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PSW0010.1177/1478929919887349Political Studies ReviewWelfens

Special Issue Article

Political Studies Review

Protecting Refugees Inside, 1­–15

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DOI: 10.1177/1478929919887349
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Responses to the
‘Refugee Crisis’

Natalie Welfens

Abstract
Migration tends to be denoted as a crisis which needs a solution. The European Union has
developed policies for dealing with this crisis internally, within its borders, and externally. Both
the experiences of migrants and European Union policy responses are gendered and have
gendered effects. This article analyses how the European Union refers to gender in its definitions
of and responses to the crisis. Grounded in feminist policy analysis, I scrutinize European Union
internal and external policies under its Agenda of Migration. The analysis finds that European
Union internal crisis responses demonstrate a more comprehensive understanding of gendered
vulnerabilities and a commitment to human right provisions. External crisis responses reduce
gender considerations to refugee women and the policy objective of reducing refugee arrivals
which leads to further curtailing refugees’ access to protection. Showing how the crisis transforms
the very meaning and scope of gender considerations to various degrees, the article furthers
insights on how the European Union’s normative commitments develop in times of crisis.

Keywords
European Union, refugee policies, gender, refugee crisis, refugee protection

Accepted: 18 October 2019

Introduction
The so-called ‘European refugee crisis’1 mobilized discourses on who is vulnerable, in
need of protection and, hence, entitled to access the European Union (EU). Gender, in
interaction with other social categories like nationality, age or sexual orientation, influ-
ences all phases of the migration process (Lutz, 2010). Therefore, the way refugee poli-
cies refer to gender can be determinative for who may leave their regions of origin and get

Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Corresponding author:
Natalie Welfens, Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1000 GG,
The Netherlands.
Email: [email protected]
2 Political Studies Review 00(0)

recognized as a refugee in the EU. Before the increase in refugee arrivals to the EU in
2015, gender considerations have increasingly become part of the EU’s Common
European Asylum System (CEAS) (Tsourdi, 2011). However, before the crisis, gender
considerations played only a marginal role in EU external policies (Allwood, 2015).
As times of crisis offer an opportunity to expand, abandon or introduce new framings
and normative demands (Boin et al., 2009), the question arises whether the crisis led to a
more comprehensive recognition of refugees’ gendered vulnerabilities in EU policies or,
to the contrary, let them slip off the policy agenda. Following insights from feminist
policy studies, this article scrutinizes the role that gender plays in representations of and
EU policy responses to the crisis. It analyses the EU’s legislative action under its May
2015 Agenda on Migration (European Commission, 2015a) as the central coordinated EU
response.
Academic and non-governmental organization (NGO) advocacy research stresses the
need for gender-sensitive asylum and refugee policies to take the different vulnerabilities
between and among refugee populations sufficiently into account (Buckley-Zistel and
Krause, 2017; Cheikh Ali et al., 2012; Freedman et al., 2017). Despite this increasing
academic interest in gendered dimensions of forced migration,2 a focus on gender in EU
responses to the crisis remains to be explored (Krystalli et al., 2018: 18).
Times of crisis work as a magnifying glass for conceptions of gendered vulnerabilities:
they lay bare whose vulnerabilities matter and how they are addressed (Allen et al., 2018).
In the context of forced migration, gendered vulnerabilities describe the way in which
gender, in interaction with other social categories like, inter alia, age, ethnicity, social
class, and the body, creates contingent positions of privilege and disadvantage (Hancock,
2007; Mügge and de Jong, 2013). For instance, a young able-bodied Senegalese who
identifies as homosexual, a single mother from Syria suffering from a chronic illness and
an unaccompanied minor from Iraq will experience their encounters with EU internal and
external policies in different ways. At the frontline of the EU’s asylum system, such inter-
sections may become decisive of who is granted protection. The extent to which EU
external and internal policies take gender into account is decisive for reinforcing or reduc-
ing inequalities among and within different refugee groups.
EU internal policies cover the reception, asylum procedure and status determination
under the umbrella of the CEAS (Kaunert, 2009). External policies are ‘EU-level policies
in migration and asylum as regards countries outside the EU’ (Haddad, 2008: 190) and
include externalization of migration control, for example, through cooperation with third
countries on border control; combating irregular migration, smuggling and trafficking;
readmission agreements; and measures addressing the ‘root causes’ of migration such as
targeted use of development assistance (Boswell, 2003).
This article contrasts internally and externally oriented policy responses to show how
the EU mobilizes gender in the context of crises. Internally, the EU emphasizes human
rights and expands a comprehensive understanding of how gender and other categories
constitute refugees’ vulnerabilities and protection needs. Externally, the EU reduces gen-
der considerations to essentializing notions of ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe, 1990) and
uses gender for the overall aim to reduce arrivals at all costs.
I present this argument along the following structure. First, to embed the article in
scholarly debates, I bring the scholarship on gender in forced migration, EU refugee poli-
cies and EU gender promotion into context with one another. Second, I briefly discuss the
conceptual pillars and methodological approach of my analysis. Third, I analyse how the
EU’s Agenda on Migration represents the problem and delineates the EU policy responses
that explicitly refer to gender.
Welfens 3

