No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The “migrant crisis” as racial crisis: do Black Lives Matter in Europe?
Abstract
We are currently witnessing a remarkable conjuncture between the escalation, acceleration, and diversification of migrant and refugee mobilities, on the one hand, and the mutually constitutive crises of “European” borders and “European” identity, on the other, replete with reanimated reactionary populist nationalisms and racialized nativisms, the routinization of antiterrorist securitization, and pervasive and entrenched “Islamophobia” (or more precisely, anti-Muslim racism). Despite the persistence of racial denial and the widespread refusal to frankly confront questions of “race” across Europe, the current constellation of “crises” presents precisely what can only be adequately comprehended as an unresolved racial crisis that derives fundamentally from the postcolonial condition of “Europe” as a whole, and therefore commands heightened scrutiny and rigorous investigation of the material and practical as well as discursive and symbolic productions of the co-constituted figures of “Europe” and “crisis” in light of racial formations theory.
... In this paper, the concept of "racial socio-technical formations" is used to analyse how border landscapes are both shaped by and mediate the global hierarchy of nation-states that emerged from the hegemony of imperial powers (Achiume 2022;De Genova 2017;Isakjee et al. 2020;Sharma 2020). This hierarchical model has created a division between those who are considered to "belong" and those who do not through constructions such as citizenship structuring who can enter national territories and under what conditions. ...
... While for others, particularly those from the Global South, legal pathways to the Global North are essentially denied (van Houtum 2010) and their movements irregularised, criminalised, and illegalised (Sheller 2018). This has reinforced unequal access to resources, opportunities, and rights revealing the underlying structures of capitalism and racialised exploitation (De Genova 2017;Gilmore 2007;Guti errez Rodr ıguez 2018;Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). ...
This paper investigates the interplay between infrastructures, geophysical
environments, and mobility regimes by focusing on the Evros/Meric River, as the border between Turkey, Greece, and the EU. Situated in the fields of Infrastructure Studies, Mobility Studies, and Critical Border Studies, this paper examines how border regimes are enrolled in the riverscape, thereby shaping who can cross the river-as-border and under what conditions. Through an interdisciplinary research practice of “montaging”, which integrates ethnographic research, literary and visual analysis, cartography, and textual analysis, this paper analyses how geophysical environments and socio-technical formations co-constitute racialising border regimes. Using the conceptual framework of infrastructure as ecology, this paper highlights the relationality between geophysical environments, border regimes, and how people-on-the-move navigate these landscapes. In so doing, this paper explores a critical way of thinking about “natural borders” and “infrastructures” and aims to put forward analytical tools for documenting and analysing bordering practices.
... En este escenario, una de las dimensiones menos exploradas ha sido el papel activo que desempeñan los organismos internacionales en la producción y reproducción de jerarquías raciales de movilidad. La problematización parte de reconocer, entonces, que las lógicas de control migratorio y fronterizo dependen de "formaciones raciales" históricas y cambiantes (De Genova, 2017). Para atender estos procesos, se recuperan aportes de los estudios decoloniales con el objetivo de enriquecer los debates en el campo de los estudios críticos sobre migración y fronteras y, al mismo tiempo, contribuir a la producción de conocimiento sobre el nexo entre migración, racialización y fronteras. ...
... En términos teóricos, los estudios decoloniales han diferenciado los conceptos de raza, racismo y racialización a partir de la distinción entre: la "raza", en tanto categoría social de la diferencia construida para crear y legitimar relaciones desiguales de poder y dominación; el "racismo", como el sistema de ideas que permite fundamentar la existencia de la raza como categoría biológica/ esencializada y dividir a las poblaciones del mundo de manera jerarquizada; y la "racialización", como el proceso de construcción de "identidades raciales" por medio de la creación y recreación de relaciones de subordinación e inferioridad en el marco de la historia y presente del modo de producción capitalista (Quijano, 2019). Este artículo toma las distinciones señaladas y propone hacer foco en los procesos de racialización que, como se ha señalado desde diferentes campos de conocimiento, no son reductibles al fenotipo o a los trazos físicos visibles, sino que se entrelazan con categorías culturales y religiosas, escalas espaciales, significantes políticos y estatus legales diversos, además de dimensiones de género, orientación sexual, etnia, edad y clase, entre otros (Gilmore, 2002;Anthias y Yuval-Davis, 2005;De Genova, 2017). Así, se reconoce la existencia de una amplia gama de prácticas institucionales basadas en el control selectivo de los cuerpos de migrantes -de sus rasgos físicos, tonos de piel, género, nombres, idioma, formas de hablar, de vestirse, de identificarse-que emergen como marcas exteriores de la colonialidad y que funcionan como signos de la historia en sus cuerpos (Quijano, 2019;Oso et al., 2017). ...
Este artículo busca aportar elementos teóricos, empíricos y reflexivos para discutir, desnaturalizar y visibilizar la implicación de relaciones racistas de poder en los modos de gobierno de la migración, partiendo del uso político-institucional que recibe la categoría de migración “extrarregional” en Sudamérica y Mesoamérica entre 2010 y 2021. Se adopta un enfoque metodológico cualitativo, basado en revisión documental y entrevistas a informantes claves. En el contexto hegemonizado por movimientos sur-norte de migrantes del Caribe, África y Asia que impera en este periodo, se argumenta que la OIM ha desempeñado un papel activo en la producción política de sujetos racializados mediante diversos diseños de intervención dirigidos a “migrantes en tránsito”. Se sugiere que la gobernanza migratoria construye (y se apoya en) un “racismo técnico” que, basado en la negación de jerarquías raciales y geopolíticas que estratifican la movilidad, permite conferir apariencia de neutralidad a clasificaciones y prácticas políticas que coproducen la subordinación del movimiento. Se concluye que el análisis de la configuración y reconversión de la categoría de migrantes extrarregionales está revelando especificidades históricas de las migraciones sur-norte que, siendo geopolíticamente cambiantes y disputadas, permiten advertir cómo se plasman procesos globales de racialización del control migratorio y fronterizo en la región.
... It is a showcase for projecting and fixing the securitisation of migration in the collective imaginary as an indispensable means of keeping oneself safe from the outside, in which the others, the threatening strangers, are forged as suspicious subjects (Ritaine, 2009) and threats to states and national communities (Williams, 2003). However, not all outsiders are perceived in the same way, as class, gender (Gabrielli, 2021;Varela-Huerta, 2020b), and especially racialized features are central in enacting the border spectacle (i.e., De Genova, 2018;Pulido 2004). Moreover, the border spectacle is a keystone in the constant political framing of 'crises' in border areas (De Genova, 2018;Gabrielli, 2021;Hernández León, 2012;Scott et al., 2018;Varela-Huerta, 2015, 2019b, 2020a. ...
