Migration Management in the European Union: Between Extraordinary Measures and Routinized Risk Management

Abstract: This thesis examines the migration management of the European Union from 2015 until 2019. The discursive approach towards securitisation of the Copenhagen School will be applied in order to examine the processes of security that underlie the European Union’s approach to migration. However, since the European Union’s discourse on migration does not fulfil the requirements of emergency language required by the Copenhagen School and often relies on the language of routinised migration management, the concept of risk as developed by Critical Risk Studies will be introduced in order to account for the perception of migration as an issue of security for the European Union. By conducting a discourse analysis of selected speeches by high ranking EU officials, this thesis will argue that European Union migration management since the refugee crisis in 2015 is defined by a normalisation of migration as a security issue in the official discourse. This discourse is constitutive of as well as constituted by routinised practices of security and risk management.