Building Bridges: Gender, Refugee Policies and the EU’s

Promotion of Gender Norms
The analysis presented here brings together and contributes to work on gender in forced
migration, EU refugee policy – especially in times of crisis, and the EU’s promotion of
gender equality. Bringing these distinct bodies of literature into dialogue with one another
enables us to better understand how gendered vulnerabilities are (re)shaped and addressed
by EU refugee policies in times of crisis.
The insight that gender matters throughout all phases of the migratory journey is not a
novel idea. Scholarly work and feminist norm advocates have highlighted the need to
address gendered inequalities in refugee and asylum policies (Bosworth et al., 2018;
Hyndman and Giles, 2011; Martin, 2010; Spijkerboer, 2000). Earlier work was largely
concerned with the situation of refugee women and their supposed vulnerabilities
(Freedman, 2008, 2010). Yet, recent studies now highlight how gender in interaction with
other social categories like age, sexual orientation, social class, religion and the body
shape inequalities within refugee populations (Krystalli et al., 2018; Vervliet et al., 2014).
However, the recognition that refugee policies can create, reinforce or diminish gen-
dered inequalities did hitherto not play a major role in the studies of EU refugee policies.
Scholars have mainly scrutinized EU external refugee policies with regard to their effects
beyond EU borders (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig, 2009; Lavenex and Uçarer, 2004;
Slominski, 2013), inter alia how such policies control access and deter irregular migra-
tion. However, how these policies mobilize gender and other social categories to differ-
entiate within the group of ‘refugees’ or ‘migrants’ has only been of marginal interest
(Gerard and Pickering, 2014).
Various scholarly works have demonstrated how migration towards the EU has been
constructed as a security issue (Bigo, 2002; Guild, 2009; Huysmans, 2000; Léonard,
2009, 2010). At the core of the migration–security nexus is the juxtaposition of the free-
dom of movement within the EU’s Schengen space and a supposedly threatening
EU-outside. Haddad (2008: 201) argues that this dichotomy drives the EU’s efforts to
externalize border control to regions of origin. According to her, ‘a securitarian ethic is
promulgated within the EU, while a protection ethic is spread outside the EU in countries
or regions of origin. Or, to take this further, protection is exported in order to maintain
security inside’. Although feminist research has shown how constructions of protection
and security are highly gendered (Muehlenhoff, 2017; Shepherd, 2007, 2009; Tickner,
1992), feminist analyses of the EU’s refugee and asylum policies remain scarce.
Stachowitsch and Sachseder (2019) demonstrate the potential of such analytical
approaches: analysing how FRONTEX mobilizes gendered and racialized frames, they
show how the EU agency constructs and legitimizes itself as a protector of Europe against
the migrant ‘other’ (see also Hoijtink and Muehlenhoff, this issue). In a similar vein and
in line with the rationale of this Special Issue, this article seeks to understand how gender
considerations differ in EU internal and external policies.
Moments of perceived crisis and emergency offer a fruitful context for that, because
they reinforce vulnerabilities and create an imperative to act (Panebianco and Fontana,
2018). Times of crisis also reconfigure and lay bare the discursive, policy and legal cat-
egorisations, central for the governance of migration (Allen et al., 2018; Pallister-Wilkins,
2018). Implicitly or explicitly, gender and other social categories play into such categori-
cal distinctions that draw the boundaries between wanted and unwanted migration. As
Allen et al. (2018: 219) state, ‘the law lends consequence to elements of social identity
– including race, gender and religion – by investing them with legal consequences of
4 Political Studies Review 00(0)

