Migration Governance in the Mediterranean: The Siracusa Experience

Towards aHuman and HumaneApproach? The EU Discourse on Migration amidst the Covid-19 Crisis

“…EUMS at the Mediterranean borders remain the most exposed to migratory pressures and ask for burden-sharing, while Central-Eastern countries refuse to share the costs of migration, with Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic in outright opposition to the New Pact. European migration governance is the result of the interplay between different layers of government: the EU level interacts with EUMS and local actors engaged in migration management on the ground (Panebianco 2020).…”

“…Adopting a human security perspective means in the first place to reflect on the essential element of human security: protecting the right to life, including the safeguard of irregular(-ised) sea travellers via search and rescue (SAR) operations (Spijkerboer 2017, 22). In the first semester of 2020, EU institutional leaders, not only President von der Leyen but also the President of the European Parliament and the President of the European Council, have often adopted a 'migrantcentred' approach in their public speeches (DOC6), somewhat recalling the discourses elaborated by non-state actors engaged in migration management at the EU periphery (Panebianco 2020).…”

Equitable mitigation to achieve the 1.5 °C goal in the Mediterranean Basin

“…Some authors suggest that historical responsibility should be considered from the beginning of the industrial revolution since developed countries' progress has been tightly linked to their increase in emissions (Cao 2008;Kanitkar et al 2013). Some others propose that historical responsibility can only be demanded from the moment the international community became conscious of the climate change problem and this would place the date in the early 1990s (Ott et al 2004;Baer et al 2009;Gignac and Matthews 2015). The first IPCC report was published in 1990, and this is when the negotiations that would be taken to the approval of the UNFCCC in Rio-92 were started.…”

Decentering the Study of Migration Governance in the Mediterranean

“…Theoretically, we argue that "others" should not only consider decision-makers from non-EU countries but also perspectives of those beyond the policy-making elite (Bilgin 2017). This involves uncovering the dynamics of migration from an everyday politics perspective and everyday resistance, and in particular, connecting established and marginalised perspectives (Freemantle and Landau 2020;Kutz and Wolff 2020;Léonard and Kaunert 2021;Panebianco 2020). These works are key to understanding how EU borderwork is contested and shaped by non-EU state actors such as in Mali (Cold-Ravnkilde 2021), or in Ethiopia (Ayalew Mengiste 2021), and how contestation is framed in response to EU information campaigns that 'bring the border deeply into the everyday space of local communities before migrants even attempt to cross it' (Savio Vammen 2021).…”

“…Methodologically, we show how methodological decentring is a key step towards advancing the research agenda on migration governance, insofar that it involves circumscribing our object and choosing the words to describe it as well as "engaging" (Onar and Nicolaïdis 2013) with the "others" through sources and approaches that compensate asymmetric relations (Bilgin 2020;Freemantle and Landau 2020;Panebianco 2020). Empirically, we enrich the decentring agenda by including neglected variables affecting the governance of migration both within Europe and beyond, to avoid the risk of "devolving into an endorsement of other forms of centrism" (Onar and Nicolaïdis 2013, 294).…”