From the Conceptualisation of Migrant Smuggling to the Research Theory and Methods

This chapter engages with a number of key analytical and methodological issues related to the study of migrant smuggling and to that of EU policy-making. It also introduces the research question and the analytical and methodological tools that will be employed to explain the process under scrutiny. The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first offers an in-depth overview of the concept of migrant smuggling, including the understanding of the process that led to its conceptualisation and criminalisation, and examines the difference between existing legal definitions, with specific attention paid to the EU and Italian definitions. It will also demonstrate their limited scope and overall inconsistence with internationally agreed definitions and with the empirical characteristics of migrant smuggling as such. The second section illustrates the theoretical and inter-disciplinary embeddedness of the research. In this section, the theoretical framework—i.e. a multi-level actor-centred institutionalism—is defined and then placed in dialogue with the different literature strands that this book engages with. The way in which this framework is applied in the case at hand is explained through the definition of an analytical model, which accompanies the research question and sub-questions. Finally, the third section explores the methodological aspects of the study, including source selection and their heuristic relevance, data collection and analysis.