Informality and Un/Accountability in Asylum Governance: Testing Democratic Values at the Borders of the EU
Informality and Un/Accountability in Asylum Governance: Testing Democratic Values at the Borders of the EU
Tuesday, 8 July 2025
Location: SJES024 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Distributed Paper
Traveling along the Balkan route, one of the most transited migratory path into the EU, is to become a firsthand spectator of the violent and illicit (in)actions performed by governmental institutions against foreigners seeking protection in EUropean countries. Under these circumstances, solidarity networks supporting migrants carry out essential monitoring and denunciation work in the attempt to bring these situations to public light and advocating for the competent institutions to impose sanctions and deter misconducts. And nonetheless, upholding asylum seekers and refugees’ rights remains a significant challenge due to the climate of opacity, informality, and unaccountability surrounding the elaboration and enforcement of asylum policies and procedures.
In view of this, this paper sheds clarity on the everyday, real-world dynamics unfolding on the ground, thereby looking at who does what, and how, in the ‘battleground’ of asylum. Specifically, it focuses the attention on the relational dynamics between state and solidarity actors, and investigates how they rely on informal tools and approaches to respectively reinforce or challenge the EU border regime. Focusing on ‘push-back’ practices (e.g. informal removal of asylum seekers from one country to another), the paper highlights that state actors rely on semi-official, discretionary, and unregulated procedures to bypass normative constraints and democratic scrutiny, which allows them to exercise control over refugee flows without taking active responsibility for the negative outcomes. At the same time, informality is also strategically wielded by non-institutional solidarity actors to monitor, denounce, and possibly prevent illicit conducts performed by governing agencies.
Drawing on the principles of relational ethnography, the paper shows that informality in governance processes is a relational and reactive dynamic that can be understood as a technique to both bypass and reinforce democratic scrutiny and the rule of law. Data were collected through an itinerant ethnography along the Balkan route between 2020 and 2023.
In view of this, this paper sheds clarity on the everyday, real-world dynamics unfolding on the ground, thereby looking at who does what, and how, in the ‘battleground’ of asylum. Specifically, it focuses the attention on the relational dynamics between state and solidarity actors, and investigates how they rely on informal tools and approaches to respectively reinforce or challenge the EU border regime. Focusing on ‘push-back’ practices (e.g. informal removal of asylum seekers from one country to another), the paper highlights that state actors rely on semi-official, discretionary, and unregulated procedures to bypass normative constraints and democratic scrutiny, which allows them to exercise control over refugee flows without taking active responsibility for the negative outcomes. At the same time, informality is also strategically wielded by non-institutional solidarity actors to monitor, denounce, and possibly prevent illicit conducts performed by governing agencies.
Drawing on the principles of relational ethnography, the paper shows that informality in governance processes is a relational and reactive dynamic that can be understood as a technique to both bypass and reinforce democratic scrutiny and the rule of law. Data were collected through an itinerant ethnography along the Balkan route between 2020 and 2023.