European Border Regime Research Articles

A new EUtopia – Understanding Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and the criminalisation of migration in Europe

The aim of this paper is to expound and critically analyse the proposed reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) in December 2023. Drawing on insights from migration science and political philosophy, it argues that political agreement on the controversial reform can best be understood through a Foucauldian lens, conceptualising the European border regime as a biopolitical space in which migrant lives are contested. Against the background of the ever-expanding criminalisation and securitisation of migration, analyses of disciplinary and biopower offer unique insights into modern-day European asylum and border politics. The article criticises the bifurcation of European rights discourses in light of this trend, and calls for differentiated engagement with developments in European asylum politics.

“No Foreigners”: Migrants’ Experiences of Urban Bordering in the City of Zagreb

ABSTRACT This article examines the interplay between non-European migration in the Balkans and the securitization of the European Union’s borders, highlighting the diffusion of bordering practices into urban spaces. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Zagreb, Croatia, we explore how migrants’ encounters with urban bordering contribute to their experiences of differentiation and exclusion. The article engages with the narratives of migrants and city residents, focusing on examples from Zagreb’s Dugave neighborhood. We delve into processes surrounding fencing, policing, spatial segregation, and nightclub bans and highlight that encountering the border plays a crucial role in migrants’ urban lives. Ultimately, the article sheds light on the dynamics of urban bordering and social hostility, revealing how the confluence of policies, social attitudes, and physical barriers shapes migrants’ experiences and decisions within the urban context of a new transit and arrival city in the European border regime.

Making (in)formality work in a multi-scalar European border regime

ABSTRACT The European migration control regime claims to strife for ‘orderly’ and safe conditions of migration, yet systematically generates the opposite. This paper explores the role of informality in creating solutions to enable control and produce order in the European migration control regime by examining two areas of border policy characterised by high degrees of regulation and contestation : the implementation of the Dublin III Regulation (2013) and transnational negotiations over readmission agreements between European states and deportable people’s assumed countries of origin. We focus on Sweden and Switzerland, two countries perceived as having high degrees of ‘formality’ in their migration control regimes, and draw on ethnographic material generated between 2015 and 2018 in Swiss and Swedish migration control agencies. We demonstrate the central role of informality in making formal regulations 'work'. The Dublin Regulation necessitates tacit toleration of informality to be enforced, and readmission agreements rely on informal, transnational politics that neither follow migration law nor respectthe rights and lives of people on the move. The article underscores the importance of debunking the myth of an ‘orderly’ migration control regime, informality is what makes European migration control ‘work’, often to the detriment of people on the move.

Coming of Age While Challenging Borders: Networks of Solidarity and Resistance of Swedish-Afghan Youths on the Move in Europe

This article examines the strategies of resistance enacted by an informal network of solidarity comprised of Afghan youths on the move in Europe and their Swedish allies. In 2015, thousands of Afghan children fleeing from the Taliban regime arrived in Europe as unaccompanied minors. Many have been hosted in Sweden and lived there for several years, until coming of age. Reaching 18 years prompted a series of consecutive losses, as the Swedish state limited their opportunities to remain in the country or even illegalized them. Subjected to threats of detention, deportation, and ill treatment, many Afghan youths re-escaped into other European countries, crafting networks of informal solidarity to help them resist border violence. This article is based on an ethnographic study that delves into the lived experiences of four Afghan youths who lived in Lisbon between February 2019 and February 2020, particularly focusing on the journey of Ahmed, a young man of Hazara ethnicity. The empirical data shed light on the solidarity enactments that enhanced the youths’ resistance in hostile environments, inviting reflection on the impacts of the European border regime and the importance of agency, care, and political contestation.

