Power and informality in the polycentric governing of transit and irregular migration on EU’s eastern border with Belarus

Scholarship on transit and irregular migration related to Europe has primarily studied movements from war-torn regions in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, yet since 2021 this academic landscape has drastically changed. Irregular migration that earlier had passed invisibly towards the EU via Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, using Ukraine and Belarus as transit states, adopted new forms under Russia’s intensified “hybrid” warfare and its 2022 military invasion of Ukraine. This paper seeks to uncover: 1) how formal policies and informal practices were interconnected in the governing of the migration “crisis” on EU’s eastern border with Belarus (2021-2023); and 2) what different modes of power were used to govern it. The paper advances a polycentric governance perspective. It demonstrates that crisis governance was not simply in the hands of the Belarussian government and the EU as direct parties to the conflict. It involved a plethora of other stakeholders including Middle Eastern states, Russia, and travel agencies little discussed as non-state actors. The contribution of this paper is to show how these stakeholders, entangled in specific relationships with one other, governed via a mixture of formal and informal practices and different modes of power, ranging from more to less coercive. A polycentric perspective focusing on relations among relevant actors is more useful when studying crisis governance than statist, multilevel governance, or EU-centric approaches emphasizing institutional logics. Power modes of coercion and control dominated stakeholder relationships in the governance of this crisis, shaping how power would flow through the region's polycentric governance system.