This paper deals with the techno-hype in migration research and argues that this latter reproduces a state-gaze on migration and technology. It contends that instead of focusing exclusively on the ...surveillance exercised on migrants through technology, it is key to investigate how migrants are affected by technologies and which struggles they engage over these. The paper develops a counter-mapping approach to the techno-hype which involves taking migrants' struggles as a standpoint, challenging presentism, and investigating the assemblages of low-tech and high-tech in migration governance. The paper moves on by illustrating these two points. First, focusing on Greece, it interrogates what it means to see technology like a migrant, by considering how technologies obstruct migrants' access to asylum and by analysing migrants' claims over technology. Second, it undoes presentism by tracing the genealogy of border technologies, and explores the entanglements between low-tech and high-tech at the border. The paper concludes explaining that a counter-mapping approach conceptualises mobility not as a by-product of technologies of control but, rather, as what states try to bridle, channel and manage.
This article advances a genealogy of migrant struggles and citizens solidarity practices, with a focus on the French-Italian migrant passage. It contends that scholarship has mainly mobilised a ...spatial approach to migrant struggles, while the temporality of solidarity and the collective memory of struggles have remained under-theorised. Then, the article moves on by focusing on the French-Italian Alpine border and it analyses the longstanding history of migrants' passages there and, jointly, the mobilisations that took place in that area over the last decades exploring how these sedimented a citizen collective memory of solidarity practices. The final section deals with the history of mountain rescue at the French-Italian Alpine border and shows how migrants were saved by volunteers. The piece concludes by arguing that an insight into the memory of migrant struggles and solidarity practices enables foregrounding the transversal alliances which have been built between migrants and citizens and unsettling binary opposition between the former and the latter.
Abstract This article investigates the reshaping of the military-humanitarian border in the Mediterranean, focusing on the Italian military-humanitarian mission Mare Nostrum, that started for ...rescuing migrants at sea after the deaths of hundreds of migrants in October 2013 near the coasts of the island of Lampedusa. The main argument is that in order to understand the working of the military-humanitarian border at sea and its impacts, we must go beyond the space of the sea, and analysing it in the light of the broader functioning of migration governmentality. The notion of desultory politics of mobility is deployed here for describing the specific temporality of the humanitarian border working and its politics of visibility. In particular, an analytical gaze on the military-humanitarian operations at sea to rescue-and-control of migrants’ movements shows that what is at stake is the production of some practices of mobility as exceptional. Then, this article takes on Mare Nostrum operation for exploring the ways in which the military and the humanitarian are rearticulated and how they currently work together.
Resumo Este artigo investiga a remodelação da fronteira militar-humanitária no Mediterrâneo, com enfoque na missão militar-humanitária da Itália, Mare Nostrum, que começou com o intuito de resgatar migrantes no mar após as mortes de centenas de migrantes, em outubro de 2013, perto da costa da ilha de Lampedusa. O argumento principal é que, para entender a ajuda militar-humanitária no mar e os seus impactos, é preciso ir além do espaço marítimo e analisá-la à luz do funcionamento mais abrangente da governamentalidade da mobilidade. A noção de políticas intermitentes de mobilidade é usada para descrever a temporalidade específica da ajuda humanitária na fronteira e a sua política de visibilidade. Mais especificamente, um olhar analítico sobre as operações militares-humanitárias no mar para resgate-e-controle do movimento dos migrantes mostra que o que está em jogo são algumas práticas de mobilidade como exceção. Em seguida, este artigo usa a operação Mare Nostrum para explorar como o militar e o humanitário são rearticulados e como atualmente funcionam juntos.
This article interrogates the reservations in the Left in Europe towards claims for freedom of movement and stay. The piece argues that an unequal right to desire – conceived as an aspiration move, ...to stay and to seek for a better life – underpins those criticisms and suggests that for developing counter-politics of migration, it is key to challenge such racialised predicament. The first section shows how expansive claims for equal access to mobility and the right to stay are discredited as utopian and non-realistic. The second section unsettles the politics of number that sustains public discourses on migration showing that this can be turned to the advantage of arguments in support of border controls. It moves on contending that a critique of racialising borders needs to unpack the unequal right to desire. The fourth section draws attention to the nexus between the disruption of futurity and the unequal right to desire and argues that this enables tracing connections between migrants and (some) citizens through the lens of dispossessed future. It suggests that the allegedly utopian character of claims for freedom of movement does not the depend on the failure of past struggles but on the unquestioned racialised right to desire
This paper engages with the military‐humanitarian technology of migration management from the vantage point of the European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR MED) “Operation Sophia”, the ...naval and air force intervention deployed by the EU in the Central Southern Mediterranean to disrupt “the business model of human smuggling and trafficking” while “protecting life at sea”. We look at the military‐humanitarian mode of migration management that this operation performs from three vantage points: logistics, with a focus on the infrastructure of migrant travels; subjectivity, looking at the migrant profiles this operation works through; and epistemology, building on the mission's first stage of intelligence and data gathering. Through this multi‐focal approach, we illuminate the productivity of this military‐humanitarian approach to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean.