Migration and the Dystopian Imagination of European Border Regimes

Inward migration has long troubled the European political imagination. For example, an emphasis on fortification and low immigration was key to the civilisational fantasy of many early modern European literary Utopias. The dominant contemporary political framing of irregularised migration as a European problem thus leans on an imagined transnational ‘European civilisation’, concretised in the contemporary EU but with roots stretching back centuries. This article examines critical cultural treatments of legal and policy frameworks, grounded in a (supra-)nationalist civilisational myth, which now determine the treatment of irregularised migrants. Specifically, I examine three cultural texts (a novel, a film, and documentary artwork) produced in the years immediately preceding the development of the current Dublin III Regulation, which determines how and where asylum claims are processed in the EU. These three realist primary texts counter the official techno-scientific discourse of territorial integrity using science fictional narrative strategies, generic conventions, and tropes: the 2012 documentary artwork Liquid Traces: The Left to Die Boat Case by Forensic Architecture uses science fictional visualisations to directly confront the deadly effects of European bordering in the Mediterranean. Aki Kaurismäki’s film Le Havre (2011), shows how twentieth-century history haunts contemporary migration fears by spatialising multiple temporalities in the titular city. Finally, Chika Unigwe’s novel On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), explores the colonial dynamics of irregularised migration and the complexities of individual agency, producing a form of critical dystopian engagement with the social and political conditions of the present without being a generic dystopia. These three texts expose the dangers and violence of European bordering, and counter the science fictional civilisational fantasies of its policies. They share an emphasis on the need for solidarity, resistance, and, via encounters with the spectral presences of Europe’s past, they demand forms of historical justice which will break with contemporary dystopian conditions and the hard borders of the present.

Speaking Racism – Raciolinguistic Frontiers, Worth and Belonging in the Governing of Refugees in Norway

ABSTRACT This article explores the role that language requirements for residence and citizenship play in delineations of worth and belonging in the governing of refugees in Western Europe after 2015. In the past two decades residence and citizenship rights for migrants have increasingly become conditional on formalised language requirements. While language requirements embed promises of inclusion and opportunity, this framing skirts the ways in which they legitimate and reproduce racially charged inequalities. Based on rich ethnographic data from Norway, this article investigates how refugees encounter, perceive, and contest language requirements. By mobilising Kamran Khan’s notion of ‘raciolinguistic borders’ alongside Ann Laura Stoler’s notion of ‘interior frontiers’, I explore how language requirements are heard to ‘speak racism’. I argue that a political geography of language provides a timely and needed contribution to the geopolitical toolbox, and more specifically, to geographical explorations of the racial taxonomies of contemporary European border regimes.

Within, beyond, and after citizenship: the interplay between visibility and invisibility among migrants in Patras

ABSTRACT Drawing upon empirical research conducted in Patras in 2015, this paper investigates the multiplicity of visible and invisible practices migrants have employed to challenge, negotiate, or evade the pervasive border regime and (attempt to) claim their freedom of settlement and movement. The paper will make two interrelated contributions. Theoretically, it will critically explore the concepts of ‘acts of citizenship’ and ‘imperceptible politics’ through the lens of visibility to analyse the nuances and differences between them and reinstate their importance in capturing the vitality of migrants’ agency. Empirically, the paper will investigate the interplay of visibility and invisibility both in the development of the European and national border regimes and in the fragmented formation process of a migrant political subjectivity. In capturing and analysing the ever-changing development of migrants’ movements and struggles, as well as their multiple ways of being political through visibility and invisibility within, beyond, and after citizenship, the paper contributes to the ongoing dialogue between two broader bodies of work: Critical Citizenship Studies and Autonomy of Migration.

‘Citizenship as incorporated beyond’ – Challenging national citizen–migrant categorisations with transnational (post)colonial relations of incorporating agrifood

ABSTRACT Migrant activists in Bremen, Germany, challenge classifications of people as national citizens or migrants by highlighting the (post)colonial and capitalist relations that have contributed and continue to contribute to this citizen–migrant divide. Based on ethnographic research and using the relational–ontological tools of material semiotics, I concretise these alternative-knowledge claims by tracing two of many entanglements (1) between the EUropean border regime, the exploitation of migrant labour in the agrifood industry, and the enactment of European citizens and companies and (2) with the (post)colonial histories underpinning these exploitative relations. First, I argue that citizen bodies and migrants’ labouring bodies are intimately related in bodily, fleshy ways. Moreover, corporations that pay taxes for national states are materially related to transnational, (post)colonial migrant labour. Second, I contribute to the literature that challenges the notion of independent individual national citizens or states. Considering citizenship–migrant categorisation based on those agrifood relations, I conceptualise ‘citizenship as incorporated beyond’. This means that national citizens and body politics such as Germany have been and continue to be brought into being by incorporating (i.e. eating, embodying, forming a corporate body, black boxing), among others, (relations of) agrifood from beyond their ‘national’ bodies and borders.

