European Border Regime Research Articles

The everyday at the border: Examining visual, material and spatial intersections of international politics along the ‘Balkan Route’

This article examines the intersections between the visual, spatial and material and considers how these interactions capture the border politics of everyday ‘banal’ objects. We do this by looking at some of the objects and things that constitute the ‘Balkan Route’ through Europe: posters, signs, directions, notices, flyers and maps produced by state authorities and volunteer-led aid networks. We use objects to reflect more broadly on how seemingly banal and everyday things become incorporated into the political work of states and become constitutive of fluid borders. We argue that everyday objects become visualisations of states and authorities, and help to make and regulate physical spaces. We show how each visual object encountered along the route gives us a broader insight into the macropolitics of European border regimes, specifically the effects of ‘closed borders’ and the criminalisation of aid networks. The article pushes forward the ‘aesthetic turn’ debate in international relations by bringing in insights from political geography and materialism, and suggests that a walking methodology can be a productive way of encountering the visual and understanding how its physical location creates political effects.

Solidarity under siege: The crimmigration of activism(s) and protest against border control in Spain

Over the past two decades, the creation of the European border regime has increasingly sparked acts of protest and resistance by immigrants and led to the creation of initiatives to defend immigrant rights. This activism has provoked many European states to formalize what is known in the literature as ‘crimes of solidarity’ in their legal systems. Taking the Spanish case as an example, the objective of this article is to analyse the ‘crimmigration’ of protest and activism defending the rights of irregular immigrants at Europe’s southern border. This analysis describes the development and implementation of the repressive tactics employed by the state against activists, including forms of police control of protests, informal and formal dissuasion techniques, and the use of administrative and criminal sanctions. This work provides valuable insight into the practical impact of these crimmigration processes, particularly how they have affected activists, social organizations and immigrants, as well as how they have extended beyond the territory of the state (externalizing punishment).

Humanitarian and Human Rights Surveillance: The Challenge to Border Surveillance and Invisibility?

The European border regime has traditionally rested on the hidden surveillance activities of border authorities, which have contributed to human rights violations (including “push-back” and “left-to-die” practices) and a rising migrant death toll. Recently a number of humanitarian and activist organizations, including Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Sea-Watch, and WatchTheMed, have organized to aid migrants in distress at sea using surveillance technologies, ranging from drones to GPS. By doing so, they presented a challenge to the European border surveillance regime. In dialogue with the concept of countersurveillance, this paper introduces the concepts of humanitarian surveillance and human rights surveillance and deploys them to examine and categorize the activities of MOAS, MSF, Sea-Watch, and WatchTheMed. Humanitarian surveillance narrowly focuses on aiding victims of surveillance without problematizing the logic and hierarchies of surveillance, while human rights surveillance operates as a form of countersurveillance; it aims to protect and advance the human rights of victims of surveillance and expose human rights violations committed by authorities through opposing the hierarchies of surveillance. The paper shows how civilian groups incorporate elements of humanitarian and human rights surveillance in their activities at varying levels and discusses the extent to which they challenge the European border surveillance regime.

The waiting game: Immigration detention as the waiting room of immigration law

Abstract In this article, I examine detained third-country nationals’ negotiations with the immigration system during detention, focusing on how immigration and removal proceedings inform their waiting while in detention. Based on multisited ethnographic research into the immigration detention system in Finland, I argue that waiting in immigration detention needs to be understood as a relational concept that involves different objects and expectations depending on the details of detainees’ immigration cases that affect the possibility of being released and the country of removal under the common European border regime. Immigration detention is a ‘waiting room’ of immigration law in that detainees wait for the outcome of pending immigration proceedings or the implementation of enforceable removal decisions. At the same time, immigration detention constitutes a space of border struggles, or what I call the ‘waiting game’, where detainees actively negotiate with authorities concerning their immigration cases, including terms of removal. Contrary to common belief, deportable detainees did not usually actively resist removal, especially to other European Union Member States. Instead, waiting in detention is a different matter for those with pending immigration decisions or whose removal would be to African or Middle Eastern countries. Additionally, detainees’ migration preferences affect their level of compliance and attitudes while in detention: many research participants planned to come back to Europe. My empirical analysis demonstrates that detention times and detainees’ attitudes toward removal are significantly dependent upon their individual immigration cases and their country of removal, resulting in different temporal horizons among waiting detainees.

