Over the last two decades, the European border regime has become the subject of a growing body of scholarship in critical security studies. In this article, I draw on Stuart Hall’s work on racialized ...policing, authoritarian populism and conjunctural analysis to argue that this literature has paid insufficient attention to the close relationship between racism, capitalism and state violence. Writing at the dawn of Thatcherism and neoliberal globalization, Hall theorized the growth in repressive state structures as a revanchist response to breakdowns in racial hegemony. Revisiting these insights, the article argues that the ongoing expansion of the European border regime is a hegemonic strategy of racialized crisis management. The imposition of ever more restrictive immigration policies, increased surveillance and heightened forms of deportability are attempts to defend white bourgeois order and to police a (neoliberal) racial formation in crisis. The migrant ‘crisis’ is ultimately the result of one racialized world order collapsing, and another struggling to be born.
Europe as a continent has throughout its history been one of the most popular destinations for migrants and foreigners who have viewed the Old continent as a place of better social and economic ...possibilities. However, recently most European states and its publics have not been so willing to accept the refugees fleeing the wars and violence. For instance, there have been only a few countries such as Sweden and Germany which have openly welcomed the migrants over the past years. On the other hand, some EU states such as Slovakia have openly rejected to accept the refugees just because they do not want the Brussels to impose immigration policies on them or because they simply do not want Muslims or non-Europeans in their communities. The migrant crisis has thus become a real litmus test for the EU coherence and unity. Thus, in this paper I study the cases of Sweden and Slovakia in terms of their immigration policies since they have applied completely different responses towards the migrants. Through this comparative study I hope that it will be much clearer whether the last migrant crisis can be an end to a united Europe in a global world or is this just one of the several crises the EU has faced throughout its history. Probably the biggest problem in this sense is that only a few EU states have proved their democratic and humanistic matureness to accommodate the migrants and accept them as equal citizens.
Europe as a continent has throughout its history been one of the most popular destinations for migrants and foreigners who have viewed the Old continent as a place of better social and economic ...possibilities. However, recently most European states and its publics have not been so willing to accept the refugees fleeing the wars and violence. For instance, there have been only a few countries such as Sweden and Germany which have openly welcomed the migrants over the past years. On the other hand, some EU states such as Slovakia have openly rejected to accept the refugees just because they do not want the Brussels to impose immigration policies on them or because they simply do not want Muslims or non-Europeans in their communities. The migrant crisis has thus become a real litmus test for the EU coherence and unity. Thus, in this paper I study the cases of Sweden and Slovakia in terms of their immigration policies since they have applied completely different responses towards the migrants. Through this comparative study I hope that it will be much clearer whether the last migrant crisis can be an end to a united Europe in a global world or is this just one of the several crises the EU has faced throughout its history. Probably the biggest problem in this sense is that only a few EU states have proved their democratic and humanistic matureness to accommodate the migrants and accept them as equal citizens.
In this article we focus on one important event related to the Greek dimensions of the so called refugee crisis in Europe. This event took place during late February and March 2020 and is known as ...the Evros events that occurred when Turkey decided to open its European borders to the refugees. Greece responded by closing its land borders with Turkey, and by halting the asylum application process. The area surrounding the Evros River in Greece became heavily policed by the Greek police and the EU’s Frontex border police, further aided by various citizen militias consisting of Greek and other EU nationals. This research analyzes the newsmedia coverage of the specific incident through a qualitative frame analysis on news articles written by five Greek newspapers that have different political affiliations. The analysis then answers a two-fold research question: how did the Greek press frame the Evros events, and how did these frames contribute to the public debate around migration in the country.
This article addresses solidarity and the opening of social spaces in the relations between refugees and residents of Greece who try to help them. ‘Socialities of solidarity’ materialise alternative ...worldviews; they are loci for the production of lateral relationships; places inhabited by the prospects that derive from the political production of sociality. The article discusses the ‘gift taboo’, dominant in the pre‐crisis era, that reflects the risks of giving to the formation of horizontal relationships. In the contemporary ‘European refugee crisis, and other crises, the gift taboo has collapsed, posing challenges to the egalitarian visions of sociality.
