively and through an elaborate intelligence network. Thus, institutionalized arbitrariness allows the central state to fragment political and social resistance to its rule and undermine the ability of citizens to make meaningful claims on the state.
In this theme section we explore why and when states knowingly refrain from recording people and their activities. States are not simply in pursuit of enhanced “legibility”; at times they also need to be able to “look away.” In explaining strategies of nonrecording, our focus is on how subjects negotiate with state recording agencies, how nonrecording relieves state agents from the burden of accountability, how the discretionary power of individual state agents affects (non)recording in unanticipated ways, and how states may project an illusion of vigorous recording internationally while actually engaging in deliberate nonrecording. Presenting case studies from China, Greece, the Netherlands, India, and Romania, we show that strategies of nonrecording are flexible, selective, and aimed at certain populations—and that both citizens and noncitizens can be singled out for nonrecording or derecording. In analyzing this state-produced social oblivion, divergences between national and local levels are of crucial significance.
Lebanon has had an ambiguous approach to the more than one million Syrians seeking protection in the country since 2011. The country is neither party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, nor does it have any national legislation dealing with refugees. In October 2014, Lebanon’s Council of Ministers adopted the first comprehensive policy on Syrian displacement, one explicit goal of which is to decrease the number of Syrians in Lebanon by reducing access to territory and encouraging return to Syria. This ambition is currently being implemented through the December 2014 General Security Office new set of entry requirements for Syrians and new rules for Syrian nationals already in Lebanon applying for and renewing their residency permits. Building on 10 months of fieldwork in Lebanon, this article explores the legal status of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in light of the recent regulatory changes. It argues that these leave many refugees in a deeply precarious legal position, with an overwhelming majority of Syrian refugees present in Lebanon without legal status. In essence, this article argues that Syrians in Lebanon are left with two options: they either leave the country or stay and accept exploitation.
This article provides an excerpt of a report that maps out how the Syrian refugee crisis is being played out in four of the main states hosting the refugees, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey. This excerpt focuses on the laws and policies in the host states and how they are creating particularly devastating consequences for Palestinian refugees. The excerpt sets out the Report’s conclusions and recommendations, primarily the call for a global Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA), with various components within and outside the Middle East region that build on existing legal obligations to better allocate responsibility for the refugee population and lift the overwhelming and unsustainable burden from the current frontline host states. The conclusions and recommendations combine legal and policy measures that would allow close the Palestinian refugee ‘protection gap,’ stem the phenomenon of trafficking and disasters-at-sea, prevent further fallout of the Syrian humanitarian crisis, and create incentive amongst the larger community of states to intervene to end the regional conflict.
This introduction addresses the ways in which flight and exile create particular types of uncertainty, including both radical and protracted, in people's lives. We argue that the concept of uncertainty, in its meaning of imperfect knowledge and the unpredictability of the future, is
central to studies that theorize conflict-induced displacement, transit, and refugeeness. We start with an exploration of the spatial and temporal aspects of uncertainty in situations of displacement, and within that we discuss how uncertainty functions as a governing mechanism. We then analyze
the ways that refugees and those internally displaced navigate situations of radical and protracted uncertainty. This article and those that follow in this special issue suggest that in our analysis of conflict-induced displacement, we must understand uncertainty rather than certainty as the
norm.
