Dirty Governance: The Architecture of Non-Accountability in EU Migration Governance
Please join Routes for our May Conversation with Saher Ahmed
Please join Routes for our May Conversation "Dirty Governance: The Architecture of Non-Accountability in EU Migration Governance" with a visiting PhD scholar from the University of British Columbia Saher Ahmed.
| A Routes - Migration, Mobility, Displacement seminar | |
|---|---|
| Date | 5 May 2026 |
| Time | 11:30 to 12:30 |
| Place | XFI Conference Room 1 Zoom |
| Organizer | Routes @ Exeter |
Event details
Abstract
This paper introduces the concept of dirty governance to describe a mode of EU migration governance in which accountability for rights violations is dispersed among actors with misaligned mandates, fragmented jurisdictions, and irreconcilable legal frameworks. As a result, no single forum exists in which responsibility for violations of rights or harms can be claimed or assigned. This paper argues that non-accountability in EU migration governance is not a failure of enforcement but a constitutive feature of institutional design. The fragmentation of responsibility between EU agencies, member states, and third-party actors is not incidental to the governance architecture. It is the governance architecture. Drawing on Everett Hughes’s sociology of dirty work and original qualitative fieldwork compromising thirty semi-structured interviews with Frontex officials, European Commission officials, the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, investigative journalists, and civil society organisations conducted across Athens, Lesvos, Samos, and Brussels between 2025 and 2026, the paper identifies three mechanisms through which dirty governance operates: institutional mandate fragmentation, technological opacity, and humanitarian legitimation. These are examined across six accountability arenas, each producing outcome that are foreclosed, deflected, or partially operative. The argument is anchored in the 2025 Court of Justice of the European Union Grand Chamber ruling in Hamoudi v. Frontex (C-136/24 P), read not as an accountability breakthrough but as judicial confirmation of how deeply the architecture of non-accountability runs. This paper makes three contributions. First, dirty governance is offered as an original analytical concept with cross-institutional explanatory reach. Second, the fieldwork provides empirical grounding across surveillance, detention, and border externalization. Lastly, the Hamoudi reading reframes a landmark ruling as evidence of the problem rather than its resolution.
Speaker Bio:
Saher Ahmed is a PhD candidate in Global Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, BC, Canada, supervised by Dr. Helen Yanacopulos. With a disciplinary focus in International Relations, her doctoral research examines how the European Union governs migration through surveillance, detention, and border externalization, tracing how these systems stretch across maritime routes, land borders, and detention centers into shifting geographies of control. Saher is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, supervised by Dr. Irene Fernández-Molina, where she develops the concept of dirty governance to examine how international organizations, states, and other actors evade responsibility for the harm their governance produces.
Discussant Bio:
Yazid Benhadda holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Exeter (UK). His research intersects critical security studies, colonial migration history, and North African studies. During his time in Exeter, he has also worked as a postgraduate teaching associate at the same university. Between September 2025 and April 2026, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (University of Tunis). Prior to that, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Marburg as part of the CRC138 “Dynamics of Security”. His work appeared in International Political Sociology and Migration Studies.
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Location:
XFI Conference Room 1