Since 2016, many German citizens have participated in so-called ‘buddy schemes’ in which volunteers provide personalised support to refugees to help them build their new lives in Germany. These relationships are characterised by ethnic, gender, and age differences between the two parties. This article looks at buddy schemes from the perspective of both volunteers and refugees and investigates whether their relationships open up spaces for transformative citizenship practices, or rather reinforce exclusionary discourses. Drawing on feminist theories of care, the article describes how volunteers and refugees attach meaning to their activities and roles in the relationship. On the one hand, values attached to caring relationships, such as emotional closeness, trust, and respect, contribute to migrants’ heightened sense of self-esteem and autonomy and foster volunteers’ sense of responsibility for fighting against inequality. On the other hand, both parties enter into particular logics of care that potentially reinforce power hierarchies between them. These ambiguous dynamics influence the possibility of transformative citizenship practices on both sides. While some volunteers and refugees develop and take a critical stance on restrictive migration policies in their relationships with others, others reinforce their exclusionist viewpoints on who deserves to be helped and by whom.

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The term "externalization" is used by a range of migration scholars, policy makers and the media to describe the extension of border and migration controls beyond the so-called 'migrant receiving nations' in the Global North and into neighboring countries or sending states in the Global South. It refers to a wide range of practices from controls of borders, rescue operations, to measures addressing the drivers of migration. The ambition of this Special Issue is to contribute to the mapping of the responses to externalization dynamics. The different articles in this volume are chosen to exemplify some of these processes at different levels of analysis. Through diverse disciplinary perspectives, the authors show how practices of externalization are being confronted, succumbed, modified and contested by individual (would-be) migrants, civil society actors and the host states' institutions in different parts of the globe. In an effort to move away from a sole focus on border zones in the Global North, the Special Issue contributes to emerging literature shifting the locus of analysis to places in the Global South, which are conventionally understood as "transit" or "sending" countries in Africa, America as well as within Europe itself.

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