Translating ‘legitimate’ violence in deportation: a bottom-up relational approach to EU policy norms in practice

This article examines how norms of 'legitimate' violence in EU deportation have transformed. Following serious injuries and deaths during removals from the 1990s to mid-2010s, there have been significant changes to the implementation of deportation, most notably the establishment of forced-return monitoring systems in nearly all EU states and Frontex. Despite this, academic attention to these developments remains limited. This article asks how the introduction of monitoring has shaped implementation and practitioners' understandings of 'legitimate' violence, and what effects emerge from regular interactions between monitors and escorts responsible for deportation. Using interviews, document-access requests, and documentary research, the article investigates these questions by focusing on relational dynamics from 2013 to 2023. To capture these dynamics within the international and multiorganisational context of Frontex and EU co-funded Forced-Return Monitoring projects, it proposes the analytical lens of norm translation in transnational grey areas. This approach reveals co-constitutive social spaces between written rules and their application on the ground, where escorts' and monitors' interactions can generate new normative views and shifts in behaviour over time. These actors shape, negotiate, and contest expectations of appropriateness, showing that bottom-up relational dynamics, beyond top-down EU standards, play a key role in driving change and informing practice.