Undoing the Borders of ‘Access’: A Socio-Legal Inquiry into Migration Management and Refugee Struggles at the European Union’s External Borders

Since the summer of migration in 2015, the European Union’s (EU) Common European Asylum System has experienced significant reforms. The EU’s Greek–Turkish external border has witnessed increasingly harsher measures of externalization and internalization following the EU–Türkiye Statement of 18 March 2016, aimed at restraining refugee mobility and asylum seeking. These measures pose real-life implications for refugees in ‘irregular’ circumstances, who, in return, react to these measures in their everyday lives.
This thesis investigates the interplay between the externalization and internalization of migration management and the political agency of refugees. It consists of five peer-reviewed publications and an introduction, reflecting the findings from three case studies conducted between 2021 and 2023 on the five Eastern Aegean islands of Greece. The thesis responds to the questions of what kind of borders are produced through migration management measures in reaction to refugee mobility, how and where they are produced, how this affects refugee ‘access’, and what this means for refugees who constantly encounter these measures. The main objective is to develop an analytical framework that is theoretically informed, contextually detailed, and grounded in the case studies. The framework provides an understanding of how states manage refugee ‘access’—a selective inclusion process to the state territory, protection (asylum, including procedures, and other rights), and society—within and outside their territories, and how refugees get access.
This study amalgamates international refugee law (and EU asylum law) scholarship with critical border and migration studies, visuality, and multimodality. It merges the top-down and bottom-up approaches of socio-legal studies, examining the interplay between migration management and refugee struggles from the perspectives of both states and refugees. The study blends the qualitative analyses of relevant legal texts from international refugee law and EU asylum acquis, non-legal documents, and refugee-produced paintings and social media content. These are supplemented by a qualitative analysis of ethnographic data from semi-structured interviews conducted with founders of the Hope Project Greece, an NGO based in the Greek island of Lesvos, and of the social media campaign ‘Now You See Me Moria’, and written testimonies from three refugee artists who painted at the Hope Project.
The results indicate that (i) the externalization of migration management is a process closely linked to the control of refugee mobility within the EU through internalization, (ii) these diverse measures reproduce state borders as layered in respect of political/physical borders (the border), legal/structural borders (the law), and social/symbolic borders (the social) that manage access to the EU territory, protection, and EUropean society, respectively, (iii) these measures do not take place in a vacuum but always emerge in reaction to the mobility of certain populations, and (iv) they engender an unremitting struggle over ‘access’ between state actors and refugees. The thesis seeks to advance scholarly debates on migration management, refugee experiences, rights claiming, and bordering in international refugee law, EU asylum law, and migration and border studies.