Decentering Migration Governance Practices: Humanitarian Assistance and Border Control Strategies in the EU Peripheries

Since 2015 migration has become a highly politicized issue both at European and national level. On the one hand, the ‘duty to protect’ puts the humanitarian dimension at the center of crisis management. On the other, the ‘border control’ argument takes on the defence of states’ frontiers as the main goal to achieve, irrespective of individuals ́ needs. By focusing on the Italian case, this paper shows how these contradictions are the result of conflicting/uncoordinated practices between state and non-state actors and that these practices assume different meanings if analyzed in the “centers” or the “peripheries”. The contribution zooms into the so-called ‘Syracuse model’ developed by CSOs with the support of local authorities to explore the center-periphery cleavage in humanitarian assistance and border control. It combines the international practice theory (Adler and Pouliot 2011) with the multi-level migration governance model (Lavenex 2016) and demonstrates that the lack of coordination cannot be properly understood without looking at the neglected level of governance(local level), across practices and without reconnecting the different meanings generated by these practices.