COVID-19 Responses and the European Border Regime in Croatia and Serbia: Spectacularizing Borders and Sovereignties

This article focuses on multiple bordering practices introduced in the context of the initial COVID -19 responses in Croatia and Serbia. These practices, often focused on the imposition of mobility control, were differently framed, executed and challenged in these two contexts and demonstrated a long-term restructuring of the European border regime at the gates of the EU . The paper outlines and contextualizes constant interplay and mutual stimulation of movement suppression and movement resilience in response to the new virus, blurring and sharpening borders, as seen from these two states at the political and geographical peripheries of Europe. Croatia and Serbia employed spectacularization and invisibilization of movement control, which steadily fostered the further compartmentalization of the population in both countries but with notable differences, especially regarding the control over unwanted migration toward the EU . In the period under discussion, borders were activated, imposed and challenged, exposing the changeability of relations between the EU border regime and the sovereign-nation states which comprise it. Different positions of Serbia and Croatia in the EU border regime also led to differences with regard to movement control, bordering, encampment and the repression exhibited toward people on the move. Old and new typologies of movement repression were tested and employed within the COVID -19 crisis framework, resulting in the further compartmentalization of societies and exclusions

The Humanitarian Theater in the Mediterranean and the Threat of Violence in the Balkans

ABSTRACT This article compares the Mediterranean and the Balkan routes of migration into the European Union, exploring the (in)visibility and (un)knowability of the management of European borderlands. It offers a historical overview of the hotspot approach in the Mediterranean, where securitarian concerns merged with humanitarian affects, making certain practices and subjectivities possible, but foreclosing others. Lampedusa, Italy, has been turned into a stage where “humanitarian theater” performed for European audiences has become a crucial aspect of border management. The strategy of EU border management has been different in the Balkans, where the use of violence has been concealed with a veil of official denial. Instead of a humanitarian theater, in the Balkans we can find stories of border terror, official denial of such violence, and competing claims to knowledge about it. This official denial has kept “Europe” as a political community simultaneously implicated in and innocent of the use of violence in border management. Despite their differences, the key functions of the EU border regime have been the same in these two regions. The comparative perspective illustrates the different strategies the European border regime uses to manage the perceived “crisis” of migration, while simultaneously keeping the liberal space of Europe “safe.”

Defensive integration through cooperative re-bordering? How member states use internal border controls in Schengen

ABSTRACT Following the refugee crisis in 2015 and the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the use of internal border controls within the EU expanded considerably. This change seems to be at odds with the freedom of movement within the Schengen Area, a cornerstone of European integration. Previous research has been inconclusive as to whether this re-bordering signals a move towards renationalisation and disintegration or if it should be understood as a reconfiguration of European cooperation. This article takes a long-term perspective on the use of internal border controls and compares, through content analysis, the prevalence of renationalisation and European integration themes in member states’ notifications of internal border controls from 2006 to 2020. While controls have become more extensive in duration and scope over time, the results show that, contrary to expectations, increased focus on national security was not accompanied by less commitment to European integration in these notifications. Thus, rather than a sign of disintegration, it is argued that internal border controls can be understood as a reconfiguration of the European border regime towards cooperative but defensive integration.

The use of smartphones and the quest for a future among West African men in reception centers in Italy

In this article, I will analyse the creative use of smartphone by West African men living in reception centers in Torino, in Italy. As the usurpation of time has become an integral part of the European border regime, I place migrants’ media practices in relation to their claims for temporal justices. Drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that the use of smartphones – and especially the making and sharing of images – represents a practice of future making, which is linked to the dimension of hope and desire more than that of nostalgia. After having considered the mobile phone as an instrument for “killing time” during the slow daily routine of the reception centers, I will go on to analyse how the skillfully crafting of one’s own virtual image helps to carry out migratory projects and to obtain a residence permit. Finally, I will turn my attention to the materiality of the smartphone. As an “object of desire,” it is part of a chain of gifts and counter-gifts capable of unlocking new scenarios through the creation of relationships. I conclude that the smartphone can be seen as a weapon in the battle over time which is proper of contemporary migration politics and governance.