Socialités de solidarité: revisiter le tabou du don en temps de crise
Cet article traite de la solidarité et de l'ouverture des espaces sociaux dans les relations entre les réfugiés et les résidents de la Grèce qui tentent de les aider. Les « socialités de solidarité » matérialise les visions du monde alternatives; ils sont des locus pour la production de relations latérales; des lieux habités par les perspectives qui découlent de la production politique de la socialité. L'article traite du « tabou du don », dominant à l'époque avant la crise qui reflète les risques de donner à la formation de relations horizontales. Dans le scenario contemporain du « réfugié européen » et d'autres crises, le tabou du don est effondré, ce qui pose des défis sur les visions égalitaires de la socialité.
The paper analyses popular geographical imageries of the European migrant crisis. It focuses on visualities that shaped discussions about the event among Czech Facebook users with anti-immigration ...attitudes. The paper elaborates on the co-production of migrants' visibility and visualities that depict them in certain ways. Visuality influences visibility and shapes what it means for people (who are represented by images) to be visible in certain ways when seen by another people (who observe and consume the images). Here, we analyse how cartographic visualizations and the practice of montage of images produce meanings and affects that make migrants either visible only as abusers of the Czech social welfare system (linking migrants in a racist way to the Roma minority) or visible only as dehumanized raging Muslim invaders that resemble more machine-like beings. These interpretations are explained with references to historical specificities of the Czech context. A user-made, film-like sci-fi video of the crisis is also analysed carefully to demonstrate its imaginary of a collapsing Western Europe, where raging invaders dominate. Presenting migrants' visuality as invaders links these racist and Islamophobic attitudes to migrants' visibility as enemies and targets to be killed, not pitiable human beings to be helped.
The UK media's reporting of events in 2015 contained constantly evolving categorisations of people attempting to reach Europe and the UK, each with different implications for their treatment. A ...discourse analysis of UK media outputs charts the development of the terminology used to present the crisis and those people involved. First, “Mediterranean migrant crisis” was used to present those involved as “migrants” to be prevented from reaching Europe. Next, it became a “Calais migrant crisis” in which migrants were constructed as a threat to UK security and then the “European migrant crisis” an ongoing threat to Europe. Photographs of a drowned child led to a shift to a “refugee crisis” in which refugees were presented in a humane and sympathetic way. When terrorist attacks were linked with the crisis, refugees reverted to migrants. Findings are discussed regarding the impact of categorisation on debates about the inclusion and exclusion of refugees.
News media have transformed over the last decades, there being increasing numbers of online news suppliers and an increase in online news consumption. We examine how reporting on immigration differs ...between popular German online and print media over three crucial years of the so-called immigration crisis from 2015 to 2017. This study extends knowledge on the framing of the crisis by examining a period covering the start, peak, and time after the intake of refugees. Moreover, we establish whether online and print reporting differs in terms of both frame occurrence and variability. The period of the crisis provided an ideal test to see whether the focus of media reporting differed between online and print sources. Employing a most- similar- cases design based on (autonomous) online and print versions of three major German news outlets, we extract the dominant frames in almost 18,500 articles using algorithm-based topic modelling. While results indicate that many frames are more visible in either online or print media, these differences often do not follow theoretical expectations. Furthermore, online media are dominated by particular frames and, hence, show less diversity than print media. However, important key events happening during our period of investigation do not affect overall diversity of frames.
Nika Autor, a Slovenian visual artist, director, and photographer is a member of the Newsreel Front (Obzorniška Fronta). Her films delve into themes such as the migrant crisis, labor rights, and the ...politics of memory, while challenging the expressive possibilities of the film news format through stylistic experiments and interventions in the social field. This paper aims to explore the multifaceted symbolic connotations that Autor infuses into the motif of shoes while addressing the aforementioned issues, starting from the film Solidarity (2011), where footwear becomes the central visual symbol of the protest for workers' rights, all the way to the films created in 2022, focusing on illegal migration, where shoes become bear traces of arduous and uncertain movement, signifying both physical and spiritual displacement. The motif of shoes in Autor's movies is not treated as an isolated object of interest but rather as a mediator of meaning. The analysis of individual films (Postcards /2010/, Solidarity /2011/, In the Land of Bears /2011/, Newsreel 63 - The Train of Shadows /2017/, Newsreel 2021 - Here I Have a Picture /2022/, Newsreel 451 - Across the Water to Freedom /2022/), is complemented by intertextual and intermedial comparisons exploring the relationship between film and visual art. This approach provides a comprehensive insight into the subject of research and a clearer positioning within Nika Autor's artistic oeuvre, by drawing analogies with the use of the shoe motif to express related ideas by other film and visual artists.
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