Engaging the Geopolitics of Asylum Seeking: The Care/control Function of Vulnerability Assessments in the Context of the EU–Turkey Agreement

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores vulnerability assessments as practices of filtering, caring and border enforcement. Following the EU-Turkish Agreement which came to force March 2016, migrants crossing from the Turkish coast onto the Greek Aegean islands are subject to a set of administrative procedures which assess the country responsible for processing their asylum claim. As I demonstrate their chances of accessing the asylum process or risk being returned to Turkey are shaped by the outcome of vulnerability assessments. Drawing together feminist approaches on vulnerability and geopolitics with recent work that addresses hotspots and the humanitarian border, the article suggest that vulnerability assessments are is crucial for understanding the ways in which state strategies to discourage mobility are woven into protection practices and the ways in which exclusions are authorised through the strategic deployment of vulnerability. The study is based on fieldwork and interviews conducted on the island of Lesbos during three separate periods between the summer of 2017 and December 2018. By interrogating processes of documentation and the role of state and non-state actors in the operationalising vulnerability, I demonstrate how mobile bodies are governed through vulnerability, medical knowledge and trauma. As a result, vulnerability assessments privilege certain, often gendered mobilities as opposed to others while in parallel contribute to enhancing a mode of care and control at the border that justifies the perpetuation of forms of violence.