inclusion and privilege or exclusion and subordination’. Thus, investigating how and in
which policy areas the EU mobilizes gender shows how gender and the EU’s governance
of inclusion and exclusion relate.
The present analysis also seeks to build on and contribute to existent scholarly work
on the EU’s actions in the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ or the ‘CEAS crisis’ (Niemann and
Zaun, 2017). Trauner (2016), for instance, has shown how the economic and financial
crises impacted EU asylum policies and led to a discrepancy between EU laws and
Member States’ actual practices. In their Special Issue on ‘EU Refugee Policies and
Politics in Times of Crisis’, Niemann and Zaun (2017) included diverse approaches and
empirical studies to explain the absence of effective cooperation in response to the
increase in refugee arrivals to the EU (e.g. Ripoll Servent, 2018; Slominski and Trauner,
2018). Scholarly work has scrutinized the crisis’ impact on the EU’s normative commit-
ments mainly with regard to its humanitarian responsibilities (Jeandesboz and Pallister-
Wilkins, 2016; Moreno-Lax, 2018), yet without paying attention to how they intersect
with the EU’s self-understanding as a ‘gender champion’ (Woodward and Van der Vleuten,
2014: 68).
Assessing the EU’s realization of such normative engagements has a longer tradition
in other policy fields. Feminist policy studies have examined gender equality norms in
EU internal policies (Lombardo et al., 2009; Walby, 2004) as well as different external
policy fields such as enlargement (Bretherton, 2001), development (Debusscher and Van
der Vleuten, 2012; Elgström, 2000) and security policy (Ansorg and Haastrup, 2018;
Guerrina et al., 2018). The field of EU refugee policy has received little attention (for an
exception, see Allwood, 2015), despite the increasing political relevance of this field.

Expanding Gender Considerations in Times of Crisis?

The analysis of whether and how the EU expanded gender considerations in a moment of
perceived crisis demands reflection on (1) the relation of crisis and policy change, (2) the
meaning of expanding or mainstreaming gender considerations and (3) the understanding
of gendered vulnerabilities.
First, the ‘EU Refugee Crisis’ marks a critical juncture for reframing the EU’s role,
policy objectives and responsibilities in the field of refugee policies (Niemann and Zaun,
2017). While here I am mostly interested in the ‘narration of crisis’ (Hay, 1999: 322) –
how crisis is constructed in policy documents – it is imperative to note that crisis is real
as an experience and in its consequences. As Hay (1999: 323) asserts, crisis is ‘a lived
experience, it is a politically mediated moment of decisive intervention and structural
transformation’. According to Boin et al. (2009: 81), crises produce ‘framing contests to
interpret events, their causes, and the responsibilities and lessons involved in ways that
suit their political purposes and visions of future policy directions’. Therefore, the follow-
ing analysis of the Agenda on Migration pays attention to how the EU frames the causes
of and solutions to the crisis, internally and externally.
Second, feminist scholarship argues that a simple reference to gender in a policy docu-
ment does not mean that this policy comprehensively incorporated, or mainstreamed,
gender in a transformative way (Caglar, 2013). Gender mainstreaming, according to the
definition, implies ‘the (re)organization, improvement, development and evaluation of
policy processes so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all
levels and at all stages, by the actors normally involved in policy making’ (Council of
Europe, 2019). In addition, as Lombardo and Meier (2006: 153) note, a feminist reading
Welfens 5

of gender mainstreaming demands ‘tackling the multiple interconnected causes that cre-
ate an unequal relation between the sexes’ and ‘a focus on gender not only on women’. A
crucial component for gender mainstreaming to be transformative is to rethink ‘policy
ends and means from a gender perspective and prioritiz[e] gender over competing objec-
tives’. Thus, feminist policy analysis highlights what gender means, what actions gender
considerations envisage and how they relate to other policy objectives.
Finally, in contrast to notions of vulnerability that presume a per se and fixed disad-
vantage of mainly refugee women, I depart from an intersectional understanding of gen-
dered vulnerabilities. The concept of intersectionality was originally coined by Kimberlé
Crenshaw (1991) who showed how different axes of inequality co-create a particular
instance of marginalization. Intersectionality recognizes gendered vulnerabilities as con-
tingent, relational and non-additive (Hancock, 2016). The way gender and other social
categories create positions of relative privilege or marginalization is always in relation to
the specific context and other subject-positions. For example, in a refugee camp, a young
single mother may be particularly vulnerable, while in a European resettlement pro-
gramme, single, heterosexual men may be underprivileged because they have little chance
to be resettled (Turner, 2017). Depending on the context, gender and sexuality play out
differently. Turner notes that ‘a person is not vulnerable because they are a man or a
woman, but because of what being a man or a woman means in particular situations’
(Turner, 2016). Based on these conceptual reflections, the following section explains the
details of the analytical approach.

