Migration as "hybrid threat" at EU´s Eastern borders

Rising geopolitical tensions between the EU and its Eastern neighborhood has prompted claims that countries like Russia, Belarus, and Turkey are instrumentalizing migration as a tool of ‘hybrid warfare’ to destabilize the EU.

In response, the EU has adopted a new crisis regulation, which will allow member states under alleged threat of hybrid warfare to suspend migrants’ access to protection and rights at the border.

The aim of this project is to explore how this changes borderwork at Europe’s Eastern borders and its implications for migrants’ access to fundamental rights.We focus on the borders of Finland and Cyprus – two states which have recently experienced an alleged increase in instrumentalization of migration by Russia and Turkey.

Methodologically, it draws on a mix of qualitative methods.

To explore how the framing of migration as a hybrid threat changes borderwork, we rely on interviews with border authorities and civil society organizations and ethnographic observations at land and maritime borders.

To assess the implications for migrants’ fundamental rights, we undertake doctrinal legal analysis of new EU regulations and existing jurisprudence on migrant instrumentalization.

Migrants’ navigation tactics are explored through interviews with people who crossed into the EU via Cyprus and Finland.

The project will generate timely empirical analyses of how EU borders are reconfigured into sites of warfare and and legal and geopolitical contestations.