What are ‘acts of desertion’, how do they feature in contemporary border struggles, and what might an emphasis on such acts bring to the analysis of the politics of mobility? This article seeks to address these questions in the context of the Sonoran borderzone, which crosses Mexico and the US. It develops an analysis that sheds light on contemporary border struggles in terms that acknowledge both the intensity of security practices as well as the significance of migratory acts, without pre-fixing the relation between the two. The analysis shows how ‘acts of desertion’ involve differentiated dynamics of abandonment and renouncement, which demand appreciation of the ambiguities of contemporary border struggles. As acts that variously involve a dynamics of refusal, the article argues that acts of desertion challenge the limits of liberal citizenship, without wholly transcending its limitations.AbstraktWas sind ‘Desertionsakte’, inwiefern spielen sie eine Rolle in gegenwrtigen Border Struggles, und was könnte die Betonung solcher Handlungen zur Analyse von Mobilittspolitiken beitragen? Dieser Artikel will diese Fragen im Kontext der Sonora-Grenzzone adressieren, die Mexiko und die Vereinigten Staaten durchzieht. Er entwickelt eine Analyse, die gegenwrtige Border Struggles auf eine Art und Weise beleuchtet, die sowohl die Intensitt von Sicherheitspraktiken, als auch die Bedeutung von Migrationshandlungen berücksichtigt, ohne die Beziehung zwischen den beiden vorwegzunehmen. Die Analyse zeigt, inwiefern ‘Desertionsakte’ differenzierte Dynamiken des Verlassens und Aufgebens beinhalten, die eine Berücksichtigung der Ambiguitt gegenwrtiger Border Struggles nötig machen. Der Artikel legt dar dass diese Handlungen, indem sie auf verschiedene Art und Weise Dynamiken der Zurückweisung beinhalten, die Beschrnkungen liberaler Staatsbürgerschaft herausfordern, ohne jedoch vollkommen über deren Einschrnkungen hinauszugehen.
Many names have been attached to regional spaces of migration around the edges of the European Union, including the Mediterranean, Africa-Europe, EU, and Schengen. These regional distinctions and the image of contiguous boundaries assume certain territorial stabilities that can be known, mapped, and policed: the African continent, the European Union, the Mediterranean and even the notion of territorial waters. Yet, territoriality itself is an unstable concept, and the many crises unfolding in the interstitial spaces in the Mediterranean signal precisely the fluidity of the region. Regional solutions are popular within the current panoply of enforcement strategies used to manage migration, but they function to reify and stabilize the concept of the region and obscure violence happening at other scales. In this paper we build on political geographers’ examinations of the social construction of scale to investigate the ways in which the region has been created through “migration management.” Building on the work of feminist geographers, we contend that attention to the scale of the migrant body shows the violence obscured by regionalized migration management and opens up spaces and strategies of political engagement. This approach highlights the multiple places where the EU-Africa borderlands are constructed and shifts the conversation from a state-centric discourse of migration management enacted at the region to one of embodied migration politics that addresses violence transpiring at finer scales.
The article examines some of the novel ways in which the European Union carries out its ‘border-work’– border-work that stretches far beyond the external borders of the current Union. It highlights, in particular, the role of EUrope's neighbours in new strategies of securitisation, drawing attention to some of the actors, sites and mechanisms that make the Union's border-work possible. The emphasis in the paper is on the Mediterranean, long the premier laboratory for creative solutions to the policing of EU borders. The discussion focuses predominantly on a difficult neighbour turned ‘friend’ – Libya – and its role in the EUropean archipelago of border-work.
This article examines the effects of an uncertain legal status on the lives of immigrants, situating their experiences within frameworks of citizenship/ belonging and segmented assimilation, and using Victor Turner's concept of liminality and Susan Coutin's "legal nonexistence." It questions black - and - white conceptualizations of documented and undocumented immigration by exposing the gray area of "liminal legality" and examines how this in - between status affects the individual's social networks and family, the place of the church in immigrants' lives, and the broader domain of artistic expression. Empirically, it draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D. C., and Phoenix from 1989 to 2001. The article lends support to arguments about the continued centrality of the nation - state in the lives of immigrants.
In plural societies, social welfare can be a terrain of political contestation, particularly when public welfare functions are underdeveloped and ethnic or religious groups provide basic social services. It is well established that such organizations favor in-group members, but under what conditions do they serve out-group communities? To address this question, the authors compare the welfare programs of the predominantly Sunni Muslim Future Movement and the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah in Lebanon. Although they operate under the same institutional rules and economic contexts and boast the largest welfare programs in their respective communities, the Future Movement aims to serve a broader array of beneficiaries, including non-Sunnis, whereas Hezbollah focuses more exclusively on Shiite communities. Based on analyses of an original data set of the spatial locations of welfare agencies, qualitative data from interviews with providers and beneficiaries, and case studies of areas where the two parties established and did not establish welfare agencies, the authors argue that distinct political mobilization strategies—whether electoral or nonelectoral—explain different patterns of service delivery across the two organizations.