This article deals with this ongoing spatial and political recrafting of the Mediterranean sea as a space of migration governmentality. It retraces the recent political and spatial transformations ...occurred with the starting of the military-humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum in the channel of Sicily and then the handover to the Triton operation coordinated by Frontex. The two specific angles from which it tackles this issue are the politics of and over life that is at stake in the government of migration at sea and the politics of visibility that underpins it. In the first section it analyses the politics and the scene of rescue that has been put into place with the start of Mare Nostrum, tacking stock of the re-articulation of military and humanitarian technologies for governing and containing migrant movements. Then, it discusses the recent transformations occurred with Triton operation and the effects on the level of political actions undertaken by activist migrant groups. The article moves on by taking into account the peculiar politics of visibility that is at stake in the government of migration in the Mediterranean.
The government of migrant mobs Tazzioli, Martina
European journal of social theory,
11/2017, Letnik:
20, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article engages with the production and government of migrant multiplicities in border zones of Europe, arguing that the specificity of migrant multiplicities consists in their temporary and ...divisible character. It is argued that there are three different forms of migrant multiplicities: (1) the multiplicity produced due to migrants’ spatial proximity; (2) the virtual multiplicity generated through data; and (3) the visualized and narrated multiplicity that emerges from media portraits of the ‘spectacle’ of the arrivals of migrants. It is claimed that multiplicities are made to divide and partition the migrants and thus prevent the formation of a collective political subject. In the concluding section, the article deals with the ambivalent character of the term ‘the mob’, addressing the twofold dimension of migrant multiplicities: these are in fact generated by techniques of power, at the same time exceeding them and representing potential emerging political subjects.
Introducing the notion of “digital expulsions”, this paper argues that digital technologies in refugee humanitarianism are mainly used for hampering migrants from becoming asylum seekers and getting ...access to rights. Focusing on Greece, it explores which carceral mechanisms are enforced and sustained through the incorporation of digital technologies in refugee governmentality: it contends that it is key to investigate the specific harms that digital technologies generate on asylum seekers. The article intertwines scholarship on digital technologies in migration governance with carceral geography literature and shows that carceral mechanisms are enacted also through digital technologies. The paper draws attention to how in Greece asylum seekers’ access to the asylum procedure and to financial and humanitarian support is further obstructed due to forced technological intermediations. In the second part, it investigates refugees’ carcerality considering the increasing use of technology in refugee camps and in the asylum procedures: it contends that carceral mechanisms are enforced beyond detention and shows that these work by debilitating and choking refugees’ lives and stealing their lifetime.
This paper argues that COVID-19 has triggered a multiplication of heterogeneous bordering mechanisms that, far from stopping movement as such, have enhanced hierarchies of mobility. In particular, it ...shows that a confinement continuum has been put in place in the name of the “contain to protect” principle: migrants have been subjected to protracted lockdown measures in the name of their own protection. The piece concludes by interrogating how to rearticulate critique in COVID times in light of the enforcement of discriminatory “passports to freedom” (COVID-19 travel certificates).
Criminalisation of individual acts of solidarity and coordinated platforms of refugee support is undertaken both in the name of national and European laws, in opposition to the facilitation of ...irregular entries, and through arbitrary police measures. Citizens who help migrants to cross national borders are prosecuted in Italy under the same law that punishes smugglers who take money from migrants. In France, the 'humanitarian clause', which exempts from sanctions citizens who support migrants whose life, dignity and physical integrity is at risk, is often disregarded. Here, Tazzioli tackles this issue by exploring states' arbitrary measures that are taken in the name of migration containment, regardless of whether or not they are legally grounded or in violation of the law.
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