Tamirace Fakhoury, Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts

While much literature focuses on externalisation policies, less is known about externalisation as an embodied engagement with everyday policy landscapes, and with the quotidian lives of local organizations and societies. I introduce the concept of ‘afterlife’ to examine how externalisation changes discursively, perceptually, and materially as it intertwines with a variety of lived experiences and policy narratives. My case study is the EU’s external refugee policy in Syria’s neighbouring countries or the so-called proximate geographies that EU-funded actions have focused on. Illustrative scenarios that define the ‘afterlife’ of externalisation are policy distortion, the enactment of non-responsibility over refugee lives, aid fatigue, and erosion of trust in the humanitarian order. Further empirical research could study externalisation as part of both an embodied and dynamic reality, where multiple, concurrent policy and human stories reconfigure responsibility, authority, and power.

This working paper moves past the analytical focus on externalisation to consider the ‘afterlife’ of externalisation, or the transformation of externalisation as a policy dynamic after it ‘exits’ the realm of EU policymaking. Externalisation refers to a set of policies aimed at managing migration beyond the territory of the governing entity.[1] I use the expression ‘afterlife’ as a metaphor to capture the transformation of these policies as they mesh with new geopolitical and policy milieus.  Building on the case of mass displacement after the Syrian war in 2011, I look at the EU’s external refugee policy in Syria’s neighbouring countries also known as the EU’s proximate geographies.[2]

Instead of zooming in on the EU as the external perceiver of these borderlands, I borrow from a “dwelling perspective”[3] that looks at the complex interweaving of policy cycles, societies and human geographies. I examine how various discourses, policies, and practices shape the landscapes they inhabit, and how these landscapes, in turn, influence these engagements.[4] In this context, I conceptualise the EU’s so-called Southern Neighbourhood[5] as a set of “temporal landscapes” encompassing multiple orders with time-related, legal, policy, and organizational features.[6] Beyond the external gaze of the viewer, these landscapes tell an ongoing story.[7]  With this backdrop in mind, I look at how externalisation is enacted, embodied, and practiced in such “temporal landscapes”: Actors – framed as recipients of policy scripts and funding – give meaning, transcribe, and recraft the EU’s externalisation project and transform its dynamic.

Reacting to mass displacement from Syria, the EU has put in place a refugee governance order in Syria’s neighbouring countries. Guided by the concept of resilience-building, this order enshrines a dual governance rationality: help governments and societies absorb shocks while enabling the EU to curb “unwanted” migration and reduce pressures on its borders.  Here, I advance a two-fold argument. First, policymakers have transformed the EU’s externalisation project. Concurrently, the latter has intermeshed with grassroots organizations’ daily work and lived practices. Local actors frame it as part of a broader governmentality that leads on the ground to fatigue, and to the erosion of trust in the international refugee regime.

The paper draws its findings from some of my earlier research,[8] and from two research projects that focus on humanitarianism and refugee responsibility sharing since the onset of Syrian displacement.[9] It is grounded in a multi-level conceptual approach that integrates literature on externalisation,[10] resiliency humanitarianism,[11] and refugee governance as a site of contestation and leverage.[12] Additionally, it draws on work that examines geographies as a simultaneity of presences, timescales, and realities. [13]

The first section provides a brief overview of the EU’s external refugee governance project in its so-called ‘Southern Neighbourhood’. The second section examines examples demonstrating how first-host governments have internalised and altered the EU’s externalisation project. It also explores how externalisation meshes with local organisations’ perceptual, material, and everyday realities. In doing so, the paper delineates illustrative scenarios that define the ‘afterlife’ of externalisation: policy distortion through contestation and dismissal, the enactment of non-responsibility over refugee lives, aid fatigue, and erosion of trust in the humanitarian order. The EU’s ‘borderscapes’ are no policy vessels that the EU designs from a distant perspective. I position them as what Doreen Massey calls ‘a simultaneity of stories-so-far’.[14]

