Migration Power Europe: Between Norms and Leverage in the EU's Global Role

This volume conceptualises the European Union as a distinctive migration power: an actor that governs human mobility through several forms of power at once. Building on Barnett and Duvall’s account of compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive power, it treats these modalities as overlapping and mutually constitutive rather than discrete, and uses them to make sense of an EU migration regime that operates less as a coherent policy domain than as an assemblage of contradictory logics, scales, and instruments. Across twelve chapters, the contributors examine how the EU governs migration through externalisation to neighbouring and transit states, through interdependence rather than direct territorial control, and through the hybridisation of humanitarian, developmental, security, and diplomatic rationales, sustained by financial, legal, infrastructural, and symbolic architectures. The cases range across the Mediterranean, Türkiye, Morocco, Greece, and sub-Saharan Africa, extend to the EU’s own internal institutions, and reach back to the displacement politics of the late 1940s. Rather than seeking to prove the framework universally, the volume stress-tests and refines it through empirically diverse contributions. In doing so, it treats the tensions it surfaces, between coercion and consent, dependence and co-production, and crisis and the long term, as productive openings for theory. The result is a vocabulary for analysing the European Union as a migration power, and for marking the limits of that power.