Understanding EU Member States cooperation within the asylum regime during the migration and refugee crisis from an IR perspective

Abstract

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we analyse the failure of the Prisoner's Dilemma and Suasion Game in explaining refugee protection burden-sharing cooperation through a literature review of both game-theory models. Second, the paper also supports an alternative to these theoretical models: the Issue Linkage. This paper is set out in three main parts: fi rst, we provide the background to the 2015 Emergency Relocation Scheme as part of the EU's immediate response to the migration and refugee crisis; second, we review the existing Prisoner's Dilemma and Suasion Game literature on international cooperation in general, and on refugee protection in particular, followed by an Issue Linkage literature review to get some insight into overcoming collective action failure in EU asylum cooperation; third, we apply these theoretical models to explain EU refugee protection burden-sharing through an analysis of Germany's and Poland's approaches to the implementation of the 2015 Emergency Relocation Scheme.