Analysing Gender in the ‘Refugee Crisis’

In this analysis, the EU Agenda on Migration together with all legislative documents is
taken as an entry point to understand how problem representations and proposed solu-
tions are constructed and gendered. As of June 2018, the Commission has issued 255
legislative documents, including annexes, summaries and staff working documents.
With a gendered perspective on problem representations and proposed policy
responses, feminist adaptations of frame analysis (Lombardo et al., 2009) are well suited
to analyse gender consideration in EU policies. Verloo’s (2005, 2007) Critical Frame
Analysis (CFA) proposes to analyse the discursive framing of gender and its ‘multiple
meanings’. A set of synthesizing questions helps to analyse policy documents with regard
to the problem definition (diagnosis: What is represented as a problem? Who is seen as
responsible for the problem?), proposed solutions (prognosis: What should be done? Who
is acted upon? How is action legitimized?) and normativity (What is seen as good and
bad?). Such an analysis of policy documents does not take into account the actual imple-
mentation. Thus, implicit or explicit gender considerations in the EU’s policy practice lie
beyond the scope of this article.
The analysis proceeded in three steps First, I downloaded all documents the
Commission lists as ‘legislative documents’ of the Agenda on Migration on its website
(European Commission, 2019) and identified those that are relevant to the analysis. An
automated lexical search for key words like gender, women/men, female/male, sexuality,
and LGBT/LGBTI helped to identify policy areas that referenced gender. Table A1 in the
online appendix summarizes all analysed documents.
Second, assisted by the programme MaxQDA, I read and manually coded the docu-
ments listed in Table A1 through the lens of CFA’s synthesizing questions. The questions
were adapted to the context at hand, for example, ‘what is considered to cause the crisis’
6 Political Studies Review 00(0)

and ‘what does gender mean in this context?’ Third, I grouped the documents into internal
and external policy instruments and looked for similarities and differences with regard to
how they refer to gender. Before I present the analysis of policy responses, the following
section discusses how the Agenda on Migration represents the crisis.

Defining a Multifaceted Crisis: The EU’s Agenda on

Migration
In general, the EU’s commitment to gender equality in the field of migration and asylum
results from its general subscription to gender norms in EU and international law, for exam-
ple, its commitment to Gender Mainstreaming in the Treaty of Amsterdam. In addition, the
Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women and the
Council of Europe’s 2011 Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence
against women and domestic violence should also apply to refugees. The first demand for
more gender sensitivity in the field of refugee policies came from the European Parliament.
Specifically, in its Resolution of 13 April 1984, it demanded a gender-sensitive reading of
the Geneva Refugee Convention of 1951. Yet, only with the 1999 Treaty of Amsterdam
were EU institutions granted power to develop legislation in the area of asylum. The
European Council’s adoption of the Tampere Programme of October 1999 envisaged the
development of common asylum standards and procedures. Until 2006, the EU developed
the Asylum Procedure Directive, the Reception Conditions Directive, the Qualification
Directive, and the Dublin and the EURODAC regulation. Despite some limitations, gender
and sexual orientation were increasingly incorporated into the CEAS (AIDA, 2017; Tsourdi,
2011), while references to gender in EU external refugee policies remained limited.
The 2015 increase in refugee arrivals to the EU and the fatalities in the Mediterranean
created significant pressure to develop a coordinated crisis response. The EU’s Agenda on
Migration serves as a guiding document for the EU’s reaction to the crisis and is therefore
central to understand the underlying problem representation. The Agenda sees its raison
d’être in the

need to restore confidence in our ability to bring together European and national efforts to
address migration, to meet our international and ethical obligations and to work together in an
effective way, in accordance with the principles of solidarity and shared responsibility (European
Commission, 2015a).

