Mobility, racism and geopolitics

Abstract

The paper tries to ‘map’ the shifting discursive and institutional practices with regard to international migrations, by analyzing the discourses and regimes of migration control in Europe. The perspectives of ‘critical’ geopolitics are deployed in the analysis of international migrations, to address issues of the construction of migrations as ‘threats’ and ‘mass’ migrations to the West. The racialization, criminalization and securitization of international migration have emerged as key ingredients of discursive regimes of international migrations, informing the changing contours of migration discourses in Europe and the West. The paper tries to draw some of the complex and multiple interfaces of the current crises of capitalism and the ‘new world’ order, global inequality, hegemony, and the dominant representations of a category of international migrations as ‘threats’. © 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved