Thibaut Jaulin

Migration Diplomacy in the Horn of Africa

During the 2015 'migration crisis', the Horn of Africa became the target of the European Union's (EU) external migration policy. This brief explores the historical roots of this recent development in migration and asylum diplomacy. It shows that migration gradually became both a security and a protection concern for those foreign powers and international organizations involved in military and humanitarian operations in the sub-region in the 1990s and 2000s. It moreover examines the ways in which the expansion of EU external migration policy into the Horn since the 2015 'migration crisis' has led to the mainstreaming of migration and asylum containment into foreign aid objectives.

Introduction

The Greater Horn of Africa has long been home to some of the world's largest numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. 2 Every country in this region is simultaneously a country of origin, of transit and of destination for various populations on the move. As is the case in other regions of the global South, conflict-induced forced migration in the Greater Horn of Africa has been closely linked to seasonal and long-term migration for labour, education D8.12 and family purposes, which has been driven by urbanization, cross-border flows, and nomadism. Such movements have occurred in political and institutional contexts that have been both consistently welcoming and extremely volatile. Since the end of the Cold War, the Horn has been a key site of military and humanitarian interventions involving the United States (US) and Western powers, along with international (IOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) seeking to address the crises, both systemic and contingent, that have plagued this region, from state failure to war and famines. While such interventions have almost never been primarily designed to manage mobility as such, migration and asylum have become part and parcel of their mission prerogatives and mandates.

This brief explores the ways in which since the 1990s, international intervention and foreign aid have become an instrument of migration and asylum governance in the Horn. 3 It examines the manner in which foreign and international actors have gradually established discursive and operational linkages between mobility, security and development in order to channel their funding and operations into the containment of migrants and refugees in countries of origin, transit and primary asylum. This brief argues that such containment objectives have become integral to international interventions and foreign aid in the Horn, thus complementing, and sometimes even superseding, the broader, long-standing goals of peace, state-building and socio-economic development.

The first section shows that migration gradually became both a security and a protection concern for those foreign powers and international organizations involved in military and humanitarian operations in the sub-region during the 1990s and 2000s. The second section argues that the expansion of EU external migration policy into the Horn since the 2015 'migration crisis' has led to the mainstreaming of migration containment into foreign aid objectives.

Evidence and Analysis

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, several conflicts and crises in the Horn generated massive refugee flows within the region. The following figures represent the five main refugee-sending countries in the Horn from 1961 to 2018 (figure 1) and the five main host countries in the Horn from 1990 to 2019 (figure 2). First, they demonstrate that refugees from the Horn remain mostly in the region and constitute a very sizable proportion of refugees worldwide, regardless of the period under consideration. These figures, moreover, show that the size of the refugee population remained consistently high throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. After a relative drop in the early 2000s, the number of refugees surged again in the late 2000s and in the 2010s. These variations are related to new crises and conflicts, but they also result from the cumulative effects of protracted crises.

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International interventions and migration control

During the second half of the twentieth century, there were not many barriers to cross-border mobility. Exile and emigration were largely seen as a resource to mitigate the negative impact of economic, environmental and political crises. 6 Migrants and forcibly displaced persons would leave their homes to reach the nearest safe haven in their country or to travel to the closest neighbouring state, and even farther afield, to the Middle East and the rest of the African continent. Governments in the Horn generally adopted open-door policies, with little distinction made between the various groups of people on the move. These governments' political commitment to the principle of non-refoulement regarding the forcibly displaced was de facto extended to non-registered refugees or non-persecuted migrants. People on the move were hardly ever stopped at the border, where little to no formal screening was conducted. Moreover, migrants and refugees were usually allowed to settle in rural or urban areas, under the control of local authorities and according to the constraints of land use regulations. They were often given access to the (limited) public services (e.g. schools, healthcare facilities) available in these areas.

However, such relatively free cross-border mobility did not take place in a vacuum in terms of asylum and migration policies, and the implementation of welcoming policies at the local and national level was largely dependent on international donor support, channelled through IOs and humanitarian organizations. Host countries in the Horn, usually working in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), defined both formal and informal requirements for displaced persons to be entitled to the right of asylum. Some states, such as Sudan, developed fairly sophisticated asylum policies,7 and 41 member states of the Organization of African Unity signed the 1969 Convention Governing Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, which was initially signed by.

From the 1990s onwards, foreign governments became key players in migration and asylum governance in the Horn. While military operations did take place in this region during the Cold War, they were not concerned with population movements as such, and the issue of mobility was not part of these missions' mandate. Until the 1990s, United Nations (UN) organizations and international NGOs would deliver humanitarian assistance every time a displacement crisis occurred. By contrast, the 1990s signalled the beginning of a new kind of interventions, one that encompassed migration and asylum policies. These interventions combined military and humanitarian operations and they involved foreign powers. This change in the nature of international interventions was, moreover, accompanied by a concomitant increase in the number and size of foreign military operations after 2001. 8 After Siyad Barre was overthrown and the Somali civil war broke out, a series of international interventions led to the formation and consolidation of a military-humanitarian-development complex. 9 These interventions came with extensive military support and they pursued a combination of political, humanitarian and development objectives. 10 Following a series of local D8.12 attacks in the late 1990s and early 2000s as well as the start of the US-led 'global war on terror' after 9/11, 11 the Greater Horn of Africa region became a priority for the Bush administration. An integrated military command of the Horn of Africa was established, 12 and military-humanitarian-development inter-agency cooperation, along with local cooperation with regional powers such as Ethiopia, was declared to be of paramount importance.

Such events and processes led to the growing militarization of humanitarian and development aid and the increasing involvement of Western militaries in civil affairs through stabilization operations aimed at policing local communities. 13 Mobility came to be seen as an important dimension of the issues at the heart of the military-humanitarian-development complex, which had, indeed, been designed as a coordinated and integrated response to legal and humanitarian concerns regarding refugees (offering legal protection and providing assistance) and to security challenges (preventing and countering terrorist activities). For instance, the money transfer networks used by migrants to send remittances were accused of financing terrorism, and the fight against piracy led to the criminalization of informal means of mobility, which, rather paradoxically, created the conditions enabling smugglers to exercise a monopoly on population movements. 14 All in all, humanitarian assistance in Somalia, Sudan and Kenya, jointly delivered by Western militaries and IOs, went hand in hand with mobility control, as migration was increasingly framed as a threat, including by African states such as Kenya. 15 During this period, IOs and other international actors in the Horn were confronted with recurring crises and the resulting long-term displacement of people, all of which was underpinned by complex social, political and economic processes. 16 Although both the UNHCR and national governments sought to implement large-scale 'voluntary repatriation' programs, forcibly displaced persons across the region were neither ready nor willing, it seemed, to move back permanently to the 'homeland', especially when the latter remained beset by endemic and continuing violence, political instability, and economic insecurity. 17 Living conditions worsened in refugee-hosting regions, 18 and anti-immigrant sentiment arose in some areas. 19 Indeed, the became the overarching umbrella for the network of US agencies and programs in the Horn. 11 These attacks were the 1998 bombing of US embassies in Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) by Al-Qaeda, the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden (Yemen), and the 2002 attacks on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel and an Israeli charter plane in Mombasa (Kenya). 12 Camp Lemonnier (United States Naval Expeditionary Base), the first and only permanent US military base in Africa and formerly a garrison for the French Foreign Legion, was established in Djibouti in 2002. 13 Jan Bachmann, 'Policing Africa: the US military and visions of crafting "good order"', Security Dialogue 45: 2, April 2014, pp. 119-136, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010614521267. 14 Currun Singh and Arjun Singh Bedi, 'War on piracy: the conflation of Somali piracy with terrorism in discourse, tactic, and law', Security Dialogue 47: 5, October 2016, pp. 440-458, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010616665275. 15 James Milner, 'A history of asylum in Kenya and Tanzania: understanding the drivers of domestic refugee policy', Monde(s) 15, 2019, pp. 69-92, https://doi.org/10.3917/mond1.191.0069. 16 Such crises were the 1998-2000 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, the Houthi rebellion in Yemen starting in 2005, post-electoral violence in Kenya in 2007, the partition of Sudan in 2011, etc. 17 For example, the end of the Eritrea-Ethiopia war and the independence of Eritrea notwithstanding, most Eritrean refugees in Sudan refused to repatriate after the UNHCR announced in 2002 that the 'ceased circumstances' cessation clauses would apply to Eritrean refugees, who were thus no longer entitled to international protection. Around 300,000 'former Eritrean refugees', in UNHCR parlance, remained in or returned to Sudan, and therefore the agency had no other choice but to continue to provide protection and assistance. See Hélène Thiollet, 'Wad Sharifey, Kishm el-Girbâ, Asotriba… Métamorphoses d'un réseau régional de douze camps de réfugiés érythréens dans l'Est du Soudan (1962-2013)', in Michel Agier, ed., Un monde de camps (Paris: La Découverte, 2014). 18 See United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (thereafter UNHCR), 'Malnutrition in Kenyan Refugee Camps', UNHCR, 2007, https://www.unhcr.org/news/briefing/2007/7/468a3e3e6/kenya-malnutrition-levelsrefugee-camps-cause-alarm.html. 19 In Kenya, for instance, the integration of refugees into local society became more difficult in the mid-1990s as a new influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees, mostly from Somalia, arrived.