The Political-Humanitarian Borderwork of Ngos in Sicily: Between Migration Management and Repoliticisation

ABSTRACT The literature highlighted the depoliticising role of humanitarianism and its contribution to the perpetuation of migration control. Recent studies questioned the interpretation of humanitarianism as merely legitimising migration control, and reported on the capacity of grassroots actors to challenge the current European border regime. This paper focuses on the mainstream NGOs’ role in the making and unmaking of the southern European border. It further explores the relationship between NGOs’ humanitarian and political borderwork and investigates if and how NGOs’ humanitarianism opens up or closes down opportunity for their political interventions. This article analyses the interventions of Terre des Hommes, Medu and Oxfam within the southern Italian border management system during two recent re-bordering phases: the introduction of the hotspot approach in 2015 and the adoption of the restrictive migration policies of 2018. The fieldwork in Sicily covers a ten-months period between 2017 and 2018. The research methodology includes multi-sited ethnography, semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The paper concludes by arguing that the line between NGOs’ humanitarian and political borderwork is blurred. The borderwork of these actors can be considered as a political-humanitarian borderwork: NGOs’ humanitarian interventions were intertwined with political interventions and the former also contributed to accomplishing the latter.

Symmetry in the Delegation of Power as a Legitimacy Criterion

AbstractThe EU's power is expanding, calling for reassessments of its normative legitimacy. This article proposes a novel criterion for assessing the EU's legitimacy: symmetry in the delegation of power. We illustrate the usefulness of this criterion through an analysis of the European border regime. Existing analyses of the border regime have tended to dismiss it as weak and intergovernmental. We show, to the contrary, that it is both strong and weak. The EU wields significant power in border control but lacks power altogether in immigration policy. This asymmetry has rendered the EU incapable of discharging the moral responsibilities that arise in migration control, posing a novel legitimacy challenge. Finally, we argue that the symmetry criterion generalizes and can shed light on the EU's legitimacy beyond the area of migration.

A externalização das fronteiras europeias e os efeitos indesejados de uma fronteira dinâmica

The debates on the externalization of the European borders translate a wider theoretical discussion on the transformation of border regimes and about the emergence of migration infrastructures for the management of irregular migration. The development of migration management policies focused on ‘emergency’ in crisis situations suspends common practice and creates a state of exception. In the European case these migration infrastructures generate new forms of governance and result in what some authors call ‘necroborder’. This paper aims to understand the transformations of the European border regime; assess the main elements of European migratory infrastructures; and, inquire how these infrastructures lead to the emergence of a so-called ‘necroborder’.

The ‘New Humanitarians’: Vernacular aid in Greece

Since 2015, the ’refugee crisis’ in Greece has turned the Eastern Mediterranean migration route into one of the main entry points to Europe. In response, a grassroots solidarity movement has emerged in the Aegean islands that has become instrumental for boat rescue at sea, and for camp service provision. These local and international volunteers, as well as refugees, identify as ‘New Humanitarians’. This paper presents the emic aspects of the ‘New Humanitarians’, and focuses on vernacular actors and how they challenge the humanitarian landscape in Greece by examining their principles, practices, and discourse.
 A key finding is that the ‘New Humanitarian’ principles that they model revisit the existing ones—i.e. solidarity, hospitality, equality, and agency. Other findings show that the ‘New Humanitarians’ are reproducing governing technologies imposed by the government and other agencies. They do so while trying to contest mainstream humanitarianism and pleading for much-needed change in the European border regime and refugee management systems.

Refugee agency through bare life? New forms of voice and strategies of imperceptibility at the European borders

In the course of the comparatively high numbers of refugees arriving in Europe in 2015 and 2016, several practices of the European border regime became more restrictive. This development accounts for the precarious situation in refugee camps at the external borders of Southeast Europe and the refusal of Mediterranean countries to accept more asylum seekers –against the backdrop of a lacking European solidarity system. Literature suggests that refugees in these contexts find themselves more often in (what Agamben understands as) a bare life situation, which challenges the possibilities for refugee agency at the European borders. This paper reflects on two concrete cases interpreted as bare life situations based on field research in Greece and Italy. It explores conceptualizations considering an assumed change of refugee agency. The first case refers to the situation in former camp “Moria” and the second to practices of irregularization in Southern Italy. The article aims to specify the limitations of refugees’ agency by building on an understanding of agency as relational to the border regime. The findings suggest that the bare life refugees have been reduced to explains the development of new forms of voice in refugee camps and strategies of imperceptibility in irregularity. Thereby refugee acts expose the adversity of border practices, while appropriating and redefining the bare life conditions.
 Received: 14 February 2022Accepted: 06 May 2022