Externalising refuge: Anchoring governance in resiliency humanitarianism

Externalising refuge has spurred heated debates (See this compendium). Generally, externalisation entails the deployment of various measures beyond states’ territory to deter the arrival of asylum seekers. At the same time, externalisation is a polysemous concept which involves various policy stages, instruments and models. States have externalised migration through sophisticated ways that range from non-entrée measures to entering agreements with third states that process asylum on their territory. Externalisation, as a politics of deterrence, enshrines what David Fitzgerald frames as the “the architecture of repulsion.”[15] It may however take on subtler policy pathways such as foregrounding refugee governance in resiliency humanitarianism.[16] In so doing, states and organisations “outsource policies of non-departure”[17] by negotiating cooperation agreements that delegate refugee governance to first host countries. Sandra Lavenex frames this policy model as “the latest stage of refugee externalisation policies”. The policy model involves keeping potential asylum seekers “in their region of origin, in so-called countries of first asylum, or within ‘safe zones’ in their home country”. [18]

As underscored, the paper is particularly interested in externalisation as outsourcing non-departure to refugees’ region of origin. Yet it is important to highlight that providing aid and capacity building to initial asylum host countries does not necessarily equate to externalisation. However, it transforms into a mechanism of externalisation in this case if it is deployed in the following context: Firstly, when the assistance to countries serving as a first place of sanctuary coincides with restrictions on asylum within the EU, and secondly, when it is part of a wider power strategy aimed at evading and sidestepping refugee responsibility-sharing.[19]

In this context, understanding externalisation as the politics of “outsourcing non-departure” requires an insight into how actors broaden, dilute and recalibrate the scope of authority, territory and responsibility. It also requires an understanding of how capacity-builders draw on discourses such as resilience to shift responsibility from the ‘intervener’ who provides funds to the ‘intervened upon’ who receives the funds. Funding actors place refugee-related interventions in a de-territorialized and discursive policy space that various humanitarian and development actors navigate. At the same time, this policy space blurs how territory interlaces with rights and responsibility. On the one hand, funding actors use governance logics based on discourses of self-reliance and stabilisation. On the other, they may distance themselves from the territorial responsibility of hosting refugees. Such governance logics shift focus to governments and civil society actors in refugees’ “regions of origin” as core service providers and sites of authority. Through localisation rhetoric, they aim to ‘empower’ aid beneficiaries, but this often obscures the very meanings of governance.[20] As our interviews reveal, localisation may shift the burden onto local actors without adequate support.[21]

The EU’s externalisation project in its ‘borderlands’: The gaze of the external viewer

The EU’s and its member states’ handling of the so-called 2015-2016 refugee crisis is by now a classic example of externalisation as “containment”[22]. Understanding this move however requires an insight into how the EU has shaped neighbouring geographies through a spectrum of policy tools. Raffaella del Sarto looks at the European Union as “an empire” that strives to “export its order beyond the border” while extracting advantages from it.[23]  Policies juxtaposing trade, migration and security are illustrative of this “imperial borderlands framework.”[24] A parallel lens lies in understanding external migration policymaking as “region-building”, creating spaces of inclusion and exclusion.[25] Here, critical geopolitics provides a relevant framework for understanding how actors territorialize politics through various material and immaterial ways. They do so by enshrining bordering and discursive practices that differentiate between the core and the periphery, the archaic from the modern, and the insider versus the ‘other’ etc. Non-entrée, border and containment measures define this architecture of migration control as region-building. Yet, this is only part of the story. The EU shapes its Mediterranean borderlands by diffusing policy scripts linking migration policies with incentives like visa liberalisation, preferential trade agreements, development and border management aid etc. Recent examples are the migration aid packages negotiated with Mauritania, Egypt, and Lebanon in 2024. These packages aim to help communities deal with manifold social and economic challenges while building the capacity of countries to monitor their borders, equipping them with tools to intercept individuals on the move.