D8.12 notion of a protracted refugee situation was coined in 2004 to describe the predicament of refugees in the Horn.

Inter-governmental and non-governmental humanitarian agencies relied on mega camps, seen as easier to manage by the UNHCR. For example, between 1997 and 1999, all of the eight small camps that existed in Kenya in the coastal area of Mombasa, near Nairobi, and in the North were closed, and the remaining refugee population was relocated to the Dadaab and Kakuma camps. 20 Likewise, in eastern Sudan, the UNHCR developed and carried out an ambitious policy of camp closure and camp consolidation. 21 Although African borders remained open, refugees were strongly encouraged to settle in camps in order to benefit from humanitarian aid. Camps were meant to be neutral spaces where refugees could be temporarily accommodated, with little prospect of integration into society and with no avenue for political engagement with local communities and governing bodies. The UNHCR's strategy was, moreover, to gradually transfer responsibility for the management of refugees and displaced persons to local authorities. In Kenya, for instance, the Refugees Act, which came into force in 2007 and was complemented by the Refugees Regulations in 2009, established the Department of Refugee Affairs (DRA), meant to take over Refugee Status Determination operations, which had been processed by the UNHCR up until then. 22 Foreign actors, claiming that they were promoting the empowerment of African governments and societies, wanted to ensure that local communities and host countries also benefited from the humanitarian assistance that they provided to refugees. There was a flurry of initiatives to address the long-term settlement refugees by involving local host communities as joint beneficiaries of development and capacity-building projects, 23 as aid and humanitarian agencies sought to challenge the lingering perception of refugees as a 'burden'. 24 The Refugee Aid and Development approach, 'based on achieving self-reliance for refugees, while simultaneously addressing the burden of refugees on developing host countries', 25 had originally been devised in the 1980s, but it really gained traction in the 2000s and thus became a cornerstone of UNHCR strategies and programs in the Horn, such as the Self-Reliance Strategy program designed by the Government of Uganda and the UNHCR Kampala Branch Office. 26 It was also in the 2000s that the notion of 'mixed migration' gained salience and was proposed as a response to the challenges that complex migration dynamicspeople on the move for a variety of reasons in times of crisisposed to international protection. 27 In February 2006, António Guterres, then High Commissioner (UNHCR), gave a speech to the European 20 Madeline Garlick et al., Building on the foundation: formative evaluation of the Refugee Status Determination (RSD) transition process in Kenya, PDES/2015/01 (Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, April 2015), https://www.unhcr.org/5551f3c49.pdf. 21 Thiollet, 'Wad Sharifey, Kishm el-Girbâ, Asotriba'. 22 Refugee Status Determination (RSD) continued to be processed through UNHCR offices until 2014, when the DRA assumed a small share of RSD operations, in accordance with the UNHCR's plan to fully transfer RSD capacity and responsibility to the government of Kenya. See Garlick et al., 'Building on the foundation'. 23

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Parliament, in which, drawing on the example of migrants and refugees smuggled across the Gulf of Aden and the Mediterranean to support his argument, he declared that a change of paradigm had occurred, in that migration was now characterized by mixed motives for moving as well as by mixed flows of irregular migrants, refugees, and trafficked people. [START_REF] Guterres | Statement by Mr. António Guterres, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, to the European Parliament[END_REF] The notion of mixed migration was developed into an ad hoc framework of action, the 10-Point Action Plan, as a result of which new programs were designed and implemented across the Horn, including on both sides of the Gulf of Aden, and new organizations, such as the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat, were established. [START_REF]The 10-Point Plan in Action[END_REF] With the creation of the Global Protection Cluster under the aegis of the UNHCR, the landscape of international organizations changed and new power configurations emerged. A competition arose between the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UNHCR: both organizations assumed prominent roles in migration governance, but they pursued markedly different agendas. While the UNHCR led the Cluster with a clear protection-oriented agenda, IOM developed a mandate geared towards mobility containment and strongly influenced by Western donors' agendas. [START_REF] Pécoud | What do we know about the International Organization for Migration?[END_REF] More recently, the expansion of EU external migration policy into the Horn of Africa since the 2015 'migration crisis' has led to the mainstreaming of the EU objective of migration containment into the mandates and activities of humanitarian and development organizations.

Mainstreaming migration containment: European policies in the Horn

The EU's external migration policy, which some scholars have characterized as externalization, [START_REF] Lavenex | Schimmelfennig define externalization as 'the attempt to transfer the EU's rules and policies (acquis communautaire) to third countries and international organizations': 'EU rules beyond EU borders: theorizing external governance in European politics[END_REF] seeks to transfer European legal norms, policies and practices to non-EU states in order to shift the responsibility for controlling migration flows and managing refugee populations to states of origin, primary asylum and transit. Externalization aims to contain migration outflows in countries of origin, primary asylum and transit, to facilitate return and secondary flows to 'safe third countries', [START_REF] Lavenex | Safe third countries: extending the EU asylum and immigration policies to central and eastern Europe[END_REF] and to institutionalize the procedures for the return of irregular migrants in Western states to sending or transit countries. [START_REF] Cassarino | Informalising readmission agreements in the EU neighbourhood[END_REF] To achieve its objective of outsourcing migration control and asylum management to third countries, the EU has relied on conditionality, [START_REF] Collinson | Visa requirements, carrier sanctions, "safe third countries" and "readmission": the development of an asylum "buffer zone" in Europe[END_REF] issue linkage as a negotiating tool, divide-and-rule tactics, and the role of

