Emiliya Bratanova (PhD candidate, Lund University, Sweden) will give a presentation on Legal pathways to protection in the European Union: on Theory and Method.

Legal pathways to protection generally encompass all mechanisms that enable legal and secure access to effective protection on the territory of the host country from a transit country or country of origin. There is neither a legal definition thereof, nor an obligation for states to put in place such pathways. At the same time, there seems to be a consensus among various stakeholders that more legal pathways should be established. In relation to this momentum, Bratanovas’ research has three aims: first, to shed light on the notion of ‘legal pathways’; second, to assess their ‘potential for protection’; and third, to reflect on the link between the ‘potential for protection’ and its embeddedness in an externalization context.

In her work she uses four main theoretical perspectives: externalization, particularism/universalism, (critical) refugee studies, and (critical) border studies. A growing body of literature on externalization, and the related processes of deterrence and containment, is to serve as the backdrop against which the legal pathways are to be understood in the EU. A second theoretical lens which helps understand the functioning of legal pathways has to do with bolder attempts of states to give priority of sovereignty considerations over the human rights of migrants and refugees. Thirdly, the topic of legal pathways can be better understood from the perspective of the so-called ‘asylum-migration nexus’. Finally, within critical border studies literature on legal pathways sheds light on another possible function of legal pathways: namely, that they reproduce the externalization regime.