Various critical scholars have pointed at postcolonial continuities within EU’s migration and externalization policies in African countries. Similarities can be drawn with critiques on the epistemology and consequences of humanitarism and development policy, such as its ambiguous care/control nexus, its depoliticizing nature and the reproduction of exclusive practices and a geopolitical status quo. Besides the conflation of funding, another similarity with development policy is the emphasis on collaborating with ‘local civil society organizations’. This is based on the assumption that local CSOs are best placed to adapt EU policies to local contexts as well as the preserving premise that ‘capacity building’ of ‘weak’ civil society is the primordial step to good governance. While Euro-centric approaches analyze the nature of EU’s partnership with African CSOs and its consequences for EU’s policy ‘efficiency’ or ‘coherence’, this paper questions what this interaction means for local CSOs. In concrete, this paper zooms into Ethiopian CSOs supporting vulnerable migrants in the framework of the Better Migration Management Programme (EU Trust Fund for Africa). We question which CSOs are in/excluded and look at the role of influential faith or community based CSOs who do not fit the prescriptive views on institutionalised CSOs (e.g., Iddir, Zewold). Second, we examine who is considered as ‘vulnerable migrant’ and how this relates to local understandings and community responses to vulnerability. Hence, we aim to contribute to more detailed understanding of CSO responses to migration in Ethiopia, taking into account the historical and current EU influence on civil society building.

In my paper, I will analyse the EU’s use of external migration and asylum policy based on cooperation with third countries and how this maintains unequal responsibilities between Global North and Global South countries. More specifically, my paper will address how the use of informal cooperation frameworks, such as the 2016 EU-Turkey Statement, constitutes a new form of civilising mission. Using Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) as theoretical framework, I will develop an iterative analysis of the development and evolution of EU externalisation policies. Looking at the early developments such as the EU’s focus on readmission agreements from a critical perspective, my analysis shows how readmission agreements and returning migrants to countries of origin or transit constitutes a form of civilising mission where the EU teaches partner states how migration should be controlled and managed. By doing so it also maintains unequal responsibilities towards migrants. Going further, my discussion turns to the growing use of migration-related cooperation to other areas of EU external action following the ‘comprehensive approach’ set up by the Tampere European Council. Here, a TWAIL perspective suggests that the increasing association between migration and development provided the EU with added influence over its partners by entangling internal reforms or development funding with border and migration control. This invigorates the EU’s new civilising mission towards third countries by deepening reforms in Global South countries and overall strengthens the unequal responsibility-sharing between the EU and its partners towards migration.