Novel abstract

Why have the European Union and Turkey developed markedly different migration governance regimes in response to the rise of irregular migration? Existing explanations of migration governance typically emphasise political economy dynamics, political rent-seeking, securitisation, populist mobilisation, transactional relations, or processes of Europeanisation and policy diffusion. While these perspectives illuminate important dimensions of migration governance, they do not fully explain why broadly comparable migration pressures have produced divergent migration governance regimes in the EU and Turkey.

A comparative framework drawing on Ontological Security Theory may help explain this divergence.Migration can generate ontological anxiety by unsettling routines through which political actors reproduce stable understandings of identity, membership, and territorial order. Large-scale mobility challenges narratives about who belongs, how borders function, and the boundaries of political community. The EU and Turkey may therefore be seen as seeking ontological security through distinct migration governance regimes.

In the EU case, stabilisation is pursued through intensified territorial boundary consolidation and

enforcement. Over the past decade the EU has expanded legislative, administrative, and operational instruments reinforcing the boundary between inside and outside. Migration is increasingly framed through a security lens linking irregular mobility to border protection, internal security, and crisis management, often accompanied by civilisational narratives emphasising the protection of Europe and European values.

The EU has also developed dense regulatory and administrative layering, including expanded border procedures, strengthened operational capacities at the external borders, and harmonised screening and asylum rules. Migration control is increasingly externalised through financial instruments, conditionality, and cooperation arrangements with neighbouring states, shifting enforcement beyond the Union’s borders.

Together these practices form a migration control apparatus reinforcing what may be described as legal territoriality, in which institutionalised procedures stabilise territorial boundaries and reaffirm the image of a bounded rule-based political order.

Turkey’s trajectory has evolved differently. Rather than constructing dense legal frameworks oriented toward territorial boundary consolidation, the Turkish state has developed a migration governance regime conceptualised here as “controlled porosity”: a system combining selective permeability in mobility regimes with sovereign discretion in implementation. Liberal visa regimes, informal labour market absorption, and Turkey’s positioning as a regional transit hub coexist with stricter enforcement along the EU-facing western frontier. Controlled porosity does not imply unrestricted openness. Turkish migration governance also includes detention practices, deportations, return operations, and increasingly visible anti-migrant rhetoric.

In this sense, controlled porosity can be understood as a governance strategy through which mobility is managed while sustaining narratives of sovereign autonomy, connectivity, and Turkey’s role as a regional centre of attraction and influence. Institutionally, Turkey has adopted elements of the EU migration acquis through cooperation frameworks, particularly in asylum administration and border management. Yet full Europeanisation has not occurred. Instead, partial institutional alignment has been embedded within a broader migration governance regime oriented toward flexibility and sovereign discretion.

These divergent migration governance regimes reflect different ontological security strategies through which political actors seek to maintain stable understandings of identity, membership, order, and territorial control in the face of mobility pressures. In the EU case, ontological security is sought through territorial boundary consolidation, legal proceduralisation, territorial closure, and the protection of European identity from non-European outsiders. In contrast, the Turkish case pursues ontological security through sovereign discretion, strategic ambiguity, and controlled permeability. This perspective moves beyond depictions of Turkey as a buffer state within the EU’s externalised border regime and challenges reductionist interpretations of Turkish migration policy framed as either “weaponisation” or purely transactional bargaining.