In the past few years, spaces of transit have become prominent sites for people seeking refuge in Europe. From railway stations and parks in European cities, to informal settlements around Calais, to the hotspots in Italy and Greece, the movements of people and the techniques that govern them are at the heart of what has been misnamed the ‘European refugee crisis’. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, this article takes spaces of transit as a vantage point for interrogating the relationship between mobility, migration management and violence, focusing on the fracturing of journeys due to forced and obstructed mobility both outside and within the EU. We develop the notion of ‘politics of exhaustion’ to highlight the impact and protracted character of these forms of migration management – its accumulated effects over time and across spaces – yet without reducing people seeking refuge to passive victims. Struggles for mobility are closely related to the existence and continued adaptation of migration management practices. The notion of fracturing can thus be employed not only to make sense of the violent effects of migration management but also the ways in which conventional conceptions of state and citizenship are challenged by the emergence of alternative living spaces, communities and politics.
This article deals with the modes of (contested) control that are at play at the Mediterranean frontier for containing, dividing and discipling unruly mobility. Building on ethnographic research conducted on the island of Lesvos and of Lampedusa, it focuses on the implementation and the functioning of the Hotspot System in Greece and in Italy, analysing beyond the fences of detention centres and by looking at the broader logistics of channels, infrastructures and governmental measures deployed for regaining control over migration movements. The article argues that more than control in terms of surveillance and tracking, the Hotspot System contributes to enforce forms of containment through mobility that consists in controlling migration by obstructing, decelerating and troubling migrants’ geographies – more than in fully blocking them. The article takes into account migrants’ refusals of being fingerprinted, showing how migrants radically unsettle the association between seeking refuge and lack of choice, enacting their right to choose where to go and claim asylum.
This article discusses how the Lebanese state has responded to displacement from Syria (2011–17), and how the resulting policy formulation processes and discourses have constructed the relationship between the hosting state and the refugee. It focuses especially on how this small state has negotiated its politics of reception and choice of policy tools amid dysfunctional institutions and political disputes. To this end, it uses the lens of Lebanon's model of sectarian power sharing to understand the polity's response to mass displacement. This process has been structured by the defining dynamics of the country's politics of sectarianism: slack governance, an elite fractured model, and a politics of dependence on external and domestic nonstate actors. The Lebanese model offers broader insights into types of coping mechanisms that emerge in the context of forced migration, notably when a formal refugee regime is absent. The article contends that states lacking a legal asylum framework and grappling with various governance hurdles are likely to draw on the repertoire of their political regime to deal with displacement.
This article explores the way in which the concept of ‘public’ is continually and unpredictably constituted, redefined, and unmade in Gulu District, northern Uganda. It uses case studies of three local security initiatives and their conflicts with state agents to examine how public authorities establish power through a dynamic process of both claiming and denying authority, thereby divesting themselves of responsibility to intervene. It also shows that the state maintains its power over other claimants to public authority such as the local security initiatives by unpredictably shifting the boundary between public and private, and enforcing these seemingly arbitrary definitions with a very real threat of violent force. Together, these two phenomena prevent civilians from developing expectations of public authorities or creating alternative public authorities, which helps to explain the lack of state accountability to citizens in northern Uganda.
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A significant part of Lebanon's Palestinian refugees live in unofficial camps, so-called “gatherings”, where they reside on Lebanese land. Many of these gatherings are now threatened with eviction. By means of two qualitative case studies this article explores responses to such eviction threats. Residents, it turns out, engage in deliberate disinformation and stalling tactics and invoke both a professed and real ignorance about their situation. In contrast to dominant discourses that project Palestinian refugees as illicit and sovereignty undermining, I explain these tactics as a reaction to, and duplication of, a “politics of uncertainty” implemented by Lebanese authorities. Drawing on agnotology theory, and reconsidering the gatherings as sensitive spaces subjected to aleatory governance, I propose that residents’ responses to the looming evictions are a manifestation of the deliberate institutional ambiguity that Lebanese authorities impose on the gatherings. As such, the article contributes to understanding the spatial dimensions of strategically imposed ignorance.