The EU has been a significant donor since the Syrian war began in 2011, providing aid to both refugees and host communities in the region.  Through its external policies, it has coupled external refugee governance with the politics of regional resilience-building. As I argue in one of my papers,[26] this politics envisions solutions to refugees as close as possible to countries of origin. Examples are improved access to legal residency, education and to the labour market. This politics also aims at stabilising countries hosting refugees by offering support facilities. As underscored, it connects cooperation on migration with development aid and the enhancement of border management capacities, among other measures.  The 2016 EU-Jordan Compact calls for the creation of jobs for Syrian refugees in exchange for preferential trade agreements. The 2016 EU-Lebanon Compact sets out to facilitate the temporary stay of Syrian refugees and their access to certain jobs in agriculture and in the environment in exchange for development aid and deepened cooperation.  Such compacts need to be read in a broader historical context. The external dimension of the EU’s refugee policy builds on an assemblage of transregional and bilateral frameworks. EU external policy in the Middle East has been defined through the 1995 multilateral Barcelona Process with formalises cooperation around trade, democracy assistance, migration and security. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) enshrines bilateral cooperation between the EU and its Southern neighbours as a key vector for expanding its ‘governance’ project.

Neighbourhood policies, Single Support Frameworks, multi-annual programmes, and bilateral deals provide a myriad of possibilities for the EU to disseminate discursive and behavioural ways of doing things. In doing so, the EU sustains a policy imaginary based on a logic that places the funder above the funding recipient, prompting the latter to step up to the task of governance. However, as this policy imaginary travels, it does not remain unchanged; it clashes with the political and historical legacies of the so-called fund receivers. The latter recraft EU policies through various tactics: criticising the EU’s ‘neocolonial’ power, stalling on negotiations, outright dismissal or non-compliance with agreements. Consequently, the EU’s outsourced policies of non-departure take a life of their own. Policies of externalisation are not only reinterpreted by neighbouring governments, but they also intertwine with the realities of refugees and the diverse forms of precarity that mark their daily existence. As shown below, they moreover mesh with the daily work of local organizations who need funding to carry out their work.

In this context, research has increasingly focused on the tangible impacts of EU policy externalisation. By promoting refugee resilience where refugees are whilst non-engaging with the negative push factors coercing refugees into returns or uncertain journeys, the EU obscures responsibility over the ways its funding instruments interact with precarity.[27] Ahlam Chemlali suggests the concept of “felt externalisation” to describe the influence of externalisation on the lived experiences of people and on the environment where externalisation policies take root.[28] In the following section, I will present some illustrative examples of how governments and local organizations have redefined the EU’s externalisation project.

How the EU’s externalisation project is redefined, practiced and embodied

Scenarios of policy dissonance and distortion

In July 2019, the Turkish government declared that it was suspending the ‘EU-Turkey deal’ concluded in 2016. This action was in response to the so-called EU sanctions on Turkey’s gas drilling operations in Cypriot waters. According to EURACTIV’s partner Euroefe, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu stated that suspending the agreement was not solely due to the recent sanctions. The decision was also influenced by the EU’s failure to introduce the visa-free regime for Turkish citizens that had been agreed upon.[29] Following the adoption of the EU-Lebanon Compact in 2016, the Lebanese government criticized the agreement, accusing the EU of overstepping on Lebanon’s sovereignty and interfering with its control over labour laws.[30] Such statements and actions are commonplace practices. By now, it is well established that first host states, which are EU partner countries too, have buttressed their capacity to take advantage of the EU’s project of ‘outsourcing non-departure’.[31] They exploit refugee funding instruments to push for their own interests such as lobbying for more aid or reducing their debts.[32] They also alter the policy tools negotiated with the EU. In my earlier work, [33] I identified two modes of contestation: rhetorical dissent (such as political elites contesting discursively the EU’s policy frames) or contestation on the ground, via non-application, selective implementation or dismissal of agreed upon instruments. These modes of contestation build on each other. Governments exploit policy dissonance on the issue of refugees between them and EU member states as an entry point to extract gains and, subsequently, twist – either through covert or overt ways– the application and meaning of agreements.