To address this multifaceted problem definition, the Agenda reframes existing policies
and introduces new ones. Immediate actions consist of key emergency responses like sav-
ing lives at sea, fighting smugglers, relocation, resettlement, cooperation with third coun-
tries and support for frontline Member States like Italy or Greece. The EU’s long-term
vision ‘to manage migration better’ comprises four pillars: (1) ‘reducing incentives for
irregular migration’, (2) ‘border management: saving lives and securing borders’, (3)
‘Europe’s duty to protect: a strong common asylum policy’ and (4) ‘a new policy on legal
migration’ (European Commission, 2015a: 3–6). Oriented towards the external, the first
two pillars comprise cooperation on border control with countries of origin and first ref-
uge, development cooperation, fighting smuggling activities and trafficking in human
beings, return and increasing the activities of FRONTEX.
Overall, all externally oriented policy proposals aim to prevent mobility towards the
EU, regardless of individual or group-specific protection needs. Targeting development
Welfens 7

cooperation towards the ‘fight of root causes’ of migration and expanding FRONTEX
activities against smugglers and trafficking, the EU adopts a security-oriented and milita-
rized crisis response (see Muehlenhoff and Hoijtink, this issue). Despite the declared goal
to ‘save lives’ (European Commission, 2015a: 3), FRONTEX operations like Triton,
Poseidon and Sophia are military naval missions, whose principal mandate is the ‘disrup-
tion of the business model of human smuggling and trafficking networks’ (European
Council, 2015). There is no mention of how gender in interaction with other social cate-
gories shapes vulnerabilities throughout different phases of the migratory process. While
underscoring different motivations for fleeing to Europe (European Commission, 2015a:
2, 7), the Agenda conceals refugees’ individual, diverse and complex situations, subsum-
ing them all under the term of ‘migration’. Migration then becomes an agent and actor-
free problem that the EU can ‘tackle’, ‘fight’ and ‘manage’. This depersonalized and
depoliticized representation of refugees disregards the heterogeneity of this group, their
individual experiences and the deeply political dimensions of their flight. As Horst (2006:
14) puts it, ‘the complex identities of a single person are taken and replaced by one: that
of the refugee. [. . .] Refugees are stripped of specific features of their society, their place
of origin and history’.
The only social category singled out as vulnerable in the Agenda are ‘children’, whose
fundamental rights should be protected by monitoring reception and asylum procedure
standards (European Commission, 2015a: 12). However, children’s special protection
needs become only recognized within the EU. Thereby, the EU border marks a geographi-
cal line from where on refugee children’s rights and protection needs start to matter, while
the relevance outside the EU is disregarded. Neither this passage nor the rest of the docu-
ment refer explicitly to gender, sexuality or any other social categories at any time.
As a whole, President Juncker’s Agenda of Migration represents the crisis as a prob-
lem of numbers, migratory pressure and legal versus irregular migration. Internally, it
frames EU action in terms of the protection of refugees, and externally as protection of
EU borders. The absence of an explicit commitment to gender norms in the EU’s Agenda
on Migration persists in most legislative texts, however with some exceptions.

Gender in EU Internal Policy Responses

Internal responses to the crisis were mainly concerned with emergency measures for
Southern EU Member States, EU internal distribution of refugees via relocation and
EU internal protection standards under the CEAS (cf. Table A1). Due to their geo-
graphical proximity to refugee hosting states along with existing EU visa regulation
and the Dublin system, Southern Member States have faced significantly higher num-
bers of arrivals when compared to other Member States. One response to this was the
so-called ‘hotspot-approach’. According to the EU, these ‘first reception facilities’
aim ‘to better coordinate EU agencies’ and national authorities’ efforts at the external
borders of the EU, on initial reception, identification, registration and fingerprinting
of asylum-seekers and migrants’ (Mentzelopoulou and Luyten, 2018: 1). The report on
the EU’s implementation of the hotspot approach (European Commission, 2017b: 6)
designates unaccompanied minors, victims of trafficking as well as ‘shipwreck vic-
tims, single women, victims of violence etc.’ as particularly vulnerable groups. The
Commission requests that Member States apply a ‘minimum gender balance among
the deployed experts’ and have ‘safe and separated areas’ for vulnerable persons
(European Commission, 2017b: 3).
8 Political Studies Review 00(0)

