Abstract
ABSTRACT In this article, we seek to challenge some of the ways in which the ‘2015 Mediterranean migration crisis’ has been scripted by elites. Situated within – and contributing to – a flourishing research agenda on everyday geographies and ontologies of personal (in)security, we aim to bring non-elite knowledge and experience to the foreground. We do so by examining the diverse grounded perspectives of those on the move who are arguably the key dramatis personae in the so-called ‘crisis’ and yet whose voices are often absent in dominant representations of it. Specifically, we focus on the dynamic interplay between contemporary European Union border security apparatuses and mobile subjects who encounter, negotiate and challenge these apparatuses. Drawing upon 37 in-depth qualitative interviews with recent arrivals as part of a multi-sited research project across the Mediterranean region, we offer a historicized and geographically situated analysis of the contested politics of ‘irregularity’ on the island of Malta. As a geopolitically significant site along the central Mediterranean route, the changes in migratory dynamics witnessed in Malta over the past two decades offer an instructive lens through which the ‘crisis’ narrative can be usefully problematized and disaggregated.
Highlights
Problematizing and disaggregating the ‘2015 migration crisis’ As images of lifeless bodies in the Mediterranean and columns of unauthorized arrivals crossing through central and eastern Europe made headlines around the world, policy-making and policy-debating communities have variously referred to 2015 as marking the onset of a ‘crisis situation in the Mediterranean’ (EU Commission, 2015), a ‘refugee crisis’ (Youngs, 2017), and a ‘pan-European crisis [...] Europe’s 9/11’ (Krastev, 2017)
A geopolitically significant site along the central Mediterranean route, we argue that the changes in migratory dynamics witnessed in Malta – since 2015, and over the past two decades immediately beforehand – offers an instructive lens through which the dominant ‘crisis’ narrative as one characterized by hyperagentic economic migrants posing an existential threat to European security can be usefully problematized and disaggregated
Without making strenuous efforts to understand the ‘closest-in’ (Philo, 2014) geographical perspectives of those on the move, there is a risk that abstract, catchall, and depoliticizing elite constructions of ‘migration crises’ as being caused by the excessive and unfettered agency of those on the move will perpetuate the violent conditions that we know many mobile populations are subject to. What this conceptual and methodological step to prioritize ‘closest-in’ perspectives opens up is an alternative ground from which to view and understand events associated with those population upheavals – one that privileges the everyday standpoints of diverse people on the move – which in turn allows for a series of problematizations of dominant policy constructions of ‘crisis’ and their associated agendas of displacing and deferring responsibilities for situations that they have had a role in shaping
Summary
Problematizing and disaggregating the ‘2015 migration crisis’ As images of lifeless bodies in the Mediterranean and columns of unauthorized arrivals crossing through central and eastern Europe made headlines around the world, policy-making and policy-debating communities have variously referred to 2015 as marking the onset of a ‘crisis situation in the Mediterranean’ (EU Commission, 2015), a ‘refugee crisis’ (Youngs, 2017), and a ‘pan-European crisis [...] Europe’s 9/11’ (Krastev, 2017). The dominant policy framing of ‘the 2015 crisis’, is one that presents the essence of the issue flatly in terms of excessive ‘irregular’ migration from ‘outside’ Europe, which in turn is presented an existential threat to the security of the EU and individual Member States and justified the introduction of tougher deterrent border security policies, the militarization of the Mediterranean region, and the crude reliance on fences and barbed wire along the central Balkan route to Germany This securitized narrative has been reinforced by a powerful visual repertoire of racialized and gendered representations of the geopolitics of the ‘crisis’ that emphasize unprecedented mass movement and play on the common theme of unruliness, invasion, and besiegement
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