Formal Education of Asylum Seeker Children in Belgrade, Serbia: Expanded Meaning of Social Inclusion

Formal education of asylum seeker children in Serbia officially started in September 2017, when the consequences of European border regime became more obvious. In spite of the official attitude that Serbia is a transit country, there was a pressure to improve integration policies regarding migration, since a lot of people wanting to seek asylum in European Union have remained in Serbia for months. Educational inclusion is the aspect of asylum seekers’ integration in which the most resources and effort was invested. In this article, I try to define the notions of social and educational inclusion in relation to integration policies of asylum seekers coming from different cultural backgrounds and in relation to existing educational inclusion policies.

Amplifying Migrant Voices and Struggles at Sea as a Radical Practice

This article takes the encounters between migrant travelers at sea and Alarm Phone activists on land as a starting point to inquire into recent transformations in maritime migrant mobilities and EUropean and North African attempts to govern them, with a focus on the western Mediterranean Sea. The Alarm Phone, an activist hotline assisting migrants in distress at sea, has been involved in everyday struggles over movement in all three Mediterranean regions, so that tracing its interventions can provide insights into the complex interplay between enactments of the freedom of movement and the ways in which EUrope seeks to preempt and deter them. Situated right at the nexus of migrant movements conceived in a kinetic and a political sense, the Alarm Phone constitutes an analytic of the EUropean border regime, able to observe the interplay between disobedient movements and their policing at sea.

Bordering through domicide: spatializing citizenship in Calais

ABSTRACT This paper examines domicidal practices against illegalized border crossers in Calais, France as a technology of citizenship and migration governance. It addresses recent calls to include actions and interventions which restrict citizenship in the context of illegalized migration within critical citizenship studies literature. Studying the state violence upholding and spatializing normative citizenship allows for a deeper understanding of citizenship’s implication in the European border regime, and raises questions on the concept’s continued application to theorizations of migrants’ political movements and spatial manifestations. The paper proposes anti-citizen politics as an alternative before arguing that the presence of this politics within the city’s squats and jungles, more than the physical occupations as such, is what the French state seeks to eradicate through acts of domicide. Working from empirical examples, the article describes a ‘carrot-and-stick’ domicide currently at work in Calais where the eviction and destruction of autonomous forms of migrant inhabitance is combined with a simultaneous offer of state managed accommodation. These tactics operate together to drive migrants out of the city of Calais, away from the UK border, and ultimately into a determination of their detain/deport-ability via citizenship’s scrutiny.

For ‘common struggles of migrants and locals’. Migrant activism and squatting in Athens

ABSTRACT This article analysis the socio-political form of the migrant squats, and the socio-spatial interactions they foster and generate. Drawing on empirical research, it focuses on the Athenian context where, since September 2015, political groups belonging to the anti-authoritarian and Left-libertarian movement, occupied some empty buildings to host migrants in transit through the country. From a political perspective, the squats are interpreted here as strategies of struggle to gain access to the space of the city and they also constitute instances of migrant activism and resistance to the European border regime. Moreover, migrant occupations represent practices and sites for contesting citizenship, intended as a category of political status; as such, they exceed the limits of this category and move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, originating practices of citizenship ‘from below’, while at the same time they produce subjectivities that choose to ‘opt out’ of citizenship as a legal status. This article is situated within the contextualisation of space and autonomy. Migrant squats are looked at from the angle of the ‘gaze of autonomy’, since they are aimed both at contesting citizenship as an exclusionary feature, and at revindicating the activists’ (both migrants and non) presence in the space of city.

The politics of big borders: Data (in)justice and the governance of refugees

This article provides an overview of the collection and uses of data in relation to European border regimes. We analyse the significance of these developments for the governance of refugee populations and make the case that within the current policy context of European border control, data functions to systematically stigmatize, exclude and oppress ‘unwanted’ migrant populations through mechanisms of criminalisation, identification, and social sorting. This, we argue, highlights the need to engage with data politics in a way that considers both the politics in data as well as the politics of data, highlighting the agendas and interests that advance the implementation of these technologies, privileging justice concerns on terms that go beyond techno-legal solutions, and positioning those who are most impacted by developments at the forefront of discussions.

Infrastructuring European migration and border control: The logistics of registration and identification at Moria hotspot

This paper examines Moria hotspot in Greece as a logistical site which fulfills two different functions within the European migration and border regime. It locates, contains, and sorts individuals ...

All quiet on the ‘Eastern front’? Controlling transit migration in Latvia and Lithuania

ABSTRACT While much of current debate on European border control focuses on the reinforcements of Europe’s Southern and South-eastern borders, the Baltic States, traditionally countries of emigration to Western Europe, are experiencing their own challenges in adapting their border regime to handle novel transit migration. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the Lithuanian and Latvian State Border Guard Services, tasked with securing the Europe Union’s Eastern external borders and curtailing migrants’ onward movement to Western Europe, this paper sheds light on the meanings and practices of ‘borderwork’ in an underexplored region. The article asks: How is the Baltic border regime performed by State Border Guards, what meanings do they attribute to these borders, and what can this tell us about the ever-changing nature of the European border regime? For border guards, the complex landscape of de – and reterritorialised Schengen borders primarily serve as tools for manifesting their belonging to ‘Europe’ and their geopolitical distancing from Russia. Only recently did their borderwork become politicised in the context of migration. The Baltic case sheds light on the diverse manifestations and meanings of borders, which go beyond the mobile populations they are declared to be set up to control.

The Struggle Against Deportation of Bangladeshi and Indian Immigrants at the Border Cities of Ceuta and Melilla: a Case Study of Citizenship After Orientalism

ABSTRACT Several groups of Bangladeshi and Indian migrants where confined between 2005 and 2011 in temporary holding centers for immigrants in Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish (European) border enclaves in North Africa. To prevent being deported, one day several men escaped from a holding center, known as a CETI (Centro de Estancia Temporal de Inmigrantes) and their struggle created a number of support movements not only in Ceuta and Melilla but also across the Mediterranean. This paper focuses on the various acts of citizenship (demonstrations, occupation of immigration offices, and legal advocacy) that arose, particularly in cities such as Madrid and Barcelona, to fight for these men to be transferred to the mainland and to prevent their deportation. The day they escaped was also the day they stopped being double victims of neo-Orientalism– both of the smugglers who had extorted them for years through the deserts of North Africa, and of the European border regime that confined them at these border sites. This article is a case study of citizenship after Orientalism.

Stadtbürgerschaft „Light“: Migration und Vielfalt in der neoliberalen Stadt

In recent years, the concept of ‘urban citizenship’ has become an important reference for cities and municipalities positioning themselves in the context of the European border and migration regime. However, the reference often falls short. Especially in the case of urban policies focusing on ‘diversity’, the affinity to neoliberal ideas of citizenship is noticeable. The article analyses the European ‘Intercultural Cities Programme’ (ICC), in which more than 100 cities participate, as an example for this trend. Here, the meaning of citizenship is being shifted

Recuperation through Crisis Talk

The diagnosis of a migration crisis has prompted multiple processes of rebordering in Europe and beyond. These include the build-up of physical barriers like walls and fences, the tightening of asylum regimes, the expansion of biometric databases and the enrolment of authoritarian regimes in controlling Europe’s borders. These developments have prompted a revival of the image of the ‘fortress’ in critical accounts of the European border regime. Building on existing criticisms of the metaphor Fortress Europe, this article proposes an alternative political imaginary of the European border regime. Starting from a version of the autonomy of migration approach that is based on the notion of appropriation, it proposes to apprehend the European border regime as a parasitic and precarious apparatus of capture. This apparatus of capture tries to recuperate migrants’ practices of appropriation in order to turn the knowledge and creativity of these practices into a driving force for its own development. Important aspects of this dynamic are illustrated through two examples: the refinement of control mechanisms of the European visa regime and the repeated tightening of Germany’s asylum regime since the ‘summer of migration’ in 2015. Taken together, these examples illustrate three aspects of processes of recuperation: first, that legal changes often only formalise previously informal practices of recuperation, secondly, that the framing of migration in terms of crisis functions as a vehicle for processes of recuperation which open up, thirdly, new opportunities for practices of appropriation as they are incoherent. In sum, the reading of the European border regime as an apparatus of capture paves the way for more assertive antiracist politics as it invites us to apprehend increasingly violent forms of border control not as signs of strengths of the European border regime, but as indicators of its increasingly desperate fight for survival.

