European migration policy is often described in the language of management, partnerships, cooperation, incentives, border control or migration diplomacy. But beyond this vocabulary lies another question: who has the power to shape how migration is governed, and through which forms of power?
In this interview, Irene Fernández-Molina (University of Exeter) and Gerasimos Tsourapas (Migration Policy Centre and University of Birmingham) discuss 'Migration power Europe: between norms and leverage in the EU's global role', recently published by the European University Institute. The volume brings together twenty contributors across twelve chapters and analyses the European Union as an actor that governs human mobility through several forms of power at once.
How does the European Union engage with international migration as a site of power?
Irene Fernández-Molina: Brussels does not normally talk about international migration as a site of power. But such has increasingly been the EU and EU member states’ approach to external migration governance. The European Asylum and Migration Management Strategy presented by the Commission in January 2026 resorts to euphemisms when it calls for an ‘assertive’ and ‘effective’ migration diplomacy that promotes EU ‘interests’ through issue-linkage, ‘leverages and incentives’. The discursive omission of power here contrasts with the language associated with the notion of a ‘geopolitical’ EU in other foreign policy and security areas – and is also inadvertently reproduced by much scholarship on EU migration governance. Our aim is to expose and centre power, power relations and power struggles in this conversation.
What is ‘migration power’? And what does it have to do with Europe?
Irene Fernández-Molina: The concept of ‘migration power’ allows us to draw a connection with longstanding debates on power in international relations (IR), while dissecting, pluralising and problematising the power in question. It is not one phenomenon but multiple processes occurring through multiple relations at (and across) multiple levels. In addition, when juxtaposed to ‘Europe’, the term ‘migration power’ inevitably evokes well-known conceptualisations of the EU as an international actor, such as ‘normative power Europe’, which face a particularly hard litmus test when confronted with the violent reality of many migration and border control practices. In fact, our holistic take on migration power underscores that ‘Fortress Europe’ and ‘normative power Europe’ are both true at the same time.
How was this volume born? Why did you bring together different methodological approaches?
Gerasimos Tsourapas: The volume began with a problem that a single article could not settle. In 2024 we argued, in International Affairs, that the international politics of migration should be read through the vocabulary of power, and that four modalities of power (compulsory, institutional, structural and productive) could be brought to bear on it. Having proposed this framework, we wanted to press it against a case as sprawling as Europe. So, in February 2026 we convened a workshop at the EUI's Migration Policy Centre and invited colleagues to test it. Twelve chapters and twenty contributors later, the framework is less settled than when we started, which is what we had hoped for.
The volume’s methodological range follows from our ambition. Different forms of power leave different traces and need different instruments to detect them: whereas coercion is legible in agreements and funding lines, the productive power that determines who counts as a ‘migrant’ surfaces only in the categories and reports that circulate around them. Structural power, in turn, reveals itself over decades rather than in a single negotiating round. The volume therefore runs from archival history of the late 1940s through doctrinal legal analysis to the discourse of Commission reporting. Each method catches only the kind of power it is equipped to see; only their assembly brings migration power Europe into view.
The volume presents the different layers, scales and migration policy differences across and within the EU. How are these dimensions held together? Can we talk about an 'EU migration regime'?
Irene Fernández-Molina: There is certainly a well-developed EU migration regime, including supranational integration, concerning intra-EU mobility. When it comes to internally managing immigration from third countries, member states have long been reluctant to transfer to the Union level what they see as core sovereign powers, but steps towards harmonising policy and enhancing cooperation – in a restrictive direction – have recently been taken with the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. What has grown exponentially in the past three decades, by contrast, is the external dimension of immigration (control) policies, projected beyond the EU’s territory, on which most of the volume’s chapters focus. This relies on bilateral instruments such as readmission agreements, mobility partnerships, special ‘deals’ and compacts, as well as interregional dialogue processes. Practices range from migration deterrence and containment at the border to political conditionality vis-à-vis third states and formalised cooperation regimes, from funding and capacity-building for assorted governance or enforcement actors to the discursive framing and categorisation of migration and migrants.
Yet, viewing the fabric of all this proliferating external migration governance as an ‘EU migration regime’ amounts to missing half of the picture – missing the concerns, interests and agency of all the non-EU actors that necessarily coproduce it and the power relations established within it. This is exactly what our volume aims to highlight through the lens of migration power and a fourfold typology distinguishing between its compulsory, institutional, structural and productive manifestations. Rather than a coherent regime, the contributions reveal power and counter-power in constant circulation, and an assemblage of practices that is frequently inconsistent, institutionally fragmented, and subject to significant member state variation.
The volume also exposes five cross-cutting tensions, what are these? What do they imply for research and policy?
Gerasimos Tsourapas: Reading the twelve chapters together produced five tensions, which we have tried to state precisely rather than resolve. The first is that productive power provokes its own contestation: the EU's framings of partnership, protection and technical assistance are redeployed and subverted by the states they are addressed to. The second concerns coherence. What presents itself as a European strategy is often an assemblage of fragmented practices, and that fragmentation is itself a resource that third states exploit. The third is agency: Türkiye, Morocco, Niger, Tunisia and Senegal negotiate the terms of European structural investment rather than simply absorbing it. The fourth, and the most generative, is informality. Europe governs through soft law, memoranda and trust funds rather than binding commitment; the selective absence of policy is itself a policy choice. Finally, the fifth is internal to our own framework: are the four forms of power co-equal, or do productive and structural power sit upstream, constituting the categories on which the others operate?
Two implications follow from this. For research, it means that studying declared policy (the treaties, the strategies and the published agreements) will miss most of what is happening, because much of the significant activity takes place in instruments nobody signs. For policy, it means that arrangements adopted informally, and frequently presented as temporary, have become the durable architecture of Europe's relations with its neighbours; these are correspondingly difficult to review or to contest, much less undo.
The volume ‘Migration power Europe: between norms and leverage in the EU's global role’ is open-access and available on Cadmus, the EUI's research repository.
A companion article, setting out migration power Europe in its own terms, is forthcoming in the Journal of Common Market Studies.
Gerasimos Tsourapas is a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute (2025-26), and 125th Anniversary Chair and Professor of International Relations at the University of Birmingham. His research examines how governments use migration as both a practical policy tool and a symbolic resource, shaping international image, signalling alliances and rivalries, and performing state power through migration diplomacy. Gerasimos is also Editor-in-Chief of Migration Studies (Oxford University Press).
Irene Fernández-Molina is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Exeter. She is a scholar of international relations of the Global South and across the Euro-Mediterranean space, contested statehood and international recognition politics, and foreign policy and conflicts in the Maghreb.