Towards a new ontology of crisis? Resilience in EU migration governance

ABSTRACT

In critical security studies, resilience counts as promoter of a new ontology of crisis insofar as policymakers accept crises as unpredictable and uncontrollable and, eventually, engage in reflexive change of their governance approaches. This paper interrogates the meaning, empirical application and institutional implications of a resilience turn in EU migration governance; a domain where resilience has recently been discovered as potential remedy for dealing with crises, especially so since the on-set of large-scale refugee movements in 2015. The paper offers two contributions: first, we conceptualise resilience as promotive of a new ontology of crisis by wedding existing typologies of resilience to theories of policy change, thus making the notion of resilience-induced ontological change operationalizable for an evaluation of EU migration governance. Second, we analyse three recent EU policy initiatives to illustrate the mileage of our analytical tool. The analysis shows that the EU Commission’s inclination towards reflexive renewal is juxtaposed by the stability-oriented decision-making institutions of the EU and member states. A transformation of policy goals from status-quo preservation through sovereign migration control to flexible policy and institutional change in fluent migration societies seems unviable where EU migration governance remains ontologically torn about migration-related crises and suitable policy responses.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration governance
• European Union
• resilience
• crisis management
• policy change
• asylum policies

Acknowledgements

Valuable feedback on several versions of this article was provided by Helena Farrand Carrapico, Ariadna Ripoll Servent, Philippe Bourbeau and Jonathan Joseph. Two anonymous reviewers offered substantial and constructive feedback and we are grateful for the opportunity to strengthen our argument on ontologies of crisis in response. We appreciate the research assistance by Henry D. Schreffler at Harvard College and Suat Alper Orhan at Europa-Universität Flensburg. Regine further acknowledges generous research support funding through a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellowship 2017/18 at the Center for European Studies Harvard where large parts of the conceptual part were drafted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Regine Paul is currently Interim Professor of Comparative Politics at Kassel University and Research Associate at Bielefeld’s Law and Society Unit. She was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow 2017/18 at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University and received her PhD from the University of Bath (UK) in 2012. Regine is the author of two monographs: The Political Economy of Border-Drawing (Berghahn 2015) and The politics of analytical innovation in multi-level administrations (forthcoming with Routledge); several journal articles and book chapters on migration governance, risk regulation and public governance reform in Europe. She is also a co-editor of the forthcoming Edward Elgar Handbook on the Governance and Politics of Migration.

Christof Roos currently holds the position of Assistant Professor for European and Global Governance at Europa-Universität Flensburg since. He is Research Associate at the Institute for European Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel where he worked from 2014 to 2017. At University of Bremen and its International Graduate School for Social Sciences he received a PhD in political science in 2012. His research focus is on EU migration politics, freedom of movement, Schengen cooperation, and the common European asylum system.

ORCID

Regine Paul http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3562-7527