... However, not all outsiders are perceived in the same way, as class, gender (Gabrielli, 2021;Varela-Huerta, 2020b), and especially racialized features are central in enacting the border spectacle (i.e., De Genova, 2018;Pulido 2004). Moreover, the border spectacle is a keystone in the constant political framing of 'crises' in border areas (De Genova, 2018;Gabrielli, 2021;Hernández León, 2012;Scott et al., 2018;Varela-Huerta, 2015, 2019b, 2020a. It is also a driver of a socio-political context prone to accepting the exceptionality of the state's performative response in terms of violence, necropolitics, and complete legal and vital uncertainty (De Genova, 2021;Ferrer-Gallardo and Gabrielli, 2018;Jones, 2016;Varela-Huerta, 2020b, 2019a. ...
This paper explores the ‘border spectacle’, namely the production and diffusion of images of immigration, in contemporary digital journalism to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic public health crisis overlapped with the dual semantics of illegalisation/victimisation of migrants. This article addresses a gap in the field of political economy of the border spectacle, conducting a bottom-up analysis of the socio-economic and material conditions under which visual narratives of migration and borders are produced and diffused in the case of Mexico. The methodology combines virtual ethnography and in-depth biographical/life stories interviews with three female reporter/photojournalists covering migration issues in Mexico and the Americas and producing accounts that differs significantly from the hegemonic iconography of migration. By analyzing the data collected between 2020 and 2021, we explore the extreme violence, precariousness and health risks, as well as strategies of self-support characterising these media professionals’ experiences. The analysis helps understand the rationale behind the political economy of the media during the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown in Mexico, as well as how the media’s structural frame exposes, amplifies and mediates migration in terms of ‘infectious’ and, therefore, a threat to national communities already vulnerable to the virus. Finally, we highlight the conflict between the purpose of the reporters, who want to provide empathetic, first-hand accounts of migration, on the one hand, and the commercial interests of mainstream media, which tends to seek to follow a hegemonic framing, make some of these images viral to create moral panic against migrants, on the other.
... Furthermore, the professed morality and values of the EU have been called into question (Jones, 2024). Furthermore, the "Black Lives Matter" campaign has prompted the international community to reflect on the long history of systemic racism in European colonial history, the slave trade, and EU immigration policies (De Genova, 2020). ...
... Denise Ferreira da Silva's Toward a Global Idea of Race is a highly original and ambitious book that offers an account of modern 'Euro-white' thought, in philosophy, science and in national consciousness and political discourse, that seeks to understand how conceptions of reason and the self-evolved from the 17th to the 20th century in such a way that the routine and violent death of black and brown people does not cause an ethical crisis (Da Silva 2007: 2), but in fact appears entirely coherent within prevailing understandings of reason. Da Silva's main focus with respect to such violent death is on the Americas, but a parallel lies in the routine death of thousands of black and brown people in the Mediterranean, not merely as a consequence of, but as a part of, European 'migration management' (Broeck and Saucier 2016;Danewid 2017;De Genova 2018;Van Gemert 2024 forthcoming). How is it possible that such events do not threaten prevailing worldviews? ...
In this article, we regard concepts of inclusion and exclusion as epistemological obstacles for a political (rather than a critical) analysis of migration. Working with the rich conceptual innovations and scientific and philosophical genealogies developed by Denise Ferreira Da Silva in Toward a Global Idea of Race, we seek to show how concepts of inclusion and exclusion, as well as equations between migration and mobility fortify what Da Silva has called ‘globality’ and ‘raciality’. Either explicitly or implicitly according primacy to inclusion means that what Da Silva calls ‘the logic of exclusion’ ultimately folds into what she terms ‘the logic of obliteration’, which revolves around the necessary assimilation of the European other to the Euro-white subject. As we argue, today, the racial institution of the global operates to a large extent by way of the conceptual, classificatory and ocular practices that make up what is known as ‘migration’, which continues to be understood (falsely but constitutively) as cross-border mobility. We seek to show how ‘migration’, and its concomitant binary analytic of inclusion and exclusion, has become an apparatus separating what Da Silva calls the ‘transcendental I’, that is, the universal, self-determining, Euro-white subject, from those primarily characterized and known by what Da Silva calls ‘affectability’, that is, external determination. In the hierarchy of humans that ensues, migrants become recognizable as racially inferior, affectable not-quite-subjects.
... Beck's (2001) discussion of the "risk society" and the fear of the Other can help explain why the news media often portray the Other as an enemy, particularly after 9/11. Following the 2015 migration crisis and the New Year's Eve events in Cologne, 2 for example, Muslims in Germany became more racialized and stereotypically categorized not only as "terrorists" but also as "uncivilized" and "criminals" (De Genova, 2018). Research indicates that media representations of Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Muslims have been consistently stereotypical and negative, perpetuating Othering and contributing to the reproduction of certain categorized marginalized group stereotypes (Ahmed & Matthes, 2017;Axner, 2015;Ezz El Din, 2016;Imtoual, 2005;Manning, 2004;Poole, 2002Poole, , 2009Said, 1981Said, , 1997Shaheen, 2009Shaheen, , 2012Vicente et al., 2009;Weng & Mansouri, 2021). ...
Flera forskare har betonat vikten av att lärarutbildningen behandlar ämnen
som mångkultur och interkulturalitet, eftersom den spelar en betydande roll
i att forma framtida medborgare (Banks, 2021). Inom ramen för
utbildningen men också i sin kommande yrkesutövning möter lärarstudenter
och lärare elever med olika språkbakgrunder och många elever läser på
svenska som ett andraspråk. I detta kapitel fokuseras därför läsutveckling
på såväl ett första- som ett andraspråk. Elever som läser ämnet svenska som
andraspråk har ökat de senaste åren. Internationella undersökningar visar
att elever som läser svenska som andraspråk har sämre läsförståelse på
svenska än elever som läser svenska efter de inledande åren i grundskolan.
Vi ville studera detta närmare och har genomfört en tvärsnittsstudie med
över 46 000 elever där vi kan konstatera att elever som läser ämnet svenska
som andraspråk, som grupp betraktat, har sämre förmåga att avkoda ord
och förstå text, än elever som läser ämnet svenska redan i årskurs 1–3.
