A right to reside as a self-sufficient person in the UK was long written off for many as a pipe-dream route to equal treatment rights, specifically due to the requirement to have comprehensive sickness insurance and, for example, the UK’s interpretation of this requiring private health insurance.
The 2022 decision in Case C-247/20 VI v HMRC theoretically opened a door to long-term resident EU Migrants in the UK to solidify their rights. By finding that registration with the National Health Service discharges the requirement to have sickness insurance, EU nationals in the UK could now more easily plug gaps during periods of low-level economic activity or inactivity with evidence that they had enough resources to avoid becoming a burden on the social assistance system. Such an option could pave the way to a permanent right of residence, and unlock access to welfare rights.
Utilising case studies from the EU Rights and Brexit Hub - an advice-led ethnography project at the University of York, this paper examines the reality of relying on self-sufficiency, especially when it relates to a period of self-sufficiency in the past. Decisions from the DWP and the First-tier Tribunal suggest that it is not enough for an EU migrant to simply get by. Instead, a focus on substantial evidence of historical resources and problematic ideas of what is ‘sufficient’ results in the steep requirement of demonstrating that there was never any risk of potentially becoming a burden, even where no burden has factually materialised.

This paper argues that the analysis of the internal and external borders of the EU can tell us a lot about Schengen as part of the Europeanization process and the consequences of EU policies on daily practices. To that end, it presents a comparative analysis of Schengen land and sea borders in Croatia - the most recent EU member (2013) and among the last to join the Schengen Area (2023). Croatia’s external frontier comprises both types of border crossings, with 55 land road crossings and 13 sea crossings. Prior research on Croatian borderlands and borderland studies more broadly has focused primarily on land borders (Zavratnik-Zimic, 2003; Leutloff-Grandit, 2023), leaving sea regions relatively neglected, despite the Schengen Agreement’s equal territorial application to both (EUR-Lex, 2000). Contrarily, some scholars highlight comparative advantages of sea borders over land borders (van Geenhuizen & Rietveld, 2002).

Theoretically, the paper adopts a critical perspective that conceptualizes borders as processes rather than fixed realities (Fassin, 2015; Rumford, 2008). Borders and the Schengen regime are understood as flexible and dynamic formations shaped through processes of bordering and debordering (Schimmelfennig, 2021). These processes are mutually constitutive - borders shape actors and everyday practices; those practices in turn reshape Schengen. Consequently, border areas are approached as dynamic social spaces embedded in historical experiences and collective memory rather than merely zones of political-geographical separation.

Methodologically, this is a qualitative study that combines semi-structured interviews and visual ethnography. Interviews explore how respondents articulate their experiences of borders before and after Croatia’s Schengen accession, focusing on socio-historical, economic, and security dimensions. Fieldwork has been conducted since 2024 and includes over 50 interviews with residents, workers, border police, economic actors, political representatives, and religious leaders across six Croatian border areas. The research includes both urban and rural, internal and external Schengen borders (with Slovenia, Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro). To complement the interview data, visual ethnography was incorporated. Photographs, field sketches, and spatial notes were systematically collected to document border infrastructure, remnants of war, symbols, and everyday movement. These materials enable the analysis of borders as socio-material formations and provide insight into how borders are inscribed in infrastructure and landscapes.

The paper addresses the following two research questions: How has Schengen accession reshaped everyday practices when comparing land and sea border areas? How do historical legacies, mobility regimes, and everyday economic practices shape the understanding of Europe across Croatia’s land and sea borders?

This paper critically considers the construction of an ‘ideal worker’ in EU free movement law and its implications for EU migrant women in low paid, often precarious work. Drawing on empirical research, this paper outlines the everyday work experiences of EU citizen women in low paid, low skilled work living in small and medium sized towns in England. The paper explores how historically free movement rights and protections have privileged an ‘ideal’ worker: economically active, professional, mobile, full-time, (male?), while marginalising those whose work is precarious, part-time of undervalued. The paper argues that despite formal rights of free movement and EU citizenship, EU migrant women in low paid/ low skilled work experience significant precarity in their everyday life and qualified/ limited access to safety nets provided to others (e.g. access to social welfare) compounds this precarity. The result for these women is a lived experience of rights on paper, but precarity in practice. The paper concludes that the EU free movement framework (under which the migrant women in this study moved to the UK) and the current market conditions in which their free movement operates (now including UK Withdrawal Agreement law) serve to construct an architecture of precarity which traps women in precarious and unsafe work environments.

Contemporary European democracies are increasingly shaped by everyday experiences of mobility. Free movement within the European Union, transnational residence patterns, and expanding diasporas unsettle traditional, territorially anchored assumptions about political membership and electoral participation. In this context, electronic voting is often framed as a pragmatic solution to “bring the ballot to the citizen”, promising to facilitate participation and, implicitly, to reduce abstention among mobile voters.

This paper examines how electoral mobility interacts with abstention and with the legal design of participation, adopting an interdisciplinary perspective combining public law and political science. It argues that mobility does not merely create logistical barriers to voting; it reshapes the social conditions under which electoral participation is experienced as meaningful, accessible, and trusted. Consequently, technological fixes may lower procedural friction while leaving intact— or even obscuring— the deeper determinants of non-participation.

Using Portugal as a central case study within a comparative European framework, the paper analyses why electronic voting has not moved beyond limited, non-binding pilot projects conducted between 1997 and 2005 (including in-person electronic voting and an experimental online model for external voters), despite persistent concerns regarding abstention and the political representation of citizens living abroad. The Portuguese experience highlights how constitutional principles and institutional safeguards—transparency, equality of the vote, secrecy, verifiability, and public trust—operate not only as legal constraints but as conditions of democratic legitimacy in everyday practice.

The paper concludes that adapting democracy to mobility requires more than digitising procedures: it calls for a normatively grounded approach to participation that addresses abstention as a socio-political phenomenon, while ensuring that any technological innovation remains subordinate to constitutional guarantees and democratic trust.

Cross-border regions are often portrayed as flagship spaces of European integration, where EU freedoms materialise in everyday life. When the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly re-borderised many of these spaces, daily routines were disrupted and the fragility of cross-border mobility exposed. This paper examines how cross-border commuters in the Öresund region experienced and navigated these disruptions, what their experiences reveal about the everyday dimension of EU law and integration, and how subsequent legislative developments have sought to address these challenges.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with commuters travelling between Denmark and Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic, we analyse how pandemic-related border controls, health regulations, and administrative uncertainties affected everyday working lives as well as perceptions of European integration. Commuters’ narratives highlight the mismatch between formal legal frameworks and the lived realities of cross-border life, as well as the informal strategies developed to cope with renewed borders.

The paper then situates these lived experiences in relation to post-pandemic legislative and policy developments at both the regional and EU levels. It explores how these initiatives increasingly recognise cross-border regions and mobility as distinct governance concerns. We argue that these developments reflect a growing, though still partial acknowledgement of the everyday dimension of EU law. By bringing socio-legal analysis into dialogue with empirical insights from the Öresund region, the paper demonstrates how legislative and policy changes interact with the daily practices of cross-border commuters, highlighting the mutual shaping of law and everyday life in European integration.