The recent 2024 EU-Lebanon migration package is a case in point. On 17-18 April 2024, the Special Meeting of the European Council confirmed the EU’s determination to support “the most vulnerable people in Lebanon, including refugees, internally displaced persons, and host communities” in addition to providing support to Lebanon’s army and curbing trafficking and smuggling. [34] The European Council also reiterated the objective of ensuring “conditions for safe, voluntary, and dignified returns of Syrian refugees, as defined by UNHCR”.  While the EU has declared that it would like to achieve conditions for returns in safety and dignity, certain Lebanese government officials have interpreted the aid package as an indication that the EU will no longer advocate for refugees to remain in Lebanon. Fending off criticism that the aid would encourage Syrians to stay, Lebanon’s Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati declared: “We have made it a condition to the European Union that the aid not be granted to Syrians in Lebanon, but that it be an incentive for their return to their country.” He continued that “We no longer hear from the EU that refugees must stay in Lebanon.”[35]

Refugee rentierism represents a powerful framework to understand the complex logics of leverage and contestation that refugee-hosting states deploy in their interactions with the international community. [36] A parallel approach consists in decrypting the complex governance motives underlying the EU’s neighbouring countries’ actions. Examples of governments distorting EU policies illuminate the EU’s external migration agenda as an arena of competing struggles.[37]  Simultaneously, they reveal how states strive to localise, renegotiate, and disrupt governance as an uneven playing field due to diverse factors: whether to advance their interests, challenge established power imbalances, or because they view certain ways of doing things as incompatible with their contexts.[38]

Funding fatigue and the erosion of trust

A growing body of research has looked at how governments internalise EU policy tools. Yet how do grassroots organizations and civil society actors reformulate externalisation and localise its effects, and how do EU external policies mesh with their daily work?

Our interviews with researchers, local organizations, and practitioners in Middle Eastern countries like Jordan and Lebanon revealed that outsourcing non-departure policies amid weak responsibility-sharing has complex consequences. These external policies, perceived as transactional and mixing with local endemic challenges, induce fatigue with the logic of aid, and intensify mistrust in the rationale behind funding.[39]

Illustratively, some our discussions with researchers and practitioners in Jordan and Lebanon point to a diminishing trust and a growing scepticism towards external humanitarian aid. Mistrust, according to them, can be measured through various ways: by monitoring broken and stalled promises of sustainable aid, tracking temporary aid packages, and documenting disengagement from the roots of dispossession that spur refugees to become doubly or triply displaced in their lifetimes.[40]

In Lebanon, some refugee-focused organisations report ‘burnout’. They find themselves caught between two logics that impact the management and daily execution of their projects aimed at enhancing protection and rights. On one side, they face recalcitrant government officials that reappropriate EU financing instruments to push for their own interests. On the other hand, they recognise that, in the light of dwindling refugee resettlement numbers, “resilience” funding diverts attention from effective refugee solutions. Operating within these constraining structures depletes the energy they need to continue their daily tasks.  From another perspective, some organizations we interacted with are interested in documenting how EU funding meshes with daily scenes of intercepted boats between Cyprus and Lebanon.[41]  Indeed, amid Lebanon’s economic collapse and the deteriorating conditions that people have faced, the EU’s politics of securing resilience from afar meshes with daily stories of despair and precarity. While it promotes the narrative of resilience, the EU disengages from whether and, if so, how its instruments interact with partner governments’ policies or practically transform people’s lives. [42]