Studien visade också att många elever som läser ämnet svenska som
andraspråk behöver stöd för att utveckla god läsförmåga. Behovet av att
skolan stödjer dessa elever med utgångspunkten att alla elever ska ges
möjlighet att utveckla fungerade läsförmåga diskuteras. Vi beskriver också
en studie där vi genomfört en satsning med läsning under sommarlovet i en
kommun med stor andel elever som har svenska som andraspråk. Teoretiskt
bygger vårt kapitel på modellen ”The Simple View of Reading” som visar
att läsförståelse på såväl ett förstaspråk som på ett andraspråk är produkten
av att kunna avkoda ord och att förstå dem.
... Beck's (2001) discussion of the "risk society" and the fear of the Other can help explain why the news media often portray the Other as an enemy, particularly after 9/11. Following the 2015 migration crisis and the New Year's Eve events in Cologne, 2 for example, Muslims in Germany became more racialized and stereotypically categorized not only as "terrorists" but also as "uncivilized" and "criminals" (De Genova, 2018). Research indicates that media representations of Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Muslims have been consistently stereotypical and negative, perpetuating Othering and contributing to the reproduction of certain categorized marginalized group stereotypes (Ahmed & Matthes, 2017;Axner, 2015;Ezz El Din, 2016;Imtoual, 2005;Manning, 2004;Poole, 2002Poole, , 2009Said, 1981Said, , 1997Shaheen, 2009Shaheen, , 2012Vicente et al., 2009;Weng & Mansouri, 2021). ...
För att barn ska kunna följa med i undervisningen i förskola och senare i skola behöver de behärska det svenska skolspråket. I dagens förskolor med stor mångfald finns det grupper av barn som av olika skäl inte är motiverade att lära sig svenska som andraspråk (SvA), utan i stället visar hög motivation för att lära sig engelska. Den låga motivationen för SvA gör det svårt för förskolans personal att säkerställa att barnen får de förutsättningar de behöver för att senare kunna lära sig på svenska i skolan. I detta kapitel ger vi en kort bakgrund om motivation och språkinlärning, och presenterar därefter resultaten från ett digitalt frågeformulär med fokus på SvA och motivation. Målet med kapitlet är att väcka lärarstuderandes intresse för olika aspekter av och motivationen till svenska som andraspråk.
... Beck's (2001) discussion of the "risk society" and the fear of the Other can help explain why the news media often portray the Other as an enemy, particularly after 9/11. Following the 2015 migration crisis and the New Year's Eve events in Cologne, 2 for example, Muslims in Germany became more racialized and stereotypically categorized not only as "terrorists" but also as "uncivilized" and "criminals" (De Genova, 2018). Research indicates that media representations of Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Muslims have been consistently stereotypical and negative, perpetuating Othering and contributing to the reproduction of certain categorized marginalized group stereotypes (Ahmed & Matthes, 2017;Axner, 2015;Ezz El Din, 2016;Imtoual, 2005;Manning, 2004;Poole, 2002Poole, , 2009Said, 1981Said, , 1997Shaheen, 2009Shaheen, , 2012Vicente et al., 2009;Weng & Mansouri, 2021). ...
News media reporting on immigrant communities are often blamed for being biased or prejudiced. News organizations – especially tabloids and alternative right-wing news media – have been criticized for their insensitivity while covering immigrants, and for failing to adapt their reporting style to accommodate the new, globalized, multicultural immigrant societies. Instead, they tend to focus on stereotypical negative aspects of immigrant communities, often portraying them in a disproportionate or unfavorable light as “the other.” This chapter presents an overview of a selection of previous studies on the media representation of immigrants in the West. It further explores various approaches to reporting on immigrants and examines how each approach contributes to a specific narrative construction. The chapter concludes by advocating for a more “constructive approach” in journalism to effectively represent a multicultural society, as well as discussing the relevance of such an approach for educators.
... 13 The crisis on the so-called 'Balkan Route', and later also on the EU-Belarus border, gave rise to new expressions of state racism but also fresh anti-racist solidarities. 14 After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the issue of race again came to the fore: migration regimes established to enable the exodus of mainly women and children speedily began to racialise the normative Ukrainian refugee as fully white -itself a novel developmentwhile restricting mobility to those racialised as other, namely Afro-Ukrainians born in Ukraine, Global South nationals living in Ukraine, and Ukrainian Roma. 15 Scholars seeking to understand Eastern Europe's place in the 'worldsystem' of capital, coloniality, and race view it as what Immanuel Wallerstein termed a 'semi-periphery'. ...
The concept of vulnerability has become central in debates and policies around migration and asylum, but its use has been criticised as ‘individualising’ vulnerability and neglecting the socio-legal structures that promote it. However, shifting the focus on the structural determinants of vulnerability risks ignoring the agentic power and subjective conditions of individuals within a group considered vulnerable. On this backdrop, the current study proposes to focus on the phenomenological level and sets out to provide an exploratory analysis of conditions of experiential vulnerability. The study draws from 15 interviews conducted with a group of young adults who continue to live in temporary reception centres in Luxembourg despite having obtained refugee status. Integrating a conceptual model of vulnerability as embedded, multi-layered, and dynamic with insights from a critical phenomenological approach, the comparative thematic analysis identified three main elements shaping young refugees’ experiences of vulnerability: positions, interpretations and (re)actions. The conclusion discusses some limitations of the study and potential implications, focusing on the potential short and long-term impact of experiential vulnerability on migrant individual’s well-being and on society as a whole.
This ethnographic study explores the transformation of Dugave, (Novi) Zagreb, focusing on racialization and safety perceptions in the context of non-European migration. Analyzing urban meanings and historical narratives, the research analyzes talk about “azilanti,” assumptions of Croatian whiteness, and unveils the layers of mixedness in Dugave. The article emphasizes the coexistence of perceptions of safety and danger, looking into the gendered dynamic of socio-spatial marginalization with regard to crime, drugs, and hooliganism inscribed in postsocialist and postwar Dugave. The study underscores the need to study the nuances of migrant emplacement as embedded in local histories and global racialized hierarchies.
En un escenario de profunda inequidad social y económica a escala mundial, particularmente en América Latina, para muchos migrantes el desplazarse de su país se presenta como la mejor o incluso la única alternativa para acceder a una existencia en condiciones que les permita vivir dignamente. Respecto a la recepción de venezolanos, la región ha experimentado cambios en las políticas migratorias, con algunos países dificultando su entrada, lo que ha llevado a un aumento en el uso de rutas peligrosas y pasos fronterizos informales. El texto hace una crítica a la securitización de la inmigración e introduce a la Seguridad Humana como enfoque que incluye en la definición de seguridad áreas centradas en las personas y los grupos sociales (amenazas como el hambre, la enfermedad y la represión) y no solo las vinculadas a la seguridad nacional y a la defensa del territorio por medios militares. Se subraya la importancia de desecuritizar la migración y de adoptar políticas inclusivas y humanitarias que reconozcan no solo el aporte en términos productivos de la migración sino especialmente la dignidad y los derechos de la población migrante.
