Generating instability? The impact of the EU's hybrid migration governance in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan

Abstract

This article analyses the migration agreements between the European Union (EU) and Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. These international policy frameworks were negotiated in tandem with one another, and all were announced in 2016. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the three countries, the article argues that they fuse humanitarian elements with a bloc‐based security logic in an ad‐hoc mix that lacks substantive legitimacy in the three states, rendering the frameworks unstable. The article introduces the idea of hybrid migration governance which we have developed inductively to conceptualise the empirical findings from our fieldwork, building on existing work on hybridity in the conflict and security studies literature and Nora Stel's conception of governance as the ability to shape the field of action of others. In our usage, hybrid migration governance refers to the efficacy of EU intervention in the institutional management of migration in the three case study countries (‘shaping the field of action’), the ‘frozen’ character of the societal relations formed through this process and their underlying lack of domestic legitimacy. In conclusion, we argue that hybrid migration governance poses problem for the EU's ‘Barcelona’ conception of human security, because rather than expanding the bloc's ‘zone of security’ to the international neighbourhood, these policies have generated downstream security‐risks.