Under Control? Or Border (as) Conflict: Reflections on the European Border Regime

Sabine Hess,Bernd Kasparek

doi:10.17645/si.v5i3.1004

Abstract

The migrations of 2015 have led to a temporary destabilization of the European border and migration regime. In this contribution, we trace the process of destabilization to its various origins, which we locate around the year 2011, and offer a preliminary assessment of the attempts at re-stabilization. We employ the notion of “border (as) conflict” to emphasize that crisis and exception lies at the very core of the European border and migration regime and its four main dimensions of externalization, techno-scientific borders, an internal mobility regime for asylum seekers, and humanitarization.

Highlights

Issue This article is part of the issue “Perspectives on the European Border Regime: Mobilization, Contestation, and the Role of Civil Society”, edited by Ove Sutter and Eva Youkhana (University of Bonn, Germany)
We argue that the border, and especially the European border regime, is structurally ridden by moments of crisis as its order is constantly contested by the movements of migration, and that this contested and inherently unstable relationship between the border and migration has to be put into the center of any analysis of contemporary border theory
While the discussions on the Dublin crisis and the legal interpretations of the applicability of international law extra-territorially were largely confined to experts, the volatility of the European migration and border regime was brought into sharp focus with back-to-back tragedies that occurred in October 2013 in Lampedusa

Summary

Disputed Borders

In one of the most bizarre turns of the ongoing Brexit negotiations, the British Overseas Territory Gibraltar and its future status has become a bone of contention. In order to underline this perspective, we will approach both the period before the summer 2015 as well as its aftermath from the notion of border conflict, i.e., through a perspective on the past and present struggles and contestations in the context of migration control at the borders of Europe To this end, we want to analyze in this article: a) which processes and dynamics led to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015; and b) the multidimensional, hybrid, and at times contradictory re-stabilization attempts that demonstrate that the crisis of the border regime is not solved by drawing on our recent research project in the Aegean region and along the Balkan route.. We want to analyze in this article: a) which processes and dynamics led to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015; and b) the multidimensional, hybrid, and at times contradictory re-stabilization attempts that demonstrate that the crisis of the border regime is not solved by drawing on our recent research project in the Aegean region and along the Balkan route. Even though the scope of this article prevents us from presenting our ethnographic material in more detail, we find the ethnographic approach, meaning observing dynamics in situ and in actu, indispensable for arriving at the conclusions we present later

From Border Work to Border Conflict

An Announced Crisis

The Arab Spring and the Breakdown of Externalization

The Crisis of Dublin

Lampedusa and the Humanitarization of the Border

Conclusion