European Border Control Research Articles

The border as a space of contention: the spatial strategies of protest against border controls in Europe

This article analyses the spatial dimension of social movements mobilising against border controls. Focusing on the case of the protests against European border controls, this paper shows that new spatial strategies of protest have emerged since the beginning of the 2000s. Movements construct collective actions that aim to identify border controls and occupy specific border sites. These new strategies are related to a transformation of the material and symbolic dimensions of border controls in the last decades. As they have become more diffuse and organised through a selective power, social movements strategically locate their protest in order to document the existence and nature of border controls. In doing so, they disrupt the exclusionary logic of citizenship.

Time and the Migrant Other: European Border Controls and the Temporal Economics of Illegality

ABSTRACTThe Western world's borders increasingly seem like a battleground where a new kind of “threat” is repelled—the so‐called “illegal migrant.” At Europe's southern frontiers, sea patrols, advanced surveillance machinery, and fencing keep migrants out, much like at the U.S., Israeli, and Australian borders. Such investments have created a dense web of controls that displaces the border both inward and outward into the borderlands beyond it. Building upon recent border studies and ethnographies of illegality, I explore in this article Europe's migration controls by focusing on their temporal rather than their spatial aspects. I show that, in the borderlands, irregular migrants are not only subjected to extended periods of waiting, as migrants often are, but they also face an active usurpation of time by state authorities through serial expulsions and retentions. The ways in which migrants’ time is appropriated reveal a complex economics of illegality, complementing existing “biopolitical” perspectives on Europe's borders. [migration, illegality, time, borders, temporality]

Deterrence and Protection in the EU’s Migration Policy

EU migration and asylum policy is facing tough challenges at the southern borders of the Union as migration and asylum pressures rise, fuelled by political instability and poverty in several regions of Asia and Africa. Current European border control practices create three spaces of control: externalised borders, through readmission and return agreements which enrol third countries in border control; the EU borders themselves through the work of Frontex and the development of a whole arsenal of technology tools for controlling mobility to and from the EU; and the Schengen area, whose regulations tend to reinforce deterrence at the borders through the Smart Border System. As a result, the EU’s balancing act between irregular migration control and protection of refugees and human life clearly tips towards the former, even if it pays lip service to the latter. More options for mobility across the Mediterranean and more cooperation for growth are essential ingredients of a sustainable migration management policy on the EU’s southern borders. In addition asylum management could benefit from EU level humanitarian visas issued at countries of origin.

Ethnic Hierarchies and the Shifting EU Schengen Border in the Post-Cold War Era

Borders in Central and Eastern Europe witnessed stark changes in recent decades. Frontiers went from high security zones during the Cold War to far more open borders as socialism retreated. Yet, the subsequent eastward shift of the European Union's Schengen border control system returned some borders to high security status, with only a few later shedding such status as the system moved further eastwards. Beyond discerning how the Schengen border undercuts the EU's effort to promote non-discrimination and other liberal values, this article also shows how Schengen holds the power to further entrench perceptions of ethnic hierarchy.

Euroscapes in Senegal Seen Through the Lense of the Hip Hop Movement

In contemporary concepts globalization is understood as a process interconnected to dynamics of re-bordering that develop in relation to political dynamics of fear. In this context the application of migration management is practiced as an externalization of European border controls to places like Senegal. Such practices are severely criticized by migrant activist who blame EU agencies and states ‘in cooperation’ with African states to violate basic human rights and the right to mobility. The campaign of the Senegalese hip-hop movement against “illegal” migration seems to stand in opposition to this migrant activists discourse. This paper argues that the way how the hip-hop scene imagines mobility and performs socio-political citizenship is not a reproduction of a European securitization of migration rather it can be understood as a geopolitical critic of European political relations with Africa.

The Treaty of Lisbon and the European Border Control Regime

The question raised in the article is how the new provisions of the Lisbon Treaty and the Stockholm programme concerning the EU’s asylum and migration policy might consolidate existing trends within the European border control regime. The regime is defined by a combination of three features: (i) a harmonisation of categories among the EU/Schengen member states, (ii) a growing use of new technology in networked databases and (iii) an increasing sorting of individuals based on security concerns. Although none of these features is new, the combination gives a new impetus to the European border control regime. The article concludes that the Lisbon Treaty and the Stockholm programme consolidate and strengthen existing trends. This implies that policies on border control, asylum, immigration, judicial cooperation and police cooperation are consolidated in a broader approach to border control, and that there is a strengthening of EU foreign policy within the European border control regime. The boundaries between previously dispersed policy areas are blurred. The combination of different aspects of security and various levels of authority requires coordination of policies with substantially different goals, and goes beyond mere border control.

Nouadhibou « ville de transit » ?

On se propose dans cet article de montrer comment, dans le contexte de l’exacerbation des pressions a la fermeture des frontieres exercees par les institutions europeennes, la qualification de la ville portuaire de Nouadhibou (Mauritanie) comme ville de transit vient mettre a l’epreuve l’image et le sens de l’urbanite propre a cette ville. Les composantes de cette image sont d’abord precisees : son caractere de ville industrielle, en contraste avec les valeurs de la citadinite maure, et de ville commerciale inscrite dans des circuits d’echange globaux mais longtemps isolee du reste du territoire mauritanien. La presence dans la ville des etrangers originaires de la sous-region etait jusqu’ici integree a cette image, comme une sorte de confirmation supplementaire de la valorisation de l’esprit d’entreprise. Jusqu’a une date recente, les migrations de transit des « aventuriers » en quete d’un passage vers l’Europe ont pu s’articuler aux differents types de circulation presents dans la ville sans que soit altere ce fond de representations partagees. Les mesures mises en place dans le cadre de la politique de surveillance des frontieres sont venues neanmoins polariser ce systeme migratoire fluide sur son dernier segment, en ciblant la categorie d’emigrant clandestin ou illegal dans un contexte ou rien ne differenciait jusque-la ce dernier de l’immigre, nullement clandestin ou illegal. Elles tendent a creer des categories distinctives d’immigres (reguliers, permanents, de passage), la ou precisement le systeme migratoire local produisait l’indistinction. Comme toute politique migratoire, la politique de controle des frontieres de l’Europe implique pour sa mise en œuvre tout un travail de legitimation des actions entreprises, qui les rende comprehensibles et acceptables par les opinions publiques des pays concernes. L’approche monographique developpee dans l’article conduit a considerer que ce travail de legitimation est correlatif d’un proces en illegitimite des migrants eux-memes et de leur presence dans la ville, illegitimite que ces mots (« transit », « clandestin », etc.) viennent precisement souligner.

The impact of Western European border policies on the control of ‘refugees’ in Eastern and Central Europe

Abstract Much of the contemporary debate on Western European exclusionary border policies focuses on the nature of that exclusion, rather than the impact such policies are likely to have on border controls of other migrant receiving or producing states. This article addresses some of the issues of Western European border control harmonisation in the context of Eastern and Central Europe, and Hungary in particular. It suggests that the concept of ‘Fortress Europe’ needs some refinement as harmonisation of controls are progressively on different levels, from the Schengen group of ‘inner‐Europe’ to the EEA ‘greater inner‐Europe’, with perhaps the Visegrad group waiting in the wings. What is clear is that present policies and exclusionary practices, on whatever level, directed against ‘refugees’, are primarily framed within a notion of threat and necessary compensation for potential freedoms. So long as this persists, policies of control per se will outweigh prevention. What we have in Eastern and Central Eur...

European Border Controls: Who needs them?

European Border Controls: Who needs them?