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Informal institutions are increasingly recognized as a core concept in our understanding of the organization of socio-political life in refugee communities. This article contributes to this understanding by exploring the ways in which urban refugees in the Palestinian informal community, known as gathering, of Maashouk create, reconfigure and contest informal institutions in their quest to access basic urban services such as electricity, water, waste management and shelter maintenance. In particular, the findings generated through an innovative process mapping methodology suggest that informal institutions do not merely complement and challenge existing formal institutions, but also portend future ones. Formalization of service delivery, however, is complicated by the fact that current informality does not merely stem from residents’ coping mechanisms, but also from Lebanese state officials’ nascence of how to deal with people who are neither citizens nor residents of UN-administered refugee camps.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has positioned itself as a modernising country (re)built on the profits of its energy boom and the efforts of, currently, over four million labour migrants, the majority from Central Asia. Far too many migrants endure an extremely precarious everyday as they are forced to live in what this article describes as a citywide state of exception, within which legal frameworks protecting migrants are ignored or misinterpreted to the benefit of the market. Many migrants who desire ‘legality’ are forced into ‘illegality’ by their employers and landlords refusing to register their documents correctly, increasing their vulnerability. Such abuses are facilitated by the state construction of migrants as diseased and criminal, which in turn becomes embedded into cultural imaginations. Employing Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, this paper theorises how these constructions position migrants as superfluous and that they can be ‘let to die’. The research demonstrates that migrants are simultaneously visible and invisible to the state; with the latter, the legal uncertainty denies migrants access to welfare and a voice within the city, but they are visible for exploitation both in terms of their labour and the political capital gained from their presence.
This article explores the relationality of governance and resistance in the context of the constitution of refugee subjectivities in Malaysia. Whilst recognising their precarity, the article moves away from conceiving of refugees merely as victims subjected to violence and control, and to contribute to an emerging body of literature on migrant resistance. Its contribution lies in examining practices of resistance, and the specific context in which they emerge, without conceptualising power-resistance as a binary, and without conceiving of refugees as preconstituted subjects. Rather, drawing on the thought of Michel Foucault, the article examines how refugee subjectivities come into being through a play of governance-resistance, of practices and strategies that may be simultaneously affirmative, subversive, exclusionary, and oppressive. The relationality and mobility of this play is illustrated through an examination of practices surrounding UNHCR identity cards, community organisations, and education. Secondly, governance-resistance is conceptualised as a play of visibility and invisibility, understood both visually and in terms of knowledge production. What I refer to as the politics of (in)visibility indicates that refugee subjectivities are both constituted and become other than ‘the refugee’ through a continuous play of coming into being, becoming governable, claiming a presence, blending in and remaining invisible.
This article addresses the question of how to theorize the relation between uncertainty and governmentality with regard to displacement and its consequences. It explores the experiences of asylum seekers in Turkey and the bureaucratic processes of refugee status determination, local
dispersal, and third country resettlement, illustrating two main points throughout. First, 'protracted uncertainty', characterized by indefinite waiting, limited knowledge, and unpredictable legal status, is a central element of the experience of being an asylum seeker in Turkey. Second, this
uncertainty serves to demobilize, contain, and criminalize asylum seekers through the production of protracted uncertainty, which in turn is normalized as a necessity of bureaucracy and/or security. The article invites readers to question the governmentalities of asylum and border regimes
that not only discipline refugees' everyday movements but also determine the uncertainty of 'refugeeness'.
After the 2008 war with Russia, many internally displaced people (IDPs) in the Republic of Georgia complained that they had nothing, despite the fact that international donors gave more than $450 million in humanitarian aid. What was nothing? How was it related to forced migration? Why did humanitarianism continually focus the IDPs' attention on what they had lost rather than the help they had been given? In this article, I use the work of existentialist philosopher Alain Badiou to argue that humanitarianism creates four forms of absence: anti-artifacts, black holes, imaginary numbers, and absolute zero. These forms of nothingness force displaced people into having nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing, which in turn prevents them from reassembling the fragments of their previous lives into meaningful forms of existence in the present.
