When does the refugee encounter the State? The straightforward and traditional answer to this question would be, when arriving at the border and surrendering herself to the authorities uttering the magical word, asylum. Reality, however, only seldom conforms to this picture. Today, the person...

The present paper explores the growing link between EU’s migration priorities and its foreign policy agenda. As part of the evolving EU acquis on asylum and immigration issues, particular priority has been given to cooperation with third countries and efforts to extend EU’s possibilities for...

This paper starts from the encounter between a European navy vessel and a dinghy carrying boat refugees and other desperate migrants across the Mediterranean or West African Sea towards Europe. It explores the growing trend in the EU of enacting migration control at the high seas or...

The removal of internal border controls across most of the European Union (EU) has increased the interdependencies between the Member States, triggering the emergence of many different EU common goods. In the fields of external border controls, asylum and migration, Article 80 of the Treaty on...

The current EU Asylum policy is widely seen as ineffective and unfair. We propose an EU-wide market for tradable quotas on both refugees and asylum-seekers coupled with a matching mechanism linking countries' and migrants' preferences. We show that the proposed system can go a long way towards...

The significant numbers of arrivals through the Central Mediterranean route to Italy between 2014 and 2017 have put the Italian reception system under pressure, and pushed its rapid expansion. This paper examines how the governance of reception has evolved between 2011 and 2018, a time during...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the institution of asylum, exacerbating longer term trends limiting the ability of asylum seekers to cross-borders to seek protection. As a result, the early months of 2020 saw an effective extinguishment of the right to seek asylum. This...

Political trust matters for citizens’ policy preferences but existing research has not yet considered whether this effect depends on how policies are designed. To fill this gap, this article analyses whether and how policy design and political trust interact in shaping people’s policy...

In this paper we aim to map public preferences in the domain of asylum policy in order to explore the various lines of conflict and their intensity in the aftermath of the refugee crisis. Taking as a starting point the EU polity’s two-level structure, we study both transnational lines of...

The ‘flexible’ interstate solidarity model envisaged by the 2020 ‘New Pact on Migration and Asylum’ (‘the Pact’) allows European Union (EU) member states to choose how to do their share in the distribution of the costs connected to asylum. According to one of the proposals contained...