Breaking the legal link but not the law? The externalization of EU migration control through orchestration in the Central Mediterranean

Transcending the established problem-solving perspective, this article proposes a novel conceptualization of orchestration as a strategy to escape legal responsibility. To test our conceptual argument, we study the case of EU migration governance vis-à-vis Libya in the Central Mediterranean. We show how legal constraints stemming from the 2012 Hirsi judgement of the ECtHR drove the EU from direct extraterritorial border operation to indirect...