Despite long-standing recognition that variations exist between people's experiences of time, and that time is central to the framing of social life and bureaucratic systems, migration scholars have tended to neglect the temporal dimension in their exploration of mobility. This continues to be the case today despite it being over a decade since Saulo Cwerner, in this journal, called for migration researchers to give greater attention to time. This article seeks to reinvigorate the debate, drawing on ethnographic research with refused asylum seekers and immigration detainees in the UK to question how an appreciation of time provides insights into understandings of mobility and deportability. It argues that deportable migrants suffer from the instability and precarity created by living with a dual uncertainty of time, one that simultaneously threatens imminent and absent change. The article distinguishes between four experiential temporalities (sticky, suspended, frenzied and ruptured), and considers how the re-appropriation of time might aid individual resilience.
This article strives to meet two challenges. As a review, it provides a critical discussion of the scholarship concerning undocumented migration, with a special emphasis on ethnographically informed works that foreground significant aspects of the everyday life of undocumented migrants. But another key concern here is to formulate more precisely the theoretical status of migrant "illegality" and deportability in order that further research related to undocumented migration may be conceptualized more rigorously. This review considers the study of migrant "illegality" as an epistemological, methodological, and political problem, in order to then formulate it as a theoretical problem. The article argues that it is insufficient to examine the "illegality" of undocumented migration only in terms of its consequences and that it is necessary also to produce historically informed accounts of the sociopolitical processes of "illegalization" themselves, which can be characterized as the legal production of migrant "illegality.".
Many of the significant urban transformations of the new century are taking place in the developing world. In particular, informality, once associated with poor squatter settlements, is now seen as a generalized mode of metropolitan urbanization. This article focuses on urban informality to highlight the challenges of dealing with the "unplannable" - exceptions to the order of formal urbanization. It argues that planners Must learn to work with this state of exception Such policy epistemologies are useful not only for "Third World" cities but also more generally for urban planning concerned with distributive justice.
Borders are a unique political space, in which both sovereignty and citizenship are performed by individuals and sovereigns. Using the work of Agamben and Foucault, this article examines how decisions made at the border alienate each and every traveler crossing the frontier, not simply the ‘sans papiers’ or refugees. The governmentality at play in the border examination relies on an embedded confessionary complex and the ‘neurotic citizen’, as well as structures of identity, documentation, and data management. The state border is a permanent state of exception that clearly demonstrates the importance of biopolitics to the smooth operation of sovereign power.
Irregular migration in Europe appeared on policy agendas in the early 1970s and more intensively in the late 1980s and 1990s; since then, it has become a top priority issue in policy discourses. With reference to exemplifying country cases, this article elaborates on two discursive elements that have emerged across discourses in the EU: 1. threat and criminalization, 2. `number games'. The discourse of irregular migration has become increasingly coloured by deviousness, a criminalisation took place at discursive and legislative level alike, but at the same time the insecurity about `numbers', i.e. the scope of irregular migrants residing in the EU, geared policy discourses to a particular development. This article argues that an interplay between these two elements amounts to a necessity of ongoing demonstration of efficient governance. This takes the form of `political games' that are run by political actors demonstrating the capacity and efficient governance of controlling irregular migration and its underlying implications.
The past two decades have seen the steady emergence of various bilateral and multilateral migration agreements between Europe and migrant-sending countries in the global South.
This article provides a critical assessment of the way the EU – and individual countries such as Spain, France and Italy – have played active roles in reshaping old and developing new strategies for keeping migration under control while opening up new opportunities for “regular” migration. It also discusses the extent to which migration agreements help migrant-sending countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to optimize the link between migration and development. Based on an analysis of the contents of the migration agreements and their implementation, it has become obvious that there is still a long way to go to achieve “fair multilateralism” and create “win-win” situations between the EU and the poorer migrant-sending countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
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