Статтю присвячено детальному аналізу впливу популістських і консервативних рухів на європейську меморіальну політику. Мета статті полягає у розкритті того, як ці політичні течії формують критику офіційних наративів і політик пам’яті в Європі, та вивченні викликів, які вони ставлять перед національними і європейськими дискурсами пам’яті. Аналіз охоплює два основних аспекти: критичний погляд на концепти «європейської спадщини» і «культурного ідентифікаціонізму» та вплив цих поглядів на сучасну меморіальну політику. У статті розглядаються конкретні приклади, зокрема як правопопулістські ідеї спотворюють європейську спадщину шляхом ностальгії за «старою Європою». У цьому контексті акцентується на ігноруванні колоніального минулого та спрощенні наративів про колоніальне насильство і Голокост. Оцінюється, як ці ідеї використовуються для підтримки націоналістичних наративів, що ставлять під сумнів мультикультурний підхід Європейського Союзу та політики пам’яті. Стаття також аналізує, як популістські та консервативні рухи критично ставляться до ЄС, уважаючи його «спілкою банкірів» і «примусовим плавильним котлом», що нав’язує політику мультикультуралізму та прийняття мігрантів. Розглянуто, як ці рухи, включаючи Національне об’єднання Марін Ле Пен і «Золоту Зорю» в Греції, виступають за повернення національного суверенітету та збереження культурної ідентичності на основі європейської спадщини, яка, на їхню думку, не має нічого спільного з ЄС. Окрема увага приділяється поняттю «нового расизму» або «культурного расизму», що характеризується відмовою від біологічних ієрархій і натомість акцентує культурні відмінності як підставу для виключення мігрантів. Аналізується, як правопопулістські ідеї виправдовують культурну неспівмірність як загрозу європейській ідентичності, тоді як нові праві ідеологи просувають концепцію етнорегіоналізму, що базується на культурному диференціалізмі і заперечує мультикультуралізм. Завдяки всебічному аналізу стаття має на меті розкрити трансформацію європейської меморіальної політики під впливом популістських і консервативних тенденцій та оцінити їхні наслідки для європейської політики пам’яті й ідентичності.
This article explores the frictions between national sovereignty and the universalization of human rights, highlighting the deep colonial roots and persistent coloniality within the nation-state system and international law. It critiques the liberal framework of nation-states that marginalize “non-nationals” while also perpetuating colonial relations and racial hierarchies through unequal integration into the nation-state system. The ongoing assault on Gaza starkly illustrates the violence inherent within the nation-state and points to the limitations of the current human rights framework. Advocating for a decolonial approach, the article argues that the violence in Palestine underscores the need to rethink and debate international law and human rights, expanding on decolonial scholarship to liberate these frameworks from their colonial, modern, and capitalist contexts.
Het proefschrift betoogt dat ‘migratiecrisis’ een hernieuwde uitdrukking geeft aan een geracialiseerde, Europese notie van wat het betekent om mens te zijn, dat wil zeggen, een verbeelding van Europese humaniteit.
This study investigates the complex dynamics of squatting in Brussels, examining its influence on shaping solidarity norms and practices in urban settings. Through activist-ethnography conducted within squats, we identify a recurring pattern: the (re)production and negotiation of mobile commons. Analyzing three squatting instances, we emphasize their role as not only spaces for commons (re)production but also platforms for migrants’ and activists’ social becoming. We argue that squats are not mere shelters but dynamic spaces where negotiation and social transformation occur, challenging conventional humanitarian assistance models. Ultimately, this research highlights the significance of (re)producing alternative dwelling infrastructures for illegalized migrants in shaping the urban commons and thereby impacting everyday urban politics of solidarity.
In this article the Special Economic Zones “SEZ” are analyzed according to a new social vision linked to conflicts arising from policy problems and other negative phenomena. Port areas are not always the site of economic development but also of lack of growth and increase in social disparities, which occur on different dimensions. The article therefore raises a reflection on what problems can arise at a social and urban level if SEZs are not well built. For the development of SEZs we used the theory of change to identify necessary phases and solutions. The analysis focused on two fronts, one nationally Italian, and the other foreign. Starting with the most challenging international SEZs, where disputes have been most severe, we question whether the SEZ regulations in place today can prevent disputes and exclusions. Five sectors have been recognized as having more vulnerabilities due to SEZs. We conclude by outlining recommendations for improving the well-being of citizens and addressing social issues that may arise from Special Economic Zones (SEZs).
This article traces how Caribbean nations become Black by virtue of their relationship to colonialism, capitalism and their linkages with race. First, it outlines how colonization linked race, labour and Blackness, and draws connections to the racialization of Caribbean nations under neoliberalism. Second, it argues for how those processes in turn generate racial tropes that mark certain nations as Black. Using Haiti and Jamaica in comparison, this article suggests that Caribbean nations and their migrants become racialized as Black in ways that both insert them within the U.S. racial hierarchy and situates them within a larger context of global Blackness.
In the wake of recent interventions to better connect the subfields of international migration and race and ethnicity through a sociology of racialized immigration, we push this further by arguing for the necessity of a global Blackness perspective on global migration. Such a focus does not just reflect the role of race in the dynamics of migration, and vice versa, but more importantly shifts assumptions about this relationship. So, it is not enough to say that race matters in migration but rather that blackness and Black lives matter in how migration unfolds. Using global blackness as a starting point in our analyses of migration reveals a clearer and closer entanglement of race, racism, colonialism, and migration. We argue that global Blackness structures notions of who migrates and under what conditions, as well as our ideas regarding migrants and their descendants and use the examples of New York City, Paris, and France as paradigmatic sites for understanding this relationship.
It is often erroneously assumed that Russians and Ukrainians are the “same people.” This conviction of sameness partly drove the aggressive invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with a determination to forcefully drag a sovereign nation onto an assumed similar destination with Russia and Belarus. Such an assault on a sovereign nation drew denunciations from organizations and people around the world. Nonetheless, by November 2022, the invasion had resulted in the tragic loss of numerous innocent Ukrainian lives and compelled an unprecedented number of people to seek sanctuary throughout Europe. The same event prompted a growing use of the language of imperialism to characterize Russia's supremacy, concurrently giving rise to the logic of Europeanness and whiteness. In this IMR Dispatch, I explore the impact of Europeanness, whiteness, and sameness on people of color fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. While it is crucial to examine the systematic racialization of these people, I argue that the racialized border enforcement witnessed during the conflict is better understood when viewed through the global color line embedded within migration and border management, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe where racialized logics are still underplayed.