In Jordan, while the monarchy has been generally responsive to the EU’s approach, practitioners, researchers and journalists have voiced various critiques. [43] The EU-Jordan Compact, which allocates funding focused on Syrian displacement, has stirred tensions between Syrian refugees and other neglected communities, such as Egyptians and Palestinians. The issue extends beyond merely tracking the destination of financial flows; it involves how these interventions foster artificial policy terminologies, and labelling categories that are at odds with Jordan’s historical lexicon.[44] Firstly, the process of assigning eligibility for financial aid or work permits through external funding instruments conflicts with Jordan’s informal traditions of guesthood and hospitality. Secondly, it is at odds with Jordan’s role as a sanctuary that has historically welcomed diverse communities. [45]

Further research is needed to explore the interplay between EU policies on outsourcing non-departure and issues such as burnout, mistrust, and pervasive precarity. These preliminary findings underscore however the significance of understanding how externalisation policies take shape in practice, altering both their own lifecycle and that of local policies throughout the process.

Conclusion

To conclude, this paper foregrounds the importance of exploring the EU’s externalisation project as part of a wider entanglement: How this project is transformed as it travels beyond EU policy realms, and how it intertwines with a variety of lived experiences and policy narratives. While much literature focuses on externalisation, less is known about the latter as an embodied engagement with everyday policy landscapes, and with the quotidian lives of local organizations and societies.[46] I propose the concept of ‘afterlife’ to examine how externalisation interacts discursively, perceptually, and materially with the ‘temporal landscapes’ it endeavours to change. In so doing, I call for an empirical concept of externalisation that is useful to probing policy stories and people’s lived experiences.

The so-called policy borrowers and recipients of fund transform not only the meanings but also the embodiments of externalisation. As the cases of Lebanon and Turkey suggest, policymakers may draw on externalisation to further ‘internalise’ the approach to non-asylum or temporary asylum.  It is, however, not only about policy dissonance, reappropriation, and distortion. It is also about how actors on both sides of the Mediterranean enact non-responsibility over refugee lives. While the EU seeks to distance itself from territorial burden-sharing, some officials leverage the EU’s security approach to claim that they have surpassed the EU in their generosity. (Fakhoury 2020; 2022).

Against this background, it is crucial to account for how local organisations, who face the everyday task of building on-the-ground resilience, ‘take in’ the meanings and effects of externalisation. First, they grapple with governments’ strategic indifference on both shores of the Mediterranean. Second, as the EU’s external policies intermesh with ‘non-resilient’ realities, they sense aid fatigue and mistrust in the international humanitarian order. Exploring these situations provides a nuanced insight into the everyday work of grassroots actors as they navigate misalignment and disconnects between the local and the external. Further empirical research could study externalisation as part of an embodied relationship, where multiple, concurrent policy and human stories reconfigure responsibility, authority, and power.

Footnotes

[1] Jorrit J. Rijpma. (2017). “External Migration and Asylum Management: Accountability for Executive Action Outside EU-territory.” European Papers 2 (2): 571- 596 https://www.europeanpapers.eu/it/system/files/pdf_version/EP_eJ_2017_2_7_Article_Jorrit_J_Rijpma_00169.pdf.

[2] European Commission, “Southern Neighbourhood”, https://neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu/european-neighbourhood-policy/southern-neighbourhood_en

[3] A dwelling perspective accounts for unfolding temporalities and interactions as important features shaping our engagement with the world.  See Tim Ingold. (1993). “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25 (2): 152–74.  https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1993.9980235. In this working paper, I adapt this perspective to describe the ongoing human, material and discursive interactions that shape policies and their long-term impacts as they materialise on the ground.

[4] See Catherine Brace and Hilary Geoghegan. (2011). “Human Geographies of Climate Change: Landscape, Temporality, and Lay Knowledges.” Progress in Human Geography 35 (3): 284-302; Diana Krichker. (2019). “Making Sense of Borderscapes: Space, Imagination and Experience.” Geopolitics, 26 (4), 1224–1242. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2019.1683542; Monica Janowski, and Tim Ingold, eds. (2016). Imagining Landscapes: Past, Present and Future. London: Routledge.