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IOs, especially the UNHCR and IOM, as intermediaries, [START_REF] Frowd | Developmental borderwork and the International Organization for Migration[END_REF] as country case studies in Morocco and Turkey have shown. [START_REF] Qadim | Postcolonial challenges to migration control: French-Moroccan cooperation practices on forced returns[END_REF] Initially concerned with countries in eastern and central Europe, the EU's external migration policy has gradually expanded in scope to include southern European islands, North and West Africa since the Rabat Process started in 2006, and more recently, the Near East, the Sahel, and the Horn of Africa. [START_REF] Collyer | Geopolitics as a migration governance strategy: European Union bilateral relations with southern Mediterranean countries[END_REF] Although the EU began to develop migration-related cooperation with countries of the Horn as early as the 2000s, [START_REF]EU cooperation with Tanzania began in the early[END_REF] such cooperation only really gained momentum in 2014 and 2015, partly due to the belief that large numbers of asylum seekers and irregular migrants from the Horn were heading for Europe, in particular Eritreans travelling through Libya to reach Italy. Contrary to this perception, however, FRONTEX records of illegal border crossings show that, except for a limited increase in Eritrean asylum seekers between 2013 and 2015, migrants and asylum seekers from the Horn represented only a very small percentage of the total number of undocumented people crossing into Europe in 2015. 39 The Khartoum Process was spearheaded by the Italian government, then holding the presidency of the Council of the European Union, and was launched in November 2014. Unlike the Rabat Process, which initially focused on migration and development, this new regional dialogue 'amongst the countries along the migration route between the Horn of Africa and Europe' was, and remains, devoted to combating migrant smuggling and human trafficking, and thus to disrupting (irregular) migration flows to Europe. [START_REF]Declaration of the Ministerial Conference of the Khartoum Process[END_REF] In November 2015, at the Valletta Summit on Migration, the EU announced the creation of the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for stability and addressing root causes of irregular migration and displaced persons in Africa (EUTF for Africa). Targeting three regions -North Africa, the Sahel/Lake Chad, and the Horn of Africaand 26 countries, the EUTF for Africa received an initial endowment of €1.8 billion in 2015 and, by 2020, it was worth some €5 billion, out of which €1.8 billion were allocated to the Horn of Africa. 41 However, both the Khartoum Process and the EUTF for Africa were widely, and promptly, criticized for transferring the responsibility for managing migration and asylum to regimes known to be directly responsible for refugee flows and involved in trafficking. Indeed, thanks to EU cooperation, repressive security apparatuses could indirectly have access to extra resources and gain international legitimacy. For instance, although the EUTF for Africa does not funnel money to states and governments as such, the regime of Omar al-Bashir in Sudan indirectly benefited from EUTF for Africa funding under the Better Migration Management program as early as 2015, that is two years before the US lifted economic sanctions on D8.12 Sudan. 42 In 2016, the European Parliament raised concerns that Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group directly involved in the war in Darfur, purportedly fought illegal migration on behalf of the EU. 43 EU cooperation with the regime of Omar al-Bashir continued nonetheless until the 2018 revolution.

As well as increasing the bargaining power of authoritarian states, and thus reshaping migration diplomacy in the region, 44 the Khartoum Process and the EUTF for Africa have served to extend, deepen and routinize the rationales and practices of migration and asylum containment, beyond cases of emergency intervention per se. As a result of the creation of the EUTF for Africa, together with the adoption of the Migration Partnership Framework in 2016, 45 all European development projects in the targeted regions were brought in line with EU external migration policy. Funding for the EUTF for Africa was, for the most part, reallocated from the European Development Fund (EDF), the main Official Development Assistance (ODA) framework for EU development cooperation in the countries of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP). Whereas migration and asylum were seldom, and only marginally, mentioned in early EDF framework documents, [START_REF]based on the fourth renegotiation (Lomé IV) of the Lomé Convention (first signed in 1975), include non-binding recommendations regarding migrant and refugee rights. Following the Cotonou Agreement (2000), which extended ACP-EU development cooperation and paved the way for[END_REF] the EUTF for Africa proposes to earmark ODA money to address the 'root causes of irregular migration and displaced persons in Africa'. [START_REF] Bakewell | Keeping them in their place": the ambivalent relationship between development and migration in Africa[END_REF] EUTF for Africa projects are directly proposed and designed by EU member states' embassies and EU delegations, working in conjunction with partner governments in the region.

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Minutes of EUTF for Africa Strategic Board meetings reveal that the amount of funds allocated to a particular country is sometimes determined by the number of its nationals crossing the Mediterranean and, moreover, that funding of development-oriented projects is contingent on the outcome of negotiations over readmission agreements. 48 Therefore, countries that actively cooperate with the EU on migration issues can expect to have access to larger cooperation funds and to be offered visa and travel facilitation agreements as well as labour migration programs. Finally, the assessment of a EUTF for Africa project's performance also depends on its contribution to migration management and the reduction of irregular flows, even if the project in question, focusing on livelihood opportunities or resilience-building for instance, is not actually concerned with migration governance as such.

Ethiopia, for instance, was among the first recipient countries of the EUTF for Africa as well as one of the six priority countries targeted by the Migration Partnership Framework. Discussions between the government of Ethiopia and EU representatives about funding were linked to the negotiation of readmission procedures. Although it feared that the country would be turned into an asylum-processing centre, the Ethiopian government signed a readmission arrangement with the EU in December 2017 [START_REF] Raty | The EU Trust Fund for Africa: trapped between aid policy and migration politics[END_REF] . Moreover, negotiations between Ethiopia and international donors, including the EU, led to the adoption of the Ethiopia Job Compact Sector Reform and Performance Contract (Ethiopian Job Compact) in 2016, co-financed by the World Bank, the European Investment Bank, the United Kingdom's Department for International Development, and the EUTF for Africa. The Compact aimed to create 100,000 new jobs, of which 30 per cent would be allocated to refugees, through a package of $500 million in concessional financing to support Ethiopia's industrialization strategy. [START_REF] Eutf | Action document for the implementation of the Horn of Africa Window[END_REF] Like the Jordan Job Compact, the Ethiopian Job Compact illustrates the recent shift in policy discourse on refugees from humanitarian assistance to development aid, with greater emphasis now placed on promoting refugee employment in order to reduce reliance on foreign aid and facilitate refugee inclusion in host societies. [START_REF] On | Forced migration governance in Jordan and Lebanon: lessons from two EU Compacts[END_REF] Although in January 2019, the Ethiopian government passed a law granting refugees the right to work and live outside refugee camps, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Tigray crisis have made it impossible to fully assess the Ethiopian Job Compact.

The EUTF for Africa has also taken over the funding of refugee programs, with a view to extending the benefits of humanitarian and development assistance to host communities and addressing the issue of long-term settlement and refugee integration into local economies and societies. In 2016, for instance, the government of Turkana County in Kenya proposed that the area of Kalobeyei be used as a site to establish a settlement for refugees from South Sudan, thus relieving the demographic pressure on the Kakuma refugee camp, which at the time was hosting a population of 183,000 compared to its capacity of 70,000. [START_REF] Unhcr | UNHCR diagnostic tool for alternatives to camps: 2016 global results[END_REF] The UNHCR and the DRA drew on international aid, including €15 million from the EUTF for Africa for the period 2017-2019, to accommodate up to 8,000 refugees alongside 23,600 locals in a 'hybrid settlement', as part of the Comprehensive Refugee and Host Community Plan in Turkana D8.12

Policy Implications and Recommendations

This brief emphasizes the pivotal role that international interventions and foreign aid played in reshaping the governance of migration and asylum in the Horn in the post-1991 period. While there were not many barriers to people's mobility until the 1990s, since then the region has witnessed a significant shift in the perception and management of mobility by foreign and international actors involved in military, humanitarian and development operations. Mobility has been construed as a security threat, rather than as a source of safety from harm as well as a socio-economic asset for people on the move and their wider communities. Foreign and international actors have gradually established discursive and operational linkages between mobility, security, and development and, accordingly, they have channelled their funding and operations into the management of migration and asylum. Relying on a variety of governmental techniques and strategies, which have ranged from outright repression (border surveillance, encampment, deportation, repatriation) to political and socio-economic incentives, foreign and international actors have sought to make people either stay where they are or go back to where they came from. Since the 2015 'migration crisis', the objective of migration containment has complemented, and even sometimes superseded, the traditional goals of peace, state building, development, and poverty reduction. European leaders should reconsider their policy of migration containment and set out to create migration policy frameworks that genuinely take into account the political, social and economic costs that the lack of migration opportunities entails for African countries, especially refugee-sending and refugee-hosting countries.

