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P.E.K. El-Khoury

Pauline El-Khoury is a PhD candidate within the ERC-funded project SoftEn – Soft Enforcement in EU Migration Governance. project. Within SoftEn, Pauline examines steering as a form of soft enforcement, focusing on how EU migration agencies such as the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) and Frontex steer national implementation practices through non-binding instruments and informal governance processes. Her doctoral project combines doctrinal legal analysis and empirical research to: 

  • Conceptualise “steering” as a distinct form of soft enforcement in EU law;
  • Map and classify holistically the mechanisms through which EU migration agencies steer implementation;
  • Analyse the institutional, political, and constitutional factors driving or constraining these practices;
  • Evaluate empirically the impact of a selected number of processes on Member States’ implementation and on the evolving EU legal-institutional framework. 

Her work bridges legal and political science approaches to EU governance and contributes to SoftEN’s broader goal of developing a theory of soft enforcement in EU migration policy and a governance framework for its operationalisation.