Helping migrants while protecting against migration: the Border Security Team in crisis

In this chapter, we study the inter-organizational response to the European migration crisis by using a collective sensemaking perspective. Collective sensemaking refers to the process by which organizations construct a shared understanding of an ambiguous and confusing situation, which subsequently facilitates collaboration between them. On the basis of interviews, we distill different narratives on the migration crisis for the Dutch Border Security Team (BST) and its partner organizations (i.e. Frontex, Greek authorities, and humanitarian organizations). The BST, Frontex and the Greek authorities viewed the crisis primarily in terms of a security threat, which fostered easy collaboration between them in border protection tasks. BST members, however, also deplored the suffering of migrants and found some common ground with humanitarian actors, thus becoming involved in several humanitarian actions as well. As a result, BST members ended up helping migrants while at the same time protecting Europe against migration