Even though the most recent, and one of the greatest refugee crises in Europe is gradually ceasing, it has certainly revealed numerous underlying issues within the European Union (EU) and its Member States. The magnitude and the intensity of the 2015 refugee crisis put to test the international refugee protection regimes and their effectiveness to quickly neutralize the crisis. Having said that, this work will attempt to address one of the main challenges that had been faced by the international community in the last six years – the overwhelming influx of refugees, and its impact on the effectiveness and the functioning of international refugee protection regimes. Unprecedented scale of migrant flows, heightened regime complexity and lack of solidarity among involved actors are just some of the factors that have greatly impacted the course of the crisis in Europe, and the manner in which the crisis has been resolved. The main contribution of this research is the generalizability of this analysis – the institutional and systematic issues that have been revealed throughout the refugee crisis have been around before the crisis itself. Whereas the focus of most refugee crisis-related research is on the narrowed-down, refugee-specific aspects, this research leaves more space for widespread application of findings to other fields of research. The refugee crisis is only the spark, which has caused the perfect storm of failed burden-sharing, normative flaws and flawed decision-making, all of which can transcend into any other form of crisis, and another system of regimes.
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