Welcoming the unwelcome: Migration industries and border control for homeless job-seeking migrants in central Copenhagen

As modes of border control increasingly shift to cities, private charities that engage in caring for non-national homeless migrants risk, unintentionally and unwillingly, serving the so-called ‘migration industries’ as front agencies for the European border regime. Since the 2008 financial crisis, which hit migrant populations in southern Europe particularly hard, the number of homeless migrants sleeping rough in northern European cities has increased. In Copenhagen, these new homeless include jobless West African men who reside in Spain or Italy but are transiently in the city to reboot their lives by collecting empty deposit-carrying bottles left on the streets. Political will to address this rising social problem at state and city levels has so far been limited, leaving the private non-profit charities of central Copenhagen as sole providers of care for homeless migrants. This article examines how these long-established institutions, which used to provide care primarily to locals with substance dependencies or mental health problems, have transformed into migrant industries shaped by the logic of the European border regime. For this purpose, prior research on urban borderlands and homeless migrants is reviewed, and documents issued by non-profit charities operating in the field of urban homelessness are analysed. The article focuses on the increasingly hostile elements of state and municipal policies on non-Western migrants, which work to divide ‘our’ homeless from the migrant ‘others’. It also considers the various ways in which charities work to enable different survival strategies to emerge and be maintained among migrants without access to the formal labour market, and finally how charities’ transformed role affects their relationships with local residents.

Keeping migrants at the margins. Governing through ambiguity and the politics of discretion in the post-2015 EUropean migration and border regime

This article deals with the roles of ambiguity and discretion in the governing of migration and how they contribute to the marginalisation of migrants at the borders of EUrope. Building on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in Sicily, it connects legal-institutional ambiguities of two recent policy interventions in the field of migration governance in Italy – the Security Decree-Law and the Hotspot Approach – to the discretionary practices by public officials tasked with their implementation. By theoretically and empirically tracing the co-constitutive relationship of ambiguity and discretion, the article draws on and contributes to recent inquiries into grey areas of governance, particularly in the field of (critical) border regime studies. Based on two distinct cases, it analyses how ambiguity and discretionary local practices are related both to each other and to the contemporary fragmentary reconfiguration processes of the EUropean Migration and Border Regime, and shows how they intersect to form spatio-juridical grey areas that foster the spatial and social marginalisation of migrants in EUrope.

Strategic Cruelty: Legitimizing Violence in the European Union's Border Regime

AbstractViolent border practices against irregular migration are not new, although increasing xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments have drawn greater attention to such practices in recent years. Such measures—both in and at the borders—constitute organized violence on migrant bodies, making them permanently insecure. This is particularly striking in the context of European liberal democracies with its established discourse of human rights, which have since the 1990s consolidated a formidable architecture of deterrence and which have intensified such efforts with the 2015 “migrant crisis” with increasing sea interceptions, restrictive anti-immigrant measures, and the criminalization of solidarity efforts. This article asks: How does the European Union (EU) legitimize violence in its border regime and reconcile this regime with its core identity as a defender of human rights and a “normative superpower”? By drawing on critical discourse analysis and reviewing policy statements, speeches, and press releases, it identifies the discourse topics, discursive strategies, and linguistic means through which EU migration discourse seeks to legitimize its sprawling architecture of strategic cruelty against irregular migration. This article argues that the purpose of the resulting discourse is to “absolve and resolve”—absolving the union as a whole of guilt and resolving the cognitive dissonance between the professed identity of the EU as supremely humanitarian and the observable inhumane acts of itself and its member states. This explains how the EU can employ strategic cruelty to mitigate the arrival of migrants while simultaneously maintaining moral standing to chastise individual members for “violating” the hegemonic collective identity of the union.