A second and related policy proposition to support Southern Member States was the EU
relocation mechanism. Established in 2015, it aimed to relocate 106,000 persons in need
of international protection. In November 2017, EU Migration Commissioner Avramopoulos
declared that the implemented facility was to be closed with around 31,500 persons relo-
cated from inauguration until time of closure (European Commission, 2017d). The reloca-
tion mechanism gave priority to ‘vulnerable applicants within the meaning of Article 21
and 22’ of the reception Recast Directive (European Commission, 2015b: 16). It defines
‘vulnerable persons’ as, inter alia, ‘minors, unaccompanied minors, disabled people,
elderly people, pregnant women, single parents with minor children, victims of human
trafficking, persons with serious illnesses, persons with mental disorders and persons who
have been subjugated to torture, rape or other serious forms of psychological, physical or
sexual violence, such as victims of female genital mutilation (European Union, 2013).
Thereby, in contrast to EU external policies’ reductionist definitions, the directive offers a
comprehensive understanding of vulnerabilities. Special protection needs are not limited
to children and women per se, but also to the elderly, to single parents irrespective of their
gender, and to different forms of bodily and medical conditions, such as female genital
mutilation. Yet, sexual orientation, for instance, does not figure in the list.
To address the internal dimension of varying standards and procedures, the EU pro-
posed another reform to the CEAS, amending the EU legal norms on qualification, recep-
tion and procedures (European Commission, 2016b, 2016d, 2016e). Like in the previous
version of the CEAS, the proposals demonstrate a clear commitment to gender sensitivity
and further extend the recognition of gender. To illustrate, the proposal for a common
procedure for international protection (European Commission, 2016d) points to the
Charter of Fundamental Rights and to the right to non-discrimination, equality of rights
between men and women, and the rights of the child. It invokes Member States’ obliga-
tions under the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against
women and domestic violence. Provisions aim to ensure ‘substantive equality between
female and male applicants’ through same-sex interpreters, medical examiners and the
opportunity for spouses to be interviewed separately (European Commission, 2016d).
The proposal for a revised reception directive (European Commission, 2016b) suggests
several changes with regard to gender, for example, that:

the specific needs of women applicants who have experienced gender-based harm should be
taken into account, including via ensuring access, at different stages of the asylum procedure, to
medical care, legal support and to appropriate trauma counselling and psycho-social care.

Furthermore, Article 24 adds gender-based harm to the definition of ‘victims of torture

and violence’ (European Commission, 2016b: 26, 61).
All factors considered, some internally oriented EU responses to the crisis demonstrate
a comprehensive understanding of gendered vulnerabilities and include concrete proposi-
tions of how to address them. Internally, the EU emphasizes refugees’ diverse protection
needs and remains committed to upholding international human rights.

Gender in EU External Policy Responses

External policy areas with explicit references to gender are the EU funding schemes, the
EU’s cooperation on migration with third countries, especially with Turkey, and the EU
proposition for an EU resettlement framework. In addition, a joint communication on
Welfens 9

‘Migration on the Central Mediterranean route’ identifies the increasing number of ‘vul-
nerable migrants, especially women and minors’, crossing the Mediterranean as a ‘worry-
ing trend’ (European Commission, 2017c: 4). By emphasizing the deaths of women and
children in the Mediterranean, the communication creates an implicit gendered and age-
differentiated hierarchy of suffering. This reinforces stereotypical gender notions in forced
migration, claiming that ‘“authentic” refugees are women and children, who are implicitly
vulnerable and in need of external assistance’ (Turner, 2017: 29), while male refugees’
vulnerabilities are disregarded. Such gendered representations also resonate with male
refugees’ portrayal as potentially dangerous and undeserving of protection in broader soci-
etal and public debates (Rettberg and Gajjala, 2016; Vollmer and Karakayali, 2018).
Along a similar line, the EU’s funding schemes, aimed at fighting ‘root causes’ of
migration, mention gender only in relation to the ‘special needs’ of women and children.
EU funds like the Trust Fund for Africa or the Asylum, Migration and Integration (AMIF)
fund have been used to address conditions in refugees’ regions of origin. These funds
equate gender with women and consistently group the former with children and youth.
For instance, various EU development projects under the AMIF funding scheme consider
women, children and youth as the target group for their actions and combine child-related
activities and actions to prevent sexual and gender-based violence. In these mostly devel-
opment-oriented external responses, gender considerations result in concrete policy
actions. Yet, this grouping of women and children under a victimization frame infantilizes
female refugees and ignores the agency that both children and refugee women can have
in the migratory process. The one-dimensional categorization of vulnerability ignores the
complex intersections of gender or age with other social categories like ethnicity, reli-
gion, social class and the body. Moreover, this categorization implicitly disregards refu-
gee men and their experience. Reorienting EU development cooperation towards the fight
of ‘root causes’ limits gender to the categories of vulnerable women and children, whose
protection needs the EU seeks to address in their regions of origin.
Besides development instruments, the EU-Turkey Statement of 18 March 2016 con-
stitutes one of the core external policy responses to the crisis (European Council, 2016).
It details Turkey’s commitment to stricter border control on both land and sea. In
exchange, the EU promises a voluntary humanitarian admission scheme, visa liberaliza-
tions for Turkish nationals, financial assistance for projects benefitting Syrian refugees
in Turkey as well as upgrading the Customs Union and the recommencement of the
accession process (European Council, 2016). In regular Progress Reports, the EU
Commission communicates the statement’s implementation. With its focus on reducing
the number of arrivals to the EU, the statement aligns with the EU’s crisis definition:
disregarding the question of how many refugees in Turkey are in need of assistance.
Overall, the EU-Turkey statement has no explicit commitment to a gender-sensitive
approach or gender promotion in Turkey.
Nevertheless, the allocation of humanitarian assistance under the Facility for Refugees
in Turkey refers explicitly to gender in certain sections. The first progress report of 20
April 2016 lists ‘child protection, women’s health, and education in emergencies’ as
examples of vulnerable groups that shall benefit from EU humanitarian assistance in
Turkey (European Commission, 2016a). The sixth progress report (European Commission,
2017f: 11–12) stresses that ‘in its delivery, the Facility for Refugees in Turkey supports
rights of children, and human rights of refugees in general, including gender equality’ as
well as ‘vulnerable refugees including victims of gender-based violence’. The subsequent
report (European Commission, 2017e: 11) declares ‘particular attention to the situation of
10 Political Studies Review 00(0)

