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Bureaucratic Entrapment: Refugee Experiences of the European Union (EU) Migration Regime
MacKenzie Bonner, Department of Sociology, UCI  (Winner of the 2025 Etel Solingen Award for Outstanding Paper in International Cooperation)

This talk advances sociological scholarship on how regional migration governance shapes the lived experiences of refugees and asylum seekers in the European Union (EU). It focuses on the Dublin Regulation (1990, 2002, 2013), which requires asylum-seekers to apply for legal status in the EU country where they are first fingerprinted—typically the country of initial entry. For migrants arriving via the Mediterranean route, this is most often Italy. Drawing on over 170 hours of participant observations and interviews with 42 working-class migrants from Africa and the Middle East at a refugee center in Rome, Bonner examines the experiences of ‘returnees’—asylum-seekers sent back to Italy after unsuccessful claims elsewhere in the EU. Bonner asks: how do encounters with the Dublin Regulation shape refugees’ trajectories and incorporation in the EU? Rather than streamlining asylum processes, Bonner argues that the Regulation produces a process of “bureaucratic entrapment”—where overlapping national and regional governance structures prolong migrants’ uncertainty, constrain their mobility, and obscure the accountability of the EU. As regional migration governance structures proliferate globally, this article shifts the analytical focus beyond national borders, emphasizing the transnational dimensions of asylum governance and offering new insights into the lived realities of displacement under increasingly complex legal frameworks.

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Prosecuting Disappearance: Lawfare and Counter-lawfare in Bangladesh
Muhammad Raqib, Department of Anthropology, UCI

Following the collapse of the Awami League’s 16-year authoritarian regime in Bangladesh (2024)—marked by widespread state violence, systematic enforced disappearances, and the use of emergency legal instruments such as the Special Powers Act, Anti-Terrorism Act, and Explosives Act to suppress dissent—the post-revolution interim government initiated a transitional justice process centered on domestic trials of international crimes. This talk interrogates the juridical and political implications of these trials, focusing on how international criminal law is translated, adapted, or neutralized within Bangladesh’s reformed legal system. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and courtroom observations, Raqib argues that international law becomes entangled in localized legal reasoning, technocratic adjudication, and bureaucratic filtering—thus reshaping its scope and meaning. At the same time, survivors and families of victims of enforced disappearance are reclaiming legal discourse and institutions in their pursuit of justice, challenging former state actors through what Raqib terms counter-lawfare. This dual movement—state lawfare for authoritarian control and post-revolutionary counter-lawfare by citizens—offers a critical lens into the evolving relationship between law, violence, and political agency in contemporary Bangladesh. By treating enforced disappearance as a legal-anthropological object, the paper explores how international legal norms materialize in the vernacular of accountability, and how victims reorient law from an instrument of repression to one of redress.

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