Discourse played a crucial role in upholding the “Border Spectacle” throughout the “refugee crisis”. This essay seeks to explore the discursive components of migration governance throughout the “refugee crisis” in Italy by drawing on Sayad’s observation that the state thinks about itself when it talks about migration. The analysis shows that the national categories through which states think about immigration are significantly influenced by the colonial legacy. I rely on discourse analysis approaches to explore the speeches of the two Ministers of the Interior who oversaw migration governance between 2013 and 2018. I argue that the “crisis” offered Italy a key opportunity to showcase its national community as a good-natured and selfless one, while also emphasizing its unique performance within the Mediterranean space. As the Italian case demonstrates, unpacking the national categories through which states conceive migration can contribute to exposing and challenging the historical sanitization of migration governance discourse throughout the “refugee crisis”.
Israel’s war on Gaza following 7 October 2023 has given birth to several political and social changes in European nations. According to the United Nations Report of the Special Rapporteur, Israel has used this moment to “distort” international humanitarian law principles “in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.” In the European context, this has led to European Muslims and non-Muslims, including organizations, institutions, as well as individual academics, politicians, and activists mobilizing and voicing their condemnation and demand their governments to do more towards peaceful and equitable solutions. However, this has been met with a strong reaction from European governing bodies. This paper situates this reaction within wider discourses on the European Muslim crisis. It begins with a systematic literature review on the so-called European Muslim crisis, followed by case studies on the United Kingdom and Germany on their respective changes to policies impacting Muslims in the post-October 7 contexa Regarding the literature review, this paper illustrates how this concept has three distinct, yet intersecting meanings: the crisis of European identity; the crisis of foundational ideologies of Europe; and an internal Muslim crisis that often leads to radicalization. Through the British and German case studies, this paper illustrates that October 7 has reinforced and strengthened the shift towards values-based citizenship and integration. This paper argues that through branding pro-Palestine protesters and organizations as extremists in the British context, and adding questions related to antisemitism and Israel in the citizenship tests in the German context, the Israel/Palestine issue has now become yet another yardstick to demarcate the European, civilized “us” vs. the Muslim “other.” In doing so, October 7 has escalated elements already present within the wider discourses of the European Muslim crisis.
This article aims to explore how the entanglement of Protestant Christianity and race and racism is manifested in contemporary Dutch society, and to identify which themes for introspection this yields for majority white Dutch Protestant churches. We argue that introspection on perceived superiority of white Dutch Protestantism is crucial to uncover subtle, unconscious mechanisms and ideas that are present in majority white Dutch Protestant churches and that contribute to maintaining racism. Furthermore, we argue that contemporary topical issues such as racism and colonial history run the risk of being pushed to the margins again as long as there is no systematic review of power and privilege of white Dutch Protestantism.
We critically examine the lived experience of food insecurity among asylum seekers in England, adopting a framework of racialized governance to consider how experiences are situated within historical and political processes. We draw upon longitudinal interviews from January 2023-February 2024 with people, including asylum seekers, living on a low-income in the North and South of England. Food insecurity was unavoidable for asylum seekers subject to No Recourse to Public Funds; food charities did little to mitigate food insecurity and could be sites of racialized stigma. The racialization of food insecurity among asylum seekers was fuelled by a politics of “racialized governance” which gained cultural traction through media narratives and manifested in everyday interactions around food. Developing literature on food insecurity among asylum seekers through new empirical and theoretical insights, we show how food charities can be racialized spaces where “non-white” asylum seekers are responded to according to a differential humanity.
This study investigates the complex dynamics of squatting in Brussels, examining its influence on shaping solidarity norms and values in urban settings. Through participative observation conducted within squats, we identify a recurring pattern: the (re)production and negotiation of mobile commons. Analyzing three squatting instances, we emphasize their role as not only spaces for commons (re)production but also platforms for the social becoming of migrants and citizens. We argue that squats are not mere shelters but dynamic spaces where negotiation and social transformation occur, challenging conventional humanitarian assistance models. Ultimately, this research highlights the significance of (re)producing alternative dwelling infrastructures for illegalized migrants in shaping the urban commons and thereby impacting everyday urban politics of solidarity.
This paper applies a conjoint experiment to assess the sources of contemporary social status hierarchies in Western Europe. Social status has become a popular concept in political science to explain resentment against economic and cultural transformations. However, we do not know whether cultural sources like race and gender have an independent causal effect on social status perceptions. Furthermore, these characteristics may be more contested between societal subgroups and thus have a weaker stratifying effect than income or occupation. This study employs an innovative conjoint experiment, conducted in Switzerland, to systematically assess the multidimensional sources of status. The design asks respondents to place profiles with randomized criteria and thus captures intersubjective status perceptions. In contrast to evaluating one's own placement on the social status hierarchy, placing others provides more accurate insights about the structural force of social status. The results show that both economic and cultural sources strongly shape social status, with occupation, race/ethnicity and income being most important. Furthermore, different subgroups agree on the hierarchy no matter their own status. This study helps to understand the structural roots of political resentment by showing that both cultural and economic inequalities are recognized.
This article examines the evolving narratives of the German political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and its potential as a hybrid threat. Through narrative manipulation, the AfD has demonstrated its ability to influence public discourse and distort reality via disinformation dissemination. The AfD established in 2013 in response to the financial crisis and dissatisfaction with the European Union, has transitioned into a populist party, and along with this change, it has also changed its narrative. This shift was notably evident during the migrant crisis in 2015, showcasing the party's adeptness at evoking fear and animosity among German voters. The AfD's narratives have been for years similar to those of the Russian Federation, which has used almost identical narratives on some topics. The German party is consequently working with Russian politicians to reshape democratic politics within Europe, and the AfD is accordingly acting as a hybrid threat to the entire European Union. The study is based on a discourse analysis of interviews conducted with German experts on the topic as well as a content analysis of selected German media to explore these narrative dynamics and their broader implications.