Research Parameters

This policy brief is based on research conducted as part of the Horizon2020 project "Migration Governance and Asylum Crises" (MAGYC, grant agreement number 822806) for the Work Package (WP) no. 8 "External dimensions of the crisis," led by Sciences Po in Paris. This WP seeks to understand how the EU's externalisation policy intersects with intra-regional dynamics in the Middle East and Africa. Research conducted under this WP pays particular attention to local and intra-regional political dynamics in non-EU countries, including inter-state and nonstate relations, formal and informal dynamics, and the role of international organisations (IOs) operating locally. This WP examines the following issues: how policies deployed at the border and beyond the borders of the EU have an impact on mobility across different regions; how EU and international governance mechanisms intersect with local, national, regional and transnational dynamics; and how these mechanisms shape the interests and policies of target states, both in terms of migration diplomacy and domestic politics. The originality of this WP is that, drawing on the expertise of scholars of non-EU politics and partner research institutions in Middle Eastern and African countries, it looks at externalisation practices and policies from the perspective of non-EU countries.

As part of this WP, Task #4 "New governance frontiers: the Horn of Africa" looks at the changes in and prospects of migration governance in the Horn of Africa, by investigating local state and non-state actors, IOs and NGOs, as well as the EU's involvement in the region on various scales and in different spaces. It examines the impact of the recent expansion of EU asylum and migration governance into the Horn of Africa. What have been the consequences of this process for local actors and institutions, local communities, both migrant and non-migrant, and the EU itself? What are the prospects of the new lines of diplomacy that have been pursued as a result? How might the various ongoing refugee crises affect the EU's diplomatic ties with host countries in the sub-region?

This paper provides an inductive analysis of the discourses, policies and practices of political actors across the Horn of Africa, combined with an empirical analysis of the practices of African D8.12 states, foreign powers, and multilateral organisations. Given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the fieldwork originally planned for this study, this brief is based on an extensive desk review and on previous fieldwork research carried out by one of the authors in the region. The analysis presented here relies on qualitative data collected during these fieldwork trips in the Horn of Africa between 2005 and 2012, as well as on semi-structured interviews conducted in Kenya, Sudan, and Yemen with refugees, both inside and outside camps, migrants, African government officials and civil servants, foreign diplomats, IOs and NGOs staff and representatives (UNHCR, Médecins Sans Frontières, the Danish Refugee Council, the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat). More fieldwork will be conducted to further the analysis towards the forthcoming deliverables on the Horn of Africa.

Figure 1 .Figure 2 .

 12 Figure 1. Refugees from the Horn: five main countries of origin 1960-2019. 4

  Lahra Smith et al., 'Local integration and shared resource management in protracted refugee camps: findings from a study in the Horn of Africa', Journal of Refugee Studies 34: 1, March 2021, pp. 787-805, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fez010. 24 Tom Kuhlman, Burden or boon?: a study of Eritrean refugees in the Sudan (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990); Merle Kreibaum, 'Their suffering, our burden? How Congolese refugees affect the Ugandan population', World Development 78, February 2016, pp. 262-287, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.10.019.

25

Sarah Meyer, The 'refugee aid and development' approach in Uganda: empowerment and self-reliance of refugees in practice (Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, October 2006), p. 2, https://www.unhcr.org/4538eb172.pdf.

26

Meyer, The 'refugee aid and development' approach in Uganda.

27

Johannes van der Klaauw, 'Refugee rights in times of mixed migration: evolving status and protection issues', Refugee Survey Quarterly 28: 4, 2009, pp. 59-86, https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdq003; Nicholas Van Hear, Mixed migration: policy challenges (Oxford: The Migration Observatory, 2011).

This policy brief has been reviewed by Nicole Hirt (GIGA) and Shoshana Fine (Liège-Université de Lille) as part of MAGYC's internal review process.

The 'Greater Horn of Africa' is commonly understood to comprise countries located in the Horn of Africa itself -Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djiboutias well as Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda, sometimes also

This brief does not engage in the scholarly debate on the failures of liberal interventionism, as exemplified by the case of Somalia. See John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen, 'Blowing the Horn', Foreign Affairs 86: 2,

W. Neil Adger et al., 'Migration, remittances, livelihood trajectories, and social resilience', AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 31: 4, June 2002, pp. 358-366, https://doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447-31.4.358.

Peter Nobel, Refugee law in the Sudan: with the refugee conventions and the regulation of Asylum Act of 1974 (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1982).

Neil Melvin, The foreign military presence in the Horn of Africa region (Solna: SIPRI, 2019), https://sipri.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/sipribp1904.pdf.

These international interventions were the United Nations Operation in Somalia I (UNOSOM I) from April to December 1992, Unified Task Force (UNITAF) from 5 December 1992 to 4 May 1993 (involving a US initiative code-named Operation Restore Hope), and UNOSOM II from March 1993 to March 1995.

In 1994, the Clinton administration launched the Greater Horn of Africa Initiative (GHAI) in order to compensate for the 1993 debacle of Operation Restore Hope. The GHAI was placed under the direct supervision of the President and the head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The GHAI sought to reshape crisis management and development in the Horn by joining up disaster bureau teams, which were connected to US military operations, and development offices, which had been independent until then. The GHAI

The Better Migration Management (BMM) program was the first major multi-country project launched under the EUTF for Africa in 2016. Coordinated by the German development agency (GIZ), it aims to develop national

Tuuli Raty and Raphael Shilhav, The EU Trust Fund for Africa: trapped between aid policy and migration politics (Oxford: Oxfam GB, January 2020), pp. 3, 8-10, https://doi.org/10.21201/2020.5532.

legislation, improve migration management, and promote access to justice and protection for smuggled migrants and human trafficking victims. Its budget was €46 millionthe EUTF for Africa and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) contributing €40 million and €6 million respectivelyfor phase I (2015-2019) and €35 million (€30 million from the EUTF for Africa and €5 million from the BMZ) for phase II (2019-2022), the latter including Egypt, Libya and Tunisia in regional activities, in addition to the initial recipient countries from the Horn. See European Commission, 'Better Migration Management Programme', https://ec.europa.eu/trustfundforafrica/region/horn-africa/regional/better-migration-management-programme_en; The European Union Emergency Trust Fund for stability and addressing root causes of irregular migration and displaced persons in Africa (thereafter EUTF for Africa), Action fiche for the implementation of the Horn of Africa https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/4e04fc78-738e-11e8-9483-01aa75ed71a1/language-en. A year later, the vice-chair of the European Parliament's subcommittee for human rights called for a thorough EU investigation of the BMM program. See Arthur Neslen, 'EU urged to end cooperation with Sudan after refugees whipped and deported', The Guardian, 27 February 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/feb/27/eu-urged-to-end-cooperation-with-sudan-afterrefugees-whipped-and-deported. 44

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West. [START_REF]Financing for solutions to displacement: Kenya country study[END_REF] This area-based approach, in effect replacing the population-or refugee-focused approach, developed out of a study, which concluded 'that the existence of the Kakuma refugee camp had had a net positive impact on the County's economy over the years, and that a policy of inclusion (rather than separated camps) would be even more beneficial for the host population'. [START_REF]Kalobeyei Integrated Socio-Economic Development Plan In Turkana West[END_REF] Another case in point is Uganda, which has often been portrayed as a role model for refugee integration through land distribution and, indeed, serves as a pilot country for the UNHCR-led Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework. [START_REF] Hammond | Comprehensive refugee responses in the Horn of Africa: regional leadership on education, livelihoods and durable solutions (London and Nairobi: EU Trust Fund for Africa and Research & Evidence Facility[END_REF] However, the management of the influx of South Sudanese refugees to Uganda since 2013 exemplifies the limitations and potential flaws of such a strategy. The government of Uganda used land distribution to refugees as a development policy in dry regions, where (non-farmer) refugees were sent to cultivate small plots of infertile land. This policy gave rise to tensions between refugees and locals in a context of scarce resources, thus hindering the dynamics of social and political integration, which, conversely, were relatively successful in urban settings.