human rights of refugees overall and support [for] in particular women, children and disa-
bled persons’. At least on paper, considerations of gendered vulnerabilities seem to gain
importance over time.
A concrete example of gender considerations can be found in the Emergency Social
Safety Net. The EU Commission launched the facility together with Turkish authorities,
aiming to progressively cover ‘one million of the most vulnerable refugees’ by the first
half of 2017. The EU allocated humanitarian assistance to projects that aim at preventing
sexual and gender-based violence in South Turkey, and to protecting survivors of gender-
based violence. Yet, only 3 out of 57 EU projects under the Facility for Refugees in
Turkey explicitly mention a gender-related focus, amounting to only €18,000,000 out of
2.9 billion (European Commission, 2017a).
A second dimension of gender in the EU-Turkey statement can be found in the EU’s
progress assessment of the visa liberalization roadmap. The Commission Staff Working
Document (European Commission, 2016f), accompanying the third report on ‘progress by
Turkey in fulfilling the requirements of its visa liberalization roadmap’, lists 72 require-
ments of this roadmap and describes Turkey’s implementation progress. The overall prob-
lem representation remains irregular migration to the EU, for which Turkey’s improved
‘border management’ is presented as the solution. The purely number-driven problemati-
zation of Turkey’s borders stands in sharp contrast with a normative set of requirements in
the chapter on fundamental rights. It requires Turkey to ensure the freedom of movement
of citizens without discrimination based on any ground such as ‘sex, race, colour, ethnic or
social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion,
membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation’
(European Commission, 2016f: 24). The following requirement requests Turkey to ensure
‘full and effective access to travel and identity documents for all citizens including women,
children, people with disabilities, persons belonging to minorities, internally displaced
people, and other vulnerable groups’ (European Commission, 2016f: 35–36). By instruct-
ing Turkey to consider gender and other discrimination grounds, the EU stages itself as the
global teacher of gender and non-discrimination norms. Thereby, the EU further external-
izes not only its border control but also responsibility for realizing normative commit-
ments, such as gender equality, to third countries.
The Proposal for a Union Resettlement Framework (European Commission, 2016c)
also includes several explicit references to gender. Resettlement aims to show solidarity
with countries of first refuge by granting a limited number of refugees safe and legal
access to a third country that has agreed to admit them (United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR), 2011: 3). The proposal’s section on fundamental rights refers to
the Istanbul Convention and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and stresses
that ‘a gender-sensitive approach should be adopted when interpreting and applying this
Regulation’. Furthermore, the proposal subscribes to the general principles of equality
and non-discrimination (European Commission, 2016c: 8–9). Echoing to a large extent
the resettlement criteria of the UNHCR, the proposal lists, inter alia, ‘women and girls at
risk’ and ‘survivors of violence and/or torture, including on the basis of gender’ as eligible
groups for resettlement to the EU. While the focus on refugee women can also have
exclusionary effects for single, young men (Turner, 2016), the reference to gender sensi-
tivity is nevertheless striking. The fact that the framework comes in the form of a regula-
tion, which – in contrast to ad hoc ‘deals’ like the EU-Turkey statement – has to pass EU
policy-making procedures with more influence of norm advocates, may explain this out-
lier among EU external policies.
Welfens 11