[5] European Commission, “Southern Neighbourhood”.

[6] Reva Berman Brown. 2005. “Mapping the Temporal Landscape: The Case of University Business School Academics.” Management Learning, 36: 4, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507605058141

[7] Ingold, “Temporality of Landscape”. See also Stella Peisch. (2024). “South Lebanon: Time-Space Dynamics”. Rights for Time Working Paper, forthcoming.

[8] Tamirace Fakhoury. (2020). “Leverage and Contestation in Refugee Governance: Lebanon and Europe in the Context of Mass Displacement.” In Resisting Europe. Practices of contestation in the Mediterranean Middle East, edited by Raffaella Del Sarto and Simone Tholens, 142-163; Tamirace Fakhoury. (2022). “The External Dimension of EU Migration Policy as Region-Building? Refugee Cooperation as Contentious Politics.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48 (12): 2908-2926.

[9] The projects are “Investigating and Mobilising Peace and Trust for Sustainable Development via the UK’s International Rights for Time Research Network,” Arts and Humanities Research Council, Grant Ref: AH/W009676/1 (Investigators: Tamirace Fakhoury; Heather Flowe and Nora Parr), and “Responsibility-Sharing and the Global Compact on Refugees: Perceptions of Local Organizations in Lebanon”, Issam Fares Institute, American University of Beirut (Investigators: Tamirace Fakhoury and Watfa Najdi).

[10] Sandra Lavenex. (2022). “The Cat and Mouse Game of Refugee Externalisation Policies.” In Refugee Externalisation Policies: Responsibility, Legitimacy and Accountability, edited by Azadeh Dastyari, Amy Nethery, Asher Hirsch. London: Routledge, 27–44. See also Inka Stock Ayşen Üstübici, and Susanne U. Schultz. (2019). “Externalisation at Work: Responses to Migration Policies from the Global South.” Comparative Migration Studies 7: 1-9.

[11] Dorothea Hilhorst. (2018). “Classical Humanitarianism and Resilience Humanitarianism: Making Sense of Two brands of Humanitarian Action.” Journal of International Humanitarian Action 3 (1): 1-12.

[12] Tamirace Fakhoury. “Leverage and Contestation in Refugee Governance”; Gerasimos Tsourapas. (2021). “The Perils of Refugee Rentierism in the Post-2011 Middle East.” Digest of Middle East Studies 30, 4: 251-255.

[13] Brace and Geoghegan, “Human Geographies of Climate Change”; Janowski and Ingold, Imagining Landscapes.

[14] Doreen Massey (2005). For Space. London: Sage, quoted in Brace and Geoghegan, “Human Geographies of Climate Change”, p. 294.

[15] David Scott FitzGerald. (2020). “Remote Control of Migration: Theorising Territoriality, Shared Coercion, and Deterrence.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46 (1): 4-22.

[16] Fakhoury, “The External Dimension of EU Migration Policy as Region-Building?”

[17] Lavenex, “The Cat and Mouse Game of Refugee Externalisation Policies.”

[18] Ibid., p. 30.

[19]  Discussion with Madeline Garlick and Sandra Lavenex in a seminar organised by the Migration Policy Center at the European University Institute ‘The Effects of Refugee Policy Externalisation on Target Countries and International Institutions’, 2 June 2021.

[20] See Ana E. Juncos, A. E. (2016). Resilience as the new EU foreign policy paradigm: a pragmatist turn? European Security, 26(1), 1–18.

[21] Findings of the interviews, “Responsibility-Sharing and the Global Compact on Refugees.”

[22] Are John Knudsen, and Kjersti G. Berg eds. (2023). Continental Encampment: Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East and Europe. Berghahn Books. See also Dawn Chatty (2017). “The Syrian Humanitarian Disaster: Understanding Perceptions and Aspirations in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.” Global Policy 8: 25-32.

