Glenda Garelli

New keywords : migration and borders

“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i) Introduction, (ii) Migration, Knowledge, Politics, (iii) Bordering, and (iv) Migrant Space/Times. The keywords on which we focus are: Migration/Migration Studies; Militant Investigation; Counter-mapping; Border Spectacle; Border Regime; Politics of Protection; Externalization; Migrant Labour; Differential inclusion/exclusion; Migrant struggles; and Subjectivity.

Migration discipline hijacked: distances and interruptions of a research militancy

Abstract In this paper we reflect on some instruments to interrupt the governmentalization of knowledge production at play in migration studies – mainstream, critical, and radical alike. We take knowledge production as the struggle-field where confronting, resisting, and interrupting the disciplining of migrations that arises from their academic and governmental incorporation as objects (of research and of policies). In contrast, we sketch a political epistemology of migrations, asking: which knowledge practices and interventions account for the contestedness migrations spark, and for the turbulence, excess, and upheavals migrants trigger? The paper discusses two of such paths. First, we sketch an approach to research that works ‘within and against’ the distances that perform and define migration field-sites and their pristine subject positions; second, we argue for the development and deployment of interruptions against those unquestioned chains of equivalences that are embedded in migration knowledge. Building on our engagement with Libyan war refugees in Tunisia and in Italy, we reflect on how these instruments somehow bring scholarly knowledge to its limits while working within its premises.

Containment beyond detention: The hotspot system and disrupted migration movements across Europe:

This article deals with the ways in which migrants are controlled, contained and selected after landing in Italy and in Greece, drawing attention to strategies of containment aimed at disciplining mobility and showing how they are not narrowed to detention infrastructures. The article starts by tracing a genealogy of the use of the term ‘hotspot’ in policy documents and suggests that the multiplication of hotspots-like spaces is related to a reconceptualisation of the border as a critical site that requires prompt enforcement intervention. The article moves on by investigating the mechanisms of partitioning, identification and preventive illegalisation that are at stake in the hotspots of Lampedusa and Lesbos. Hotspots are not analysed here as sites of detention per se: rather, the essay turns the attention to the channels of forced mobility that are connected to the Hotspot System, focusing in particular on the forced transfers of migrants from the Italian cities of Ventimiglia and Como to the hotspot of Taranto. The article concludes by analysing channels of forced mobility in the light of the fight against ‘secondary movements’ that is at the core of the current European Union’s political agenda, suggesting that further academic research could engage in a genealogy of practices of migration containment.

The biopolitical warfare on migrants: EU Naval Force and NATO operations of migration government in the Mediterranean

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the recent transformations of the military-humanitarian technology for managing migration in the Mediterranean Sea, focusing on two naval operations, i.e. the European Union Operation Sophia deployed in the central Mediterranean and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) operation in the Aegean Sea, both deployed between 2015 and 2016 and still underway. Building on archival research on both missions and interviews with officials of Operation Sophia, we propose the notion of ‘biopolitical warfare’ to discuss these military-humanitarian interventions in the field of migration. These operations, we argue, stage a move to the offensive in the military-humanitarian government of migration by enlisting warfare against the logistics of migrant journeys. We then situate this argument within both the activist and the International Relations (IR) discourses on migration in the Mediterranean context: we differentiate the framework of ‘warfare’ from the ‘war on migrants’ argument deployed since the 1990s as part of activist discourse; we discuss the migration and warfare nexus in relation to the deployment of ‘migrants as a human bomb’ which has characterized the international relations discourse in Mediterranean countries since the early 2000s, including the recent Turkish–Greek context that led to the NATO intervention. Subsequently, the paper focuses on the targets and operations of the EU and NATO interventions and mobilizes the concept of ‘hybrid war’ to discuss how military and humanitarian techniques and rationales work when deployed as instruments of migration containment.

Beyond Citizen Politics

This chapter sums up the theoretical stakes of the book, focusing on the emergence of new spaces of governmentality we looked at. It stressed the importance of going beyond institutional and mapped spaces focusing instead on what we call “incipient spaces” that remain below the threshold of political visibility. The chapter explains how the non-cartographic counter-mapping approach we have developed in the book allows to go beyond “citizen politics” and “methodological citizenship.” Then, it reconceptualises the notion of “struggle” and “migrant struggles” building on the struggles for movement analyzed in the Chap. 2. Finally, building on the notion of “unequal illegality” introduced in Chap. 2, it concludes that in order to adequately analyze how processes of migrantization and precarization are intertwined it is necessary to move beyond juridical categories.

Counter-Mapping a Revolutionized Space of Mobility

This chapter presents our approach to the study of the Tunisian space of migration. First, reflecting on the revolution and migration nexus, we illustrate what it means to be writing about the Tunisian space of mobility four years after the outbreak of Tunisian upheaval. Second, by illustrating the different strands of mobility that crisscross the Tunisian space at this particular historical and political conjuncture, we intervene in the debate about the “Mediterranean region,” opening up the Mediterranean signifier beyond a fixation on its shores. Third and fourth, we ground our approach to the Tunisian revolutionized space of migration in debates about precarity, introducing the notion of “migrantization,” and about counter-mapping, which we embrace as a critical epistemology.

The Tunisian Migration Space

This chapter engages with new spaces of migration in Tunisia, consolidating in the aftermath of the Revolution and in the context of a global financial crisis: the emergence of a humanitarian regime and its hold over refugees’ lives; new routes of mobility to and out of Tunisia, with a focus on European migrants—mostly undocumented youth—in Tunisia; Tunisians who were residing in Europe and who spontaneously decided to return home; and Tunisian migrants’ mobility to the Gulf States. Building on ethnographic and archival research, our analysis revolves around four conceptual frameworks: the protean humanitarian border, mobilizing precarity in migration, autonomous return, and statistical invisibility.

Afterword: Writing in the Turmoil of the Present

This afterword speaks about Tunisia as an important laboratory in the EU politics of externalization where border enforcement activities are tested, pointing, however, also to the frictions between Tunisia and the EU concerning migration controls. More broadly, the afterword refers to the social transformations that occurred in Tunisia five years after the outbreak of the revolution and to the huge political instability that is at stake today in the country. Finally, it focuses on the terrorist attacks that happened in Tunisia on March 18 and June 26, 2016, to which the Tunisian government responded by declaring a national state of emergency in the country and building a barrier at the Libyan border.