Description
As political violence erupts across the Sahel, scholars must ask why liberal interventions have failed to bring peace to the region. The EU has increasingly utilised its crisis management missions in Mali as instruments of its migration policy, effectively putting its own security concerns about migration ahead of local interests. Why has the EU prioritised migration control to the detriment of its other policy goals in third countries? This paper investigates the driving forces behind securitisation in the EU institutions to understand how migration control has recently come to dominate the mandates of the EU’s crisis management missions, looking at Mali as a case study. The paper adopts a post-structuralist theory of securitisation as a dynamic and intersubjective process wherein actors performatively exchange validity claims about the external world, which iterate upon their shared logic of security. This is coupled with a discursive institutionalist methodological framework that is sensitive to the systemic and actor-centred ways in which security is constructed, negotiated, and contested within political institutions. Using mixed-methods discourse analysis, the paper argues that actors in the EU institutions securitise migration to claim authority, which recursively causes migration to become more deeply embedded in the institution’s epistemic terrain of security.
