Governance by arbitrariness at the EU Border: Trajectory ethnographies of illegalised migrants

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork in Sweden and Morocco, this chapter attempts to highlight the myriad of ways in which European Union (EU) bordering practices are experienced by illegalised migrants at various stages of their journeys. It then moves away from the idea of a migrant 'crisis' or emergency and situates the research within the burgeoning literature drawing attention to bordering as a mundane technocratic and bureaucratic set of overlapping routines. In terms of empirical material, the chapter draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork in two separate countries at two different points in time vis-a-vis the so-called ‘refugee crisis'. The first is Sweden between 2013 and 2014; some months before the peak of the so-called ‘crisis' and the ‘long summer of migration’. The chapter concludes by arguing that it is possible to show that illegalised migrants are precisely governed through arbitrariness; it produces them as subjects, pushes them 'under the radar' and steals their time.