On 11 September 2025, the ESIL Interest Group on Migration and Refugee Law hosted a Workshop on “De/Re-Constructing Asylum: New Actors, Processes and Spaces” as part of the 20th Annual Conference of the European Society of International Law (#ESIL2025), 10-13 September 2025, Freie Universität Berlin. The Workshop was organised in partnership with two research projects: REF-FIN and CoSME. REF-FIN (Refugee Finance: Histories, Frameworks, Practices) is an ERC-funded project based at Lund University and led by Daria Davitti, which focuses on the link between complementary pathways and refugee entrepreneurship and charters innovative instruments of refugee finance that replace aid funding. CoSME (Community Sponsorship for Migrants in Europe) is an Italian Ministry of University and Research funded Research Project of National Interest, led by Daniela Vitiello at the University of Tuscia (Viterbo), which investigates the design and standard setting of community sponsorship schemes and looks at the main features of a European model.
Giulia Raimondo (University of Fribourg) opened the Workshop with introductory remarks, setting the scene for the three subsequent panels on Spaces, Processes and Actors.
The first panel, chaired by Daria Davitti, featured the presentations by Andrea Maria Pelliconi (University of Southampton), Ayşe Dicle Ergin (Bilkent Üniversitesi) and Ibtissam Ghaich (Mohammed V University of Rabat). These presentations focused on externalisation policies and practices, highlighting how externalisation shifts the legal and spatial boundaries of international law, rendering key and well-established legal features of international protection meaningless.
The second panel, chaired by Daniela Vitiello, hosted the reflections by Runar Hilleren Lie (University of Oslo), Zvezda Vankova (Lund University) and Lucía Álvarez Albarenga (Universidad de Vigo). They first addressed the use of international law in national asylum adjudication and then provided additional insights into the deconstruction of processes for acquiring rights through the normalisation of the state of exception in migration and asylum policies.
The third panel, chaired by Marco Borraccetti (University of Bologna) examined the pursuit of scaling up complementary pathways and community sponsorship in the context of this restrictive trend. It gathered the analyses by Marilù Porchia (University of Tuscia) and Sara Arapiles (Lund University) shedding light on the role of new protection actors in the transformative processes affecting international refugee law.
Sissy Katsoni (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) concluded the workshop by summarising the key findings of the panels. The IG co-conveners would like to thank all the panellists and participants for their engagement and thought-provoking contributions.
The link to the video recordings are available below:
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Video 1: LINK
Video 2: LINK
The European Society of International Law (ESIL) Interest Group on Migration and Refugee Law (MigRefLaw), in collaboration with REF-FIN (Refugee Finance: Histories, Frameworks, Practices) and CoSME (Community Sponsorship for Migrants in Europe), is organising a pre-conference workshop on 11 September 2025 in Berlin as a side event to the ESIL Annual Conference.
The workshop will examine the evolving frameworks of asylum in light of emerging actors, processes, and spaces. As international protection undergoes significant transformations due to externalised migration governance, digital technologies, private sponsorship, and non-state actors, the workshop will explore how these changes affect the legal and practical dimensions of asylum. Key themes include the role of financial institutions, private actors, and local communities in asylum systems, as well as legal voids, extraterritorial border policies, and offshore processing.
A Call for Papers has been issued for contributions addressing topics such as:
- The impact of legal changes since the UN Global Compacts on Migrants and Refugees;
- The role of private and humanitarian actors in asylum governance;
- The effects of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum on protection frameworks;
- The increasing reliance on informal legal instruments in migration governance;
- Automated decision-making and legal fictions in asylum procedures;
- The role of community sponsorship in facilitating refugee access and integration.
Scholars and practitioners interested in contributing are invited to submit abstracts (max. 300 words) by 11 April 2025 to the IG conveners at migreflaw@gmail.com. Selected participants will be notified by 24 April 2025. Extended abstracts (3000–3500 words) will be due by 31 July 2025.
All workshop participants must register for the ESIL Annual Conference. Some ESIL travel and carers’ grants are available to support participation. Further details on registration and funding opportunities can be found on the ESIL website.
It is now available on the ESIL website here. All the calls for papers for IG workshops at the 2025 ESIL Annual Conference in Berlin are published on this webpage.
CoSME 2025 - Sito creato e sviluppato da Matteo Arrotta