In an apparent departure from responses to the so-called 2015 “migration” crisis, Ukrainians displaced by the war have been welcomed relatively unbureaucratically by European states. Yet, despite this, they are positioned as a problem to be solved, a disruption to the normal order and state system. This article asks what this problematization of “migrants” reveals about the dominant system of thought that assigns people to place and how it might it be possible to think beyond its limits. It starts by demonstrating that the “security-space” imaginary both excludes and relies upon highly problematic, concealed assumptions about time and race. It shows how questions of time and race continually haunt and disrupt the seemingly coherent and indomitable “security-space” way of thinking. Following a strategy of deconstruction, the article arrives at the counter-intuitive conclusion that this dominant problematization of migration is temporal and structured by a relation to the future. Building on existing critical literature produced by scholars of Geopolitics, International Relations, and International Political Sociology, it offers an alternative imaginary, “time-race,” which opens up new ground for reimagining borders and migration to overcome reproducing the never-ending cycle of “migration crises,” to which there is apparently no alternative.
This article explores how Spanish families view immigrants in an intercultural school context and how this is reflected in their trust in public schools in Barcelona. A qualitative methodology is used, based on in-depth interviews and focus groups, comparing the discourse of the parents of children who attend schools in different neighbourhoods in Barcelona, with either high levels or low levels of immigration. The data from the fieldwork indicate that the cultural and social distance perceived by the interviewees, and the different languages and religions of the immigrants in question constitute the major sources of differentiation based on racism and Islamophobia. Moreover, in my analysis, I have distinguished between two different ways that perceptions of immigration result in distrust in institutions: (i) perceptions that result in distrust within the schools and (ii) perceptions that result in distrust in higher-level institutions, such as the educational administration bodies and city-level institutions.
The European Union has worked with non-EU countries, including Afghanistan, to manage migration from that country since 2015. EU policies regarding Afghan migration aim, in part, to change a migration dynamic in which smugglers have played a key role. This approach was maintained even in the immediate aftermath of the return of the Taliban in 2021 and was mainstreamed into EU humanitarian efforts. Here, we argue that current efforts at so-called border externalization have contributed to a moral rift between the EU and Afghan smugglers, one in which the smugglers develop moral justifications for their work. We show that the EU’s short-term gains with regard to lower arrival numbers have come at the expense of developing a sense of legitimacy for their migration principles, governance, and infrastructure among the Afghan people over the long term. The widening moral rift between Afghan smugglers and EU policymakers is likely to bolster an existing migration infrastructure that provides a logic for grassroots resistance.
This chapter delves into the potential for social entrepreneurship to empower asylum seekers in Slovenia through participatory methodologies, aiming to yield emancipatory outcomes. Grounded in a series of workshops convened at the Asylum Residence on Kotnikova Street in Ljubljana, during 2021, wherein diverse stakeholders collaborated with asylum seekers, the study explored an array of practices, interventions and techniques, with the intent of engendering emancipatory advancements within the sphere of labour market integration. Informed by antecedent research and experiences at the Slovenian Migration Institute ZRC SAZU, it discerned an imperative to support asylum seekers and refugees nurturing entrepreneurial aspirations—particularly towards establishing social enterprises in Slovenia—given the post-2015–16 “Crisis of the EU border regime”. This initiative drew inspiration from the educational tenets promulgated by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed. The workshops and methodology provided information that would otherwise have been difficult or impossible to obtain, and their results were useful to all participants, but the process was complex and the progress was slow, as there were constant methodological, theoretical and content discords between all involved.
This paper is a conceptual exploration and diffractive reading of refugee/(im)migrant education through multiple lenses, including data-driven decision making, critical refugee studies, new materialism and critical feminist and posthumanist studies, and trans theorizations such as Black trans feminism. After a brief introduction to “the field” of refugee/(im)migrant education, the paper turns to diffractive readings of refugee/(im)migrant education as means of exploring what is the matter, as in the material and discursive substance, in refugee/(im)migrant education, and why and how (including when, where, and by whom) does that matter come to matter? The paper concludes with discoveries, or findings, from this diffractive, transdisciplinary exploration and considerations for educators, policymakers, researchers, activists, and other actors (co)constituting and “becoming with” refugee/(im)migrant education.
Employing Johannesburg as a case, this paper explores the intersections of place branding with pervasive, often taken-for-granted phenomena, including culture, democracy, urban governance, gender and public diplomacy. The paper argues that these intersections are seldom the subject of place branding scholarship, even in the global North, where the discipline receives considerable inquiry. The paper undertakes a multidisciplinary review of the literature to situate place branding and its relation to culture, democracy, urban governance and public diplomacy. Delving deeper into the literature surrounding place branding and its relation to culture, democracy, urban governance and public diplomacy reveals the need for a more comprehensive and nuanced approach to understanding the impact of place branding. By situating place branding within these broader contexts, the paper opens new avenues for inquiry and challenges the predominant lenses through which place branding has been traditionally studied. Through delving deeper into place branding scholarship, the paper introduces a new term, “mentrification”, to enhance descriptions of placeholder disengagement and to add to the emerging lexicon of place branding. Ultimately, this paper serves as a valuable contribution by offering a new outlook on the complexities of place branding, moving beyond traditional efficacy measurements and definitional issues to delve into the deeper layers of its impact on society.
Hundreds of thousands of forced migrants from Ukraine have arrived in Poland and other countries following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Their smooth reception in the host countries did not obscure the fact that Ukrainian Roma were among those who did not receive the same welcome. In this chapter, the authors use Elias and Scotson’s model of the established and the outsiders as a lens through which to view the position of Roma refugees from Ukraine. As they argue, the Roma refugees from the war in Ukraine were caught in the historical interplay of racialized territorial regimes and the petrified pan-European structures of exclusion to which Roma—as citizens of these countries—are subjected. Nevertheless, and contrary to Elias and Scotson’s model, the Polish Roma demonstrated a group cohesion that is considered unattainable to the outsiders; they did so through various forms of mobilization and assistance to the Ukrainian Roma refugees. However, when it comes to the position of the Ukrainian Roma refugees within the structures of the majority society—both the established and the non-Roma outsiders—the figurational fate of exclusion of this category of refugees appears typical while any other outcome—unlikely.
This article explores three different methodological approaches to the UN 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees—and international refugee law (IRL) more broadly. These are termed the internal, external and dialectical approaches. It is argued that the dialectical approach, which combines elements of the internal and external approaches using a materialist postcolonial perspective helps make out in the light of changing conditions a more persuasive case for liberal interpretation and reform of the 1951 Convention. Put differently, the article is about the limitations and failings of mainstream IRL scholarship, which essentially pursues an internal approach to the 1951 Convention. It is equally about the need to decolonize and transform the pedagogy and research of IRL. This article concludes with some suggestions to advance refugee rights that would allow the 1951 Convention to respond more effectively to the protection needs of refugees around the world.