Conclusion
This article departed from the question of to which extent the crisis offered a window of
opportunity for the EU to expand its considerations of refugees’ gendered vulnerabilities.
Empirically, the analysis demonstrated a divide between EU-internally and EU-externally ori-
ented crisis responses. Internally, definitions of vulnerability avoid an exclusive focus on
female and minor refugees, and instead endorse a wide range of social markers that can con-
stitute, in interaction with gender or in and of themselves, special protection needs. Referring
to the EU’s commitments to gender equality and human rights, gender considerations take the
form of concrete provisions and actions towards more gender-sensitive refugee protection.
In EU external crisis responses, gender mostly refers to the category of vulnerable
women and children, whose protection needs the EU seeks to address beyond EU borders
in countries of origin or first refuge. To this end, EU development cooperation – a policy
field with a comparatively comprehensive gender equality agenda before the crisis – is
reoriented towards ‘fighting root causes’ of migration. As Allwood (2015, 2019) has
shown, this migration–development nexus significantly reduces gender considerations.
Another way EU external responses address gendered vulnerabilities is through making
gender considerations a conditionality of benefits for third countries, for instance, through
visa liberalizations for Turkey. Such policies frame the EU as a teacher of gender and
non-discrimination norms towards third countries while at the same time containing refu-
gees’ mobility towards the EU. Thus, similar to the way the EU intertwines security and
humanitarian dynamics in the Mediterranean (Moreno-Lax, 2018; Pallister-Wilkins,
2018; Perkowski, 2018), gender considerations in EU external crisis responses paradoxi-
cally work in the benefit of border, not refugee, protection.
The juxtaposition of gender in internal and external crisis responses deepens our
understanding of how the EU’s normative commitments to gender equality develop in
times of crisis. Crisis transforms the very meaning and scope of gender considerations by
aligning them, wherever needed, with what is considered to be the solution to the crisis.
Externally, the focus on reducing arrivals to the EU kept gender considerations limited,
while internally, the demand for further harmonizing asylum standards and procedures
allowed the expansion of already existing gender considerations. This paradoxical rela-
tion between gender in external and internal crisis responses, which marginalizes the
EU’s concern for gendered vulnerabilities beyond EU borders, makes an uncritical
appraisal of EU internal progress challenging.

Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the EISA 2018 and the GLOBUS Workshop on Gender Justice
and EU External Relations at the University College Dublin. I would like to thank Hanna Muehlenhoff and
Anna van der Vleuten for their constructive and encouraging comments, Liza Mügge for her support throughout
the process, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: This research is funded by a Research Talent Grant (Project Number 406-16-535) by the
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
12 Political Studies Review 00(0)

ORCID iD
Natalie Welfens https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9025-4167

Supplemental Material
Additional supplemental material may be found with the online version of this article.
Table A1. Documents Analyzed, Sorted by Internal/External, Policy Area and in Chronological Order.

Notes
1 Various authors have challenged and problematized the notion of a European Union (EU) or European
Refugee Crisis (Baerwaldt, 2018; Gilbert, 2015). Niemann and Zaun (2017) propose to call it a crisis of
the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), to underscore that not refugees themselves caused the
crisis but rather the shortcomings of the CEAS. For the convenience of the reader, I will only speak of
‘crisis’ in the following.
2 The EU usually refers to migration without specifying it as forced or voluntary. Scholarship uses the term
‘forced migration’ to delineate studies that are interested in the specific situation of or policies for people
who are internally displaced or had to flee their home country due to individual persecution, war and
violence (Castles, 2003). Analytically, the distinction is important for the context at hand because gender
plays out differently in forced and voluntary migration.

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Author Biography
Natalie Welfens holds a Double-MA in International Relations and Political Science from the Institut d’Études
Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and Freie Universität Berlin. Currently she is working as a doctoral researcher
at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) of the University of Amsterdam. Her research
looks at inequalities and questions of inclusion and exclusion in European migration and refugee policies,in
particular in European resettlement and humanitarian admission programmes.