Wanted Refugees: The Forming of an Instrument Constituency for Refugee Resettlement in the European Union

Abstract

The European Union Agency for Asylum has emerged as an important actor in the Common European Asylum System in the past few years. In this article, we explore how the agency engages in capacity-building by looking at the development of bureaucratic instruments. We deploy the theoretical framework of instrument constituencies to investigate the agency’s development of instruments around resettlement. In relation to the literature on European migration management, deploying the theoretical framework of instrument constituencies is a novel approach. Given the European Union’s limited mandate to directly influence Member States resettlement programmes, we argue that the development of bureaucratic instruments is one of the few avenues through which the European Union can facilitate resettlement. This study reveals how the proliferation in the use of these instruments by Member State authorities is driven by a political ambition to create a more orderly form of migration and is contrasted with the seemingly uncontrollable nature of asylum. Beyond being a direct solution to a practical problem, the policy instruments studied here reveal how new bureaucratic practices around resettlement are gradually being established. We show how resettlement is continuously evolving in the intersection between Member States and the European Union in the governing of migration.