Deterrence, Development, and Denial: Securitising Climate-Induced Mobility in the European Union

Abstract

Climate-induced mobility poses a mounting governance challenge for the European Union (EU), where climate action, migration control, and security policy intersect in uneven and contested ways. While EU discourse frequently frames climate change as a “threat multiplier,” migration governance remains anchored in deterrence logics, producing a structural gap in protection for environmentally displaced populations. This paper examines how the EU conceptualises and operationalises the climate–migration nexus through a novel comparative securitisation framework, document analysis and expert interviews. It identifies three securitisation logics, positive (humanitarian–development framing), hybrid (development–deterrence overlap), and negative (deterrence and externalisation), applied across four policy instruments, the European Green Deal (EGD), the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), the Deterrence Policy Package (DPP), and non-harmonised Member State protection measures. Despite their divergent rationales, these logics converge on three analytically distinct yet structurally equivalent pathways of exclusion, viz., exclusion by omission, exclusion by development–deterrence overlap, and exclusion by deterrence and externalisation. The paper argues that this convergence is produced by two cross-domain mechanisms, viz., governance fragmentation between EU climate and migration institutions, and a shared discursive tendency to constitute climate-displaced persons as objects of risk management rather than rights-bearing subjects. It concludes by outlining pathways for integrating climate displacement into EU legal and policy frameworks, including harmonised protection categories, funding realignment, and cross-DG coordination.