Publications

This chapter analyses how the EU exercises productive power through the concept of “instrumentalisation” in relation to coercive acts by non-EU states. We examine the historical genesis and conceptual evolution of “instrumentalisa tion” as a policy driver within EU migration governance through a text analysis of a corpus of EU-level documents from 1999 to 2025. We show that the EU’s deployment of the instrumentalisation frame is selective, tracking geopolitical rather than migration-related criteria, and contrast the Poland-Belarus case, where the term is applied explicitly, with Greece-Türkiye and Spain-Morocco, where structurally similar behaviour is framed as “partnership”. Theoretically, we argue that the instrumentalisation discourse operates on two levels: first, as the reaction or non-reaction to the compulsory power exercised by neighbour ing states in utilising migration flows, and second, as a form of meta-power exercised by the EU to determine which coercive acts are classified as “hybrid threats” in the first place. The chapter thus reveals a central paradox: Migration is simultaneously portrayed as fully governable when the EU manages it, and as existentially destabilising when adversaries wield it. This insight structures both our empirical analysis and our conclusions regarding the durability of the instrumentalisation paradigm’s embedding in EU asylum law.

Read the full book chapter here.