The Multilayered Migration Regime in Turkey: Contested Regionalization, Deceleration and Legal Precarization

ABSTRACTAgainst the background of the research project on “De-and Re-stabilizations of the European Border Regime”, analyzing the recent political attempts by the EU and its member states to regain control over its borders and the movements of migration after the so-called “European refugee crisis” in 2015, this article discusses Turkey’s role and position within international migration flows and the EU-driven border regime. Reflecting on the recent history of Turkey’s migration and border politics, we argue that academic accounts, which tend to reduce Turkey’s role to a simple extension of the EU border regime, are insufficient to explain the current state of affairs in Turkey. Rather, the article sheds light on the contested and multilayered nature of the Turkish migration regime, which can be partly read as reactions to the European Union, but also as an effect of its own foreign and national policy interests. The outcome is a highly hybrid political formation causing ambiguous legal, social, and political limitations for migrants and refugees, reflected in their journeys and in social and political realities, which are discussed as exemplified in the migratory stories of two migrants.

Imperceptible Politics: Illegalized Migrants and Their Struggles for Work and Unionization

This article argues that illegalized migrants carry the potential for social change not only through their acts of resistance but also in their everyday practices. This is the case <em>despite </em>illegalized migrants being the most disenfranchised subjects produced by the European border regime. In line with Jacques Rancière (1999) these practices can be understood as ‘politics’. For Rancière, becoming a political subject requires visibility, while other scholars (Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2007; Rygiel, 2011) stress that this is not necessarily the case. They argue that political subjectivity can also be achieved via invisible means; important in this discussion as invisibility is an essential strategy of illegalized migrants. The aim of this article is to resolve this binary and demonstrate, via empirical examples, that the two concepts of visibility and imperceptibility are often intertwined in the messy realities of everyday life. In the first case study, an intervention at the ver.di trade union conference in 2003, analysis reveals that illegalized migrants transformed society in their fight for union membership, but also that their visible campaigning simultaneously comprised strategies of imperceptibility. The second empirical section, which examines the employment stories of illegalized migrants, demonstrates that the everyday practices of illegal work can be understood as ‘imperceptible politics’. The discussion demonstrates that despite the exclusionary mechanisms of the existing social order, illegalized migrants are often able to find work. Thus, they routinely undermine the very foundations of the order that produces their exclusions. I argue that this disruption can be analyzed as migrants’ ‘imperceptible politics’, which in turn can be recognized as migrants’ transformative power.

Precarious intimacies – Europeanised border regime and migrant sex work

ABSTRACTThis article examines the meaning of borders – the spaces where immigration policies and restrictions are materially condensed – in the lives of migrant sex workers. I provide a theoretical and conceptual framework to discuss the role of borders in creating living and working conditions for sex workers within the European border regime. This regime both restricts and enables a structural background for migrant sex work. I argue that sex work scholars should pay closer attention to the heterogeneity of non-citizenship and the effects of different immigration statuses on the working conditions and forms of intimacies migrants create. Borders need to be viewed as institutions that produce social relations. I categorise these relations as precarious intimacies to describe the ways in which intimacy, commerce and borders often intertwine in the lives of migrants engaged in commercial sex work. The article draws upon 18-month ethnographic fieldwork among and interviews with migrant sex workers in Finland.

Precarious Intimacies: Narratives of Non-Arrival in a Changing Europe

The representation of intimacy in depictions of immigration exists alongside histories of deeply racist contacts and connections. Yet intimate connection may also produce moments of joy, sustaining solidarity and resistance to violent forms of exclusion. In this essay, we develop the notion of precarious intimacies through readings of three films depicting the journeys of refugees to Europe: In this World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002), Ein Augenblick Freiheit [A Moment of Freedom] (Arash T. Riahi, 2008), and Can’t be Silent (2013). The desire for Europe as a “happy object” (Ahmed 2010) propels these journeys, but the films narrate stories of non-arrival which reveal the unhappy consequences of encounters with European border regimes. We consider precarious intimacies both as aesthetic strategies as well as reading practices that call attention to the realities of racialized exclusion while still gesturing to possibilities of contact and compassion.

Guests on the Aegean: interactions between migrants and volunteers at Europe’s southern border

Many would-be tourists were dissuaded from vacationing on Greece’s Aegean islands in 2016, in the aftermath of 2015’s ‘migrant crisis’. However, the islands witnessed an increased arrival of atypical ‘tourists’, among them volunteers intent on helping. This study is based on research undertaken on the islands of Lesvos and Chios in Greece as a volunteer myself. I focus on the figure of the volunteer, as an emergent humanitarian actor in border regions, to highlight issues with the way hospitality is currently being extended by one group of guests to another, at Europe’s frontiers. I investigate the way in which interactions between migrants and volunteers often end up reinforcing, rather than challenging, the distinction between them, and thus contribute to the legitimization of the current European border regime.

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

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.