Finally, it should be noted that, although it is supposed to be devoted to migration management, the EUTF for Africa also serves as a legitimizing tool for long-term state-building intervention.

In Somalia, the EUTF for Africa acts as an umbrella program for all of the EU's sustained statebuilding activities, designed to bolster the legitimacy and capacity of the fragile federal government. For instance, the Somalia State and Resilience Building Contract, adopted in 2018, merely mentions migration and protracted displacement as one of many circumstantial aspects of the country's troubled context that provides justification for funding routine governmental activities. [START_REF]EUTF for Africa, Somalia state and resilience building contract and support to debt relief[END_REF] In Eritrea, cooperation on migration issues is tenuous, and the EUTF for Africa has to navigate the limitations imposed by the authorities on any program to improve governance, including highly technical projects on national statistics, the judicial system or economic governance, or conversely, to deftly avoid the instrumentalization of such programs by the regime. [START_REF]Development assistance and humanitarian aid have, indeed, been repeatedly suspended in the name of sovereign autonomy[END_REF] D8.12 Disclaimer: The information and views set out in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Neither the European Union institutions and bodies nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Project Identity


Thibaut Jaulin

Migration diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean

Introduction

The Syrian conflict has caused one of the largest population displacements of our time. About half of the population who lived in Syria in 2011 has been forcibly displaced, mostly within Syria and in neighbouring countries. Today, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan host 5.2 million registered Syrian refugees, with more than two-thirds of these in Turkey alone. While Turkey is home to the largest refugee population in the world, Lebanon has the highest refugee-topopulation ratio, followed by Jordan. In addition, 500,000 registered Syrian refugees are scattered across Iraq, Egypt and Sudan. 2 It should be noted that these figures include only registered Syrians, but in some countries such as Lebanon, there is a much larger number of non-registered Syrian refugees as a result of national registration policies. By comparison, European countries host only one million Syrian refugees. 3 Syrian refugees now represent one of the world's largest refugee groups in a protracted refugee situation. While the basic conditions that would allow a large-scale return of refugees to Syria have not been met so far, 4 the integration prospects of Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries are bound up with highly controversial political issues, as well as with tremendous socio-economic challenges, which since 2020 have been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and Lebanon's economic, political and financial crises. 5 The Syrian so-called refugee crisis has occurred in a region that was already struggling with the legacies of past large-scale forced displacements, be it the Palestinian exodus or the refugee and migration flows generated by the two Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003), in addition to intra-regional and international migration movements taking place for labour, education or family purposes. Middle Eastern governments have oscillated between laissez faire, liberal approaches and restrictive policies in the management of refugees and migrants, their stance often depending on changing local, national and international politico-diplomatic interests. 6 Mounting European pressure to contain migrations flows has also played a major part in shaping migration governance in the region. Since the Arab Spring, and even more so since the 2015 "migration crisis," the European Union (EU) has strengthened and expanded its external migration policy, which consists in transferring the responsibility for the management of migrants and refugees to countries of origin, transit and primary asylum, with a view to containing migration flows outside EU borders. Mainstreaming migration into foreign policies and using conditionality (to tie development aid, visa facilitation or the signing of a trade agreement to the implementation of migration control policies by third countries) are the key governmental strategies that have been used to promote this externalisation process. 7 This brief seeks to analyse the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on the diplomacy of migration in the Middle East. To what extent has this crisis redefined migration and asylum policies and politics in the region, including EU external migration policy? This brief draws on the notion of migration diplomacy to emphasise the interplay between mobility regime and foreign policy (see Research Parameters below). 8 It argues that, rather paradoxically, this crisis has strengthened the negotiating position of those third countries hosting refugees vis-à-vis the EU. It suggests that such an evolution reflects the limitations of the EU's strategy of externalisation as well as of its objective of migration containment and, accordingly, it calls for the creation of more balanced migration cooperation schemes between the EU and third countries in the Middle East, including significant resettlement opportunities as well as sustained humanitarian and development assistance, in order to share the burden of the Syrian protracted refugee crisis more equitably.

The following analysis, which focuses chiefly on the three main host countries of Syrian refugees (Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan), first examines the specificity of Middle Eastern migration and asylum regimes, then looks at national and local policy responses to the Syrian refugee crisis, and finally explores EU migration policy initiatives in response to the Syrian crisis since 2015.

Evidence and Analysis

Middle Eastern asylum regimes: ambivalence and temporariness

Middle Eastern migration and asylum policy regimes have been characterised by ambivalence and temporariness. While an open-door policy has usually prevailed, governments have, on occasion, closed their borders when refugee flows were perceived to represent a security or political threat. For example, after the first Gulf War, Turkey closed its borders to Iraqi Kurds and Turkmens fleeing northern Iraq. [START_REF] Sahin | Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East[END_REF] In the mid-2000s, following the second Gulf War, Jordan, Syria and Egypt, after initially allowing free entry, restricted access to their territory for Iraqis. Middle Eastern countries, moreover, generally lack migration and asylum legal and policy frameworks (Turkey since 2013 being the exception, see below), and migration policy decisions are often made behind closed doors, at the highest governmental level. [START_REF] Tsourapas | The EU-Egypt Partnership Priorities and the Egyptian Migration State[END_REF] Middle Eastern states are not signatories of the 1951 Geneva Convention (or of the 1967 Protocol for that matter), except for Turkey, which, however, maintains a geographical limitation clause that de facto prevents non-European asylum seekers from obtaining conventional refugee status. [START_REF] Firat Genç | The Multilayered Migration Regime in Turkey: Contested Regionalization, Deceleration and Legal Precarization[END_REF] Refugee Status Determination (RSD) processes have, for the most part, been carried out by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) under formal agreementsa Memorandum of Understanding was signed with Jordan in 1997 and with Lebanon in 2003or de facto, as was the case in Turkey until 2018. [START_REF] Zaiotti | Dealing with non-Palestinian Refugees in the Middle East: Policies and Practices in an Uncertain Environment[END_REF] Refugee politics and policies in the region have been heavily shaped by the Palestinian exodus and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although Arab states have consistently reaffirmed the importance of the right of return, to date they have remained unable to develop, let alone display, a coherent and common understanding of the key notions of return, compensation and resettlement. [START_REF] Al | The Arab States and the Refugee Issue: A Retrospective View[END_REF] Similar patterns were in evidence during the more recent Iraqi and Syrian refugee crises. Middle Eastern governments have repeatedly insisted that refugees were hosted only temporarily and should return to their home countries or be resettled. For example, the aforementioned agreements that Jordan and Lebanon signed with the UNHCR explicitly state that both countries are merely transit countries and that the UNHCR should aim to resettle refugees within a year of their arrival, despite the fact that resettlement programmes actually fall outside the UNHCR's remit and are notoriously rare.

Migrants and refugees have, therefore, had no alternative but to resort on informality to cope with ad hoc policies, whereby residency status as well as access to mobility, employment, education and healthcare are often determined by a person's country of origin and by his or her ethnic or religious background. The Egyptian state's "strategic ambivalence" epitomises such a policy approach, whose objective is to neither drive out nor entirely integrate migrants in the host society. [START_REF] Norman | Migrants, Refugees and the Egyptian Security State[END_REF] Likewise, the Lebanese "politics of uncertainty" exemplify many aspects of the "no-policy" policy and the ad hoc refugee regime, with policy decisions designed for each particular refugee group. [START_REF] Stel | Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty: Refugee Governance in Lebanon[END_REF] The Syrian refugee crisis has exacerbated such trends in Lebanon given the state's dependence on foreign aid. As a result of the lack of border control strategies and regulated reception processes, the responsibility for dealing with refugees has shifted from the state to the international community as well as local and non-state actors (international organisations, international and local non-governmental organisations, political parties, religious organisations, municipalities).

