The European migration crisis of 2015-2016 exposed a number of issues with the EU’s internal system for migration management, the Common European Asylum System. As a result the EU looked beyond its own borders to deal with what they had framed as a crisis. Amongst its responses were a number of external migration management agreements with third countries. Most notable and controversial was the EU-Turkey Statement. It was heavily criticised for things that were not new in external migration management agreements. Therefore, this thesis looks into how external migration management agreements changed with the migration crisis. Understanding the crisis as a framed situation in which the EU acted differently than normal, I will look at an external migration management agreement made during non-crisis—the Mobility Partnership with Moldova—and compare it to the EU-Turkey Statement made in said crisis. The similarities between these agreements show that the crisis accelerated a number of processes that had been going on in external migration management in the EU for years: informalisation and increasing focus on security. The differences show that in crisis the EU makes agreements hastily and as a result can loose its leverage over its negotiation partner.

Les migrations constituent un phénomène transnational dont la gestion a traditionnellement occupé l’intérêt des Etats de destination des migrants dans l’exercice de leur souveraineté. Avec l’avènement de la mondialisation, le panorama migratoire s’est transformé. Les migrations occupent une place chaque fois plus importante dans les agendas des Etats ayant compris que la maîtrise des migrations nécessitait de la coopération et de l’action conjointe à l’échelle internationale. La gouvernance des migrations comporte tout un ensemble de défis tant pour les Etats de destination des migrants que pour les Etats d’origine et pour la communauté internationale dans son ensemble. D’une part se présente l’intérêt de contrôler l’arrivée des migrants très influencé par des conceptions sécuritaires; d’une autre part apparaissent les conceptions des migrations comme outils du développement qui visent à tirer profit des effets considérés comme positifs des migrations et restreindre ses effets négatifs. Et finalement nous constatons l’existence de circonstances pouvant mettre en danger les droits humains des migrants et face auxquelles des mesures doivent être prises pour assurer le respect total des droits de l’homme des migrants. Concilier les intérêts présents autour de la maîtrise des migrations n’est pas une tâche facile. Afin de trouver un cadre idéal pour la maîtrise des migrations et la protection des droits des migrants, nous explorons 5 hypothèses d’étude qui nous mènent à analyser la gestion mondiale migratoire, la gouvernance régionale des migrations (dans le cadre de l’Amérique latine et des relations bilatérales entre cette dernière et l’Union européenne), la protection des migrants en tant que personnes vulnérables titulaires des droits à vocation universelle, ainsi que la protection proposé par les Etats d’origine des migrants (le cas particulier de la Colombie). Les atouts et les défis de chaque espace de discussion sont analysés ainsi que leurs apports à la maîtrise des migrations et à la protection des migrants. / Migrations are a transnational phenomenon that its management has traditionally called attention from the destination states exercising its sovereignty. With the arrival of globalization, the migration perspective has changed. Migrations have an increasingly more important place in the government’s agenda, which has understood that migration management needed the cooperation and the joint action at an international level. The governance of migration involves multiple challenges for the destination countries as well as the countries of origin and for the international community. On one hand, it presents the interest of controlling the arrival of migrants, with a strong influence of security conceptions; on the other hand other ideas have immerged that consider migration as tools for development. Those ideas aim to profit from the effects that are considered as benefits of migration and to stop the negative effects. Finally, we consider the existence of the circumstances that can put in danger migrant’s human rights and for which some measures should be taken. Reconciling the interests surrounding the management of migration is not a simple task. For finding ideal management framework for the governance of migration and the protection of migrant’s human rights, we will explore 5 hypotheses. We will analyze the global administration of migration; the regional administration (in the framework of Latin America); the protection of migrants as vulnerable people having universal rights, as well as the protection from the migrant’s state of origin (in the particular case of Colombia). The assets and the challenges of each one of those discussion environments will be analyzed as well as its contributions to migration’s governance and migrant’s protection.

This thesis is a qualitative study focusing on the situation that has evolved in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) from the beginning of 2018, when migrants and refugees started entering the country in large numbers in the context of the so-called Balkan route. The approach adopted in the thesis is informed by critical studies emphasizing the asymmetries entailed in the emerging multilevel governance of migration. The European Union (EU), the BiH state, IOM, civil society, activists, and citizens, are inserted in a “situational map” presenting their inter-relations, and the potential of each to influence the situation of concern. This thesis analyses in details the role of the EU, which is implementing in BiH its security-informed approach to irregular migration through externalization and multilevelling strategies. Eight semi-structured interviews allow the investigation into the potential and challenges of a “governance from below”. The main argument of this thesis is that the EU, outsourcing its strategy to curb irregular migration to BiH, fails to address the humanitarian crisis that is developing there, besides mining the stability and democracy of the country.

Over the last decade, a new trend of Global Remittances has emerged within the international development community, especially a growing interest in women’s migration and remittances, and their potential for poverty reduction and economic growth. Due to the staggering amount of transnational money transfers, migrant remittances have become a central component in multilateral discussions on alternative development financing, and has been included in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The present study thus explores the multiple ways in which this gendered migration-remittance-development nexus has come to play out the recent years, seeking to understand how the “banking the unbanked” logic along with microfinance profit-making agendas serves neoliberal governmental and infrastructural discursive formations of transnational migration and its development impact. By using a decolonial approach, the study uses critical discourse analysis to scrutinize selected multilateral actors’ policy documents to explore in what ways migrant women’s “financial inclusion, independence and economic empowerment” have been included in the goals and targets within the 2030 Agenda. The main finding is that the rights-based approach towards migrants in the sustainability discourse rather tends to dismantle migrant agency into monetary practices which have come to be an important means for the financialization of migrant and non-migrant communities as well as for the transmittance of western knowledge doctrines, and in turn, are to prolong regimes of “modern slavery.”