European migration governance is often understood through the lens of institutional legacies and path dependencies.
This event explores how it is also increasingly shaped by a shadow of the future. Anticipatory logics, projections of large-scale migration, and imagined crisis trajectories have become central to EU policy development, particularly in the Euro-Mediterranean region.
Drawing on document analysis of EU institutional communications and process tracing of key policy moments between 2015 and 2025, the discussion will examine how expectations about future migration flows have contributed to a governance approach centred on deterrence, externalisation, and short-term control.
These anticipatory dynamics have been amplified by narratives of polycrisis and permacrisis narratives, which frame migration, especially forced displacement, as a systemic threat and shorten the time horizon for cooperation. The result is a deepening mobility divide in the Mediterranean and a contraction of the space for cooperation.
By considering migration governance as shaped by both the shadows of the past and the future, the event will highlight how future-oriented crisis imaginaries can become self-reinforcing, undermining trust, reciprocity, and the institutional depth required for sustainable cooperation.
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