 [23] Raffaella A Del Sarto. (2021).  Borderlands: Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East. Oxford University Press.

[24] Kelsey P. Norman. (2024). “Borderlands: Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East by Raffaella A. Del Sarto,” Political Science Quarterly 139 (1): 155–157.

[25] Alun Jones and Julian Clark (2008). “Europeanisation and Discourse Building: The European Commission, European Narratives and European Neighbourhood Policy,” Geopolitics, 13 (3): 545-571.

[26] Fakhoury, “The External Dimension of EU Migration Policy as Region-Building?”

[27] Tamirace Fakhoury and Nora Stel. (2023). “EU Engagement with Contested Refugee Returns in Lebanon: The Aftermath of Resilience.” Geopolitics, 28 (3): 1007–1032.

[28] Ahlam Chemlali. (2024). “Rings in the Water: Felt Externalisation and its Rippling Effect in the Extended EU Borderlands.” Geopolitics 29 (3): 873-896.

[29] See Euractiv. 2019. “Turkey Suspends Deal with the EU on Migrant Readmission – Euractiv, https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/turkey-suspends-deal-with-the-eu-on-migrant-readmission/

[30] Sandra Lavenex, and Tamirace Fakhoury. (2021). “Trade Agreements as a Venue for EU Migration Governance.” DELMI Migration Studies Delegation. https://www.delmi.se/en/publications/report-2021-11-trade-agreements-as-a-venue-for-migration-governance-potential-and-challenges-for-the-european-union/

[31] See for example Asli Selin Okyay and Jonathan Zaragoza-Cristiani.  (2016). “The Leverage of the Gatekeeper: Power and Interdependence in the Migration Nexus between the EU and Turkey”. The International Spectator, 51(4): 51–66.

[32] See for example Anne Marie Baylouny. (2020). When Blame Backfires: Syrian Refugees and Citizen Grievances in Jordan and Lebanon. Ithaca: Cornell, P. 134.

[33] Fakhoury “Leverage and Contestation”.

[34] European Commission (May 2024). “President von der Leyen Reaffirms EU’s Strong Support for Lebanon and its People and Announces a €1 billion Package of EU Funding”, News Article, https://neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu/news/president-von-der-leyen-reaffirms-eus-strong-support-lebanon-and-its-people-and-announces-eu1-2024-05-02_en

[35] Nada Maucourant Atallah (2024, May 7). “EU’s €1 Billion Aid Package Prompts Criticism in Lebanon”. The National. https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2024/05/07/eus-1-billion-aid-package-prompts-criticism-in-lebanon/

[36] Tsourapas, “The Perils of Refugee Rentierism.”

[37] Fakhoury, “The External Dimension of EU Migration Policy as Region-Building?”

[38] For an account on why actors contest external policy scripts and norms, see Nicole Deitelhoff and Lisbeth Zimmermann. (2019). “Norms under Challenge: Unpacking the Dynamics of Norm Robustness”, Journal of Global Security Studies 4 (1): 2–17.

[39] Findings of the interviews in the project “Responsibility-Sharing and the Global Compact on Refugees”.

[40] Findings of the project “Investigating and Mobilising Peace and Trust”.

[41] Findings of the interviews in the project “Responsibility-Sharing and the Global Compact on Refugees.”

[42] Fakhoury and Stel, “EU Engagement with Contested Refugee Returns in Lebanon.”

[43] Author’s conversation with researchers and practitioners, 2016-2018; 2024.

[44] Findings of the project “Investigating and Mobilising Peace and Trust for Sustainable Development.”

[45] For further reading, see Julia Morris (2020). “Extractive landscapes: The Case of the Jordan Refugee Compact.” Refuge 36 (1): 87-96.

[46] For exceptions, see Chemlali, “Rings in the Water”; Stock, Üstübici, and Schultz. “Externalisation at Work.”