This book analyses how international and non-governmental organisations have transferred international asylum norms to Ukraine despite the country’s low number of asylum seekers over the last 30 years. Various actors, local and international, state and non-state, participate in multi-scalar transfer, which involves translating, spreading, and sometimes resisting the norms. Analysing the support of and subtle forms of resistance to the legislative adoption of international norms in Ukraine’s Parliament, this research shows that adoption is shaped largely by domestic politicians’ pursuit of recognition and conditionality of international organisations such as the European Union and the Council of Europe. Non-state actors seek to influence administrative practices by adapting to resistance and structural obstacles, using top-down and horizontal confrontational and conciliatory, formal and informal approaches, often relying on personal contacts. While norm promoters try to formalise changes, the effects of the transfer attempts on state practices remain heterogeneous and unstable across actors, space, and time.
Irina Mützelburg is Researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include NGO-donor relations, administrative practices, and migration and education policies in Ukraine. She has taught, among others, at the Humboldt University, Germany, the European University Viadrina, Germany, and Sciences Po, France.
This book analyses why the Ukrainian state established asylum laws and policies in the thirty years since 1991, even though the number of asylum seekers was very low. International and non-governmental organisations transferred international asylum norms to Ukraine. Various state and non-state actors participated in this process, translating, spreading, and resisting those norms. In many cases, legislative adoption was driven by domestic politicians’ pursuit of recognition by international organisations, such as the European Union and the Council of Europe, and by their desire to meet conditionality requirements. NGOs sought to influence administrative practices, alternating between confrontational and conciliatory, formal and informal approaches, and often relying on personal contacts. Actors used and shifted between scales in order to transfer norms or resist transfer. In the process, they produced, renegotiated, and confirmed those scales. For instance, NGOs resorting to the European Court of Human Rights to prevent refoulement placed the European scale above the national scale. This book offers a new multi-actor and multi-scalar analysis of policy transfer.
Irina Mützelburg
European Union Politics Circulation of norms Externalisation of the reception of asylum seekers Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) Asylum Policies International Organizations' Normative power Transfer/circulation of norms and policies Implementation of public policies Street-level bureaucracy Post-Soviet space Ukraine