A Review & Analysis of the Recent Literature on the Common European Asylum System

CEASEVAL Working papers No.2 

In the now nearly 20 years since its official foundation, a lot has been written about the Common European Asylum System (CEAS); not only in academic journals and books, but also in the form of working and opinion papers, policy reports and evaluations. One of the initial tasks within work package 1 of the CEASEVAL project was to conduct a review of this literature, with a focus on academic work that was published since the year 2000, but also taking into account some of the more recent ‘grey literature’ produced by non-academic organisations.

The purpose of this review was to systematically collect, organise, and analyse – both quantitatively and qualitatively – this vast body of existing knowledge in order to inform the field research to be carried out within other work packages of the CEASEVAL project. One thing we found is that much of the existing literature about the CEAS is not necessarily based on findings of (original) empirical research but discusses or merely describes its failure or partial success at a theoretical level. Such work does often not primarily engage with existing policy and at worst treats policy in a purely superficial fashion.
CEASEVAL therefore aims to provide a more comprehensive and critical evaluation of existing legal and policy frameworks as well as their implementation, by taking into account the various roles and perspectives of state but also non-state actors and looking at developments at the European, national as well as local levels. In order to support such endeavour, we have conducted a systematic search for potentially relevant literature, thereby drawing on a range of different sources and combining various approaches to identify and collect the most relevant works. Our subsequent review and in-depth analysis of the collected material covers a total of 400 pieces of literature that have been carefully selected according to their specific relevance in relation to the central themes to be explored in different work packages of the CEASEVAL project. Electronic full-text versions of these 400 items have been compiled, thematically coded, and stored in a database. Access to the latter can easily be shared with project partners via an online cloud-storage platform provided by the University of Sussex. The aim of this working paper is to describe the review process in more detail and to summarise and discuss its most important results as well as their implications for future research.