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The externalisation of asylum has become an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary migration governance (Fitzgerald 2025). From agreements on asylum processing and responsibility-sharing to proposals for offshore processing and other forms of extraterritorial protection, states are experimenting with arrangements that seek to move asylum-related responsibilities beyond their own borders (Abbondanza 2024). A growing body of scholarship has begun to examine these developments, yet the political dynamics through which asylum externalisation emerges and evolves remain comparatively underexplored.
This panel seeks to advance this emerging research agenda by examining asylum externalisation as a process involving a plurality of actors, interests, and strategies. While existing research has often centred on destination countries (e.g., Griffini & Rosina 2024; Parker & Cornell 2024), the panel aims to broaden the perspective to the broader constellation of actors involved in the design, negotiation, and implementation of externalisation arrangements, including partner countries and international organisations. We are therefore interested in how these actors interact and how their understandings, interests and strategies shape externalisation arrangements.
Against this broader backdrop, the panel is organised around three interconnected questions.
First, what role do international organisations play in the politics of asylum externalisation? Contributions may examine how IOs facilitate, design, implement, or legitimise externalisation arrangements, the forms of agency they exercise, and their capacity to shape states’ preferences and strategies.
Second, how do partner countries, particularly in the Global South, engage with asylum externalisation? We welcome research examining partner countries’ interests, positions, and strategies in relation to asylum externalisation, the roles they seek to play, and the domestic and international conditions shaping their engagement with externalisation initiatives.
Third, how do externalisation arrangements reshape the mandates, priorities, and organisational profiles of actors whose primary mandates lie outside migration control (e.g., development, trade, external action, mobility, or humanitarian actors)? Contributions may examine how these actors become involved in externalisation, and how this affects them and their agendas.
The panel welcomes theoretically informed and empirically grounded contributions addressing any of these questions, aiming to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the political processes through which asylum externalisation arrangements emerge, are negotiated, and evolve.