Annette Quinn

Author: Annette Quinn | Majors: International Studies and French | Semester: Spring 2023

My name is Annette Quinn and I just finished my senior year in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, where I majored in International Studies and French and minored in Arabic. This past year, I worked with Dr. Jared Phillips from the International Studies Department on my honors thesis research. Now that I have graduated, I plan to take a gap year prior to attending graduate school to obtain a master’s degree. During this gap year, I will participate in the Teaching Assistant Program in France and serve as an English teaching assistant for primary school students in the Aix-Marseille region of France.

My honors thesis research explores how the European Union’s policy of migration externalization enables countries outside of the EU to weaponize migration against them, focusing on how both externalization policies and weaponized migration lead to human rights violations of migrants. Significant research has been conducted on the EU’s externalization policies, which are policies that prevent migrants from reaching EU territory or claiming asylum by outsourcing migration control to third countries, or countries outside of the EU. These policies are meant to reduce the number of migrants that reach the EU and reduce the EU’s responsibility to migrants. However, my research expands on this literature by diving into how externalization enables third countries to weaponize migration against the EU through a tactic called “coercive engineered migration”. The control over migrants that third countries receive due to their partnerships with the EU, combined with the accumulation of migrants at the border of the EU, give third countries the power to direct migration flows to the EU during political and economic disputes in order to gain concessions from the EU. My research concludes that externalization policies and coercive engineered migration both lead to violations of the human rights of migrants, particularly the rights under Articles 5 and 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and offers recommendations on how the EU can reduce the threat of coercive engineered migration and prioritize the human rights of migrants.

I stumbled upon my thesis topic completely by chance through a singular news article that I found while researching migration through North Africa. This article documented a mass influx of migrants that crossed the border from Morocco to Spain in 2021, marking the largest single influx of migrants in Spain’s history. However, this event was no accident; it was engineered by Morocco, who opened up the border, to threaten Spain during a political dispute. This news article sparked my interest in how migration can be weaponized at the expense of migrants themselves, as several migrants died and dozens were beaten by Spanish border guards during the influx of migrants.

During the Spring 2022 semester, Dr. Jared Phillips from the International and Global Studies department graciously agreed to be my thesis mentor. While he was not an expert on my specific topic, he was an expert on human rights, which my research heavily focused on, and was able to provide me with guidance on how to write a research paper with a rights-based focus. I began my research the same semester while I studied abroad in Geneva, Switzerland with the SIT International Studies and Multilateral Diplomacy program, which required a research project. This program gave me access to many migration experts in the diplomatic center of Geneva, which helped me form a base of knowledge on EU externalization policies and their connection to human rights. Simultaneously, I followed an important international event unfolding in Europe in which Belarus recruited migrants to send to the border of the EU due to disputes over sanctions, which bore distinct similarities to the way that Morocco had weaponized migration.

Upon returning to the U.S., I truly began putting together the pieces of my research by connecting externalization policies and coercive engineered migration. However, this proved more difficult than I originally anticipated and I found it difficult to map out the progression of my research. It was especially difficult to find my niche considering that this field was being flooded with new research and information due to increased interest in weaponized migration after the highly-publicized event in Belarus, which showed me how many paths my project could take. However, I eventually found my path through remembering what inspired me to take on this project: the mass migration from Morocco, and all the migrants affected by it. Rather than taking a highly geopolitical perspective on EU migration, as many new sources were doing, I chose to focus on the migrants themselves and how their human rights were affected, with the help of Dr. Phillips’ expertise on human rights. I also included the events in Morocco and Belarus as case studies, which helped guide my research as I analyzed news articles to connect these events to their effects on the migrants involved.

I worked on my honors thesis throughout my senior year of college and finally defended my research in April 2023. Thankfully, I passed my defense and graduated Magna Cum Laude. I plan to take a gap year as an English Teaching Assistant in France during the following year before attending graduate school to obtain my master’s. While I am unsure if I will continue this research in graduate school, it has greatly increased my knowledge of migration policy and international events, which will aid me in the future as I hope to continue working with the issue of migration.