Maribel Casas-Cortes

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.

‘Good neighbours make good fences’: Seahorse operations, border externalization and extra-territoriality

In recent years border externalization has emerged as a central policy framework for European Union (EU) border and migration management. New multi-lateral and bi-lateral agreements on border management have been forged between the EU, its member states, and its North African neighbours and neighbours-of-neighbours. In the process, what is meant by the ‘border’ is being transformed with implications for where the border is located, who has jurisdiction over particular spaces, and how border and migration management is undertaken. This paper analyses the spatial logics of EU border externalization practices as they are being applied to and in North and West Africa. It focuses on Operation Seahorse and the transnationally coordinated border control projects and infrastructures implemented by the Guardia Civil of Spain. Seahorse serves as an implementation case of the Migration Routes Initiative, an approach toward migration management emphasizing interregional cooperation between designated origin-transit-destination countries. The initiative is the organizing strategy of the Global Approach to Migration, the EU’s overarching framework toward migration policy. The paper shows how Seahorse is changing migration policy and re-articulating Europe’s relations with African countries, producing new bordering processes, creating new geographies of integration and border management, and redefining the practices of territory, sovereignty, and extra-territoriality.

Changing borders, rethinking sovereignty: towards a right to migrate

The intervention of European Union border authorities in countries of Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe has shown how the European state “border” has been displaced from its national moorings and externalized across the territories of neighboring states. Our research examines the outsourcing of the southern European Union border, focusing on the case of Spain and its relationship with Morocco and countries of Western Africa. In this paper we describe the development and implementation of this strategy of migration management, signaling implications of border externalization from the point of geopolitics and legality, including a suggestive call to reclaim the legal tradition of the Right to Migrate.

B/ordering Turbulence Beyond Europe: Expert Knowledge in the Management of Human Mobility

This chapter focuses on the ways in which assumptions about who “migrants” and “expats” are and how long an individual or a community needs to remain “migrant” are shaped by a series of important institutions and technical practices. The chapter focuses on the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), created in 1993 to coordinate discussion and elaboration of migration categories (as irregular, trafficked, refugee and asylum seeker, and legal, both permanent and temporary) and new spatial imaginaries to guide migration and border management institutions. In addition, ICMPD’s development of its mapping tool—I-Map—has been particularly important in reshaping contemporary geographical spatial imaginaries of the European border and the resulting externalization of the border/migration/asylum apparatus. We focus on I-Map’s effect on the Euro-Mediterranean (primarily the states bordering the Mediterranean Sea and neighboring states to the South) and on the EU initiative called the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED).