This paper discusses the instrumental use of concepts such as ‘hybrid warfare’, ‘hybrid threat’, and ‘instrumentalized migration’ in response to what has been described as a humanitarian crisis at the Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian borders in 2021. The chapter traces how these concepts have been used later used to justify legislative changes adopted in Poland and Finland, limiting access to asylum and human rights protection for migrants and asylum seekers at the EU's Eastern border in violation of Article 18 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Through a discourse analysis of parliamentary debates, expert statements, and policy and legal documents from 2022 to 2025, the paper demonstrates how the mutual reinforcement of human rights-violating solutions adopted in Poland and Finland operates as a ‘feedback loop’ for these countries’ policies. This results in the instrumentalization of refugee law itself – the law is used to achieve particular political goals and contribute to the crisis of international law and human rights.

During the past two decades, disparities in administrative capacity and political resistance among European Union member states have complicated the implementation of regional migration and climate agendas (Bauböck, 2018; Kneebone, 2016). In response, the European Union has utilized financial instruments to strengthen state capacity for managing rising migration (European Commission, n.d.) and the green transition (European Commission, 2025) with the hope of increasing burden-sharing. Nevertheless, with all the similarities between these instruments, the degree of coordination between them and influence of rising political contestation on their interaction remains underexplored.

Using a cross-policy approach, this paper will analyze the European Union’s Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) and Just Transition Fund (JTF) as cases of how EU funding mechanisms function and interact under growing strains on the liberal international order including the rise of nationalist politics and divergent member state preferences regarding solidarity and burden-sharing. These cases will be analyzed through a constructivist lens, focusing on the rhetorical and social connections between the two policies, with the goal of exploring how policy connections are perceived and contested within the European Union.

This research will utilize content analysis and discourse analysis of EU policy documents, legislative texts, and other official documents related to the JTF and AMIF. These methods will facilitate the identification of dominant narratives, policy framing, and institutional logic that influence the design and implementation of these funds. Through these methods, the study aims to inform policy discussions on the political sustainability of EU funding tools by assessing the coherence, effectiveness, and interconnectedness of current policies. The expected results are for climate and migration funds to be treated discursively as separate, mutually exclusive, policy domains, with coordination hindered by political differences surrounding migration and contradictory interpretations of solidarity among member states.

From a legal point of view, the phenomenon of migrant smuggling presents an interesting duality: on the one hand, it can be an axiologically laudable conduct, aimed at preserving the most fundamental values of a given legal order (e.g. life); on the other hand, it can be regarded as illicit conduct that disrespects those same fundamental values. The boundary between these two aspects can be fluid, as the legal consequences of the conduct will invariably change depending on the lenses through which this phenomenon is viewed. One of the tasks of criminal law is to draw this boundary rationally and precisely. The first section of this paper will thus present the social and legal representation of the migrant smuggling phenomenon, linking it to the preconceptions underlying such a representation. These will then be connected to the current issues in European legislation (and its national transposition, including its ineffectiveness), after which the new legislative proposal’s solutions and the decriminalisation potential of the CJEU’s Kinsa judgement will be analysed. This will demonstrate that the current criminal policy choices are heavily influenced by the broader migration policy, which is very clearly intent on restricting migration to the EU – be it pre-emptively or subsequently. The indiscriminate inclusion of criminal law in this arsenal is problematic, as it further decouples the EU, and criminal law itself, from their respective foundations. This, in turn, highlights the difficulty of coherently encompassing both aspects of the duality of migrant smuggling as long as no legitimate criteria are used to define its boundaries.

Gender equality is a foundational value of the European Union (EU), enshrined in Article 8 TFEU and operationalized through Gender Mainstreaming (GM) since the Treaty of Amsterdam. GM aims to integrate a gender perspective across all policy areas and stages. However, feminist institutionalist scholarship has consistently identified a gap between the EU’s rhetorical commitment to GM and its uneven implementation, particularly in policy fields framed as “gender neutral,” such as security, foreign policy, and migration. While this dynamic has been extensively studied in development and security policies, EU migration policy, especially its external dimension, remains comparatively understudied (Stachowitsch & Sachseder, 2019; Allwood, 2015; Welfens, 2020). Existing research suggests that GM in migration policy mirrors patterns observed in other securitized fields, with limited and instrumental engagement with gender equality. Hence, as part of a larger project investigating the EU’s approach to GM in external migration policy, the objective of this paper is to analyze which perspectives on gender equality are present in the New Pact on Migration and Asylum and why these prevail over alternatives. Methodologically, the paper employs Social Network Analysis (SNA) to uncover relational networks that occurred during the negotiations of the New Pact, and specify on one hand, which actors advocated explicitly for gender-related objectives to be included in legislation, and on the other hand, what ideas about gender actors brought to the negotiation tables in general. Historically, external migration is a policy domain that has already put into question the notion of Normative Power Europe (Manners, 2002; Cusumano, 2018; Lavanex, 2018), with the Union's highlighted focus on border control and securitization. The issue of gender in this field has the potential to shed light on the EU’s newsest trend in migration management vis-à-vis competing polarizing issues for Member States, gender and migration alike, and current security concerns. Additionally, studying the new policy package from this perspective answers the need to bridge mainstream EU integration theories with feminist literature, in addressing both theoretical and societal shortcomings of EU’s migration policy.