No. 7 (2022): Juillet 2022 (édition spéciale)
Editorial : Between Borders and Territories: Situations of Vulnerability and Vulnerable Groups
In the context of the international conference Time of Territories, held on the occasion of the 10 years of the research team, the EDEM launched a call for papers addressed mainly to PhD students.
As we have received a great number of proposals, we were able to organize two Young Researchers' Workshops. The workshop format resulted in rich exchanges among peers and senior academics on the broad topic of Law and Migration. For many of the researchers we have hosted in Louvain-la-Neuve, this was the first chance to meet in person.
We have now invited the Workshop participants to contribute to two consecutive Special Issues of the Cahiers de l’EDEM. In thanking all the contributors, we hope that this was a valuable opportunity to further develop their own’s research skills and nourish their respective research projects. We also thank the members of EDEM who supported us during the Workshops and during the coordination of this Special Issue.
Unlike our usual Cahiers de l’EDEM, most of these contributions present ongoing research, mainly drawn upon PhD research projects. This Special Issue is dedicated to the topic of vulnerability, as several EDEM members are part of the Horizon 2020 VULNER project*, which aims at investigating how the law assesses, addresses, shapes, and produces the vulnerabilities of protection seekers**.
Vulnerability is a concept that has been used in the context of migration and refugee protection especially through soft law instruments and Acts of international organizations. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the growing references to the concept and the spread of the language of vulnerability in the field of migration and refugee protection since the end of the 20th century, there is still a lack of clear understanding of its concrete meaning, practical consequences and legal implications. A thorough and non-stereotyped understanding of this concept is necessary given that every protection seeker is vulnerable to some extent in light of the entire migratory context (including the situation in the country of origin, along the migratory road and in the country of destination), their resources and the intersecting social identities. VULNER aims to address this gap through a socio-legal research with the objective of examining the use and of vulnerability in hard and soft legal sources, its implementation by decision-makers as well as the ways vulnerability is experienced by protection seekers. It provides scientific data on the content of vulnerability, its legal interpretation as well as its strategic use and practical experiences in order to prevent, as far as possible, a stereotyped understanding and implementation of this concept.
The five contributions of this special issue focus on a wide variety of legal topics in which the concept of vulnerability and the “categories” of people considered as vulnerable play a role. This special issue starts with a broad philosophical reflection on the role of legal categories and their consequences in migration law. In this account, categorization appears as a technique of control that tends to make individuals vulnerable (Maria Gkegka). This Special Issue then looks at an illustration of situations of increased vulnerability at the EU external borders where the special needs of vulnerable groups are often neglected (Cécile Pierson). Victims of human trafficking are considered as one of the most vulnerable groups as well as one of the hardest to detect. In this perspective, one of the contributions in this edition stresses the importance of an EU-wide common victim identification system (Georgina Rodríguez Muñoz). Among those vulnerable groups of people, vulnerability can also raise problems of selectivity. This Special Issue addresses this challenge through refugee resettlement practices and criteria (Tano Kassim Acka). Last but not least, this Special Issue ends with a criminological analysis of the preventive and punitive measures which aim to criminalise acts of solidarity toward specific vulnerable migrants, namely, those in irregular situations (Mathilde du Jardin).
Underlying that the contributions hosted in this Special Issue are part of ongoing research projects, we hope that they will foster further exchanges and contacts among researchers. In the meantime, our team hopes that these contributions will be of further interest to you, at the crossroads of themes dear to all those interested in the rights of people who often have the least, and more generally, to human rights supporters.
Comments and feedback are more than welcome.
On behalf of the EDEM,
Zoé CRINE, Eleonora FRASCA and Francesca RAIMONDO
*The project, headed by Dr. Luc Leboeuf from the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, brings together partners from various research institutions, both within and outside Europe, and focuses on the following case studies: Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, South Africa and Uganda.
** In line with the conceptual framework of the VULNER project, the designation “protection seekers” is adopted with the objective of including the migrants seeking protection, but who do not necessarily fall under the definition and requirements to apply for international protection.
