Making Sense of the ‘Refugee Crisis’

This chapter illustrates the approach the book adopts to explain the production of key outputs of asylum governance and motivates its relevance using illustrative quotes from interviews which help to prefigure the more detailed focus on subnational, national, and European asylum governance that follows. It initially provides a general overview of the conceptual framework, introducing three intuitively expressed questions that asylum governance actors had to face while elaborating responses to the ‘asylum crisis’ and suggesting some of the ways that governance actors may then go about trying to address these questions. The subsequent sections further develop on such processes, looking at understandings, actions, and interactions and, specifically, at the mechanisms through which they emerge in situations of ‘crisis’.