Unaccompanied migrant, asylum seeker and refugee minors. Towards a securitisation process in the European Union.

The 'refugee crisis' poses a big challenge for the European Union, especially since its peak in 2015. During the last years, migrant, asylum seekers and refugees are increasingly considered a threat to the countries inside the Schengen area, a matter of national security, seen as potential terrorist threats to the society, which view is created in the political arena. This qualitative study focuses explicitly on unaccompanied migrant, asylum seeker and refugee minors in the European Union and tries to determine which processes around this security discourse are of influence to their situations. An overview of the relevant EU policies is given, together with the techniques that are used to apply them. A theoretical framework is constructed from the concepts of securitisation, governmentality and bare-life, used as a lens for analysis. Empirical data during a case study is gathered from a field visit to the illegal settlements in Nord-Pas-de-Calais in France to better understand the experience and influence of policies on unaccompanied minors, through observation, semistructured interviews and an ethnographic. The observations were analysed with the help of the theoretical framework, leading to three main topics of discussion, on the social dynamics in the camp, the activities of humanitarian aid organisations and the role of the French government. A key finding is that the French government does not differentiate the treatment towards minors, because they hinder humanitarian organisations in helping all refugees, including those in the most vulnerable position. It leads to numerous violations of human rights, like that of access to sanitation and shelter, being explicitly visible in the emergence of trench foot disease, which has not been observed since World War II.