In contrast, Jordan and Turkey have developed more structured migration and refugee policy strategies, but the daily lives of migrants and refugees in these countries have also been marked by temporariness and informality. In Jordan, the rentier nature of the state have had a significant influence on the governance of migration and asylum, so much so that Jordan has turned into a "refugee rentier state." 16 Jordan lacks natural resources, but it has historically capitalised on its strategic location to secure external subsidies. In the mid-2000s, when some 500,000 to 750,000 Iraqis sought refuge in Jordan, the government devised a strategy to maximise the benefits of international assistance and funding. Indeed, the Jordanian government was accused of inflating the number of Iraqi refugees in the country and it moreover made it a requirement that international aid also benefit the local population. Such a strategy would foreshadow Jordan's later political and policy responses to the Syrian refugee crisis.

In Turkey, the construction of a legal and institutional migration and asylum architecture since the early 2000s has been a product of multi-layered dynamics, involving various governmental and international actors and their attendant interests. 17 On the one hand, migration and asylum have been a major theme of Turkey's accession negotiations with the EU, a key requirement being that Turkey control "illegal" immigration into Europe. Successive Justice and Development Party (AKP) governments have fulfilled key EU demands: Turkey ratified the Palermo Protocols regarding human trafficking and human smuggling, enacted laws on work permits and naturalization, reformed visa regulations and deportation procedures, and developed the Integrated Border Management Strategy. On the other hand, Turkey has consistently refused to remove the geographical limitation clause of the 1951 Geneva Convention. The new Law on Foreigners and International Protection, which was passed in 2013, illustrates Turkey's ambiguous position. While satisfying EU demands that Turkey adopt a new asylum legal framework, this law introduces two forms of international protection that are meant to be temporary: conditional refugee status for those under direct personal threat, and subsidiary protection status for those fleeing a situation of widespread violence. At the same time, Turkey's migration and refugee regime has also been developed in response to state security concerns (especially regarding the Kurdish population) and to foreign policy interests with Middle Eastern and African countries. For example, in the 2000s, Turkey pursued its own migration diplomacy by lifting visa requirements for Middle Eastern and African countries, as part of a broader regional and international diplomatic strategy.

Facing the Syrian refugee crisis: from open-door to restrictive policies

During the first two years of the conflict, an unconditional open-door policy prevailed among Syria's neighbouring countries. Jordan and Lebanon invoked pre-existing visa-free agreements to allow the unrestricted entry of Syrians, and Turkey formally designated Syrians as "guests." During that period, and as had been the case before the war, Syrians could travel back and 16

Gerasimos

Tsourapas forth to Syria, depending on the security situation and on the personal threats they potentially faced. Most Syrians could, moreover, freely settle in urban, semi-urban or rural areas, and only a minority were accommodated in refugee camps. 18 In Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands of Syrians were already employed as seasonal or permanent workers in the construction industry and in agriculture, 19 the government allowed the creation of informal settlements, but adamantly opposed the creation of refugee camps, a stance that reflected the historical legacy of Palestinian refugee camps during the civil war. In Jordan, the government allowed Syrians to self-settle across the country until June 2012, and then began to build large refugee camps with the help of the UNHCR and the Emirates. Besides security and political considerations, the construction of refugee camps was aimed at giving greater visibility and credence to Jordan's call for international support. The number of refugees in the Za'atari Camp, for instance, reached over 150,000 within a few months during the winter 2012-2013. 20 Syria's neighbours began to implement restrictive refugee policies in 2013, when it became clear that the conflict would not end soon. Restrictions focused on two main areas: refugee entry and refugee registration.

The timing and conditions of the implementation of restrictive entry policies varied from country to country, depending on each government's particular political agenda and perception of security threats. Jordan first denied entry to Palestinians coming from Syria in April 2012, and then limited the number of Syrians allowed to enter the country to 300 per day (January 2013). By mid-2014, Jordan's shift to a closed border policy was complete. In Egypt, the open-door policy initially implemented by Mohammed Morsi's government was ended in mid-2013, after the military returned to power. In Turkey, the government began to close its borders to Syrians in early 2014, in the context of deteriorating security conditions in the Kurdish areas. After issuing the October 2014 decrees, which heavily restricted border access and drastically tightened the regulations regarding status renewal for Syrians already in the country, Lebanon closed its border with Syria in January 2015. By 2015, then, all neighbouring countries had closed their borders to Syrian refugees, although a limited number of illegal border crossings could still be observed in Jordan and Turkey. 21 Furthermore, Middle Eastern states adopted new regulations regarding the residency status of Syrians, which served to reaffirm the temporary nature of their presence in these countries, thus ruling out their integration into society. In Turkey, the government took systematic steps to register Syrian refugees from early 2014 onwards, and it moreover adopted a "temporary protection status" specifically designed for Syrians. The creation of such a status meant that, in practice, two separate legal and administrative asylum systems coexisted thereafter: one for Syrians and one for all other non-European refugees, with varying consequences in terms of legal status and access to living conditions, hence vastly different everyday experiences and expectations. 22 In Jordan, the government created the Directorate of Security Affairs for the Syrian Refugee Camps in March 2013 and revised its agreement with the UNHCR in 2014. A 18 20 There were repeated disagreements between the UNHCR and the Jordanian government, the latter being accused of overestimating the number of refugees hosted in the country, both inside and outside refugee camps. 21 Tsouparas, The Jordan Compact; Genç, Heck and Hess, "The Multilayered Migration Regime in Turkey." 22 Genç, Heck and Hess, "The Multilayered Migration Regime in Turkey"; Mencutek, Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East.

bailout process was initially established to allow Syrians in refugee camps to settle in urban areas provided they could secure sponsorship from a Jordanian citizen. Well-off Syrians, thus able to pay middlemen and smugglers, could leave the camps, and indeed, this process was frozen following sharp criticism that it encouraged corruption and greed. 23 In 2015, the Jordanian government issued new security cards to Syrians living outside refugee camps, who were therefore forced to visit police stations every year to apply for or renew such cards. Those caught without proper documentation were threatened with relocation in refugee camps.

In Lebanon, following three years of "no-policy" policy, the adoption of the October 2014 decrees signalled a significant policy shift. With the aim of reducing the number of Syrians in the country, the government made the administrative procedures to obtain legal residency much more complicated, thus also restricting access to the labour market. Previously, under a pre-existing agreement between Lebanon and Syria, Syrians were granted a six-month residency permit at the Lebanese border, which allowed them to work. This permit could be renewed by returning to Syria for at least 24 hours or by paying a $200 fee. While many Syrians were already unable to fulfil these requirements, for either financial or security reasons, as a result of the October 2014 decrees, many more Syrians were pushed into illegality as they found themselves without valid residency status, irrespective of the length of their presence in the country and the initial reason (labour or asylum) for their stay. After January 2015, Syrians wishing to renew their residency permit were required to provide a pledge of responsibility from a Lebanese sponsor (kafil) or a certificate of UNHCR registration, along with a pledge not to work and proof of their financial means. However, a few months later, the Lebanese government instructed UNHCR to suspend refugee registration altogether, and therefore the majority of Syrians became illegal residents. 24 The Lebanese government, moreover, expanded security measures targeting Syrians and channelled part of the international aid toward the Lebanese population in a bid to mitigate the socio-economic impact of the crisis.

The implementation of more restrictive asylum policies towards Syrians in the Middle East, combined with the worsening conflict in Syria, is one of the reasons explaining the sharp increase in the number of Syrians crossing the Mediterranean to seek asylum in Europe in 2014 and 2015 (first-time asylum applications by Syrians rose from 49,000 in 2013 to 378,000 in 2015). 25 The inflow of Syrians to Europe triggered a larger wave of migration, comprising both refugees (mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Eritrea) and economic migrants (in particular from Albania). The EU, unable to agree on a common policy response, faced a major internal political crisis and thus decided to contain both refugees and migrants in countries of origin, transit and primary asylum.

