Constructing Crises to Manage

Abstract

Abstract This chapter sets out the conceptual building blocks for the book and develops the idea of migrant agency, situating it within the relevant literature. I argue that power, politics, and people are significant and often neglected elements of migration governance processes. Ignoring their role in migration governance contributes to the unremitting promotion of the migration management paradigm. In contrast, this book examines the interplay of actors, practices, and discourses within the realm of migration governance. Here, political power is often drawn from constructed crises based on a discourse of exceptionalism and sovereignty. Migrants are framed as symptomatic of globalization’s attack on state sovereignty and constructed as victims or villains. The chapter argues that the managed migration paradigm depends on the construction of a migration crisis to which the policy ostensibly responds. Such migration ‘crises’ obscure the complicity of the state in the production of vulnerability, marginalization, violence, and death through its border regimes, and reify the power of the state to control migration, despite paradoxically being promoted based on imagery of the state as overwhelmed. To complete this sleight of hand, policy discussions on migration governance ignore the role of migrants themselves, reinforcing the orientalist logic and assumptions that migrants are objects to be governed, not subjects who engage in decision-making, resist, and ultimately constitute international relations. Within the context of Europe, the chapter demonstrates how the emphasis on migration control at the EU’s external border results from constructed crises in the Mediterranean.