This chapter uses the introduction of the Visa Information System (VIS), a vast biometric database, as an opportunity to compensate for the relative neglect of the European visa regime in border and migration studies. Inspired by the autonomy of migration approach, the chapter engages the European visa regime from migrants’ perspective to study how migrants appropriate mobility via Schengen visa in the context of biometric border controls. The visa regime emerges as a vast machine of illegalisation that provokes precisely those practices of appropriation that it is meant to forestall. Illustrated through the example of the provision of manipulated feeder documents, the chapter subsequently outlines six features that practices of appropriation share irrespective of their form. Apart from demonstrating that moments of autonomy of migration persist within biometric border regimes, the chapter thus introduces the notion of appropriation as an alternative concept to theorise migrants’ capacity to subvert border controls.
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.
Over the last few years, the global face of the EU has been changing. The EU is spinning a global border web with regard to the battle against irregular migration. At the borders of the EU, a powerful and security-obsessed distinction between travellers is increasingly being constructed between the travellers who 'belong to' the EU and those who do not, based on the fate of birth. To this end, the EU has composed a so-called 'white and black' Schengen list, recently relabelled a 'positive and negative' list, which is used as a criterion for visa applications. What is striking is that on the negative list a significantly high number of Muslim and developing states are listed. Hence, there is an implicit, strong inclination to use this list not only as a tool to guarantee security in physical terms or in terms of 'Western' identity protection but also as a means of keeping the world's poorest out. Such global apartheid geopolitics-loaded with rhetoric on selective access, burden, and masses-provokes the dehumanisation and illegalisation of the travel of those who were born in what the EU has defined as the 'wrong country', the wastable and deportable lives from countries on the negative list. Such unauthorised travelling is increasingly dangerous as the high death toll suggests. It has led to a new and yet all too familiar geopolitical landscape in Europe, a scene many of us hope to never see again in postwar Europe, a landscape of barbed wire surveillance and camps. And hence, the EU-which started out as a means to produce a zone of peace and comfort ruled by law and order-has now in its self-proclaimed war on illegal migrants created a border industry that coconstructs more, not less, 'illegality', xenophobia, and fear: the EU as a global border machine.
As the world looked on in horror at the Paris terror attacks of January and November 2015, France found itself at the centre of a war that has split across nations and continents. The attacks set in motion a steady creep towards ever more repressive state surveillance, and have fuelled the resurgence of the far right across Europe and beyond, while leaving the left dangerously divided. These developments raise profound questions about a number of issues central to contemporary debates, including the nature of national identity, the limits to freedom of speech, and the role of both traditional and social media.
After Charlie Hebdo brings together an international range of scholars to assess the social and political impact of the Paris attacks in Europe and beyond. Cutting through the hysteria that has characterised so much of the initial commentary, it seeks to place these events in their wider global context, untangling the complex symbolic web woven around ‘Charlie Hebdo’ to pose the fundamental question – how best to combat racism in our supposedly ‘post-racial’ age?
Omi and Winant examine the creation and negotiation of race's role in identify construction, contestation, and deconstruction. Since no biological basis exists for the signification of racial differences, the authors discuss racial hierarchies in terms of a "racial formation," which is a process by which racial categories are created, accepted, altered, or destroyed. This theory assumes that society contains various racial projects to which all people are subjected. The role that race plays in social stratification secures its place as a political phenomenon in the United States. This stratification is tantamount to what Omi and Winant call "racial dictatorship," which has three effects. First, the identity "American" is conflated with the racial identity "white." Second, the "color line" becomes a fundamental division in American society. Finally, oppositional racial consciousness became consolidated in opposition to racial dictatorship.
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.
In this groundbreaking ethnography, Ruben Andersson, a gifted anthropologist and journalist, travels along the clandestine migration trail from Senegal and Mali to the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Through the voices of his informants, Andersson explores, viscerally and emphatically, how Europe’s increasingly powerful border regime meets and interacts with its target–the clandestine migrant. This vivid, rich work examines the subterranean migration flow from Africa to Europe, and shifts the focus from the “illegal immigrants” themselves to the vast industry built around their movements. This fascinating and accessible book is a must-read for anyone interested in the politics of international migration and the changing texture of global culture.
This paper explores humanitarianism in the practice of Frontex-assisted Greek border police in Evros and of Frontex at their headquarters in Warsaw. Building on the increase in humanitarian justifications for border policing practices as well as the charges of a lack of humanity, the paper analyzes the relations between humanitarian responses and border policing where humanitarianism is used for framing and giving meaning to institutional and operational practices. In offering an interpretive view of border policing undertaken by people in their working lives across sites and scales, it builds on the critical literature addressing the multifaceted nature of border control in Europe today. At the same time, it speaks to wider debates about the double-sided nature of humanitarian governance concerned with care and control. It argues that while humanitarian motivations have implications for operations in the field and help to frame “good practice” at the policy level, humanitarianism should not be seen as additional or paradoxical to wider border policing operations within forms of governance developed to address the problems of population. Conflict arises in the paradox of protection between the subject of humanitarianism and policing, the population, and the object of border control, the territorially bounded state or regional unit.
Border policing and immigration law enforcement produce a spectacle that enacts a scene of ‘exclusion’. Such spectacles render migrant ‘illegality’ visible. Thus, these material practices help to generate a constellation of images and discursive formations, which repetitively supply migrant ‘illegality’ with the semblance of an objective fact. Yet, the more these spectacles fuel anti-immigrant controversy, the more the veritable inclusion of the migrants targeted for exclusion proceeds apace. Their ‘inclusion’ is finally devoted to the subordination of their labour, which is best accomplished only insofar as their incorporation is persistently beleaguered with exclusionary campaigns that ensure that this inclusion is itself a form of subjugation. At stake, then, is a larger sociopolitical (and legal) process of inclusion through exclusion. This we may comprehend as the obscene of inclusion. The castigation of ‘illegals’ thereby supplies the rationale for essentializing citizenship inequalities as categorical differences that then may be racialized.
Following Barack Obama's election as United States president, the illusion that the worst excesses of the Bush administration are now simply finished must be tempered by a sober assessment of the deeply consequential institutionalization of antiterrorism as the intransigent idiom of a new species of security state formation. Obama's assumption of responsibility for the conduct of the so-called War on Terror has committed him to the dominant ethos of antiterrorism and a multifaceted program of securitization, “domestically” and internationally. Furthermore, the task of reinvigorating United States nationalism by exalting American exceptionalism is one that deeply conjoins Obama with his predecessor. This is, perhaps, nowhere so evident as in Obama's dissimulations of the racial singularity and salience of his accession to the presidency. Indeed, he compulsively deracialized his election in favor of an American exceptionalist gesture of patriotic postracialism. This essay interrogates the relation between this “postracial” Americanism and a distinctly imperial multiculturalism. Through this “postracial” and assimilationist vision of empire, and by means of the crucial (racially ambiguous) figure of the Muslim, the United States has fashioned itself as the decisive police power of an incipient Global Security State, charged with putting in order the wild new frontiers of an unruly planet.
