Over the past decade, the externalisation of migration and asylum governance has emerged as one of the most significant and controversial developments in international migration law. Through bilateral agreements, Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs), and cooperative frameworks, states increasingly seek to manage migration beyond their own territories by transferring responsibilities for border control, asylum processing, or migrant return to third countries.
From the European Union's partnerships with neighbouring states, to Australia's offshore processing arrangements, and the United States' growing network of migration agreements across Latin America and beyond, these practices are reshaping the governance of migration on a global scale. Yet despite their rapid expansion, fundamental questions remain about how these arrangements operate, whether they comply with international law, and how they are transforming the legal framework they seek to navigate.
A new four-year research project led by Professor Vincent Chetail addresses these questions through the first comprehensive cross-regional study of migration externalisation from the perspective of public international law.
Understanding a Global Trend
While existing scholarship has often focused on specific regions or individual agreements, this project adopts a broader comparative perspective. It examines externalisation practices across three major case studies: Australia, Europe, and the United States, while also integrating the perspectives of partner countries such as Albania, Guatemala, Nauru, and Papua New Guinea.
The research seeks to understand not only how externalisation arrangements function in practice, but also what they reveal about contemporary international law and its capacity to respond to new forms of migration governance.
International Law in Motion
At the heart of the project lies a broader theoretical challenge. Externalisation is often described as an attempt by states to evade legal obligations by moving migration control beyond their territorial borders. Yet international law does not remain static. Courts, treaty bodies, international organisations, and civil society actors continuously respond to new practices, generating new interpretations and legal standards.
The project therefore explores how international law evolves through an ongoing process of legal contestation, adaptation, and institutional response. It asks how concepts such as jurisdiction, responsibility, accountability, and protection are being redefined in an increasingly transnational migration landscape.
Research with Global Impact
The research combines extensive analysis of bilateral agreements and policy frameworks with jurisprudence from domestic and international courts, guidance from UN bodies, and interviews with key stakeholders from UNHCR, IOM, OHCHR, and leading civil society organisations.
By providing the first comprehensive legal mapping and assessment of externalisation practices worldwide, the project aims to inform ongoing debates among scholars, policymakers, judges, practitioners, and international organisations.
Why It Matters
As governments increasingly turn to externalisation as a central tool of migration management, the legal and ethical questions raised by these arrangements have become impossible to ignore.
This project seeks to provide the analytical foundations needed to understand one of the defining challenges of contemporary migration governance: how states manage mobility across borders, how legal responsibilities are redistributed, and how international law adapts in response.
In doing so, it contributes to a broader reflection on the future of global governance and the enduring relevance of international law in an interconnected world.
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