The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum represents a pivotal moment in the reconfiguration of European asylum governance, shifting protection increasingly toward mandatory border procedures and accelerated decision-making. While framed as a pragmatic response to irregular arrivals and responsibility-sharing deadlock, this paper argues that the Pact reconstitutes Europe’s borders as spaces of containment that produce de facto detention with distinctly gendered effects.

Adopting a socio-legal and feminist analytical framework, the paper examines how border screening and fast-track asylum procedures systematically undermine the identification of gender-based persecution. The emphasis on speed, securitisation, and presumptions of inadmissibility disproportionately affects refugee and migrant women, particularly survivors of sexual and domestic violence, caregivers, and those fleeing non-state actor harm. Although formally gender-neutral, these procedures reproduce hierarchies of deservingness that privilege certain forms of persecution while rendering intimate and structural violence less legible within asylum adjudication.

Drawing on selected European border contexts, the paper situates the implementation of the Pact within national political discourses that frame migration as crisis and risk, legitimising prolonged confinement in closed or semi-closed facilities. It demonstrates how such practices sit uneasily with existing European human rights jurisprudence on detention, procedural fairness, and protection from inhuman or degrading treatment, opening critical avenues for strategic litigation under the ECHR, EU Charter, and international gender-sensitive asylum standards.

By foregrounding gender, intersectionality, and legal accountability, this paper contributes to debates in European Studies on how Europe is constructed and contested through migration policy. It argues that contemporary border procedures do not merely manage mobility but actively shape the boundaries of belonging within the evolving European project.

Migration has become an increasingly politicised issue within the European Union, shaped not only by internal debates but also by the growing involvement of foreign and security policy in migration governance. For much of its history, EU migration policy was situated within the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. Over time, however, the EU has come to approach migration as a matter of external action and security, bringing it within the scope of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). This shift represents a structural transformation in how the EU governs migration beyond its borders.

This paper explores how the growing role of CFSP has reshaped the EU’s approach to migration externalisation since 2020. Using a comparative analysis of two external partners: a Southern Neighbourhood country and an enlargement partner, the paper shows that the EU does not follow a single model when externalising migration governance. Instead, it adopts different foreign policy approaches depending on a partner’s political status, legal relationship with the EU, and geopolitical importance. These differences affect not only the form of cooperation, but also how responsibilities for border control, asylum procedures, and protection are allocated.

The paper argues that CFSP-driven externalisation has generated uneven governance outcomes, shifting the balance between security priorities and protection commitments in ways that directly affect migrants on the ground. In particular, differentiated externalisation influences access to protection and legal pathways in partner countries, with disproportionate consequences for refugees and other vulnerable groups. By linking foreign policy logics to concrete migration outcomes, the paper contributes to broader debates on the external dimension of EU migration policy, the politicisation of migration governance, and evolving forms of belonging in Europe and beyond.

Climate change and environmental degradation are not gender-neutral phenomena. In contexts of restrictive governance and structural inequality, climate stress amplifies pre-existing vulnerabilities and reshapes the everyday conditions of women’s autonomy, mobility, and social belonging. This paper examines how environmental insecurity—particularly water scarcity, extreme heat, and pollution—interacts with gendered legal and social restrictions to constrain women’s mobility in Iran, a key case within the Global South where religious-legal governance and climate pressure intensify each other.

Drawing on a socio-legal framework and insights from intersectionality, the paper argues that women experience climate stress through layered exclusions: limited access to public space, reduced opportunities for education and employment, gender-segregated infrastructures, and heightened exposure to economic insecurity. These dynamics produce forms of “forced immobility,” where women are neither able to relocate nor access adaptive resources. At the same time, environmental pressure accelerates internal and cross-border mobility and migration pathways among households, while women bear disproportionate unpaid labour and caregiving burdens during climate-induced disruptions.

By situating Iran within broader Global South debates, the paper demonstrates how climate crisis operates as a governance mechanism that reinforces gendered inequality, restricts rights-based agency, and reshapes women’s sense of belonging. The analysis invites a re-thinking of mobility, vulnerability, and climate justice through an intersectional lens, and contributes to wider discussions on gendered precarity, environmental governance, and EU–Global South policy frameworks.

The series of pivotal 2025 electoral campaigns across Europe presents a critical turning point in analyzing how how major political forces utilize migration discourse. This issue has gained critical significance in the context of the finalization of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, ongoing migratory pressure on the EU’s eastern and southern flank, as well as the long-term consequences of the war in Ukraine.

This paper examines a comparative analysis of how candidates and major political parties constructed and presented the issue of migration and asylum policy during the key 2025 electoral campaigns in five EU Member States: Poland, Romania, Germany, Czechia, and Ireland. The selection of these countries allows for capturing the diversity of migratory experiences, exposure to border crises, and the varying intensity of the populist debate across Europe.

The research thesis is that the migration issue was strategically incorporated into electoral discourse, serving as a tool for voter mobilization, often through framing of the problem as an existential threat to national security and identity.

The main research questions are: (1) Which migration policy proposals appeared in party programs? (2) What frames and narrative dominated distinct campaigns? (3) What similarities and differences emerge across the selected states’ policy proposals and campaigns?

A mixed-methods approach combines quantitative and qualitative tools. Critical Discourse Analysis and framing analysis are applied to candidates’ programs, statements published in traditional media, and social media. Furthermore, system analysis have been employed to situate these policy proposals within the broader national and international context. Textual data will be processed using frequency analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The final conclusions will be drawn from a comparative analysis of the five case studies.

The findings will assess the degree of politicization of migration across varying states, contributing to understanding how political actors in Europe leverage narratives to shape public perception and mobilize electorates, as well as how migration policy proposals are formed in selected countries.