Across Europe, the ‘war on terror’ is having a major impact on race relations policies. New legislation, policing and counter-terrorist measures are casting Muslims, whether settled or immigrant, as the ‘enemy within’. In the process, the parameters of xeno-racism, which targets impoverished asylum seekers, have been extended to Muslim communities. Islam is seen as a threat to Europe, which is responding not only with draconian attacks on civil rights but also with moves to roll back multiculturalism and promote monocultural homogeneity through assimilation. Hence ‘integration’ measures - like France’s banning of the hijab - become an adjunct to anti-terrorist law. This is not just ‘Islamophobia’ but structured anti-Muslim racism.
This article examines dominant socio-political questions regarding migration, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘integration’, as a politics of citizenship (and race) in contemporary (post-colonial) Europe. The argument unfolds through a critique of the nationalist complacencies and racial complicities in Jürgen Habermas’s remarks on ‘multiculturalism’ during the 1990s. With recourse to ‘underclass’ discourse, Habermas’s reflections were themselves a trans-Atlantic metastasis of a distinctly US ‘American’ hegemonic sociological commonsense with regard to, but actively disregarding, the fact of white supremacy. Habermas’s thoughts are critically situated alongside their subsequent metastasis, back across the Atlantic, into Francis Fukuyama’s recent invocations of ‘terrorism’ and his advocacy of the ‘American melting pot’ model as a trans-Atlantic prescription for Europe’s ailments. Treating ‘immigrants’ as a kind of societal illness, both are preoccupied by the same ‘problem’ — non-Europeans (as disaffected ‘minorities’). Thus, these discourses of ‘immigration’ manifest a distinctly post-colonial cancer coursing restlessly through the larger social formation of ‘the West’.
In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, the virtually instantaneous hegemony of a metaphysics of antiterrorism has radically reconfigured the politics of race, immigration, and citizenship in the United States. In the extended historical moment beginning with the United States' proclamation of a planetary “War on Terrorism” and encompassing our (global) political present, the US sociopolitical order has been racked by several interlocking crises—convulsively careening between heightened demands on citizenship and the erosion of civil liberties, imperial ambition and nativist parochialism, extravagant domestic law enforcement and global lawlessness. In relation to the parallel but contradictory hegemonic projects of “American” national identity and attachment, on the one hand, and the expansion or refortification of US empire, on the other, the cumulative crisis-as-opportunity for US nationalism that has ensued is replete with unpredictable dilemmas and unresolved possibilities for both citizens and denizens alike. This essay examines significant new deployments of migrant “illegality” as this sociopolitical condition has been significantly reconfigured in the United States in the aftermath of the proclamation of a purported War on Terrorism, and the concomitant implementation of draconian police powers domestically that the author calls the Homeland Security State.
This article examines what race has meant in and to Europe. If Europe has different, if related, histories of racial thinking, expression, imposi-tion, and exclusion, how has it been shaped, in part, as specific region in the figure of race even as race, in the aftermath of World War II, is largely denied as a category applicable to human groups? And what today does Europe as a region, and the societies constituting it with all their internal variations, contribute, especially in the popular imaginary, to the extensions of racial meanings and to thinking critically about the racial ordering of social structure, racist exclusions, and social markings? This study is concerned with mapping the racial contours of contemporary European self-conception, historically understood, tracing the figures in the European imaginary of the European, the black, the Jew, and the Muslim.
We start with some figures. About 2 million people live on the Canary Islands. On average, the islands handle about 9.5 million tourists per year. This substantial tourist industry contributes over 32% of the Islands’ GNP. The entire accomodation sector consists of roughly 172,000 hotel beds and roughly 242,000 overnight places other than hotels. These figures represent interesting multinational flows, links
Stuart Hall talks to Les Back about his life and work.
Critique of Black Reason
- Achille Mbembe
Toward an African Future - of the Limit of the World. London: Living Commons Collective
- Nahum D Chandler
A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe
- Liz Fekete
The EU Hotspot Approach at Lampedusa.” openDemocracy
- Glenda Garelli
- Martina Tazzioli
Choucha Beyond the Camp: Challenging the Border of Migration Studies
- Glenda Garelli
- Martina Tazzioli
Liquid Traces: Investigating the Deaths of Migrants at the EU’s Maritime Frontier
- Charles Heller
- Lorenzo Pezzani
Calais Jungle Migrant Camp ‘Set on Fire’ after Hundreds Killed in Terror Attacks
- Scott Campbell
How Black Lives Matter Has Spread into a Global Movement to End Racist Policing: The Next Baltimore Could Be Somewhere in Europe
- Amien Essif
The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning. London: Rowman & Littlefield
- Yolande Jansen
Who Is to Blame for the Cologne Sex Attacks?” The Nation, March 10. www.thenation.com/article/who-is-to-blame-for-the-cologne-sex-attacks
- Laila Lalami
Droit de Cité or Apartheid?” In We, the People of Europe?
- Étienne Balibar
Black Lives Matter Protests Stop Cars and Trams Across England
- Bbc News
Regulating Flow of Refugees Gains Urgency in Greece and Rest of Europe
- Rick Lyman
The Politics of Counting and the Scene of Rescue: Border Deaths in the Mediterranean.” Radical Philosophy 192. www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/the-politics-of-counting-and-the-scene-of-rescue
- Martina Tazzioli
The Cologne Attacks Were an Obscene Version of Carnival
- Slavoj Žižek
Rescued and Caught: The Humanitarian-Security Nexus at Europe’s Frontiers.” In The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering
- Ruben Andersson
Is There Such a Thing as European Racism?” In Politics and the Other Scene
- Étienne Balibar
Black Lives Matter Movement ‘Needed in UK
- Bbc News
International Organization for Migration
- Thomas Spijkerboer
- Tamara Last
‘EU Must Militarize Chaotic Immigration, Identify States Behind Middle East Crisis’ - Zizek to RT.” Interview with RT News
- Slavoj Žižek
Hotspot System as a New Device of Clandestinisation: View from Sicily
- Alessandra Sciurba
We Can’t Address the EU Refugee Crisis Without Confronting Global Capitalism
- Slavoj Žižek