Categories on the move Governing refugees in transnational admission programmes to Germany

In light of record numbers of displaced people worldwide, surrounded by a rhetoric of crisis and limited resources, European states are redrawing boundaries of access and belonging. A timely example are recently introduced European resettlement and humanitarian admission programmes, admitting limited numbers of ‘particularly vulnerable’ refugees from countries of refuge. Categorisation practices are central in this process. In official policies and in daily frontline work, policy categories prioritise, include and exclude along the intersecting lines of inter alia nationality, gender, age or education. Thereby, they create inequalities and shape perceptions of who is most deserving of access or care, and who is considered undeserving or a risk. Taking Germany’s humanitarian admission programmes from Lebanon and Turkey as an example, the thesis follows categorisation practices throughout the complete transnational admission chain: from policy formulation in Germany, via refugee selection and pre-departure in countries of refuge, to refugee reception in German provinces and municipalities. Grounded in a triangulated methodology, including document analysis, interviews, and participant observations, the thesis reveals how categorisations get translated and transform from one institutional context to another, who gets prioritised at different steps in the process, and how actors normatively justify or contest categorisations and resulting inequalities. Fusing insights from Interpretive Policy Analysis, International Political Sociology and feminist theories of intersectionality, the thesis advances a dynamic and processual understanding of categorising, inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, it contributes to theorising the normative grammars actors deploy to justify categorisation practices and the inequalities they produce.