European Union

The ban on petrol and diesel cars will be repealed – the question is the size of the potential market post-2035

Rumen Radev rules out more support and warns Ukraine cash is 'draining' away

DRAFT REPORT on a European Parliament recommendation to the Council, the Commission and the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy concerning reconstruction efforts as part of a comprehensive peace process amid shifting paradigms in the broader Middle East
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Sebastião Bugalho

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Gender equality is a foundational value of the EU, enshrined in Article 8 TFEU and put into practice through Gender Mainstreaming (GM) since the Treaty of Amsterdam. The latter is used to incorporate a gender-sensitive perspective in every policy field, to make gender a cross-cutting issue and not a topic that stands on its own. In theory, a gender perspective should run through every policy area and stage. In practice, feminist institutionalist scholarship has consistently found a gap between this commitment and its uneven implementation, especially in fields framed as “gender neutral” such as security, foreign policy and migration.

The 2024 Pact on Migration and Asylum is the latest test. Which perspectives on gender equality made it into the package, and why did they prevail over alternatives? Recent events in Brussels make the question more urgent.

On June 23rd, 2026, a Taliban delegation held talks with the EU in Brussels on the issue of returning failed asylum-seekers to Afghanistan, an entirely unprecedented visit. The Commission said 15 member states took part in a technical meeting co-chaired by Sweden. The stated focus was on people who have committed serious crimes or pose security threats, but the talks also covered resuming consular services and “a dignified return process.”

Human rights activists and MEPs warned that the meeting risks normalizing a regime that has banned girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade and that seeks to erase women from public life. Among them, Human Rights Watch argued that EU countries undermine their credibility by condemning Taliban abuses while cooperating on forced returns.

This exact tension has been analyzed by the literature. After 2021, the EU made women’s rights a central pillar of its Afghanistan policy, including through a “by women, for women” approach. This was enabled by political convenience: the broad recognition of gender apartheid made feminist commitment cheap. Now that migration control is on the table the commitment is being tested at a real cost. Against this backdrop, the contradiction in this event, between promoting Afghan women’s rights in EU external action and negotiating return agreements with Afghan authorities, is precisely why we should analyze how gender is addressed in migration governance.

Texts do not write themselves; someone does. To understand how gender ended up in the Pact, or didn’t, we can look at the architecture of relations that actors built with one another during the negotiations. Social Network Analysis (SNA) maps these relations, and it is increasingly used to study power relations among actors in the same policy domain.

What makes the method valuable here is that it shows not only who was present and who held influence, but also who was not in the room. A network reveals gaps as clearly as connections. It lets us assess whether migrant women’s organizations and other intersectional actors were actually included, or whether access stayed with organizations closer to the EU’s status quo. Established, EU-based women’s organizations have been described as representing predominantly white, professional women, while the women most affected by the Pact may sit at the periphery of the network, if they are represented at all.

While SNA typically employs quantitative data to count interactions and calculate their weight, the integration of expert interviews adds the qualitative layer that moves this method towards capturing the meaning of the relationships under scrutiny and of what actors exchange. As a result, this integrated approach shows which actors pushed explicitly for gender-related objectives, what ideas about gender they brought to the table, and which actors contested those ideas.

Network analysis and gender studies do meet, mostly around gender policy issues such as equality or employment. But few accounts combine the two to study gender within a specific policy field, and fewer still look at gender policy networks in migration. That is the space this research aims to fill.

The interviews conducted so far point to the fact that gender is not simply absent from the Pact’s negotiation. It is folded into the broader language of vulnerability, and intersectionality is diluted along with it. And while this notion provides additional leeway to allow gender-sensitive provisions during implementation, avoiding politically loaded terms that would trigger contestation during the negotiations, its use bears questions about the consequences of not naming gender in policies. This fits what critical border scholarship finds in the Pact’s texts. The issue relates to reducing social categories of age, gender, geographical origin, sexual orientation and disability to a vulnerability “check list”, which does not go under the surface and hence fails to grasp more profound and structural ways in which vulnerability occurs along migration routes.

In the Commission texts analysed by Häkli and Peltonen, for instance, gender appears mainly as a label that flags certain people for care, such as pregnant women or single-parent families. That is not the same as a lens for asking how border policies affect women and men differently. The authors warn that this logic reproduces racialised, gendered and classed hierarchies among asylum seekers. Gender enters the Pact as a marker of fragility, not as a question of equality. My research therefore asks who put it there, and who could have put it differently.

Asking who pushed for gender equality, and who was left out, shows how one of the EU’s founding values fares where security and humanitarian logics collide.

This research is not only relevant for feminist studies, but also vis-à-vis the literature related to EU integration theories and concepts investigating the role and relevance of normativity within European policy, especially in relation to migration. It further responds to the need to bridge mainstream theories with feminist literature for theoretical and societal reasons, to identify the shortcomings of both the EU migration policy’s study and application.

The post Who Shapes Gender in the EU Migration Pact: A Network Approach appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

AMENDMENTS 550 - 880 - Draft report Implementation of the common foreign and security policy – annual report 2026
Committee on Foreign Affairs
David McAllister

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

AMENDMENTS 203 - 549 - Draft report Implementation of the common foreign and security policy – annual report 2026
Committee on Foreign Affairs
David McAllister

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Think tank says long-term care will drive spending growth, while private funding and a bigger budget share are unlikely fixes

As technology accelerates decision-making, commercial pressures grow, and the consequences of business decisions travel further and faster than ever before, accountants are being asked tougher questions. The challenge is no longer simply about following the rules. It’s about applying professional judgement, asking difficult questions, and doing what is right, even when it isn’t easy. In […]

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Wednesday 21 October 2026

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Wednesday 21 October 2026

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Written by Dorothee Funk-Weyer. For decades, toxicology struggled with a shortage of evidence. Today, it faces a different challenge. New Approach Methodologies (NAMs), including laboratory and computational methods that do not rely on animals, can detect detailed biological responses with unprecented sensitivity and mechanistic detail across multiple endpoints. As the European Commission develops its roadmap […]

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