Polly Pallister-Wilkins

Crisis, routine, consolidation: the politics of the Mediterranean migration crisis

Abstract The current ‘migration crisis’ is framed as a moment of reckoning in the EU’s dealings with its Mediterranean neighbourhood. Yet to what extent is crisis the most useful tool to account for migration and European border control practices in the current context? An exclusive focus on crisis, we argue, is misleading. To a large extent, the current crisis management builds on pre-existing practices and enables their consolidation. For us this is an invitation to discuss the relation between crisis, routine and consolidation in Euro-Mediterranean migration policies and practices. This intervention shows how ‘crises’ are spatio-temporally limited and used to further pre-existing migration control practices and techniques of governing. As such we interrogate what it means to talk of crisis versus routine in the field of Mediterranean security practices.

How walls do work: Security barriers as devices of interruption and data capture

What do security barriers do beyond blockading or demarcating territory? This article argues for an understanding of security barriers as sociotechnical devices. It argues for a rearticulation of security barriers as more than territorial technologies or the products and producers of sovereign power. It advances the discussion of security barriers beyond what can be thought of as a ‘geopolitics of security’, where the referent object is territory, and asks that we also consider how they work with mobility as productive devices to govern people in a variety of ways. The article empirically analyses the fences of Ceuta and Melilla, the barriers of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, and the US counterinsurgency fence in Falluja. Building on these illustrative cases, the article argues that security barriers should be understood as products of particular modes of government and producers of particular populations through their ability to perform interruptions and capture data.

Interrogating the Mediterranean 'Migration Crisis'

Abstract This Forum aims to uncover the socio-politics of the ‘migration crisis’ in the Mediterranean. The contributions explore the idea of the ‘migration crisis’ or ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean from the starting point that as scholars of the Mediterranean we can do two things: one, we can look at the way crisis introduces processes of bordering to our analysis, limiting our gaze and analytical curiosity to a specific space and a specific time; or two, we can take these limits as an opportunity to explore the wider socio-politics, geographies and economies that contribute to producing this so-called ‘crisis’ and in turn what socio-politics, geographies and economies are produced and their implications.

Humanitarian Rescue/Sovereign Capture and the Policing of Possible Responses to Violent Borders

Practices of rescue and assistance based on humanitarian concerns for life have increasingly come to shape both state and non-state action that responds to the mobility of people on the move at the borders of Europe. These processes of rescue are presented as counter to processes of border control concerned with preventing and policing migratory flows. Presented and articulated as an alternative response to the increasingly restrictive and militarised practices that make-up ‘Fortress Europe’, this humanitarian intervention concerned with saving lives both masks the violence of the border that renders people vulnerable in the first instance and masks the intimate relationship practices of rescue have with processes of capture more traditionally associated with border policing. The ascendancy of rescue as the primary response to irregular mobility also works to police the boundaries of what is considered ethical politics and the possible responses that result. Rescue does this through framing such events as unforeseen tragedies, erasing the structures of the violent border in the process and rendering counter-narratives mute.

Bridging the divide: Middle Eastern walls and fences and the spatial governance of problem populations

Building on a long history of spatial control through walling in the region, walls and fences have been built in the Middle East in recent years to undertake a range of practices. Gated communities, residential and security compounds, anti-migrant walls, separation barriers and counter-insurgency fences can all be found in the Middle East. These walls address and govern problems that take the population as their subject. These walls all share a common frame of viewing the populations they work to govern as ‘problematic’ in multiple ways. This paper explores how walls have been and continue to be used in governing populations through mobility and incorporating a combination of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques through a range of spatial and territorial repertoires. As such it works to bridge the divide in border studies and critical security studies between geopolitical/topographical and biopolitical/topological approaches to borders and governance.

Introduction: The West Asian and North African Uprisings and the Limits of Liberal Governance

This special section brings together scholars working in divergent disciplines and locations. By focusing on agency and politics from below in addition to the structural and discursive contexts that condition wider relations between the West Asian and North African (WANA) region and the European Union, the special section makes the case for a critical reinterpretation of WANA–European relations and a paradigm for future intellectual engagement.

Médecins Avec Frontières and the making of a humanitarian borderscape

This article makes the case for the consideration of a humanitarian borderscape. The article analyses the recent humanitarian responses to irregular migration in the Mediterranean, Aegean and Greece and argues that processes of im/mobility produce specific times, spaces and types of care. The argument transcends recent discussions on the shrinking and/or expanding of humanitarian spaces, suggesting instead that a focus on the specific setting of the border and the dynamics of mobility are more useful to understanding humanitarian responses to mobility and immobility. In addition, the article contributes to the emerging literature on borderscapes by offering an interpretive analysis of the creation of a particular humanitarian borderscape made up of specific features and activities, which are undertaken by a multiplicity of actors in multiple places. Building on a consideration of this multiplicity, the article focuses specifically on the work of Médecins Sans Frontières.

Hotspots and the geographies of humanitarianism

This article focuses on the humanitarian geographies of the hotspots. It argues that hotspots are humanitarian in both idea and practice by raising two fundamental questions that form the basis for the article: what is humanitarianism, and who is it for? The article understands humanitarianism as a logic of government that is more expansive than the mainstream ideal that emerged in the 20th-century. Instead humanitarianism is understood as concerning logics developed to both effectively manage disaster and to secure (in both senses of the word) imminently mobile populations for the maintenance of liberal order alongside and through the securing of life. The article takes an expansive view of humanitarian government to consider genealogies of caring and population security logics in the establishment of modern, western and liberal states. The article unsettles some of the traditional geographical understandings of humanitarianism as care for distant strangers and considers the ways compassion is rationalised by the hotspot approach. This critical reading of humanitarianism and the hotspots offers empirical weight to what has been called ‘humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic’, through which humanitarianism is deployed to secure both life and a liberal political order across multiple scales.

The Tensions of the Ceuta and Melilla Border Fences

This chapter aims to ‘complicate’ the fences and fencing of Ceuta and Melilla. It discusses the emerging theoretical literature concerned with walls and fences in both historical and contemporary settings and examines the fences within their historical and geopolitical context as well as the tensions between security and humanitarianism that have been progressively reflected in their architecture. Furthermore, the chapter examines the fences as productive sites. This is done through a focus on the communities that encounter the fences in their everyday practice and a discussion of how the fences are producers of and sites of resistance. The chapter contributes to recent work on walls and fences that has argued for a more sociological approach to these complex architectures, seeing walls and fences as more than blockaders of movement or defenders of territory.

Personal Protective Equipment in the humanitarian governance of Ebola: between individual patient care and global biosecurity

Abstract This article focuses on the use of Personal Protective Equipment in humanitarianism. It takes the recent Ebola outbreak as a case through which to explore the role of objects in saving individual lives and protecting populations. The argument underlines the importance of PPE in mediating between individual patient care and biosecurity. In addition it questions the preoccupation with technical fixes; challenges dominant perceptions about the subject of humanitarianism being the victims of disaster; traces the production of a particular politics of life; and explores the individualisation of risk and concomitant processes of labour discipline in the everyday lives of humanitarian workers.