The EU containment policy: political pitfalls and policy drawbacks

The EU first turned to Turkey, and in November 2015, both parties agreed on an EU-Turkey Joint Action Plan, whereby Turkey would better control its borders and improve the living conditions of Syrian refugees on its territory in exchange for €3 billion to develop physical infrastructures and institutional capacities. The EU moreover agreed to resume accession negotiations and to lift visa requirements for the Schengen Area for Turkish citizens. This initial 23 Tsourapas, The Jordan Compact. 24 agreement was soon complemented by a second and more ambitious deal. The EU-Turkey Statement (March 2016) reiterated the commitments of the Joint Action Plan and added two major elements: an additional €3 billion grant and a specific deportation procedure to return all migrants illegally crossing to Greek islands, regardless of their protection claims, to Turkey, in exchange for a pledge to resettle up to 72,000 Syrians from Turkey to the EU. [START_REF] Lehner | The EU-Turkey 'Deal': Legal Challenges and Pitfalls[END_REF] The EU-Turkey deal, together with the closure of the Balkan route and the creation of hotspots on Greek islands, where migrants were, and still are, kept in appalling conditions, deterred many refugees and migrants from taking the Eastern Mediterranean route. [START_REF] Van Liempt | Evidence-Based Assessment of Migration Deals: The Case of the EU-Turkey Statement[END_REF] Most refugees, therefore, were stranded in countries of primary asylum, or remained at risk in their countries of origin, and only a few chose to take alternative, often more dangerous, migration routes. [START_REF] Jaulin | Externalization Policies and their Impacts on Migrant and Refugee Flows to Europe during the "Crisis": A Preliminary Study[END_REF] The EU-Turkey deal gave Turkey a prominent role in controlling European borders and managing mobility and asylum in the Middle East. In the context of growing tensions between the EU and Turkey, this led to the blatant instrumentalisation of refugees and migrants for political and diplomatic means. [START_REF] Aydin-Düzgit | Changing Parameters of Migration Cooperation: Beyond the EU-Turkey Deal?[END_REF] Following the attempted coup of 15 July 2016, EU politicians and bureaucrats publicly declared that, due to backsliding on the rule of law and fundamental rights in Turkey, the opening of new accession chapters and the implementation of visa-free travel for Turkish citizens were no longer on the agenda. In response, the Turkish government, which had publicly justified the deal by emphasising the prospect of visa liberalisation and the acceleration of EU accession negotiations, threatened to renege on its obligations to control migration flows. [START_REF] Mencutek | Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East[END_REF] Similarly, against a backdrop of heightened diplomatic tensions with the EU regarding gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean, support to warring parties in Libya, and Turkey's role in the Syrian conflict, in February 2020 President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on refugees and migrants to walk to the Greek border, where Greek border guards pushed them back, in breach of the non-refoulement principle. Turkey's disillusionment with the agreement also had to do with the amount of EU financial assistance, considered to be insufficient, and the slow rate of disbursement of funds. [START_REF] By Late | [END_REF] At the same time, the EU mobilised funds on an unprecedented scale to support humanitarian and development projects, mostly in Jordan and Lebanon. [START_REF]Fanning Fears, Winning Praise: Egypt's Smart Play on Europe's Apprehension of more Undocumented Immigration[END_REF] The Supporting Syria and the Region donor conference, held in London in February 2016, raised around €9 billion in grants and loans, with some €2.4 billion pledged by the EU for 2016 and 2017. Major host countries and international donors agreed on the need to go beyond traditional humanitarian assistance to refugees, thus arguing that the crisis could create economic opportunities for both refugees and host communities. 33 Particular attention was given to the integration of refugees into the labour markets of host countries: this fitted into a broader narrative focusing on the need to allow refugees to have dignified and self-sufficient lives and to help host countries reap the potential economic benefits of the demographic boost resulting from the massive inflow of refugees. In addition to increased support for job creation, the EU and major donors agreed to provide preferential access to their markets as well as access to concessional financing to refugee-hosting countries in order to support economic growth.

The London conference also emphasised the principle of mutual commitments, whereby international support would go hand in hand with the implementation of policy reforms, in particular regarding access to the formal labour market for refugees. Yet, as the following section will show, by remaining staunchly committed to its objective of migration containment, the EU has, rather paradoxically, strengthened the negotiating position of refugee-hosting countries: while fully benefiting from EU financial assistance, they have successfully resisted EU demands for the adoption of policy reforms to promote refugee rights and integration. Following the London conference, the EU signed bilateral Partnership Priorities and Compacts with both Jordan and Lebanon, with a view to combining EU financial support with national strategies for policy action. With the Compacts, the Syrian crisis became a central aspect of EU relations with Jordan and Lebanon. Both Compacts are a mixed bag of policy instruments, including as they do humanitarian assistance and socio-economic development. Most of the non-humanitarian component of EU support is channelled through the EU Regional Trust Fund in Response to the Syrian Crisis ("Madad Fund"), which focuses on longer-term needs and objectives. For instance, providing employment opportunities for Syrian refugees is a key objective, as it is meant to foster the de facto integration of Syrians into host countries. 34 In Jordan, the narrative that the authorities presented to the international community aimed to portray the country as a cooperative "model reformer" and as a hub for innovative policy designs in migration governance. Jordan advocated a holistic approach to address the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on its economy and thus insisted on the importance of attracting foreign investment, opening up the EU market to Jordanian exports and creating job opportunities for both Syrian refugees and Jordanians. 35 Some components of the Compact were already present in earlier donor programs, such as multi-year grants or the conditioning of aid on refugee children going to school and on the provision of vocational training to refugees. What was specifically new was the objective of creating 200,000 job opportunities within three to five years. In exchange for allowing refugees to work, albeit in low-skilled jobs, Jordan had, indeed, hoped to stimulate the development of its manufacturing sector by integrating refugees into Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and securing access to the EU market for goods produced in the SEZs.

However, the actual results of the Compact have fallen short of these expectations. In Jordan, the goal of issuing 200,000 work permits to Syrians was not reached until 2020. The country's bureaucratic maze and the lack of trust of many refugees in the Jordanian authorities are some of the reasons explaining why this process went more slowly than expected. Moreover, the Compact has not led to a significant development of SEZs, which by 2019 employed just 1,000 workers in total, only 291 of whom were Syrians. [START_REF] Lenner | Biting our Tongues': Policy Legacies and Memories in the Making of the Syrian Refugee Response in Jordan[END_REF] Last but not least, Syrians have been mostly employed in low-skilled jobs, which previously were usually fulfilled by Egyptian, Sudanese and Southeast Asian labour migrants. In 2020, the Jordanian authorities launched a campaign to tighten controls on work permits for labour migrants and to remove those found to be illegal workers, mainly Egyptians. [START_REF] Tsourapas | The Jordan Compact[END_REF] In Lebanon, the Compact was from the outset a "statement of intent" rather than an actionable policy option. [START_REF] Fakhoury | Governance Strategies and Refugee Response: Lebanon in the Face of the Syrian Displacement[END_REF] Following a pragmatic approach, it did not include binding or conditional measures, but instead consisted of a set of weakly formalised measures, such as a pledge to create 300,000 new jobs in Lebanon, of which 60% would be allocated to Syrians. Moreover, the EU expected the Compact to result in the (partial) lifting of the complex and costly registration procedures for Syrians and to help extend access to education for Syrian children. However, the Compact merely led to the removal of the residency fees imposed on Syrians, while at the same time the Lebanese government embarked on a campaign against "foreign labour" and kept calling for the repatriation ("voluntary return") of Syrian refugees. In hindsight, the stated objectives of the Lebanese Compact appear unrealistic indeed, and Lebanon's economic, financial and political crisis poses a dilemma for donors, as supporting bottom-up initiatives and stabilisation efforts may be more effective but means circumventing the Lebanese [START_REF] Geha | People before Politicians: How Europeans Can Help Rebuild Lebanon[END_REF] Rather than a robust policy framework for migration cooperation, the Compact consisted in a political arrangement lacking long-term common interests between the parties.

Policy Implications and Recommendations

The Syrian refugee crisis has led to a hardening of political attitudes and government policy regarding the European objective of migration containment, as evidenced by a recent statement by the EU Ministers of Home Affairs: in the wake of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, they agreed to "act jointly to prevent the recurrence of uncontrolled large-scale illegal migration movements faced in the past." [START_REF]Statement on the Situation in Afghanistan[END_REF] Although, as part of its response to the Syrian refugee crisis, the EU has developed countless political and policy initiatives with Middle Eastern countries since 2015 and has funded humanitarian and development projects on an unprecedented scale, the results have been rather disappointing. If we look at the stated objective of turning the Syrian crisis into an economic opportunity for both refugees and host communities, the fact is that the EU has barely managed to keep the Syrian refugee population out of extreme poverty. And this is before we consider the dramatic impact of the Lebanese economic crisis and of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has yet to be fully assessed. Furthermore, the EU has remained firmly committed to the objective of migration containment, and this stance has not only led to the blatant instrumentalisation of refugees and migrants for political means, but also, and rather paradoxically, has strengthened the negotiating position of refugee-hosting countries, which have successfully resisted EU demands for the adoption of policy reforms to promote refugee rights and integration. So far, migration and asylum policies across the region, including in Turkey, have remained characterised by ambivalence and temporariness. In light of these concluding remarks, this brief calls for the creation and implementation of migration cooperation frameworks that do not define migration containment as the primary objective and that genuinely take into account the political, social and economic challenges faced by refugee-hosting countries in the Global South.

Research Parameters

This policy brief is based on research conducted as part of the Horizon2020 project "Migration Governance and Asylum Crises" (MAGYC, grant agreement number 822806) for the Work Package (WP) no. "External dimensions of the crisis," led by Sciences Po (Paris, France). This WP seeks to understand how the EU's externalisation policy intersects with intra-regional dynamics in the Middle East and Africa. Research conducted under this WP pays particular attention to local and intra-regional political dynamics in non-EU countries, including inter-state and non-state relations, formal and informal dynamics, and the role of international organisations operating locally. This WP examines the following issues: how policies deployed at the border and beyond the borders of the EU have an impact on mobility across different regions; how EU and international governance mechanisms intersect with local, national, regional and transnational dynamics; and how these mechanisms shape the interests and policies of target states, both in terms of migration diplomacy and domestic politics. The originality of this WP is that, drawing on the expertise of scholars of non-EU countries and partner research institutions in Middle Eastern and African countries, it looks at externalisation practices and policies from the perspective of non-EU countries.

As part of this WP, Task #3 "Crisis spillover and governance feedback: migration diplomacy and domestic politics in the Middle East" explores the recent rise of European migration cooperation with Middle Eastern countries in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. While several reports and the grey literature have emphasised the role of hospitable neighbouring countries (especially Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon), which have taken in millions of Syrians, the research conducted under this Task aims to re-politicise the policies of asylum and labour migration in the sub-region. It looks at a variety of scaleslocal, regional, internationaland revolves around processes related to EU regional initiatives, such as the Khartoum Process, the Jordan and Lebanon Compacts, and the EU-Turkey Statement. This policy brief draws on the concept of "migration diplomacy," which recent Migration Studies and International Relations scholarship has proposed to describe the ways in which migration and asylum have been used "as" diplomacy, and the manner in which states rely on diplomatic tools, processes and procedures to manage cross-border population movements. 41 By placing power relations and classic diplomatic concerns front and centre in the study of the international politics of migration, and by moving away from Western-centric scholarship in foreign policy and diplomacy as well as in Migration Studies, this concept has contributed to a better appreciation of the interplay between foreign policy and mobility. Given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the fieldwork originally planned for this study, this brief is based on an extensive desk review and the author's long research experience in the region.

6

  Gerasimos Tsourapas, "Labor Migrants as Political Leverage: Migration Interdependence and Coercion in the Mediterranean," International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2018): 383-395; Hélène Thiollet, "Migration as Diplomacy: Labor Migrants, Refugees, and Arab Regional Politics in the Oil-Rich Countries," International Labor and Working-Class History 79, no. 1 (2011): 103-121.

7

For a definition of externalisation, see Sandra Lavenex and Frank Schimmelfennig, "EU Rules beyond EU Borders: Theorizing External Governance in European Politics," Journal of European Public Policy 16, no. 6 (2009): 791-812. 8 Fiona B. Adamson and Gerasimos Tsourapas, "Migration Diplomacy in World Politics," International Studies Perspectives 20, no. 2 (2019): 113-128.

  /www.magyc.uliege.be/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/D2.6-v2August2020.pdf; Christiane Fröhlich and André Bank, Forced Migration Governance in Jordan and Lebanon: Lessons from Two EU Compacts, MAGYC, Policy Brief D4.8 (2021), https://www.magyc.uliege.be/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/D4.8-v1April2021.pdf.

	,	The	Jordan	Compact,	MAGYC,	Deliverable	D2.4	(2020),
	https:/

17

Genç, Heck and Hess, "The Multilayered Migration Regime in Turkey"; Mencutek, Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East.

  Tsouparas, The Jordan Compact; Alexander Betts, Ali Ali and Fulya Memişoğlu, Local Politics and the Syrian Refugee Crisis: Exploring Responses in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan (Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre, 2017); Lewis Turner, "Explaining the (Non-)Encampment of Syrian Refugees: Security, Class and the Labour Market in Lebanon and Jordan," Mediterranean Politics 20, no. 3 (2015): 386-404. 19 John T. Chalcraft, The Invisible Cage: Syrian Migrant Workers in Lebanon (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

  Stel, Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty; Romola Sanyal, "Managing through ad hoc Measures: Syrian Refugees and the Politics of Waiting in Lebanon," Political Geography, no. 66 (2018): 67-75; Maja Janmyr, "Precarity in Exile: The Legal Status of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon," Refugee Survey Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2016): 58-78; Tamirace Fakhoury, Refugee Governance in Crisis: The Case of the EU-Lebanon Compact, MAGYC, Deliverable D2.3 (2020), https://www.magyc.uliege.be/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/D2.3-v1December2020.pdf.

25

See https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/fr/data/database.

  33 Fröhlich and Bank, Forced Migration Governance in Jordan and Lebanon; Lorenza Errighi and Jörn Griesse, The Syrian Refugee Crisis: Labour Market Implications in Jordan and Lebanon (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2016).34 Peter Seeberg and Federica Zardo, "From Mobility Partnerships to Migration Compacts: Security Implications of EU-Jordan Relations and the Informalization of Migration Governance," Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1851465.35 Fröhlich and Bank, Forced Migration Governance in Jordan and Lebanon; Betts, Ali and Memişoğlu, Local Politics and the Syrian Refugee Crisis.

This policy brief has been reviewed by Christiane J. Fröhlich (GIGA Hamburg) and Gerasimos Tsourapas (University of Glasgow) as part of MAGYC's internal review process.

United Nations, Impact of COVID-19 on Migrants and Refugees in the Arab Region, Technical Paper E/ESCWA/CL2.GPID/2020/TP.16 (Beirut: ESCWA, 2020).

FUNDING SCHEME

This project has received funding from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (2014-2020), Societal Challenge 6 -Europe in a changing world: inclusive, innovative and reflective societies", call MIGRATION-02-2018 -Towards forward-looking migration governance: addressing the challenges, assessing capacities and designing future strategies.

PROJECT NAME

MAGYC -Migration Governance and AsYlum Crises

COORDINATOR

The Hugo Observatory (Université de Liège), Liège, Belgium. hugo.observatory@uliege.be Project Identity

CONSORTIUM