The external dimension of EU migration policy as region-building? Refugee cooperation as contentious politics

The EU has drawn on its migration policy in the Middle East and North Africa as a method of region-building set to reconfigure a broader EU Mediterranean Neighborhood. At the same time, EU migration policy as a region-building initiative has had contentious, albeit understudied, effects. We know little about either variation in states’ responses to the EU or the contextual dynamics and motives pushing them to challenge EU migration policy as a vector for regulating regions ‘from beyond’. Building on the case of displacement from Syria, the article targets the EU’s refugee approach in its ‘neighborhood’ as a site of contention whereby states, rather than being policy borrowers, dispute the EU’s attempt to regulate regions. The article employs insights from EU refugee cooperation with Lebanon, one of the key regional host states. It shows how Lebanon has sought to contest and adapt the EU’s script of resilience-building, which consists of strengthening governments’ capacity to host refugees ‘within the region’ and at a distance. Looking at EU neighbors as policy agents rather than vessels helps to unravel the tensions underlying the external, regional, and bilateral dimensions of EU migration policy and delineate how these overlapping dimensions play out on the ground.