Rogier van Reekum

The Mediterranean: Migration Corridor, Border Spectacle, Ethical Landscape

Abstract Talk of a ‘migration crisis’ calls forth three related spatial renderings of the Mediterranean Sea. Their social production involves a particular politics of visualization. First, the Mediterranean is but one leg of a longer migration corridor, yet as such substantiates a geo-racial border zone. Second, scenes of rescue at sea have functioned as border spectacles, naturalizing migration politics. Third, expanding surveillance infrastructure has undermined a firewall between border patrolling and search-and-rescue, thereby helping to create and sustain an ethical landscape of response-ability to routinized emergency. Visualizing and disseminating this landscape has, for the moment, created a political space between wanted and unwanted mobilities.Talk of a ‘migration crisis’ calls forth three related spatial renderings of the Mediterranean Sea. Their social production involves a particular politics of visualization. First, the Mediterranean is but one leg of a longer migration corridor, yet as such substantiates a geo-racial border zone. Second, scenes of rescue at sea have functioned as border spectacles, naturalizing migration politics. Third, expanding surveillance infrastructure has undermined a firewall between border patrolling and search-and-rescue, thereby helping to create and sustain an ethical landscape of response-ability to routinized emergency. Visualizing and disseminating this landscape has, for the moment, created a political space between wanted and unwanted mobilities.

Surveillance at sea: The transactional politics of border control in the Aegean:

The relationship between vision and action is a key element of both practices and conceptualizations of border surveillance in Europe. This article engages with what we call the ‘operative vision’ of surveillance at sea, specifically as performed by the border control apparatus in the Aegean. We analyse the political consequences of this operative vision by elaborating on three examples of fieldwork conducted in the Aegean and on the islands of Chios and Lesbos. One of the main aims is to bring the figure of the migrant back into the study of border technologies. By combining insights from science and technology studies with border, mobility and security studies, the article distinguishes between processes of intervention, mobilization and realization and emphasizes the role of migrants in their encounter with surveillance operations. Two claims are brought forward. First, engaging with recent scholarly work on the visual politics of border surveillance, we circumscribe an ongoing ‘transactional politics’. Second, the dynamic interplay between vision and action brings about a situation of ‘recalcitrance’, in which mobile objects and subjects of various kinds are drawn into securitized relations, for instance in encounters between coast guard boats and migrant boats at sea. Without reducing migrants to epiphenomena of those relations, this recalcitrance typifies the objects of surveillance as both relatable as well as resistant, particularly in the tensions between border control and search and rescue.

Populisme en de sociologische verbeelding

Populisme beperkt zich niet tot de politiek van Fortuyn of Wilders. In Latijns Amerika is populisme een stijlfiguur van links, terwijl sociale bewegingen als Occupy en Anonymous een populisme zonder leiderschap promoten. En ook buiten de politiek, van de reclame tot de kunst, worden populistische sentimenten en stijlfiguren ingezet tegen de gevestigde orde. Hoe kunnen we de verschillende uitingsvormen van het populisme herkennen, begrijpen en verklaren?

Patrols, records and pictures: Demonstrations of Europe in the midst of migration’s crisis

Migration is not readily seen. A vast infrastructure supports its visualization, making migration visible and actionable. Recent scholarship on the visuality of migration has clearly shown how visu...Migration is not readily seen. A vast infrastructure supports its visualization, making migration visible and actionable. Recent scholarship on the visuality of migration has clearly shown how visualizing migration is an integral part of governing it. Concepts and research approaches from Science and Technology Studies (STS) are particularly appropriate when studying these connections between knowing and doing. In this paper, the performativity of visual methods and their data practices are analysed with respect to the monitoring infrastructure of European border management. Three such methods – patrolling, recording and publicizing – are reconstructed through analysis of their histories and their present. Patrolling involves the tactical domination of terrains. Recording involves the production of documentary objectivity. Publicizing involves the pictorial capture of fleeting realities. These methods are irreducibly political. Their political significance is explored through the concept of demonstrative effects that helps to show how methods of visualising migration at once involve specific demonstrations of the European association that is operative in them. These demonstrations make visible what Europe can and cannot do. The so-called ‘migration crisis’ of Europe turns out to be more than political discourse but entangled with the very methods that render migration apparent and governable.

Out of Character: Dutchness as a Public Problem

Public debate became a crucial, political terrain for the culturalisation of citizenship in the Netherlands. This chapter reconstructs the emergence of debates and discourses that have shaped this terrain since the 1970s. In contrast to historical narratives in which culturalisation of citizenship is understood to be a reaction to weak nationalism and an imposed multicultural policy regime, this chapter argues that emerging narratives about the Dutchness of citizenship did not critique but reiterated well-established images of Dutch exceptionalism: post-racism, outspokenness moral autonomy and liberality. Public disagreements formed not about the substance of national identity, but about its public enactment. As debates about Dutchness shifted from struggles over character and began to focus on questions of identity, such debates became performative of Dutchness and its supposed deficiencies. The formation of national identity debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s thereby enacted both exceptionalised aspects of Dutchness as well as an ongoing crisis of Dutch identity. Thus, public debates on Dutchness and citizenship helped to sustain the notion that national culture ought to be protected and reinvigorated. Out of this problematisation of ethnic and religious diversity eventually came political proposals for using ‘Dutch culture’ as an instrument for assimilation into national community and a tool for excluding those that purportedly ought not belong in a country of exceptional freedoms. Debates over the post-2001 instrumentalisations of Dutchness, in the form of a revamped enculturation policy and the creation of a national history canon, enacted a logic of fame in which inclusions and exclusions are justified in relation to a native public. The chapter ends by suggesting that, recently, the struggle over Dutch citizenship might have shifted once more: away from a focus on ‘identity crisis’ and towards renewed questions of race and injustice.