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Despite clear humanitarian intensions behind the international protection system, different ideological interpretations and practices of the right to international protection have recurrently been a massive challenge for the implementation of the international refugee law. Not surprisingly, critical voices rising from some states, organizations, scholars, and not least constantly growing citizen grievances, indicate that the United Nations' Global Compact for Refugees (GCR) is not an exception from this historical trend. Politicization of the right to international protection has been further exacerbated by financial crises, refugee crises, and the recent public health crisis brought by the Covid-19 pandemic. The crises have subsided refugee protection and catalyzed its politicization. Despite its predicaments, the GCR can be a new window of opportunity for advancing the right to international protection even in this gloomy picture. For this to happen, the right to international protection should be understood correctly, and realistically, as a global conflict and contestation issue. Understanding the ways in which society is divided into groups with different political beliefs and different stances on international protection – known as political cleavages – will help policy actors navigate the current global political landscape more predictably in their efforts to achieve their policy goals. As the paper will show later, the groups contesting in the global political cleavage system (GPCS) for having their own international protection perspectives prevail, offer different legal norms, governance modes, and a variety of discourses on refugees, adding up to distinct alternative visions of international protection policy.

New policy initiatives to handle migratory movements and refugee inflows have emerged in various forms. The initiatives came from the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), and the affected states. The most important of these are the UN's Global Compact on Migration (GCM), Global Compact on Refugees (GPCS), the European Union's (EU) latest reform attempt about its Common European Asylum Policy (CEAS), and the European Commission's (EC) recent proposal on a New Pact on Migration and Asylum (the New Pact). The initiatives combine old and new policies. A noteworthy norm that is reinvigorated by both the UN and the EU is international solidarity. This is coupled with a governance mode based on the UN's multi-stakeholder perspective. However, the UN remains strategically silent about how solidarity is to be governed on regional and national levels. Similarly, the EU's "flexible and mandatory solidarity" is accompanied by a "human and humane" discourse and a supranationally coordinated governance mechanism. The EU too is silent about the governance modes needed at the member state level. Nevertheless, if successfully implemented, the new global and European policy initiatives may lead to significant changes in international protection. The intensions are good, but the consequences are not known. In addition to much support to these initiatives, there are also signs that states may attempt to instrumentalize the GCR to install their own approaches to international protection as a global norm. This includes not only progressive approaches, but also the perspective that international protection should not be the responsibility of the international community. Hence, the success of the GCR, the New Pact, and other policy initiatives does not only rely on states or stakeholders' involvement in their implementation, but also on the norms, governance modes, and discourses they deploy when they participate in the implementation processes. Since the UN's and the EU's purpose is to introduce human rights-based approaches ...

Whether agonistic or deliberative, it is evident that Europeanisation of national public spheres is hard to achieve by overlaps, synchronisation of news reporting, diffusion of Europeanist norms, or politicisation along single issues. The European Union's common public sphere project may hence be in danger. This calls for explorations of other modes of public sphere for Europe. Are there traces of other modes of public sphere emerging in Europe than what the deliberative and agonistic theory lenses enable us to perceive? In this article, we suggest a model which is based on a cleavage theory of Europeanisation. With a point of departure in Rokkan's cleavage theory (1970, 1975), we define the European public sphere as a composite architecture of communicative networks of ideological groups structured around Europe-wide political cleavages. We explore this mode of European public sphere by utilizing Facebook data and employing tools of social network analysis (Wasserman and Faust 1994).

AbstractIn focusing on the relationships between asylum recognition rates and the different institutional arrangements through which European states share or preserve their sovereignty, this article seeks to show how sovereignty-sharing affects the right to political asylum in practice. After a qualitative overview of variations in sovereignty-sharing forms, the article presents the results from a multiple regression analysis of the relationship between legal and institutional frames of asylum decision-making in 17 West European countries (EU-15, Norway and Switzerland) and the asylum recognition rates in these countries. The article ends with a brief assessment of the significance of the results for a potential policy change in the European Union.

Since 2016, the United Nation's High Commissioner for Refugees, the European Commission, the African Union, and many states endeavoring to follow suit, have been introducing new policies to bolster international collaboration on refugee protection. These new policy initiatives have, however, created controversy within the international society. A public site where this is the most visible is social media. In this paper, we study the impact of the UN, the EU, national states, political parties, and NGOs in public communication on Twitter during key international protection policy events. We study the periods around the UN General Assembly's adoption of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (19 September 2016), the UN General Assembly's affirmation of the Global Migration Compact and the Global Refugee Compact (19 December 2018), and the First Global Refugee Forum (17-18 December 2019), and the European Commission's announcement the New Pact on Migration and Asylum (23 September 2020). By using the tools of social network analysis (Wasserman & Faust, 1994), we compare the (i) activity, (ii) popularity, (iii) bridging (control of communication flow), and (iv) constraint (filling structural communication gaps) of institutions from the UN, the EU, selected national governments, and NGOs on Twitter in connection with these important policymaking events. By using the above-mentioned indicators, this paper identifies the public communication challenges encountered by global and transnational actors like the UNHCR and the European Commission. Which structural communication gaps are there in the global and European networks around the UN and EU institutions in social media? How can they be closed to reach and influence a broader spectrum of policy actors?

Studies have sought to explain variation in protection recognition rates between EU member states with, however, limited explanatory power. Surprisingly, few have contemplated the role of the administration, despite it being at the centre of the process through which asylum claims are examined. We posit that recognition rates are significantly affected by administrative capacity, although the administration's action may be mitigated by political factors. Our findings show that administrative effectiveness and experience in asylum matters yield higher recognition rates. We show that government preferences and the overall political context affect protection recognition, too. Importantly, we also find that the mechanisms at play are different if we consider the different forms of protection.

The concentration of the world's refugees in developing countries calls for international collaboration on the matter. In the face of concerns voiced not only amongst politicians but also the public, we investigate how people trade-off the two most prominent responsibility-sharing mechanism. We conduct a survey experiment in 26 countries asking whether people would rather: (a) admit more asylum seekers and (b) provide financial assistance to the host countries. We find that most respondents prefer admitting asylum seekers over paying. We also establish significant individual-level heterogeneity that sheds new light on people's attitudes towards asylum seekers. Importantly, we report on the effect of welfare chauvinism and nativism on the willingness to admit rather than to pay.