Pro-migrant Civil Society Organisations and the Law: Patterns of Legal Mobilisation at EU Borders

Legal mobilisation, including its use within the pro-migrant movement, has been addressed by scholars from different disciplines. However, its deployment in the socio-spatial dimension of borderlands has received limited attention, despite the increasing use of legal strategies in the real world and the specificity of borderlands as unique sites of contention. This research note contributes to filling this gap through empirical research, prompting a dialogue between socio-legal, contentious politics, migration and border studies. In particular, I present and discuss the preliminary findings of a study on the legal mobilisation of pro-migrant civil society organisations at the Southern European borders. These findings, based on a descriptive quantitative media analysis, provide a first overview of the use of the law by civil society organisations in border areas, making it possible to highlight some trends and suggest some relevant hypotheses to be explored in the course of further research. As such, they contribute to the international migration scholarship and policy community, in that they help to develop the study of political contention around migration, with an innovative focus on the use of the law in border areas. Additionally, they provide fertile ground for strengthening the protection of the rights of people on the move and the promotion of the rule of law, in accordance with the concerns and recommendations expressed by bodies of the United Nations and of the Council of Europe.